The perfect lover

by Christopher Priest

Priest, a young Britisher with a flair for finding quietly tantalizing sci-fi hypotheses, works some clever variations on the well-worn notions of the dream-world and alternate world. ""The perfect lover"" is an imaginary place--Wessex, product of a 1985 experiment in group illusion being conducted near Dorchester. The participants have been hypnotically projected into a ""future"" which has been laid out along general guidelines but then allowed to develop into the sum of their communal imaginings. Their unconscious bodies rest in elaborate life-support systems while they go about their Wessex lives sealed off from any memory of ""previous"" existence. The world they have made--an island cut off from England by the ""Blandford Passage"" and the ""Somerset Sea""--is a lovely resort, serenely divorced from Soviet England and its concerns. Four years into the project, a new director is brought in: Paul Mason, a cunning sociopath bent on reshaping the imaginative consensus on which the id