Heavy Water and Other Stories Author:Martin Amis Martin Amis's short stories make his novels look prim. They are also more frankly satirical. Whole words are created - or inverted. In "Straight Fiction", everyone is gay (apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community); in "Career Moves", screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angele... more »s; in "The Janitor on Mars", a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. Largely absent in the novels, the middle classes get a showing in "Let Me Count the Times", where a man has had a mad affair with himself. "Heavy Water", portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, "State of England" its weird resuscitation. And in "The Coincidence of the Arts" an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler. The earliest story, "Denton's Death", was first published in 1975, but the bulk of the collection can be firmly labelled 'most recent work'.« less