An Infinite Summer is the second collection of short stories by Christopher Priest and the first of his books to collect stories set in the Dream Archipelago. The stories had all previously been published in various anthologies and magazines.

Stories

• "An Infinite Summer" (1976)
• "Whores" (1978)
• "Palely Loitering" (1979)
• "The Negation" (1978)
• "The Watched" (1978)

The material in the collection may be divided into two types: the first, namely "An Infinite Summer" and "Palely Loitering" are more straightforward works of science fiction involving time travel while the other three are early parts of Priest's "Dream Archipelago" sequence, described by John Clute as "intensify[ing] the sense that Priest's landscapes had now become forms of expression of the psyche, and are of intense interest for the dream-like convolutions of psychic terrain so displayed."^[1] Priest would later revisit the setting at length in novels such as The Affirmation and, in 1999, these early stories would be revised and reassembled with other material as The Dream Archipelago.

"An Infinite Summer" was originally published in the anthology Andromeda 1 (October 1976, ed. Peter Weston, ISBN 0-86007-891-4). A time travel story, it was reprinted in later anthologies, such as Trips in Time (September 1977, ed. Robert Silverberg, ISBN 0-8407-6574-6), and in translation.^[2] It was selected for The Best Science Fiction of the Year 6 by editor Terry Carr. Priest says that he interrupted the writing of his 1976 novel The Space Machine ("somewhere in Chapter 13, to be precise"), and chose to publish the story separately "because there was one strong feeling that would not fit in the novel: the sense that layers of time exist, that places do not change so much as people."^[3]

In August, 1940, protagonist Thomas Lloyd daily visits the Thames Bridge in Richmond, London, England. He spots "freezers" around the park; freezers is his term for people from an unknown future who, for unknown reasons, will occasionally use a device to freeze people out of time. These frozen people remain visible only to the freezers and to others, like Thomas, who were once frozen. In June, 1903, Thomas was frozen at the very moment of proposing to a lovely young lady, Sarah, who accepted him. Thomas remained frozen in this tableau until 1935, after which he finds that the frozen are considered, by their contemporaries, to have vanished. He is now disinherited and poor; he learns that freezing may "erode" after minutes or years; and he finds what work he can in the vicinity so that he may visit Sarah, in her radiant immobility, every day. "Thomas Lloyd, of neither the past nor the present, saw himself as a product of both, and as a victim of the future." After his patient waiting, he finds Sarah unfreeze in the middle of The Blitz. The freezers have watched Thomas; when Sarah awakes, in bliss but baffled by the bombing, they restore their tableau, presumably so that they will re-waken in a kinder future. If so, this is one of Priest's happier endings.

"Whores" is narrated by a soldier, recovering from a blast of "the enemy's synaesthetic gas", who is sent to the Archipelago island of Winho to convalesce. There he hopes to find a young prostitute whom he had loved, Slenje, but she is dead. He is seduced by Elva, who has been "experimented upon" when Winho was by enemy troops.