He is a strange writer, this Brian Aldiss. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say - a strange man?.. Like his fellow countryman James Ballard, Aldiss knows how to work in a variety of genres, from horror to absurdist prose, from micro-story to play. However, he stubbornly does not want to part with fantasy, constantly using its expressive means in quite serious and very structurally complex works. It is authors like Aldiss who make SF Literature with a capital L. But this does not prevent him, in parallel with his masterpieces ("Barefoot in the Head", "Report on Probability A", "Frankenstein Unchained", "Greybeard", the "Heliconia" cycle, etc.) to easily and naturally write "one-off" novels like those included in this collection. “On the White Stripe” and “The Garden of Time” are certainly skillfully written; traditional “New Wave” references to Jung and Freud are scattered throughout the text, there is even a cautious polemic with the Bible... in short, it’s worth reading. (c) Vasily Vladimirsky