Perhaps it was a form of mid-life crisis, but a while ago – conscious of the slowing of my own body – I began to think about speed.

It must be many generations since anyone felt the world around them was decelerating. Global communication is virtually instantaneous. Given an empty road or track (rare, admittedly) our cars and trains are faster than ever. And as every world-record on the track confirms, human beings are still getting faster. Even a child in a buggy – propelled at speed by a lycra-clad parent on Tooting Common – can now be a fast machine.

For a long time, our new series of stories Short Rides In Fast Machines was in development as ‘Speed Merchants’, which probably tells you all you need to know. Later, after listening to John Adams‘ exhilarating piece ‘Short Ride In A Fast Machine’, we borrowed a better title which also gave focus to the writer’s brief.

So what have our three speed merchants come up with?

Without giving too much away, the title of Adam Marek‘s story, The Bullet Racers, isn’t a metaphor. A reporter – voiced expertly by ‘our own correspondent’ Ben Crowe – arrives to investigate an unusual annual event held in the sleepy village of Thaxted-cum-Shyne, and gets more than he bargained for. Earlier this year, we were lucky enough to record some of Adam’s published work for Radio 4Extra. His stories are like controlled explosions, the reaction caused by slapping together in equal parts the everyday and the absurd or strange. The Bullet Racers is no different in this respect, and every bit as wonderful.

The internet is the fast machine in “The Fall Of Paris” – in some ways a cautionary tale about instant and improbable global fame. The narrator in this brilliant story by Toby Litt is less than sympathetic, which sets particular challenges for the actor reading it. Make him warmer, make him ‘nicer’, and you lose the black humour and sadness and much of the point of the story. Make him too cold, and it’s possible the listener will simply switch off. But Julian Rhind-Tutt captures the nuances perfectly, and the narrator, for all of the emotional ‘want’ about him, remains all-too-human.

And time flies at ever-more alarming speed. I can’t believe it’s ten years since I read a submission by a creative writing student at Bath Spa – for an early series of The Time Being – and was temporarily blinded by the dazzle of The White Road. Since then Tania Hershman has become a doyenne of and evangelist for the short story. We’ve collaborated a number of times on radio over the years, including Flash! – a selection of Tania’s short, short work (which featured My Mother Was An Upright Piano). Some of you may recall that I spilled coffee over Tania in Vienna not so long ago, but thankfully, she didn’t bear a grudge and instead delivered About Time, a tale about the fastest vehicle of all: the time machine. Stephen Hogan – as the struggling writer whose research goes off at a very strange tangent – narrates and brings out all the warmth and wit of Tania’s story.

The recordings feature musical snatches from Brooklyn rockers Heliotropes and, principally, from John Adams, which is only as it should be. I hope you can steal 15 minutes from your turbo-charged lives to give each of these short rides a listen.

*

Short Rides In Fast Machines will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Fridays 21, 28 November and 5 December 2014. 3.45 pm (GMT) and thereafter on BBC iPlayer.