TIME OUT by David Ely. 209 pages. Delacorte. $4.95.
Man's inhumanity to man was once so limited by primitive technology that horror-story writers had to resort to ghosts, devils and other creaky props. Today's shapers of fictional barbarity have merely to invoke, with suitable exaggeration, the modern world. Computers, spaceships, nuclear weapons—these are the devices summoned in this fine first collection of 15 stories by
"David Ely," the pen name of David Lilienthal Jr., son of the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Atomic Energy Commission.
In one story, cold-warring Russia and the U.S., after inadvertently eradicating all life from the...