Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [0]
“Wildly diverse.… [Heavy Water and Other Stories] showcases Amis’ extravagant talents and splashy intellect.”
— Time
“[Heavy Water and Other Stories] demands to be read and re-read.”
— The Economist Review
“Count on Martin Amis to take risks. He is contemporary Britain’s shape-shifter of fiction.”
— Newsday
“Amis is hilariously eloquent.”
— The Plain Dealer
“Martin Amis [has] persuasively established himself as one of his generation’s most ambitious and technically daring writers.”
—The New York Times
“Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels.”
—Seattle Times
ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions
MARTIN AMIS
HEAVY WATER
AND OTHER STORIES
Martin Amis’s books include Money, Dead Babies, The Rachel Papers, The Moronic Inferno, Einstein’s Monsters, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train. He lives in London.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 2000
Copyright © 1998 by Martin Amis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1998, and subsequently in the United States by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Harmony Books edition as follows:
Amis, Martin.
Heavy water and other stories / Martin Amis.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78739-2
Contents: Career move—Denton’s death—State of England—Let me count the times—The coincidence of the arts—Heavy water—The janitor on Mars—Straight fiction—What happened to me on my holiday. I. Title.
PR6051.M5H4 1999
823’.914—dc21 98-21779
Author photograph © Quina Fonseca
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
To Delilah and Fernanda
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Career Move
Denton’s Death
State of England
Let Me Count the Times
The Coincidence of the Arts
Heavy Water
The Janitor on Mars
Straight Fiction
What Happened to Me on My Holiday
CAREER MOVE
WHEN ALISTAIR FINISHED his new screenplay, Offensive from Quasar 13, he submitted it to the LM, and waited. Over the past year, he had had more than a dozen screenplays rejected by the Little Magazine. On the other hand, his most recent submission, a batch of five, had been returned not with the standard rejection slip but with a handwritten note from the screenplay editor, Hugh Sixsmith. The note said:
I was really rather taken with two or three of these, and seriously tempted by Hotwire, which I thought close to being fully achieved. Do please go on sending me your stuff.
Hugh Sixsmith was himself a screenplay writer of considerable, though uncertain, reputation. His note of encouragement was encouraging. It made Alistair brave.
Boldly he prepared Offensive from Quasar 13 for submission. He justified the pages of the typescript with fondly lingering fingertips. Alistair did not address the envelope to the Screenplay Editor. No. He addressed it to Mr. Hugh Sixsmith. Nor, for once, did he enclose his curriculum vitae, which he now contemplated with some discomfort. It told, in a pitiless staccato, of the screenplays he had published in various laptop broadsheets and comically obscure pamphlets; it even told of screenplays published in his university magazine. The truly disgraceful bit came at the end, where it said “Rights Offered: First British Serial only.”
Alistair spent a long time on the covering note to Sixsmith—almost as long as he had spent