[An Alien Heat is set] in the twilight of human history (many thousand centuries hence), where a refined and decadent society, equally reminiscent of Wilde's aesthetes ("The party was absolutely perfect. Not a thing went right.") and the colourful, androgynous Eloi of Wells's The Time Machine, passes its days in extravagant and inconsequential amusements.

The world we know has long since passed into remote history, but is not entirely forgotten. Jherek Carnelian, a sort of Algy Moncrieff of the period, takes a special interest in nineteenth-century England, from which (as indeed from all other known epochs) time travellers occasionally arrive—to be locked up, as often as not, in someone's private menagerie of anachronistic grotesques….

It's a clever and entertaining fable, memorable and provocative in its surface texture, and not without its serious side. The ironic, Swiftian vision of the contemporary world, albeit distorted by Victorian caricature, is...