A selection of six of Wyndham’s early science fiction short stories.

• The Lost Machine (1932)
• The Man from Beyond (1934)
• The Perfect Creature (1937)
• The Trojan Beam (1939)
• Vengeance by Proxy (1940)
• Adaptation (1949)

The Lost Machine (1932)

Wyndham’s second science fiction story.

A spaceship arrives on earth from Mars. It lands in a field unnoticed by earthlings. It contains one organic lifeform and one of their advanced machines. The machine exits the ship to begin exploring, but next thing he knows the ship lifts off a little into the air and abruptly explodes in a cascade of metal, leaving the machine alone.

What follows is a series of the machine’s ‘adventures’ narrated from the machine’s point of view as it encounters various objects on this new planet, describing them from a puzzled alien’s point of view and we, the readers, have to puzzle out what it is the machine is describing.

Thus we deduce from its puzzled description that it discovers what roads are, is appalled to discover how primitive the technology is which runs cars, is shocked to learn that the stone constructions it finds everywhere are a form of ‘cave’ which the primitive life forms (i.e. humans) inhabit, is dismayed to learn the life forms appear to keep themselves warm by burning things, by fire, such an inefficient generator of heat it hasn’t been used on the fourth planet for thousands of years.

This Martian machine is described as looking like a coffin six feet long by two feet deep and two feet wide with eight mechanical legs, some kind of ‘lenses’, and forelegs which it can manipulate things with.

Wyndham’s second story, ‘The Lost Machine’, was cover-featured on the April 1932 issue of Amazing Stories.

The entertainment, such as it is, comes from figuring out what it is the machine encounters in its odyssey, from the descriptions it gives us from the point of view of an alien piece of technology. Thus Wyndham describes what it’s like for the advanced robot to discover a car which has broken down, to read the mind of the woman trying to fix it who jumps back into the car terrified, then her puzzlement as the machine fixes this primitive device allowing her to fire up the ignition and drive off.

Next he encounters a herd of cattle who charge him and poke him with their horns. We hear the farmers approaching who poke and prod this strange contraption until he starts to move at which point they all run off, all except one who is very drunk and drunkenly treats him like a sort of dog, coaxing him to come along and lie down in a kennel which the machine, out of sheer exhaustion, does.

Next morning the same man coaxes the machine to hop up into a car and drives him to a nearby place which we recognise from the description must be a circus and tries to sell it to the circus owner. However the machine makes a bolt for it, making straight for the Big Top, where he prompts predictable panic and mayhem. Disappointed at not making a sale, Tom finds him again and coaxes him back into the van. The machine agrees because what else can he do? He is a sad and depressed machine.

On the way home Tom picks up some mates and they do a pub crawl, stopping at each pub which the machine observes with puzzlement and wonder. Eventually Tom is so utterly drunk he crashes head on into another car. The machine steps down and hears a woman’s voice, then recognises the woman whose car he fixed a day or so earlier. The men are drunk and become threatening to her, so the machine barges in and rescues her, scooping her up in his forearms and carrying her along the strange metalled way. She is a little injured from the crash and becomes weaker but the machine can read her mind patterns and understands where she lives. It carries her all the way home and delivers her to her father.

And that’s where the narrative we’re reading actually begins for the entire narrative is told as a flashback. The actual narrative we read begins with the father preparing to show the machine to some men (journalists?) but when he takes them into the room where they keep the machine, all they find is a puddle of molten metal. The men leave, laughing sceptically, convinced the whole thing has been a con trick. It’s only when they’ve gone that the young woman, who we now learn is called Joan, points out to her father a sheaf of paper with strange symbols on it. She realises it is the machine’s account of its adventures, and spends the next few weeks deciphering the symbols. And once deciphered, they are the account we have just read – the first person account of a Martian machine shipwrecked on earth and not understanding a thing around it.

— The single most obvious aspect of the story is the ironic contradiction between the way the machine tells us all the way through how primitive and basic man’s technology is and Wyndham’s own conception of a machine from Mars, which is itself extraordinarily clumsy and mechanical and literal, a six-foot-long metal box with four pairs of legs, big lenses and forearms! The next obvious thing is that the real point of the story is to satirise clumsy humans and their backward technology. It is, all in all, an odd combination of broad comedy tinged with sadness for the fate of the preposterous ‘machine’.

The Man from Beyond (1934)

More satire. In Wyndham’s hands Venus is a place very like earth, in fact very like England, with cities and universities and schools. The only difference is the ruling species has six limbs and sleek silver fur. But they regard themselves as the Peak of Evolution. A school trip, very like an English school trip, is underway to the zoo, and to a new exhibit. According to the story there is a rare valley named Dur and at some point in the distant past a unique combination of gases was released through deep fissures in the valley and put everything living in it at that moment into a state of suspended animation. Now these many examples of prehistoric flora and fauna have been revived and put on display in vitrines or behind bars.

The party of schoolchildren being led around the cages is bored by all the worthy examples of flowers and plants and even the smaller herbivorous dinosaurs (it is in almost all particulars, like a terrestrial zoo with even terrestrial dinosaurs, like archaeopteryx.) The point of the story is the guide giving the tour barely stops at the cage of a funny four-limbed creature which stands upright, with only vestiges of hair on his head and face, and the rest of the class moves on but one little Venusian, school…er… alien, named Sadul. When he notices the Venusian looking at him the hairless biped – who is, of course, a man – frantically starts scrabbling in the dirt of his cage. The last few watchers move on in disgust, but Sadul, after some puzzling, realises he has drawn a map of the solar system, with a sketch of Sadul by the second planet and himself, the hairless biped, by the third.

Cut to some scientists in a Venusian university. From their conversation we learn that the man has been handed on to them and given a full account of his story, which then follows. THE EARTHMAN’S STORY.

The earthman is Morgan Grantz and he paints a picture of an earth dominated by two vast business consortiums, Metallic Industries and International Chemicals. Grantz worked for International Chemicals but was recruited as an industrial spy for Metallic Industries. He is motivated to damage them because they stole his father’s inventions and litigated him to death, then let his mother die in poverty. So he changed his name and got a job with them determined to do them maximum harm. Now he is presenting a report to the board of Metallic Industries in which he stuns them by announcing that International Chemicals is building a spaceship to make manned flight to Venus. Grantz has been offered a place aboard. Now, with the permission of the chairman of Metallic Industries, Drakin, Grantz is to volunteer for the trip to Venus and sabotage it

MURDERS IN SPACE There are ten in the crew of the spaceship Nuntia. Grantz murders three but makes it look like suicide. Increasingly worried there is some unseen depressive influence at work here in deep space, two of the crew mutiny, allowing Grantz to shoot them down as they advance on the captain brandishing spanners, and look like a loyal crew member. Now there are only four of them.

STEALING THE SHIP They penetrate the thick cloudy atmosphere of Venus to discover it is mostly grey ocean. Eventually they sight a small island and land. After settling, eating and securing everything the captain decides they should explore. (The atmosphere of Venus turns out to be pretty much like earth’s which is convenient and confirms your sense that the story is bubblegum rubbish.) They’ve only gone a little way before Grantz says he’s forgotten the ammunition for their rifles. The captain grudgingly lets him return to the ship but Grantz hurriedly closes the airlock, primes the rockets and takes off, seeing the other three futilely shaking their fists from the ground

THE VALLEY He flies for hours over ocean and becomes worried he’ll never find more land when he does, cliffs and thick jungle, then the engines give out and the ship crashlands, ripping off its fins, puncturing the sides. He survives and spends 6 months fixing it up, going on expeditions for food with his rifle. You can see from all this that Wyndham and his readers envisage an alien planet as basically an unexplored bit of earth. I kept thinking of the preposterous adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

As only an idiot in a pulp novel would, Grantz remains convinced that the spaceship Metallic Industries was surely building to fly to Venus and rescue him will appear at any moment. Every night he points a powerful searchlight into the sky so they can find him. After a few months the batteries start to give out and it begins to dawn on him that maybe Metallic Industries aren’t coming after all.

He takes to hunting for game and foraging for food and survives alright. The story is a variant of Robinson Crusoe. He befriends a couple of silver furred six-legged slinkies. These are, of course, the ancestors of the present intelligent occupiers of Venus. Then one day he goes further afield than ever before, into an eerily silent valley. The slinkies try to hold him back but he presses on, Suddenly he sees a dinosaur head rearing over the foliage and fires but it doesn’t move. Nothing moves. He kneels to take a better shot, smells a funny smell and, next thing he knows, wakes up in the cage.

What he doesn’t realise is that millions of years have passed since he went into suspended animation in the Valley of Dur. The two Venusian academics take him to an observatory. They focus the telescope on earth. When he looks through it, Grantz sees a dead, grey globe pitted with craters. Surely that’s the moon, he says. No, the earth, they reassure him. He walks out the observatory, to the edge of the cliff, and then over it, not willing to live any longer.

The Perfect Creature (1937)

Science fiction comedy.

The narrator works for the Society for the Suppression of the Maltreatment of Animals, along with colleague Alfred Weston. A deputation from the village of Membury invite them to investigate strange goings-on up at the Old Grange. They’re prompted to do so by the advent in their high street of two five foot six creatures which look like turtles with horny carapaces front and back but human-type heads peeking out the top and human arms out the sides. When the villagers made as if to threaten them the creatures waddled off over country blundering into Baker’s Marsh where they sank without trace.

At first I thought these were aliens but then it turns into a comic version of The Island of Dr Moreau. The narrator and his colleague Alfred Weston go up to Membury Grange where they are greeted by Dr Dixon who has, of course, been carrying out experiments on animals and humans, literally piecing them together from dead body parts.

In fact it turns out Dr Dixon was once a biology teacher at the narrator’s school who reputedly inherited millions of pounds, packed in teaching to set up his own lab (p.95). Now he shows them around his lab and, finally, to the cage of his pièce de resistance, his Perfect Creature, whom he has named Una. She is a monstrosity:

Picture if you can, a dark, conical carapace of some slightly glossy material. The rounded-off peak of the cone stood well over six feet from the ground: the base was four foot six or more in diameter; and the whole thing supported on three short, cylindrical legs. There were four arms, parodies of human arms, projecting from joints about half-way up. Eyes, set some six inches below the apex, were regarding us steadily from beneath horny lids. For a moment I felt close to hysterics. (p.102)

Una decides she wants to mate with Weston and becomes so distraught she swipes for him through the bars and then demolishes the bars and breaks free, moving with the obliterating force of a tank as the three men run for cover. First she demolishes the laboratory wing, then bursts through the barred door and into the main house. As our three heroes bolt up the stairs Una barges into the stairs and demolishes them. Comically, Weston falls into her four arms and she starts to croon besottedly to him.

Firemen and ambulance and police arrive and try to corral Una, while trying to loop Weston in a rope and hoist him free. Nothing doing. Una spots the rope, breaks free of it, bursts through the front door and lumbers off down the drive, towing the rope and half a dozen firemen still clinging on to it behind her. Their colleagues start the fire engine and give chase as Una breaks through the wrought iron gates to the Grange, still cradling Weston in her arms and crooning to him, onwards she goes, turning off the main road and into a steep side lane heading down to the river.

But this is her undoing. Trucking across an ancient packhorse bridge her weight makes the central span collapse into the river and, of course, Una has no ability to swim like any kind of earthly creature, so sinks like a rock. The firemen rescue Weston and pump the water out of him.

The story concludes with the boom-boom punchline that Alfred Weston has now changed profession from being an animal cruelty inspector, since he finds it impossible to look a female animal of any kind in the eye without a shiver of horror!

The Island of Dr Moreau played for belly laughs. Carry On Vivisecting.

The Trojan Beam (1939)

A sort of sci-fi angle on the contemporary war in China.

In 1937 Japan invaded China in a renewal of the conflict which had been raging, off and on, since 1894, and had included the Japanese seizure of Korea in 1910 and of Manchuria in 1931. Wyndham’s story imagines that the 1937 war descends into a gruelling war of attrition characterised by the kinds of vast networks of trenches seen on the Western Front in the Great War and has dragged on for generations, to 1964, to be precise. And it is in this year that the Chinese make a surprising technological breakthrough and invent an astonishing secret weapon.

The story is seen through the eyes of British spy George Saltry. He is employed by the Japanese as a roving spy behind Chinese lines and we see him reporting to his Japanese controller. But in fact George is actually in the pay of the Chinese army in the form of Pang Li. The story is told via half a dozen or so meetings between the two, where Pang uses Saltry to feed selected information back to the Japanese. There are two big set pieces.

Before the first one, Pang hands over to George full details of the new secret weapon, which is a highly magnetic beam which you point at the enemy forces and pulls rifles out of their hands, helmets off their heads and, when turned up to full, can drag even tanks off their forward course, pulling them sideways across the mud and into rivers. Anyway, much to George’s amazement, Pang hands him full technical details of this beam machine to hand over to his Japanese masters.

Then, six months later, Pang invites George to witness at first hand the results of the Japanese’ first use of the formerly ‘secret’ weapon. The Chinese have a simple plan. They have rounded up thousands of metal pipes and containers and packed them all with explosives or poison gas dispensers. So George is in a forward trench with Pang when the Japanese attack begins i.e. they turn on their magnetic ray, and everything metal which isn’t tied down goes flying towards the Japanese lines. The Japanese had, obviously, been hoping to disarm the Chinese troops then mount a traditional Great War advance. Instead they found all the places where they’d mounted magnetic rays suddenly infested with high explosives which, before they could do anything, the Chinese detonated, with devastating consequences. And then the Chinese advanced.

The text then switches to a kind of history textbook overview which points out that this one event, on 22 August 1965, was the turning point in the war as the Chinese took the offensive and drove the Japanese back to the coast. But the Japanese dug in and proved difficult to utterly repel. Which is why there is a second big setpiece.

In the next of their periodic secret meetings (George travels into mainland China under an assumed name and identity as a travelling evangelist for the Charleston and Savannah Oriental Endeavour League). Pang explains the Japanese will never use the magnetic ray on land again. But they discuss its effectiveness against air raids. If you just pointed the ray upwards it would attract the first bomber it touched and pull it down right on top of itself along with the bomb payload, thus blowing itself up. No, they agree the correct strategy is to have the beams waving across the sky so that a momentary touch from them disrupts any airplanes, but not stationary and so calling death down on themselves. The more powerful the beams, the more likely a passing moment caught in one will help to break up any metallic object.

So Pang dispatches George back to Japanese HQ with info about this strategy, and the date of a planned Chinese air raid on mainland Japan, 14 November 1965. Again George is puzzled why he is being ordered to give the Japanese advance warning, but he does. But in the event he has, again, been used as a tool. On the night if 14 November 1965 the Japanese do indeed turn batteries of magnetic rays up to the heavens and switch them to the highest power possible – but there is no Chinese air raid (although the Chinese make a cursory pretence by sending over a few planes with loudspeakers designed to give the impression of massed ranks of bombers).

Something far stranger happens. For on the night in question the earth is passing through the swarm of meteorites known as the Leonids, chunks of space debris of all sizes, many with a high iron content. And so the Japanese rain down upon their own country thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of meteorites of all shapes and sizes, some massive enough to cause huge detonations big enough to destroy cities, and some so large they seem to have set off volcanic activity. The net result is the utter obliteration of the entire nation of Japan and the horrifying annihilation of its entire population.

This is what Pang explains to George at their final meeting. Pang is philosophical. It is always the ordinary people who suffer in any war. But he leaves George appalled, and poignantly thinking about the great majority of the Japanese population, still living their centuries-old traditional lives in the countryside, none of whom had anything to do with their militaristic leaders’ vainglorious campaigns.

Stepping back from the details of the story as such, what strikes this reader is:

1. that Wyndham was wrong in conceiving the war in China would repeat the trench warfare of the First World War, highlighting the way he and most of his generation were oblivious of the new Blitzkrieg tactics developed by the Germans and soon to be put into lethal operation in Poland, France and then, in the early stages, in Russia.
2. that he was eerily right in foreseeing the utter annihilation of Japanese cities, including Nagasaki, and having his protagonist lament the deaths of so many innocent civilians

A curious combination of the backward looking and the spookily prophetic.

Vengeance by Proxy (1940)

A genuinely thrilling horror story.

The first person narrator, Walter Fisson, is on holiday in the Balkans with his wife, Elaine. Driving through the mountains they come across a man crawling in the middle of the road and, despite swerving, can’t help hitting him. When they get out to tend his injuries they realise he was hurt before they hit him, with a bullet wound to the chest and some kind of symbol carved into his forehead.

The car is a write-off and so, reluctantly, Walter walks to the next town where he manages to get a driver to drive him back to the scene of the accident. Here he sees Elaine sitting motionless over the man’s body. As he looks at the man Walter sees a momentary look of desperation but then his head lolls over and he dies. He pulls Elaine to her feet and into the taxi and they drive back to town, but she is strangely distant all the way.

When they get to the town, Walter is amazed that Elaine talks quite fluently to the investigating police in Serbo-Croat, a language he knows she is completely ignorant of. Not only that, but she holds herself differently, her mannerisms are different, and she can barely speak a word of English.

Now, the entire narrative is told through a series of secondary media, namely telegrams Walter sends to a friend of his in England, Dr Linton, followed by a letter which gives the story up to the point I’ve just described, then exchanges of telegrams between the captain of police in the town Walter and Elaine arrive at the the Chief of Police in Belgrade. Then Dr Linton telegraphs a mutual friend who’s also on holiday in the Balkans, Dr Frederick Wilcox, and asks him to detour to Belgrade to check up on Walter who sounds panicky and a bit nuts. Wilcox reports back that Elaine really isn’t herself, as vouched for by her wife Mary, who thinks Elaine doesn’t even carry herself like a woman! Now Walter’s first telegram to Dr Linton had asked if he knew of a specialist in Belgrade and Linton had recommended a Dr Bljedolje. When Wilcox goes to see this reputable and well-qualified doctor he is astonished that the medic spins a theory about transference of personalities, which he reports in detail in his letter back to Dr Linton. There’s a further flurry of telegrams and a final phone call between Linton and Wilcox which brings the plot to a conclusion.

What emerges from these various messages is that the man they ran over, one Kristor Vlanec, was regarded as supernatural by locals which is why a couple of brothers had shot him and carved the evil eye symbol into his forehead. Supernatural because he is capable of personality transference i.e. of moving his soul/spirit/mind, call it what you will, into new bodies. He tried to do it to Walter as he lay dying in the road, but a spasm of physical pain broke off the contact. But when Walter left him alone with Elaine, he transfered his mind into Elaine’s body. The momentary look of despair Walter saw in Vlanec’s eyes was the despair of Elaine, trapped in a dying man’s body.

This explains why Elaine could suddenly talk fluent Serbo-Croat but almost no English, why she looked ill at ease in her body, lost all her familiar mannerisms and, according to her old friend, Mary, held herself like a man pretending to be a woman.

The story has a nice narrative arc because it turns out that Vlanec-inside-Elaine is determined – in the Balkan way – on revenge for being murdered, which explains why Elaine is seen by eye witnesses entering the house of the brothers who shot Vlanec, Petro and Mikla Zanja in some remote Balkan village, and shooting them. Even as Linton and Wilcox are corresponding about Dr Bljedolje’s theories, she carries out the murders, the police are called, question eye witnesses, who are then brought to Belgrade and identify Elaine as the murderer.

In the thrilling final page, Wilcox tells Linton over the phone that Walter has disappeared, while the police have arrested Elaine. He saw it happen in the foyer of the hotel and Elaine broke away from the arresting officers and made it over to Wilcox long enough to beg him to do something, to contact Dr Bljedolje, he’ll understand. So Wilcox finishes his phone call by saying he now believes it all. He believes that Vlanec, realising the body of Elaine was in trouble, jumped out of her body and into Walter’s which promptly high-tailed it out of town. And the mind trapped inside Elaine’s body, as she is about to be tried for murder and hanged? Walter’s!

Commentary

This is a very successful short story in its own genre (science fantasy / horror) for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it is piggy-backing on Dracula. Most people remember Dracula for the central horror of the plot and numerous gory details, but when you actually read it you discover it is an epistolary novel, told through umpteen different forms of letters, journal entries, police records and so on. Well, same here, and it may be that Wyndham was prompted to the format by the supernatural subject matter and the East European setting both, of course, strongly reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s story.

But there’s another important aspect to the story. It is set in the present day, on earth – no spaceships and missions to Mars etc – and among well-educated, no-nonsense, sensible, professional English chaps. It is their initial common sense rejection of all this mystic mumbo-jumbo which makes the story all the more plausible.

And it is this approach, this tone of sensible chaps coming up against something incredible, more than the epistolary format, which was to be central to the success of the post-war novels, Day of the Triffids et al.

Adaptation (1949)

The ‘maturity’ of Vengeance By Proxy makes the ‘relapse’ into silly space fiction of Adaptation all the more surprising and disappointing.

Franklyn Godalpin is employed by the Jason Mining Corporation on Mars. He is friends with the colony’s doctor, Dr James Forbes. This is the silly version of Mars which featured in science fiction adventure yarns from Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1920s through Ray Bradbury’s haunting but still wildly impractical Martian Chronicles in the 1950s, a Mars where humans can happily breathe the Martian atmosphere, and where there are some elements of Martian flora (tiny tinkling flowers nicknamed tinkerbells) and small friendly Mars creatures a bit like earth’s marmosets.

It is a solar system conceived in a childishly anthropocentric way as a playground for human beings, easy to travel about, easy to colonise, full of life which we can, with a bit of effort, get friendly with.

Franklyn’s wife, Marilyn, is pregnant. She gives birth to the first baby born on Mars, Jannessa. But both mother and baby do not flourish. Dr Forbes recommends that Marilyn is too ill to travel but baby Jannessa’s development might be adversely affected by Mars, its low gravity and who knows what infections.

So in the last week of 1994 baby Jannessa is taken aboard spaceship Aurora carried by her black nanny, Helen, for the journey back to earth. A few months later, Marilyn wastes away and dies and is buried on Mars. But then comes the terrible news that the spaceship Aurora has been lost in space. Franklyn is distraught but never gives up hope that his baby daughter is alive, somehow, out there.

Now we, the readers, know this to be the case, because the scenes depicting Franklyn and Forbes are interspersed with passages describing Jannessa, still alive and thriving and being looked after someone named Telta. Slowly it becomes clear that Telta is an alien, with her slate-blue skin, and that Jannessa feels like an outsider and wishes she fit in with the people around her. Telta remembers how some of her people left the safety of the heated underground bunkers to venture onto the surface and discover the 12 people who had been marooned there by a passing spaceship, how the extreme cold had turned the skin of one of them black (! a reference to the black nanny, Helen) who, with her dying breath, had pointed towards the heavily swaddled baby and muttered ‘Janessa’ before dying.

So we see Jannessa having conversations with this Telta and also with Toti who explains that theirs is a small world orbiting the big planet ‘Yan’, and how his people came to Europa because their own world was dying (that really is one of the stock science fiction tropes). Toti and Telta explain that they selected Europa because it was small, had low gravity. How they had to live in their spaceships for some time while they mined below the surface and created a warren of sealed underground chambers which could be warmed and fed by underground food farms etc. And throughout these passages it is emphasised how they had to make some adaptations to Jannessa so she could fit in with their underground culture…

Seventeen years later Franklyn and Forbes meet in the terrestrial setting of a gentleman’s club. Frankly has become a rich and influential man rising through the ranks to run the entire mining operation on Mars. Now, over port at the club, he tells Dr Forbes there has been a development. For years and years he has been paying for adverts in space journals asking for news of the Aurora. Now there has been a development. On old space crewman recently passed away in a ‘spaceman’s hostel’ in Chicago. Before he did, he told the story of the mutiny aboard the Aurora. The captain became aware some of his crew were guilty of unspecified crimes and notified them he’d be handing them over to the police when they reached earth. So the criminals took over the ship and took it out towards Jupiter, where they dumped the captain, the loyal crew, and some of the passengers on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Aha. The story is becoming clearer.

Now Franklyn tells Dr Forbes that, using his power and influence, he has sent one of the Corporations prospecting ships to Europa to find Jannessa. There is a little passage of ‘philosophical’ discussion in which Dr Forbes warns that life is ‘plastic’ i.e. can be, must be, shaped and moulded by its environment. Take the way they’ve had to make adaptations to human beings in order to optimise them for life on Mars. But Franklyn isn’t listening. He just wants his baby back.

In the final scenes an excited Franklyn calls Dr Forbes to announce that the expedition found Jannessa and is bringing her back to earth! They’ve radioed ahead a photo of Jannessa and she is the spitting image of her mother, Marilyn.

Some time later the ship (Chloe) lands on earth and Dr Forbes expects a call from an excited Franklyn. Instead he gets a call from his worried housekeeper. Franklyn has had a kind of collapse. Forbes hurries round, pushes through the throng of press and photographers who’ve got wind of the story, finds him catatonic on his bed. Forbes diagnoses shock and gives him an injection. Then goes through to the other room to see Jannessa.

There she is, fit and healthy, her face the spitting image of her mother’s – and two feet tall!

Commentary

This is an effectively crafted tale, and the cutting back and forth between the earth characters and Jannessa among her Europa family are well enough done. But everything about it is silly, all the assumptions of the ease of interplanetary travel, through to the old trope of the refugees from a dying planet building a colony underground, the ridiculous idea that a spaceship could dump a dozen passengers on a moon of Jupiter and expect them to live! There are so many improbabilities and childish naiveties to process that the final payoff feels like a cheap thrill.

And then the whole issue of height. In our woke age there is nothing like the stigma against dwarfism that this story implies was enough to utterly break Franklyn’s spirit, and so the entire premise of the story loses what was (presumably) its shock value circa 1949, but is also actively offensive. So what if she’s two feet high, she’s still alive.

Summary

All these stories are silly, really. They’re a good indication of why so many serious readers, for so long, dismissed science fiction as immature, pulp rubbish. On this showing, most of it, even when written by an intelligent man like Wyndham, was rubbish. Vengeance By Proxy is the only one I’d recommend anyone to read because it is not really science fiction at all, but more of a horror story and, maybe because of this, the Dracula-style treatment gives it a technical, formal interest, a pleasure in noting the care taken over the machinery of the story.

All in all these stories show why Wyndham wasn’t taken seriously by the book world through the 1930s and 1940s and was considered a competent writer in a minority field. Until, that is, he burst upon a wider readership with the staggeringly more fully conceived, utterly serious and terrifyingly plausible masterpiece, Day of the Triffids. The real interest in Wyndham as a writer is how a man who produced a steady stream of cheap shockers like the ones in this book, utterly transformed himself into the author of his big four masterpieces.

Credit

The Best of John Wyndham 1932-1949 by John Wyndham was published by Sphere paperbacks in 1973. All references are to this edition, which I bought at the time, price 55p.

Related link

• John Wyndham bibliography

John Wyndham reviews

• Sleepers of Mars (1973) 5 short stories from the 1930s
• The Day of the Triffids (1951)
• The Kraken Wakes (1953)
• Jizzle (1954) 15 short stories
• The Chrysalids (1955)
• The Seeds of Time (1956) 11 short stories
• The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
• The Outward Urge (1959)
• Trouble with Lichen (1960)
• Consider Her Ways and Others (1961) 6 short stories
• Chocky (1968)
• Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns (2019)

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting the resulting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating what is in effect a peaceful transition to a communitarian socialist society, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the events
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth and they rebel
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, an engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover unimaginable strangeness

1930s

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the vastest vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic, Ransom, and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call Mars, where mysteries and adventures unfold

1940s

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – having survived his journey to Mars, Ransom is now sent to Perelandra (aka Venus) to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s innocent young inhabitants to a new Fall
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with vanished Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1951 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – one night the sky is full of green flashing lights as the earth passes through the fragments of a comet and the next day the entire population awakes to find itself blinded, all except for a tiny handful of survivors who have to preserve human society while fighting off the growing numbers of the mobile, intelligent, poison sting-wielding monster plants of the title
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation, set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon, as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them – until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a fast-moving novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1953 The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham – some form of alien life invades earth in the shape of ‘fireballs’ which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of ships, attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements around the world and then, in the final phase, melting of the earth’s icecaps and global flooding
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1954 Jizzle by John Wyndham – 15 short stories, from the malevolent monkey of the title story to
1955 The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – hundreds of years after a nuclear war devastated North America, David Strorm grows up in a rural community run by God-fearing zealots obsessed with detecting mutant plants, livestock and – worst of all – human ‘blasphemies’ – caused by lingering radiation; but as he grows up, David realises he possesses a special mutation the Guardians of Purity have never dreamed of – the power of telepathy – and he’s not the only one, and soon he and his mind-melding friends are forced to flee to the Badlands in a race to survive
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1956 The Death of Grass by John Christopher – the Chung-Li virus kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) leading to a global famine, so civil engineer John Custance has to lead his wife, two children and a small grop of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism towards the farm owned by his brother David in a remote valley in Westmoreland, where they can grow root crops and defend themselves
1956 The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham – ten stories of travel in time and space in which, despite the 1950s phrasing, women tend again and again to be presented as the stronger, more resourceful sex
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham – one night a nondescript English village is closed off by a force field, all the inhabitants within the zone losing consciousness. A day later the field disappears and the villagers all regain consciousness but two months later, all the fertile women in the place realise they are pregnant, and nine months later give birth to identical babies with eerily platinum blonde hair and penetrating golden eyes, which almost immediately begin exerting telepathic control over their parents and then other villagers. Are they aliens, implanted in human wombs, and destined to supersede Homo sapiens as top species on the planet?
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1959 The Outward Urge by John Wyndham – a conventional space exploration novel in five parts which follow successive members of the Troon family over a 200-year period (1994 to 2194) as they help build the first British space station, command the British moon base, lead expeditions to Mars, to Venus, and ends with an eerie ‘ghost’ story

1960s

1960 Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham – ardent feminist and biochemist Diana Brackley discovers a substance which slows down the ageing process, with potentially revolutionary implications for human civilisation, in a novel which combines serious insights into how women are shaped and controlled by society and sociological speculation with a sentimental love story and passages of broad social satire (about the beauty industry and the newspaper trade)
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1961 Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham – Six short stories dominated by the title track which depicts England a few centuries hence, after a plague has wiped out all men and the surviving women have been genetically engineered into four distinct types, the brainy Doctors, the brawny Amazons, the short Servitors, and the vast whale-like mothers into whose body a twentieth century woman doctor is unwittingly transported
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, millions of years ago, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds and the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quiet suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes, as in a scientific report, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s

1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together the author’s key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the pornographic possibilities of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1973 The Best of John Wyndham 1932 to 1949 – Six rather silly short stories dating, as the title indicates, from 1932 to 1949, with far too much casual interplanetary travel and juvenile plots
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 The Alteration by Kingsley Amis – a counterfactual narrative in which the Reformation never happened and so there was no Enlightenment, no Romantic revolution, no Industrial Revolution spearheaded by Protestant England, no political revolutions, no Victorian era when democracy and liberalism triumphed over Christian repression, with the result that England in 1976 is a peaceful medieval country ruled by officials of the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of an abandoned Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’: Turner is a tough expert at kidnapping scientists from one mega-tech corporation for another, until his abduction of Christopher Mitchell from Maas Biolabs goes badly wrong and he finds himself on the run, his storyline dovetailing with those of sexy young Marly Krushkhova, ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’, and Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’ and computer hacker
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap; but Angie is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero from the previous book in the trilogy; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster, who’s been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s

1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop with a heart of gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson –