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Cover art: Richard Jones
Blurb: “With these five stories, Langdon Jones makes a brilliant entrance into the world of speculative fiction. He has created a new, bold, daring kind of science fic-tion. Combining naturalistic precision with dreamlike poetic imagination, he explores man's struggle against the grotesqueries of warped time, fractured light, and mindless violence.
Langdon Jones is concerned with the nature of Time: time as a tyrannical ma-chine, as a fragment of schizophrenic fan-tasy, as a purely psychological mechanism, and as a question of proximity rather than as a matter of what is and what is not.
Using the idea of time as a jumping-off place,
he delves into the fantasies of schizophrenia and brings forth from madness an often horrifying perception of reality. And he shows us how, in the act of love, it is possible to experience the suspension of time.
Each of these stories is unique, but none contains obscure, hidden meanings. To read each one of them is to view a totally new concept in science fiction:
"The Eye of the Lens," the title story, contains three sub-stories that abandon conventional narrative and structure in their bizarre psychological presentation of the mind. The "eye" becomes the eye of the unconscious, the eye that sees through the appearance of reality. It exposes us to violence and insanity and gives them a strange honesty.
"The Great Clock" is a time-terror trip reminiscent of Poe's tale of the pendulum, but with consequences far more terrible than those that plagued Poe's paralyzed victim.
"The Time Machine" destroys the boundaries of time as it moves its protagonist from a prison to an intense love at-fair to a warped realization of freedom.
"Symphony No. 6 in C Minor THE TRAGIC by Ludwig van Beethoven II"' is an extraordinary statement composed by a man cursed with a name.
"The Garden of Delights" is a shocking mix of memory, sensual love, reality, and fantasy. Beneath its deceptively clear surface crouches the chilling possibility of what "would have been."
LANGDON JONES, a young Englishman is one of the most highly esteemed writers of the new sci-fi. His stories have appeared in the British magazine New Worlds and in many prestigious anthologies.