Unlikely Stories, Mostly  

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Unlikely Stories, Mostly is the first collection of short stories by Alasdair Gray, published in 1983.

Summary

Like Gray's best-known work Lanark, the book was published in the 1980s but contains work going back thirty years.

• "The Star"

  A fantasy in the style of H. G. Wells about a star falling into an urban back garden. Written when Gray was a teenager, it was first published in Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls in 1951.

• "The Spread of Ian Nicol"

  A riveter who begins to undergo fission.

• "The Problem"

  A man has an unsatisfactory conversation with the Sun.

• "The Cause Of Some Recent Changes"

  Some bored art school students dig a tunnel with terrible consequences.

• "The Comedy Of The White Dog"

  A sexual comedy set in the 1950s, involving a woman and a dog.

• "The Crank That Made The Revolution"

  Vague McMenamy invents an enhanced duck.

• "The Great Bear Cult"

  Pete Brown features in a story, written as a television script, about a 1930s cult when people dressed up as bears.

• "The Start Of The Axletree"

  The two "Axletree" stories are inspired by Franz Kafka's telling of the Tower of Babel story. They satirise multinationalism and capitalism.

In this first part, an emperor ruling a vast circular swathe of territory conceives a vast building project which will be his tomb and symbol of power, and the building of which will provide a perpetual central focus for the empire.

• "Five Letters From An Eastern Empire"

  The story examines the power of state artists Bohu and Tohu to make a political difference in a hierarchical society where whole sectors of the population are declared "unnecessary people". It was inspired by a line from Ezra Pound's Cantos: "Moping around the Emperor's court, waiting for the order-to-write".

• "Logopandocy"

  Written in the persona of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, who is trying to create a "multiverbal logopandocy", or universal language.

• "Prometheus"

  A radical intellectual discovers the limits on his ability to change how language is used.

• "The End Of The Axletree"

  The second part of the "Axletree" story begins two thousand years after the events of the first. Generations of work on the building culminate in reaching the sky.

• "A Likely Story In A Nonmarital Setting"
• "A Likely Story In A Domestic Setting"