Last orders Book

(Continues this.)

The Expensive Delicate Ship (1973)
Two friends hike over a way that connects Denmark and Sweden. One of the two is telling a story and the narrator of story retells this story within his story. He is on the high sea. Suddenly another boat appears and the swell becomes very dangerous. He sees that the other arc (the "Doppelganger arc") carries many animals and even dinosaurs. Eventually, he reveals that this story is the product of his imagination and that for a man like him, making up such anecdotes is truly living (again a theme familiar from earlier stories).

The Coins in Clockwork Fountains (1975)
This again a collection of three stories. However, this time I wasn't able to see any connection between the stories collected under the header.
The first story (probably my least favorite in the entire collection) is narrated by the servant of a sick old woman. He tells about the numerous visits that the woman received and secretly lusts for some of her guests. Noticeably, the time scale seems different, as people live for much longer numbers of years and pregnancies take "longer". Possibly things in fact are different, but since it's a different planet the more plausible explanation is a different calendar and time scale. Eventually he reveals that he is the creator of the universe (maybe the initiator of time that the sect believes in?)..
The second story is epic fantasy. Moolab is a many-legged being that gives "blood water" to other creatures (whatever that means). But tonight he is destined for a higher purpose. A priest and a "swarm master" (of the swarm that Moolab is part of) ceremonially introduce him to his quest. He is about to set out and kill a Kimarsun and bring back its eye. These creatures are so completely immobile that their position is part of the collective memory of his swarm. After some struggle he is able to defeat the being.
The third story, well it's very short and I have no idea what it is about.

An Appearance of Life (1976)
This story, easily my favorite in the collection, is about the museum of Norma. The museum was built by an highly advanced alien species, the Korlevalulaw, a race that had since then disappeared from the face of the known universe (there are many theories as to what happened to them). The museum is a huge, encompassing the whole equator in an underground facility. The Korlevalulaw left it completely empty, but at least parts of it are now filled with human artifacts which span long time frames. Female androids maintain the museum, which is noteworthy because it is said that there are now ten women on every man.
The story is narrated by a "Erster Esenplastischer Sucher", which seems to be some sort of scientist who draws links between things for which many don't see a connection. In the cause of the visit to the museum, the Suchender sees space ships from the First Galactic era and later from the Second Galactic era. The Suchender also finds a wedding ring and is surprised by the type of relationship that used to by symbolically expressed by this sort of artifact (there are no longer love relations like this).
The climax of the story is reached when he (or she?) finds two so-called holocaps, first of a woman and later of a man, created 65 Thousand years earlier. The two encapsel two sides of a long dead relationship. The Sucher decides to reunite the two, who were talking about each other in the recording. At first, it looks as if they talk to each other, emphasizing that they always upheld their marriage even after the separation. Tragically, it soon becomes clear that their messages were preprogrammed and cannot escape the boundaries of what is to be said would they ever meet again.
The story ends on a contemplative note. Maybe this is the horizon of the human race as a whole, the Sucher hypothesize, created by the Korlevalulaw a long time ago. Maybe human beings too are just responding in programmed ways.

Wired for Sound (1974)
An alternative history set in the UK after the Fall or Europe. Great Britain has become a dystopian country that eavesdrops on its citizens at all times. Companies are partly socialized. The protagonist of the story tries to strike a secret deal with the sheik who visits him. While certainly nothing special, I enjoyed the way it's establishing a very complex setting for the cause of a story that is barely a couple of pages long.

Journey to the Heartland (1976)
This is the story of another dream researcher, Andrew Angsteed, and his favorite subject, Rose-Jean Depson. As in previous stories, his institute's main purpose is to classify the dreams of its experimentees. Angsteed forms a theory: he thinks that life is determined by the eternal return of the same (well, he doesn't quite put this in these Nietzschean terms, but this is the idea), that all people make the same kinds of experiences. This is comparable to what many psychoanalysts found in dreams, that dreams instantiate the same archetypes of the collective unconscious. Philosophically, this is a very intriguing idea. The fact that we share concepts such as friendship, accomplishment, etc. is probably the main reason why we understand each other's endeavors in the first place.
Angsteed is having a love affair with Rose-Jean, who is afraid that she is repeating the same mistakes as with her husband (from which she lives separated but occasionally still has sex with). In the end, Andrew may have found a way to live in the dreamscape. As Aldiss explains in a fictional interview attached to the story, in the sad non-sf ending, the imminent break-through is part of his schizophrenia. Exhaustion as well as the realization that he and Rose-Jean are not fit for each other lead to the eventual breakdown. According to the science-fiction interpretation, his ideas are true. He comes back, changed, now living within the dream time. He is determined to lead other people to this Heartland of dreams.