The Perseids and Other Stories

The Perseids and Other Stories, Robert Charles Wilson, Tor Books, 2000

This group of speculative fiction stories take place in, and around, the city of Toronto, Canada.

An amateur astronomer buys a telescope at a local shop, and starts dating the female sales clerk. With a little hallucinogenic help, what starts as a relationship story turns into a tale of the next stage of human evolution. In 1950s California, young girl who claims to have been visited by aliens and is spending the summer with an uncle has a strange encounter with astronomer Edwin Hubble. Another story is about an ever-changing group of friends who get together for some intellectual conversation. One person says, "Invent a religion."

A writer of New Age books has a genuine encounter with the extraordinary, courtesy of a mirror that shows very interesting things to those who stand in front of it. In another story, a man speculates a being as far above humans as we are above a house cat among us right now, but we wouldn't know it. At a local used bookstore called Finders (locale for several of these stories) a man bought a rock as a paperweight. It's actually a scrying rock, which lets the holder of the rock see into their future.

I loved these stories. They could be set in any large city, they're sort of like Twilight Zone stories (a mixture of fantasy, science fiction and horror), and they are very thought-provoking. Wilson is one of my favorite science fiction writers, so I don't claim to be totally unbiased, but this is highly recommended.