4) The Seeds of Time, by John Wyndham
I got this Wyndham collection a couple of years ago, not sure if I had already read it. Well, I had read the best known stories from it – “Survival”, “Pawley’s Peepholes” and “Dumb Martian” – but not the other seven as far as I can remember. Wyndham claims in his introduction to have been trying to avoid the clichéd formula of the “adventure-narrative form of story”, and on the whole he does so, though the stories are replete with other clichés – in particular, Wyndham’s approach to time-travel is essentially as a chance to have a retake of some moral test, a theme he hits on several times here. These stories are all decent enough, but I think other Wyndham collections are stronger. Still, if you like his other work, you’ll like these.
My son has Tourette’s, but what’s interesting is that it does NOT manifest as him swearing or even necessarily saying anything. It manifests as a cycle of “tics” that he can’t stop, or can’t easily stop, and if he forces himself to stop one he just moves on to a different tic.