Christopher Priest, The Dream Archipelago, 2009

Seven stories (two of which are novellas) set on a chain of equatorial islands that are the focus of a long continental war, on a world that permanently sits beneath a strange vortex in time. These are very English stories in their manner as well as the romance of the setting, the archipelago representing an ideal locale for the perfect escape except that it is far less perfect in reality, and is also where these stories’ protagonists get to face themselves in unexpected and uncomfortable ways. Best of all is ‘The Miraculous Cairn’, which turns around at least one of the reader’s suppositions brilliantly, and ‘The Watched’ which combines a smattering of quantum theory with a rather Jungian fixation. Also present is the new Dream Archipelago story ‘The Trace of Him’, written especially for this new edition and which Priest later worked into his novel The Islanders. Loaded with metaphor and dream symbolism, Priest is something of a master at depicting unresolved sexual tensions. Highly recommended.  PY

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Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960

This was Miller’s only published novel (if one discounts his incomplete Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman), and is the cornerstone of his reputation for looking at Christian themes while placing them in a science fictional context. Leibowitz was an ordinary electrician in the military prior to the world’s first nuclear war, after which, repentant, he went on to found a minor religious order. Then came the ‘Simplification’ of humanity, and six hundred years hence an indecipherable artifact is found which was undoubtedly his, and over the following thousand years man learns once again to develop nuclear weapons.

The generally bad temper to Miller’s Catholic humour is what gives A Canticle for Leibowitz its kick: he is at turns comic, often sad but always prodigiously grim and rich. Some superbly cantankerous abbots and monks (most of whom are killed off without a shred of dignity) seem to prove their human fallability on a daily basis while at the same time debate higher morality on a grand scale with perhaps too much eloquence. The final moral dilemma for Abbot Zerchi is direct, painful and graphically drawn, making Miller’s exploration – or was it a defence? – of a self-perpetuating Christianity all the more ambivalent. Part of Miller’s point seems to be that humanity’s beliefs – whether one considers them rational or irrational – will over centuries become exaggerated to the point of having a hold over us that’s often far out of proportion to their elementary simplicity; on the one hand he seems to poke fun at this state of affairs in the wider world though on the other hand he appears to stand by some of the more ornately embellished beliefs of the Catholic Church. And where this discord applies to the story’s last third it becomes an uncomfortably big question mark that hangs over everything – just how useful, or useless, is Christianity? – a question mark with a hook that one detects Miller can’t seem to wriggle off all that easily (at least on the page, and he sits the reader squarely on that fence too, allowing you to jump either way). An angry and ironic book, and there are even iconoclastic aspects that make it as relevant today as ever.  PY

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J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962

Ballard disowned his first novel The Wind From Nowhere, so most people’s Ballard collections now have to start here. It’s a typical Ballardian cataclysm: an overactive sun has produced a melting of the polar ice caps with a submerged Earth undergoing a new Triassic era, and London is now a steamy, coral-encrusted jungle populated by giant iguanas. Robert Kerans is an expedition biologist, enraptured by the disturbing dreams that people share at this latitude, and he chooses to stay when his expedition departs. He then encounters the manic character Strangman and his seductive African entourage, who are all similarly caught up by the end of the world but in a far more sinister and symbolic way. The Drowned World openly references the influence on Ballard of Paul Delvaux, who seems to provide a creative counterpart to Ballard’s own destructive imagery, and once you ‘get’ the character of Strangman, a man with a real heart of darkness and the only properly developed character, Ballard’s intention becomes clear and the rest falls into place. It’s a somewhat stilted read now but memorable for the visual ideas it leaves you with, and given the biblical nature of this apocalypse it’s also refreshingly free of much religious referencing at all.  PY

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Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, 1966

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, has had his intelligence experimentally enhanced to such a degree that he becomes ostracised and emotionally remote, unnerving even the scientists who created his vastly superior mental abilities. Then Algernon, the intelligent mouse who served as the prototype for his experiment, prematurely dies and Charlie must face the possibility that his redemption was only temporary.

Daniel Keyes crafted an exceptionally insightful and readable book, one that succeeds in just about everything it sets out to do while exploring most of the philosophical avenues aswell. It’s also noticeable how Keyes can look into the hearts of his characters to show just how inescapably fallible they all are, no matter how great or small their intellectual achievements. A book that’s never superficial, A perfect example of how science fiction doesn’t need any science in order to tell its most humane stories.   PY

Graham Joyce, Smoking Poppy, 2001

A lonely and bitter Englishman goes to Chiang Mai in search of his daughter who is jailed on drug-smuggling charges, but is led further on a journey into the mysterious, spirit-haunted world of Thailand’s interior. Graham Joyce writes with a kind of contemporary, knowing, middle-aged English freshness; all the characters are sufficiently well-drawn to come alive vividly in the reader’s mind and the narrator never really loses his jaded cynicism throughout, though he finally succumbs to a rather belated coming-of-age as a proper parent to his two estranged twenty-something kids. An excellent book, one I would like to re-read in a few years.   PY

M. John Harrison, Nova Swing, 2006

A loosely connected sequel to Harrison’s Light, the 2002 novel which won him the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. In a retro future couched in the 1950s, some weird technologies, diseases and even weirder people are appearing on the streets of Saudade, where the unpredictable physics of the Kefahuchi Tract have intersected with the planet, creating a forbidden zone that is monitored for the dangerous and illegal trade in alien artifacts. Vic Seratonin is a corrupt tour operator secretly leading tourists over the event horizon, and the police are onto him but there are also stranger crimes to solve and some peculiarly warped destinies to be uncovered. Like plenty of ‘noir’ Nova Swing begins with a classy dame walking into a seedy joint; on a superficial level this is clearly Roadside Picnic meets Mickey Spillane, but on any deeper level it could only be compared with Light – that was a journey around Mike Harrison’s psyche and Nova Swing is no different, as there are again some very internal things going on in these pages. But although the two books are connected they do resonate differently: Light’s canvas was pretty broad and far-reaching across time and space, whereas Nova Swing’s characters all inhabit their own sad, microcosmic, intersecting lives, centred around one street on a far-off world, their motives, dreams and fears sensitively revealed. As an analogy, if Light was the wave then Nova Swing is the particle: both are equally illuminating on Mike Harrison’s preoccupations yet are equally difficult to pin down, challenging the reader to figure out just how this peculiar story took shape. The way their anachronistic ’50s world actually fits into the far future I’m at a loss to explain but somehow it does, because with Harrison’s uniquely gifted prose that’s only to be expected. ‘New Weird’? An appropriate enough label for sure, but don’t let that put you off.  PY

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