George Gaylord Simpson, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, 1996

Simpson was the most famous paleontologist in the world with a specialisation in the early period of when dinosaurs and mammals co-existed, so with the posthumous publication of Magruder he surprised everyone with what is essentially a short but very competent science fiction novel in which a 22nd century time experiment throws a chronologist back to the Cretaceous Period. It was probably written for Simpson’s own amusement in the 1970s, given that that decade is bracketed by a 1970 theory on the possibility of warm-blooded dinosaurs (something that Simpson disagreed with) and the lack of any mention of the ‘asteroid impact’ cause of their demise, a theory which first surfaced in 1980. Magruder is very much in the reliable H.G. Wells Time Machine tradition, and the novel comes with an introduction from Arthur C. Clarke that puts the novel in its science fictional context and an afterword from Stephen Jay Gould that does the same for it paleontologically, and Gould also demonstrates why there’s far more going on in the novel than you thought. An unexpected find, and a good, quick read.  PY

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Lavie Tidhar, Cloud Permutations, 2010

I can't resist something as unusual as science fiction that’s rooted in the cultures and language of the Pacific Islands – I don’t believe Bislama appears anywhere else on my bookshelves. Lavie Tidhar’s premise for Cloud Permutations is interesting too: on a colony world that has its cultural boundaries defined by clouds, Kal, a boy who want to fly, finds himself pulled onto a quest to find out the truth about his planet Heven and the colonists’ lost history. The novel comes in three parts all of which are interesting in different ways from the set-up to the sensawunda resolution, however it’s the second part that somehow feels the weakest because it seems to aspire to being nothing above and beyond a simple young-adult adventure, yet the first and third parts achieve much more so admirably. Tidhar has also crammed many familiar SF themes into this work; the end result is very good but it still left me wishing he had somehow gone deeper and explored Kal’s understanding of what he is discovering, something that seems to be consciously left out in order to preserve the novel’s central mystery. Certainly this is a highly original science fiction novella, but it’s also one that left me needing a little more than I was given.  PY

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Jeanette Winterson, Weight, 2005

A mischievous (and brief) retelling of the myths of Atlas and Heracles infused with some imaginative cosmology. It somehow resolves into a curiously direct form of science fiction, one that cuts through the tropes and gets down to a core theme: the self-imposed boundaries we have and our necessary liberation from them. One of those off-centre book many SF fans would like.

Ahmed Khaled Towfik, Utopia, 2009

Sometime in the mid-21st Century, Utopia exists as a large enclave of well-off Egyptians, living behind high walls on the north Egyptian coastline and protected by the US military. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has been left to descend into anarchy and barbarism. One of the sports favoured by the affluent and bored Utopian youth is to venture outside Utopia’s walls and return with a trophy – usually a body part of some semi-feral non-Utopian – and when one such venture goes wrong the antagonists are on the receiving end of an unexpectedly beneficial turn of events. You could reasonably expect Utopia to be a rather brutal bildungsroman, but the life lessons taught to the selfish Utopians are not learned, in fact they’re rejected in favour of a restatement of their born superiority. This is a well-written and rather chilling book, as might be expected of the Arab world’s leading writer of horror and fantasy, and is one that I cautiously recommend. Towfik spares no polite sensibilities the reader may have – no characters are particularly likeable or even admirable, and they are all put through their own versions of hell. Utopia was first published in Arabic in 2009 more than a year before the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, yet in a brief note at the beginning Towfik states he believes a place like Utopia will certainly exist in Egypt in the near future. Such is the depth of cynicism on display here that I doubt any of that sentiment will have changed.  PY

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Michael Frayn, A Very Private Life, 1968

Though it depicts a future dystopia, A Very Private Life is actually less a science fiction novel and more a futurist fairy tale. The young female protagonist Uncumber lives in a sterile underground world in which personal privacy is paramount, being a cultural reaction against the invasions of privacy that began in the 20th century. Emotions must be drug-induced to be acceptable, babies are made at the factory when you provide the ingredients, and dark glasses are the only item of clothing because they help keep your feelings to yourself. But, being a bit of a rebel, Uncumber looks for something more tactile and goes on her way to the outside world in search of Noli, a surface-living man she accidentally encountered on her holovision TV. He turns out to be a selfish low class polygamist among other things, and her situation get worse from there. As an allegory for the dangers of withdrawal from the world A Very Private Life works well but the story never really comes alive as anything other than a mild comedy of manners. Yes, life is always far more complex than we can perceive from a naïve standpoint, but that observation seems self-evident from the beginning and the development of this theme never really moves beyond second gear.  PY

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Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper, 2010

This first collection of twenty-two of Châteaureynaud’s short stories to appear in English is a very welcome addition to genre bookshelves. His stories may be bizarre and frequently disconcerting, but I’d still struggle to describe Châteaureynaud specifically as a genre writer, at least in the Anglo-Saxon sense of how we define that word: he specifically avoids invoking horror and fear in the reader, instead choosing a far more understated approach to getting across the essence of his surreal mysteries. He occasionally also employs science fictional tropes, although he never lapses into an over-reliance on them to purvey his sense of elusive, dreamy strangeness – he is far more subtle than that. I didn’t actually find the book’s description of Châteaureynaud as “France’s own Kurt Vonnegut” that helpful (apart from the obvious physical resemblance) as Châteaureynaud’s writing possesses an elegance that Vonnegut rarely achieved, but perhaps that’s partly down to the translations by Edward Gauvin, who frequently displays a knack for precision in finding that English mot juste wherever it’s needed – Châteaureynaud is actually more Kafkaesque in his leanings, perhaps with a dash of Calvino. Several stories stand out: ‘The Only Mortal’ is probably the liveliest (and funniest) story here, ‘Delaunay the Broker’ is masterful in the way it compounds its central mystery, but for sheer unique strangeness it’s hard to better the eponymous ‘A Life on Paper’ in this collection. If this ever gets a paperback edition – which it really deserves, and further collections would be very welcome too – then I expect it will sell very well, and Châteaureynaud deserves to become a much more familiar name to English language readers.  PY

•  Edward Gauvin’s translation of A Life on Paper won the Long Form Category of the first Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2011.

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Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 1975

Some may have been thinking this inclusion on the SF Masterworks list is well overdue, and they’re probably right. Russ plays a part in her own novel (her most famous) about alternates of herself that may exist out there in the multiverse, with the broad differences between them being defined along the lines of their degrees of emancipation. By including herself in her novel even though she largely takes a back seat, this seemed to be the most honest way Russ could explore the subject of women’s unequal role in society by comparing four possible universes, one of which is her own. The most prominent is of course the Joanna Russ that is Janet Evason, inhabitant of a far future Earth renamed Whileaway in which men died out in a selective plague 800 years previously; then there’s the Russ that is Jeannine Dadier from an alternate present in which WW2 never happened and American women are universally the stay-at-home types, and the fourth Russ is Jael Reasoner, combatant in a protracted and violent future war against men, who brought the four of them together for purposes she will eventually reveal. Russ does not fire off her flaming arrows at only the men, as her female characters often come in for an equally tough critique. She wrote the story scattergun-fashion with the four different points of view interchanging frequently and denying the reader any chance of experiencing a straightforward narrative, however the novel still hangs together nicely and the unusual composition is a major part of the book’s originality.

On publication The Female Man may have been a wake-up call for the men at the time who were prepared to take it on, as it is undeniably didactic. As a sequel to her Nebula Award-winning short story ‘When It Changed’, it’s probably fair to say Russ’s prickly and often very humourous rants are a little less reflective, directly, of the experience of Western women today. However much things have improved and however much the battleground may have shifted, the objective hasn’t: the glass ceiling is still there and the ongoing battles for equality of opportunity in the West are still no less important than those that went before. The Female Man can still put fire in the belly of feminists everywhere, including myself, and while it’s probably a layer or two beneath the current strata of feminist experience and thinking (that evolution could certainly be commented on better by others, not myself) it was certainly pivotal to some of the feminist literature that came after. However much this was a product of its day, its age is beginning to show a little and that’s actually something to celebrate, as its impassioned and very likeable ending itself makes clear. Certainly a masterwork, and still an invigorating book which I’m glad to have finally read.  PY

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John Wyndham, Chocky, 1968

There’s still some uncertainty over Chocky’s original publication date: Penguin claims it was first a novel in 1968 but John Clute points to an earlier appearance in Good Housekeeping in 1963 – it certainly exhibits a domesticated gentility suitable for such a magazine. This Penguin Modern Classics edition comes with an introduction by Brian Aldiss that maybe goes into a bit too much detail, as if readers of this particular edition will almost certainly have read it before. It’s an undemanding and straightforward read that ultimately reveals the identity of that extra voice in young Matthew’s head, with perhaps only a fleeting mention of the troubling matter of schizophrenia and no mention at all of Multiple Personality Disorder which, given Matthew’s Harley Street treatment, would at least have been considered more than the outdated diagnosis of ‘possession’. This seems to indicate that the science has been excised as much as possible, making it one for the list of recommendations of science fiction for people who don’t read science fiction.  PY

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Thomas M. Disch, The Prisoner, 1969

This new Penguin edition of Disch’s novelisation – the one that, in his lifetime, he resented every reprint of – is timed to coincide with the recent miniseries remake. Disch contracted to write this for a small fee while particularly short of cash, even before he caught a few episodes of it on US television, and he felt no particular affinity to the series but went on to create his own kind of embellishment on what he had seen with little regard as to how his novel might match the series’ end result. It certainly diverges from it in any number of ways, but that’s possibly explained by the (very likely grafted on) notion that this was meant as a sequel: Number 6 has been recaptured, and he goes through the motions once more with similar tenacity but with a very different set of results. I didn’t see this as a sequel at all, but I like the notion that The Prisoner’s deliberately inexplicable nature can give rise to different interpretations and outcomes from its themes. Given the circumstances of its conception this isn’t considered a great Disch novel – understandably so, although I still found it to be elegant throughout, particularly the eloquent cat-and-mouse dialogue between Number 6 and Number 2 which felt exactly as it should, and which gives an indication of why Disch was probably right to be offered this gig: he made a more mentally stimulating job of it than, say, Philip K. Dick possibly would have, despite some multiple-identity and dystopian overtones that would now be considered Dickian. Certainly one for the completists of either Disch or The Prisoner, but in many ways actually better than might be expected.  PY

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Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, 1966

A word about Ondrea Barbe’s great photograph that appears on the cover of this recent Penguin Modern Classics edition: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the alliterative nature of both Harrison’s name and the book’s title, and at the same time reflects the oppressive heat and claustrophobia contained in the book itself. Make Room! Make Room! occupies the other end of Harrison’s spectrum in relation to his satire and humour: a murder in an overcrowded and riot-prone New York in 1999 forms the backdrop to some good characterisation and a serious overpopulation message. What you get are characters to care about, a decent police-procedural plot and a strong dose of feminism; what you don’t get is the grafted-on horror aspect of the movie adaptation Soylent Green. This sits comfortably alongside some eco-conscious literature of the 1960s, published just a few years after the environmental preachiness of Silent Spring and at a time when overpopulation was not the major global concern it is today. Also, interestingly, it appeared seven years before Roe vs. Wade, and puts up a strong defence of the need for access to birth control which some at the time specifically wished to remove. Still a very good book indeed that always deserves to remain in print.  PY

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Andrew McGahan, Wonders of a Godless World, 2009

This mainstream novel received a big push from its Australian publishers, with an animated promotional video that ties in with the book’s stunning first edition wraparound cover. This story – of a nameless orphan who encounters a mysterious and nameless new patient in a nameless asylum beneath a nameless volcano on a nameless tropical island – holds a lot of promise, not all of it fulfilled. McGahan wrote it to indulge his fascination with extreme weather and extreme natural disasters, and he uses science fictional and fantasy elements as the stitching that binds them together. The story builds quite nicely for the first half, mostly using the too-easy devices of out-of-body experiences, telepathy and immortality to form the link between the orphan and ‘the foreigner’, who is the increasingly likely suspect for some bizarre behaviour among the inmates, and soon some murders, despite literally never lifting a finger. By the fourth chapter one feels one is onto something rather original, and how it avoids becoming a straightforward paranormal tale is the way McGahan has embedded everything in the Earth sciences, and these provide the best descriptive passages by far.

The flip side to this seems to be, given McGahan’s self-imposed limits on names and characterisation, an inadequacy of conviction in the relationships between the novel’s small cast, particularly when it comes to sex, all culminating in a strangely bizarre S&M scene between two catatonic patients that frankly doesn’t work at all well. In fact as the novel progresses, sex becomes more and more the vector for certain plot elements to resolve themselves, and McGahan’s approach is, given the patients’ general lack of experience in these matters, rather predictably mechanical. I felt McGahan was coasting as he passed beyond the half-way mark; the OoBEs and telepathic conversations become a little repetitive, the foreigner’s story of his vendetta against the planet increasingly unbelievable. The best aspect is the way the Earth is the real star of the story with the locations and human characters all nameless and as minor as ants; plus the way the orphan’s status in society, an unreliable narrator forever on the outside and condemned to trying to figure out what’s going on inside, echoes humanity’s position literally as ‘outsiders’ on the skin of the Earth itself: this planet beneath our feet that we do not yet completely understand really does not care about us at all. As a whole package Wonders of a Godless World is impressive, but at the center of it all the story itself lacked the kind of substance that a more rigorous science fictional approach might well have given it: a story like this, with its informative backdrop of geology, vulcanology and meteorology all threaded with a fantastical sensibility, almost deserves to be science fiction.  PY

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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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Thomas M. Disch, 334, 1972

This is the novel (or more correctly, set of linked stories) which for many showed how Disch was often too clever by half for the rest of us. The novella ‘Angouleme’ included here was the subject of a book-length critical essay by Samuel R. Delany, who argued that despite the absence of scientific themes its speculative setting made it inherently science fiction. A snapshot of the 21st century lives of the people who live in 334 East 11th St, New York, it ranges from being at turns darkly comic and farcical to sharply realistic and unfailingly sympathetic. The science fiction is there in places but played down to the everyday while the social realism is played up, to the point that 334 takes the reader into immersive layers of intricacy, and with a Dickensian eye for detail that shrugs off the fact that this is all meant to be about ‘the future’. Neither was it ever meant to be a fun read in the way that Camp Concentration could be, and if Disch’s last posts on his Live Journal Endzone were indicative of the direction his thoughts were heading in his last weeks, he’d been there already in fiction with 334’s closing sentences. Someone – and really I can only mean Terry Gilliam – could probably make a very decent film of this.  PY

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Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration, 1967

Thomas Disch was never as fashionable within the science fiction community as he deserved, and at the time of first publication Camp Concentration was perhaps (to take a very long view of things) outplayed by Daniel Keyes’s slightly more reader-friendly novel Flowers for Algernon which had been published some months earlier, explores the same theme of artificially enhanced intelligence, is hard-hitting in its own way but then is also, undeniably, outstripped by Disch’s combination of erudition, creativity and political cynicism. Camp Concentration also contains ideas that might look unnervingly close to the present dystopia: America has declared war on the world and its government is experimenting on conscientious objectors. Maybe now that Disch has sadly left us this deserves to be considered a classic of 20th Century fiction: forgive the superlatives but it’s a masterpiece of understated black comedy and still a deliciously wicked book.  PY

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James Morrow, City of Truth, 1990

The 1992 Nebula-winning novella that Morrow expanded from his short story ‘Veritas’. Morrow has never really caught on in the UK, and more’s the pity. City of Truth depicts the utopian city Veritas, where lying and anything less than complete honesty has been conditioned out of human communication, while it is under seige from the rebel ‘dissemblers’ of the hidden city of Satirev. Jack Sperry believes he must go from a ridiculous extreme to an absurd one as he learns to lie in an attempt to save his young son from a fatal disease. Morrow’s notable wit, very prominent in the first half, is gradually replaced by a sadness that shows how neither extreme of truth or untruth is ideal. A very good if rather implausible satire, and one that favourably compares with Vonnegut in Morrow’s exploration of the ridiculous.  PY

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Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1938

Rand wrote this at the same time as she was working on The Fountainhead, so the two books share the theme of asserting individuality over collective living (the edition available today is her revised 1946 version). This is a very straightforward story but also a rather overworked parable, in which a future society populated by people who are numbered rather than named exists without the concept of ‘I’, instead only having ‘we’ with which to express themselves, and collectivism is enforced almost as a religion. The protagonist, Equality 7-2521, rather unbelievably gets to do everything all by his very resourceful self: stumble upon a lost source of ancient knowledge, make scientific discoveries singlehanded, suffer cruel punishment for his good fortune, escape from jail, win the most beautiful girl and discover the Unspeakable Word. And rather uniquely, because of Equality’s upbringing most of Anthem is told only using the first and third persons plural. Any atheist who has shaken off an earlier religion will, similarly, probably understand some of Rand’s antipathy to her roots, and her loathing for Russian collectivism informs the whole story. The influence of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is also there in the background, despite being thematically rather different. This is not a natural or free-flowing tale at all, it’s (necessarily) linguistically clumsy and way too earnest, but as a vision of a mind breaking free from imposed constraints it displays its own kind of self-conscious dystopian perfection.  PY

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Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

Welcome to OneState, a soulless totalitarian regime based on mathematical principles, reason, logic and the efficiency models of the 19th century management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor. The designer of the spacecraft known as the Integral, the mathematician known only as D-503, has love and pity for the life found elsewhere in the solar system, considering them as yet uncivilized by the missionary nature of the Integral’s forthcoming journey. D-503’s diary entries depict a cold and unemotional civilization: OneState is obsessed with its own mathematical perfection, a dictatorship run through with expansionist dogma and rhetoric that it will impose on whatever aliens are encountered out there in the universe. But then there are his misadventures with the rebel movement Mephi and his infatuation with the woman I-330, both of which take his eye off the ball and force OneState to intervene. We was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship bureau and wasn’t published in Russia until 1988, despite having already inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s easy to see why this short dystopian masterpiece is considered to be among the greatest of its kind; described by its most recent translator Clarence Brown as a “clunky old postmodern monster” it feels very much of its time yet retains a great deal of charm, not least because D-503 knows he is not writing for posterity or his contemporaries but for his wild and remote ancestors, us.  PY

MORE ON YEVGENY ZAMYATIN :  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOVIET WRITERS  |  WIKIPEDIA

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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Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962

The small but important differences between the original book and Stanley Kubrick's brutal film are not often commented on. This is still, thankfully, not yet a book to be noted for being a prediction, instead as a warning it seems to have functioned very well largely as a result of Kubrick’s truncated adaptation. But what was lost to Kubrick – he was unaware of the book’s final chapter because it was omitted from US editions – is a final sense of personal sympathy for the violent and unreliable teenage narrator, Alex. It’s actually what keeps the book alive and relevant because Burgess came down clearly on the side of his distinctly amoral anti-hero, despite having been driven to write A Clockwork Orange out of personal experience and loss from precisely the kind of violence he describes. It must have been difficult to write for that reason alone, though when set against the even greater amorality of a misguided government trying to deal effectively with youth crime it’s clear the book emerged out of Burgess asking himself some hard questions while still feeling a justifiable rage. Which makes the book a moral one, and far easier to experience than the film despite the complexities of Burgess’s invented language, Nadsat, which somehow also serves to veil the violence. Of which there’s plenty.  PY

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