Tim Jones' Transported is a pleasant surprise. None of the tales have that kind of super-seriousness about them that's typical of NZ short stories. Instead, they're an intriguing mix of tongue-in-cheek, subtle humour, history turned inside out, and sci-fi.
The sci-fi increase in number as the book goes on, though forcing some of them into that category might be inaccurate. But where do you put stories about ordinary people that take place slightly in the future, when climate change has caused oceans to rise, and well-known places (like a good deal of downtown Wellington) have been submerged? Jones has a deft and succinct style, and his writing is considerably better than what's normally found in sci-fi writing, even when the story's set on a distant planet. Some of the stories are plain fantasy - When She Came Walking, for instance, in which the She of the title draws inanimate objects skipping after her, or Homestay, in which "angels" visit a farm, upsetting the locals and themselves.
And then there are short shorts about Borges, or Foucault, or Coleridge: humorous re-imaginings of the lives of other writers. Or the satirical stories: A Short History of the Twentieth Century, with Fries; or Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev!, in which Mikhail and his wife turn out to be not quite who they seem; or The New Neighbours, in which the immigrants aren't Asian, or Pacific Island, but alien.
Often the stories leave you to fill in the background from a few particulars - what's happened to the world in Filling the Isles? Why are all the people apparently living literally side by side on hills? Is it population explosion, or something not quite explained? Sometimes Jones teases the reader, as he does most effectively in Robinson in Love, in which a man meets up with a woman who seems to lead him up the garden path. Or does she?
Perhaps the most chilling story is Best Practice - chilling not just because it's set on an exposed plateau in Mt Aspiring National Park, but because of the corporation's cold and calculated attitude towards the staff who are taken there for their annual Christmas party. This story is enough to make anyone get out of the corporate world, and quickly.
Overall this is a most entertaining collection. Jones' widely varied worlds thoroughly arouse the imagination.
