3.75/5 (collated rating: Good)

Alien sex dolls. Carpet stain entities constructing love-nests. Underground retirement community entertainment. Jack Dann’s stories obsessively chart the new rituals of survival in a blasted, irradiated, and decayed future. His characters attempt to identify their place in the world, or, at the very least, stay alive as the world shifts. If you do not care for anti-heroes, a good dose of dystopian perversity, and moments of metaphysical descent, Timetripping (1980) might not be for you. Four of the fourteen stories in the collection were nominated for the Nebula Award.

If you are a fan of the New Wave (and Barry N. Malzberg and Robert Silverberg in particular), and haven’t yet explored Dann’s nightmares, don’t wait as long as I did. Also, go ahead and snag a copy of his later masterpiece The Man Who Melted (1984). I’ve acquired copies of two early fix-up novels Junction (1981) and Starhiker (1976).

My 20 best short story reads of 2025 will undoubtedly include a handful of stories from Timetripping (1980). I found his best works—“The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), “I’m with You in Rockland” (1972), and “Camps” (1979)—remain cohesive despite moments of metaphysical rumination and deluge of surreal image. Even at his least effective moments of narrative wander, Dann adeptly conjures image and turn of phrase.

Due to the quantity of stories in the collection, I apologize in advance if a few of my reviews are a bit cursory. Alas.

You can read the entire collection here.

Short Story-by-Story Reviews/Ruminations

“I’m with You in Rockland” (1972), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Strange Bedfellow, ed. Thomas N. Scortia (1972). Strange Bedfellows is one of a handful of 70s SF anthologies on sex and sexuality. This fits the remit in spades.

In a New York redolent with pollutants and humidity, Flaccus (sexual reference intended) constructs, in a reinforced metal harness, a “jagged framework of plastic and steel” with two thousand other suited workers (2). At night his relationship with Clara is on the rocks. He proclaims his love with indecision and distraction. She’s kind. She’s worried. She wants to make it work. Her words cut to the point: “Well, you certainly don’t show it” (2). He views her attempts at making love as playing “games” with a “trapped stranger” (2). He cannot perform. He yearns to abandon Clara. To drive off into the smog-drenched cityscape in his car and pick up a hitchhiker to satiate his desires. One day he decides to smuggle out his high-tech metal harness and go for a drive.

Dann delivers a sinister and perverse allegory of the corrosion of the mechanical age on modern man. Flaccus only feels whole and sufficiently masculine while inside of his metal apparatus. Flaccus doesn’t attempt to escape or make anew. He is a manifestation of the new world’s disease. He is a denizen of the present. He flourishes in the pollution. He yearns to blend into the smog. The city gives him power. He becomes indistinguishable from the metal that girds his body.

Disturbed. Dystopic.

“Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (April 1973). In a crowded city filled with “cinereal light,” Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation. And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat (“Rags”). And the cat, a projection of one of the “invisible beings,” manifest’s another’s voice: “I made [the cat] out of the bar down the street. Take a look, the bar isn’t there anymore. I used it all up” (9). She tries to blot out the voice. She does not want to accept that the “streets might change their form and substance, and the voice might grow a body” (11). Is it not better to leave some things “unsubstantial”? (11).

But the voice behind Rags draws her out. Forces her to acknowledge its existence. And then she sees Sandra, and a strange ritual she performs before a mirror. Sandra believes her ritual keeps the world, in an undefined sense of ending, existing. Entropic congregations of bugs and trash surround the room in which Sandra brings Joanna. A confrontation between the two looms. Rituals of the dead transpire below in the streets.

Rich in language and scene, “Rags” is a fantastic evocation of slippage and decay, of sad souls trying to make sense of a world that seems desperate to blot itself out.

“Timetipping” (1975), 3.75/5 (Good): First appeared in Epoch, ed. Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood (1975). An epidemic of unusual events occur–“everything went blip” (18). At one moment a person could be replaced with another, from a different time. Paley Litwak, not a “holy man, but he could hold up his head and not be afraid to wink at God” (18), remains the same, a survivor in the bizarre new world. Not once does did he trip into a different time. The rest of the world is adrift, everyone was swimming by, “blipping out of the past or future and into the present here or who-knows-where” (19). People jump into one time, and people they know jump into others. It’s impossible to create order, to stake out a fiefdom. A few references to atomic testing and weapons suggest a genesis for the shift. But then too Litwak shifts.

Of all the stories in this collection, I found “Timetipping” that hardest to parse–in part due to the references to Yiddish terminology, Jewish faith, ritual, and community. I confess my partial ignorance. At its most general, “Timetipping” is a representation of the transient nature of the present–and the human tendency to create communities and rituals to bind the mutable into sometime tangible. This story, along with “Camps” (1979) below, are analyzed in Marleen Barr’s article “Playing with time: Jack Dann approaches the Holocaust as ‘a different universe of discourse'” in Extrapolation, vol. 39, n. 2 (1998) which I plan to read soon.

Unusual. Oblique.

“Windows” (1972), 2.75/5 (Below Average): First appeared in New Worlds Quarterly 3, ed. Michael Moorcock (1972). In a cluttered, book-filled, apartment, John remembers fragments of conversations with his neighbor about history, the decadents, the connections between literary pasts and presents. Suffocating and tempted by “a vague homosexual urge” (29), John convinces himself to exit the apartment to search for another book, or perhaps a prostitute. As he walks the crush of the New York streets, vaguely familiar people call him “Richard” (30). On his sojourn he comes across a dead woman’s body. What transpires might be a hallucinogenic evocation of his intense claustrophobia and other psychosis.

Despite the insubstantial quality of the story, there are still some perceptive moments. For example, John ruminates on the nature of history: “Chunks and pieces of one era might be similar to another but for all the wrong reasons. Events might repeat themselves in form only” (29). “Windows” does adheres to the self-hating frustrated homosexual narrative. But then again, so many of Dann’s characters do… Not sure what to make of this one.

“A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): First appeared in New Dimensions: Science Fiction: Number 8, ed. Robert Silverberg (1978). Nominated for the 1979 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery (I couldn’t dispel the sense that everything took place in the labyrinthine, mossy, crumbling, tree-filled Père Lachaise). Roger dreams that he is an “angel of God guiding the eyeless through His realms” (36). Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. His wife Sandra drugs the squealing children in the back seat of their car “to make the trip go faster” (36). Bennie, Roger’s favorite son, dons the makeup of an angel and parrots the words of his father, “even kids must have their own special vision of death” (37). Roger and Bennie share a fascination over poetry, literature, and art on death and dying. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

More than simply a necropolis, this cemetery is a living organism — filled with restaurants, brothels, processions of priests and mourners, hordes of children burying unclaimed bodies, and little shops. Roger even allows his son to visit a prostitute who proclaims “death is an orgasm, not a social artifact” (40). As Roger and Sandra lay out the food for the picnic, Bennie, still in his angel costume, wanders off to dance on a fresh grave. As they wait for him to return, Roger imagines himself called by God to “man the machinery of His Cemetery” (42). Watching children play games amongst the tombstones, Roger falls asleep. And when he awakes Sandra is nowhere to be seen.

This is my absolute favorite story in the collection as Dann manages to reign in his tendency to allow stories to wander. It’s concise. It’s punchy. It’s filled with evocative imagery. It’s in turns snarky and disturbed. Roger is but a cypher of a new hedonistic fanaticism. His wife, a voice of reason, has her own part to play.

“The Drum Lollipop” (1972), 3.5/5 (Good): First appeared in Orbit 11, ed. Damon Knight (1972). Frank Harris screams at his wife. She begs him to stay. The cycle repeats. Upstairs their daughter Maureen, thinks her broken drum. The drum, and the drumsticks, appear to be able to cast spells, or, at least, animate (or hold back) a strange puddle in the living room. Soon thin tendrils emerge from the puddle. It appears only Maureen can see them. They twist around her parents, who seem to have fallen back in love. They gather others to their yard, pulling them into some love-hive. The stain remains unobserved in the living room. Will they see the stain? Will the spell hold? What is Maureen willing to do to keep her family together?

“Days of Stone” (1979), 2.75/5 (Below Average): First appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (January 1979). Mrs. Fishbine spends hours laying in bed, “almost without moving,” flipping through her “teevee selector” or starting at the “whorls in the ceiling” while daydreaming about a young man “who would quietly give her all her dreams in return for a kiss and a smile” (55). He daydreams are interrupted by more disquieting thoughts–her aging body and her husband’s abandonment despite her giving up “everything for him” (55). She imagines bloody deaths for her ex-husband and new wife. Her son stops by with bad news. Initially she’s thankful that her ex will receive his due. But soon, she makes her final calculus with the oncoming sense of death–permeating all.

Ted White was willing to publish a range of stories in Fantastic including those that do not register as overtly science-fictional. While one its own, “Days of Stone” contains some powerful images (especially at the end when Mrs. Fishbine turns on the lights in her house as “a night beacon, a flare against death”), I had to reread this one to remember the details. It’s a bit insubstantial in comparison to the best in the volume.

“Night Visions” (1979), 2.5/5 (Bad): First appeared in Shadows 2, ed. Charles L. Grant (1979). Martin attempts to commit suicide in his “Naples-yellow coupe” (59). He dreams of the impact, how time will “distend like a bladder, filled with the insights and profound despair that must attend the last instants of consciousness” (59). He imagines the final impact would be the “truly cosmic orgasm” (59). However, his car has other ideas. Subverting the trope of the roadtrip and/or car as vehicle of evil, “Night Visions” is a toothless attempt at nightmare that doesn’t quite catch. For Dann, this feels a bit unrefined.

“Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in New Worlds Quarterly 5, ed. Michael Moorcock (1973). The elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials (63). Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus. He wants to bring people together, “to smell each other, to touch each other” (67).

After the meeting, everyone else heads off to the feelie rooms. Fleitman begins to implement his vision. But there’s a problem: he senses his mind is slipping. He wonder where he heard particular words. Why he thinks of “gunnysacks” when he imagines a woman’s breasts (64). He has faint memories of Tod Brownings’ Freaks (1932). He stars to conduct research on historical circuses. And with these fragments and references and memories, he constructs a visual deluge by means of a massive computer underneath the Entertainment Building. The computer pastes and modifies and blends selected images (it’s hard to escape parallels with AI art). Fleitman “twisted the computers’ suggestions into travesties as he giggled” (71). It will be a manifestation of circus unlike any other.

The act begins. Chaos breaks loose. And he must journey to the surface. He is overwhelmed by the smells he encounters: defecation, spoiling meat, incense–orange, tabac-perspiration, exhaust fumes from makeshift engines” (80). He must navigate a new world ruled by the youth and their rituals. After he emerges, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Fleitman lives in a subterranean retirement home. Perhaps the wealthy elderly fled the youthful deprivations of the surface. Or some generational conflict forced the elderly underground, and the new world envisioned by the youth is also in a state of advanced decay.

I found “Fragmentary Blue” contained an absolutely brilliant and bizarre premise that fizzles a bit. As with so many stories in the collection, I’m a sucker for how Dann evokes societal entropic decay. He avoids all explanations of what happened. Instead, his characters manifest the syndromes of the day.

“The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): First appeared in New Dimensions: Science Fiction: Number 5, ed. Robert Silverberg (1975). Nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground” (85). The shop is located on a street owned by the Shtetl-Castigon Corporation, in turn run by the Chardin Ghetto as a money-making venture for the community’s colony on “Omega-Adriadne” (83). In this future, various thought gasses are pumped into the Undercity to encourage and control. As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. He can’t identify whether they are Kinkies looking for a thrill or upsider collectors seeking to add to their collections. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection — “you cannot satisfy yourself with dolls” he warns (85). Yes, this story has terrifying alien sex dolls. Soon Chaim identifies that something else is afoot. The shetl has a legion of enemies, motivated by anti-semitism, and this might be an attempt to entrap his business in a scandal. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

My second favorite in the collection, “The Dybbuk Dolls” contains a highly original (and seedy) premise. No wonder this one snagged a Nebula nomination (albeit, in a year with a larger slate than normal)! Again, I admit insufficient knowledge of Judaism. As the term shetl is sometimes used to refer to communities in New York city, I suspect Dann is imagining future manifestations of New York’s Hasidic population? Regardless of the specifics (I looked up a lot of Yiddish words), this is an immersive story. The world is vividly realized. The dilemma truly horrifying. The interweaving of Judaic myth, religious stories, and rituals in a future world absolutely fascinating. Recommended for the adventurous reader.

“Camps” (1979), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman (May 1979). Nominated for the 1980 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Stephen lies ill in a hospital bed, thinking only of pain. After an injection of Demerol, he “enters pain’s cold regions as an explorer” navigating a landscape of “wash-blue shards of ice, crystal pyramids and pinnacles” (101). His nurse Josie takes care of him, checking his drains, attempting to convince him to watch television. Soon his drug-induced dreamworld starts to interact with historical scenes of the Holocaust. Stephen comes to understand that he was “a Jew in this burning, stinking world” width a “yellow star sewn on the breasts of his filthy jacket” (103). But this world begins to intersect with his present medical condition. And the figure of Josie also appears to have a role in both….

A powerful invocation of the collective trauma of the past, and how the past wraps its way around our souls, informs our actions and manifests our terrors, a cloak that we cannot cast off.

“The Marks of the Painted Teeth” (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Demon Kind, ed. Roger Elwood (1973): In the wreckage of a partially bombed city, a group of hungry transient children attempt to find new members to add to their gang. They all adhere to a collective mass delusion. If they do not fit the visual characteristics of previous members, the old features are pasted onto the new: “Dorcas was erasing Sue’s face […] Her skin became brittle, then fell away to reveal new flesh underneath, full of pocks and scars” (128). As they munch on dead water rats, and avoid fights in the surviving basements of houses, they decide to project their own reality on the unstable traumas of the fractured present. Dorcas proclaims “because we have to be everything. If we want, we should be able to be anything” (132). And so they create a delusion of a cave to protect themselves within one of the children’s mouth. He’s careful to keep it closed. He lives with the others inside of his own mouth. In his dreams the bones inside of his mouth morph into a human pelvis (136). As they take turns (I think) hiding inside each other’s bodies, they wander a landscape increasingly afflicted by disease and avoiding “Screamers” (138). And like a reverse genesis myth, they believe themselves gods and plan on “making wars” and interceding against each other (139).

Stories like this one demonstrates Elwood’s wide-ranging view on the genre in his quest to fill as many anthologies as possible. This is an off-the-wall gem. As with others in the collection, I’d suggest another formulation of Dann’s obsession with worlds afflicted beyond recognition and the desperate, sad, often pathetic attempts to make meaning in the remains. Here children literally retreat within themselves and conjure games to pass the time amongst the dead and dying. 

“Among the Mountains” (1977), 3.75/5 (Good): First appeared in A World Named Cleopatra, ed. Poul Anderson and Roger Elwood (1977). In 1973, Poul Anderson published a short story called “The Serpent in Eden” (1973) that takes place on a world called Cleopatra inhabited by refugees from a poisoned Earth. They encountered a “world of gently rolling seas and unutterably beautiful sunsets” filled with exotic life and violent storms. This became the genesis of a shared world sequence, with additional stories by Michael Orgill, Jack Dann, and George Zebrowski, published under the title A World Named Cleopatra (1977). As I have not read Anderson’s original story I struggled for the majority of Dann’s installment to understand exactly what was happening. Maybe they’re more standalone tales than a sequential series? Let me know!

In a village, painted in distinctly South-East Asian strokes, daily life manifests a proscribed set of rituals. A wrinkled man named Giay tells stories that reinforce the status quo and the town’s place in the world. If a denizen leaves “the sacred grounds of his ancestors, he would sever all ties to the world of men” (144). The story follows Bao, a boy in the town, and his voyage into the larger world after a barbarian (“moi”) attack. “Among the Mountains” reads in parallel with the Vietnam War. The war rages across rice paddies and jungles. I detected references to the My Lai Massacre (1968): “Demons are running around, burning, shooting, raping girls and women in the open, in the mud and rain” (149). There appears to be a contest between two powers–both of which use bio-engineered aliens called fabers as soldiers and practice brainwashing. Bao finds himself caught in a “ching-game. He followed his programmed dreams, led dimsimple fabers, watched them die, won villages, lost villages, hit, slept, and fought” (155). He views himself as a “blind spirit submerged in a dead present” unable to escape the path he’s set upon.

The story effectively transmits the cyclical repetitions of violence and brutality. Mixed in with the sinister brainwashing experienced by the characters, a sense of relentless militaristic marching, conflict, and despair dominates. Bao cannot escape the sense that he can freely interacts with the stimuli around him, both physical and mental. Even how to dream was taught by the state (163). A powerful manifestation of the corrosive nature of violence. Bao’s a classic Dann character, he yearns to understand his place in the cosmos. If that is even possible.

“Junction” (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (November 1973). Nominated for the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novella. I suspect this is Dann’s best-known early short story. It was later expanded into a novel in 1981. John Clute, echoing Gregory Feeley, in SF Encyclopedia, describes it as a distillation of “Dann’s central theme: the rousing of a young man from disaffected solipsism into awareness of the marvels of the noösphere.”

Junction is a small town of “little houses with no glass windows” with meticulously tended almost artificial yards (171). There’s a church. There are bars and brothels. Junction claims to be a democracy, but the nature of power remains unclear: “of course, the president had no power—that was reserved for the king. But no one knew who the king was” (178). And beyond the town? Hell. Out there “nothing was predictable” (171). This mutable landscape shifts color, water cracks, the sun could transform at any moment into a “golden insect sucking up the world” (171). Ned spends his days with prostitutes while his dad begs him to attend church, which follows a Bible further redacted every year. And then one day Ned sees a creature out in Hell, and it follows him into the protective boundaries of Junction. “Elected” president by backroom dealings in the town, Ned, “King of the whores” (183), must leave his aimless life of sex and trek into the shifting chaos of Hell.

All types of dichotomies rule Junction including a heightened religiosity mixed with extreme eroticism. Reverend Surface comments on religious texts manifests this clash: “We’ll laugh at the books and obey them, mock them for being apocryphal, love them because they might be God’s” (185). And goodness me Dann has a sense of the powerful image. For example, the creature that follows Ned into the town sits “atop of the old metal buildings on a girder, all eyes open, halo attracting and killing insects” (187).

As the story spirals off into all sorts of levels transcendental metaphysics–via ruminations of the nature of time (“consecutive time is a mnemonic device”), the generative power of dreams, and time travel—the story loses a bit of its power. Regardless, “Junction” should be applauded for its evocation of cosmic immensity and of bizarre manifestations of apocalyptic process. I’m not convinced I entirely understood the logic behind ever shift other than to highlight the hilarious/horrific ironies of belief and reality.

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