Reviewed by CP in 1998. This article may be downloaded, but may not be uploaded or printed elsewhere.

Comprising six stories -- four of them short, two of them fairly long -- Elementals is written by an author who is largely unknown to the science fiction audience, and one who will be surprised to find herself reviewed in an sf magazine. However, one of the stories -- Cold -- is pure fantasy, another is an extended fantasy about a swimming-pool lamia, while the rest of the stories reveal a concern with a sense of 'otherness'. This alone will make her work interesting to the more broad-minded science fiction reader.

The best first. Crocodile Tears is the story of a middle-aged woman in a state of fugue after a sudden bereavement. Without prior planning she takes a train away from home, arriving almost by chance in the small French town of Nîmes. Here the fugue deepens; she is in denial of her former life. After a few nervous literary mannerisms at the beginning, the author’s style is gripping, touching and, for all that nothing much happens on the visible surface, compelling.

Baglady is about a woman shopper trapped in a Hong Kong mall, reminding me of Tom Disch's story Descending: a man trapped on an endlessly rolling Tube escalator. Cold is reminiscent of the fairy tales of Anderson: a faraway country, a king, a princess, handsome suitors ... all very well if you want fiction to comfort you.

For science fiction or fantasy readers interested in exploring outside the genre, Elementals will work as a transition into the work of a prizewinning mainstream author. Byatt has a sure voice when not trying to show off, and at her best writes resonant prose with a sharp, imagic style. But her subject matter is too soft for my taste; she is an author given to impressions rather than emotions, dreamscapes rather than real places, fancy rather than imagination.