2008 books

[peteryoung]

30) Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters, 1987
Amis is well enough versed in science fiction to know how to put it to good use when he wants to. This collection of five stories is centred around his own personal bête noire, nuclear weapons; he brings a science fictional sensibility to what is otherwise mostly mainstream writing and it is often hard to see the join. Easily the best story is 'Bujak and the Strong Force or God's Dice', which brings an unexpected moral aspect to a similar apocalypse of a more personal nature, but overshadowing everything that follows it is Amis's long, polemical and endlessly quotable introduction 'Thinkability'. As an example of controlled anger while eloquently nailing one's colours to the mast, it's worth buying just for this.