In chapter 15 the narrator dives into the River Thames at Shepperton and turns into a whale. He cavorts in the sun-emblazoned water and his example inspires the good citizens of Shepperton to follow suit. From the park adjoining the river a young man throws off his shirt and trousers, dives into the river and is changed into a swordfish. A woman in tennis gear slips into the water and is turned into a graceful sturgeon. An elderly woman and her husband are pushed into the river by laughing teenagers and are transformed into a pair of dignified groupers. A dozen children jump in and are changed into a shoal of silver minnows.

The Unlimited Dream Company is like that all the way through, weird and visionary things happen on every page for no reason.

Complete lack of narrative logic

Ballard’s disaster novels – Drowned World, Drought and Crystal World – have a kind of personal, psychological appeal: a disaster occurs and part of the complex pleasure of reading about it is, on some level, the way the reader correlates what is happening with their own guess or sense of what is likely. If the world is flooded, then is it likely that x or y would happen? How would people behave? How would I react?

And then the stories follow a certain logic, almost always Ballard’s familiar one of entropy and decay – the protagonists of all three disaster novels go mad but the stepping stones of their descent are carefully marked; there is a narrative and psychological logic to the course of events and Ballard artfully arranges significant incidents and twists to take the reader along with him on the journey.

In The Unlimited Dream Company the whole idea of narrative logic is for long stretches completely abandoned. There’s a basic set-up but after that, anything goes.

Blake steals plane, crashes in river, drowns, comes ashore, hallucinates

The basic set-up only takes about five pages. A disturbed young man named Blake was expelled from school for his sexual irregularities, has had various odd jobs, finally working at Heathrow Airport, and from here he one day steals a Cessna light aircraft, having previously chatted up small-plane pilots and blagged his way onto a few trips with them. He’s picked up enough to know how to take off but not about how to actually fly, and so scoots low over the ground for only a mile or so before hitting a tree in a park beside the Thames. The plane’s tail is ripped off and the rest of the plane crashes into the river and quickly sinks.

Blake comes ashore transfigured into a god, angel, bird, fish, visionary

Blake swims from the wreck and stumbles up the bank and onto the lawn of an impressive mock-Tudor mansion, watched by five figures who become highly symbolic and meaningful: young attractive Dr Miriam St Cloud, who is supervising three small children, one of whom is blind, one who has Downs Syndrome, one whose legs are in metal clamps; the older Mrs St Cloud who is watching from an upstairs window; the town’s vicar, Father Wingate.

From this point onwards the text is bewildering, not in its formal structure – it’s divided into conveniently short chapters, each with an appropriate title – nor in the actual prose, which is – as always with Ballard – formal and correct, with no slang or swearwords.

It’s that every paragraph contains the very weird and the uncanny, and that the sequence of events follows little if any logic. When Blake tries to escape from Shepperton by walking over the footbridge, the field which leads to it keeps getting wider and wider, eventually so wide that he cannot see the bridge anymore. When he gets in a rowing boat to cross the river, the harder he rows, the wider the river becomes. As he walks down the street, exotic flowers bloom in his footsteps. He spends the first night at the big St Cloud house where:

1. The older Mrs St Cloud comes to his room, Blake is naked in bed, one thing leads to another, and they have sex, but very rough sex, him manhandling her into various positions, while she drinks the blood from his still-bleeding knuckles.

2. Later that night he has a wild dream in which he is transformed into a condor and takes flight over the sleeping town of Shepperton, only for almost all its inhabitants to also be transformed into birds and come flying up into the sky to meet him.

None of this means anything or moves the narrative forward, because the narrative doesn’t seem to have any particular place to go. It just piles one surreal episode on top of another. When Blake arrives the town church next morning it is to discover that the birds of his dream were true – it did happen – the town’s inhabitants did turn into birds and flock the skies – and some of them tore off the numerals on the church tower clock, in order to abolish the past.

A plot of sorts

Instead of a plot the narrator has one or two concerns which keep recurring. 1. Blake wants to find out whoever seems to have given him the kiss of life after he’d blundered ashore and collapsed. Whoever it was had big hands which bruised his chest, so he tends to measure the hands of all the characters he meets.

2. Dr Miriam early on blurts out to him the shock revelation that Blake was trapped inside the cockpit of the plane, trapped underwater for eleven minutes! In other words, he must have died. He must be a dead man. A ghost. Yet Blake remembers swimming ashore and angrily rejects the suggestion. Later, swimming over the drowned Cessna in the form of a frolicking whale, he looks down and sees a man still trapped in the cockpit. Is it him, his corpse, or some double?

3. He keeps saying he wants to leave Shepperton, and makes repeated half-hearted attempts to do so, but in the next paragraph or chapter expresses the conviction that he has been sent to Shepperton for a purpose, to liberate the inhabitants from their shackles, to set them free, freedom envisaged as a series of ever-weirder concepts: at one stage he seems to use his magic to make them all strip naked and cavort in the street with each other, wife swapping, young maidens inviting passing young men to join them on the beds in shop windows. An orgy, fair enough. But in a later sequence he persuades the entire town that they can fly and leads them one by one into the air until the entire population is flying high high over the Thames Valley, before he returns them peacefully to earth. In the weirdest version, Blake incorporates people by somehow assimilating them into his body, merging their bodies with his until they have been kind of sucked inside him: he does this to a few unsuspecting individuals, and then to the entire town.

The point is, If this were a more traditional novel, some of this might matter and provide important clues to what is going on – but in this novel, that kind of rationality and logic emphatically does not apply. It is a sustained fantasia, 200 pages of delirious hallucination, the possibility that the narrator is dead not a matter of concern as it might be in a ghost story, but instead one more trippy idea which is just part of an unending flow of meaningless and weird events which unfold with a dissociated stoned logic of their own.

Towards the end Blake finally gets his way and sets himself and Miriam up as some kind of god figures. She wears a wedding dress (all the women in the town have become obsessed with sex and pregnancy, partly in response to Blake’s overwhelming sexual urgency) and he has been crowned by the town’s inhabitants with a complicated and heavy headpiece made from bird’s feathers attached to enormous wings and both of them – here’s where it gets trippy – are hovering off the ground above the altar in the local church, while the population, also I think hovering off the ground, are worshipping and venerating them.

But here’s the thing: into this scene erupts Stark, a character we’ve been introduced to right from the start who maintains a run-down funfair and is seen at various points maintaining spooky circus rides, hunting the myriad exotic birds which Blake has brought to infest Shepperton and, finally, trying to dredge up the crashed Cessna. Anyway, Stark erupts into the church and proceeds to shoot both Blake and Miriam through the heart. They crash to the floor. Miriam really does seem to be dead, he skin slowly yellowing and flies coming to lay eggs in it. Blake also appears to have died but not in any ordinary sense, as he carries on narrating the novel, although all the colour, the tropical vegetation and the exotic birds start to pale and die as if his power has all waned.

By this stage, nothing surprises the reader any more and, I’m afraid, none of it seems to matter.

First person narrative

Part of the reason it’s such a strange and disorientating book is that it’s told by a first-person narrator. Almost all Ballard’s novels and stories are told in the third person, and not any old third person, but in a voice which is dry, clinical and detached. So there is usually a dynamic contrast between the events being described – such as the weird psychological states entered by the protagonists of the disaster novels or the extreme psychological degradation of the figures in High Rise – and the detached and formal prose of the omniscient narrator.

But here the first-person narrator is the one undergoing the extreme hallucinations and dissociated effects and so the reader is thrown right into the deep end of his trippy, surreal visions and delusions and compulsions and there is something, in the end, exhausting and at the same time, utterly disbelievable about the experience.

Lots of sexual fantasy

The narrator is plagued by sexual thoughts, feelings and urges quite as much as the narrator of the much more famous Crash. They are so heavily mixed up with his general hallucinatory state as to be less prominent but it’s very much there. Blake fantasises about having sex with Dr Miriam while she’s still treating him, actually does have sex with her mother who he nearly kills he’s so violent with her, fantasises about impregnating every single female inhabitant of Shepperton, as he walks down the street eyes every single woman with a view to sex, is permanently conscious of his semi-erect penis.

In one scene Blake is so turned on by the hind quarters of a deer that he considers mounting it, and in another, deliberately shocking scene, early on holds the little girl among the three playing children fiercely against his loins in an overtly sexual embrace.

I knew then that I would stay in this small town until I had mated with everyone there, the women, men and children, their dogs and cats, the caged birds in their front parlours, the cattle in the water meadow, the deer in the park, the flies in this bedroom had fused us together into a new being. (Chapter 13)

So the lead character is continually thinking about his penis and imagining having sex with more or less anything that moves and yet these sexual feelings aren’t anywhere as prominent as in Crash because: 1. they are swamped by the weirdness of events 2. they are not enacted, they remain perfervid fantasies.

Already responding to the nervous irritation of this Sunday morning light, I felt a new surge of sexual potency… I wanted to celebrate the light that covered this still drowsing town, spill my semen over the polite fences and bijou gardens, burst into the bedrooms where these account executives and insurance brokers lazed over their Sunday papers, and copulate at the foot of their beds with their night-sweet wives and daughters.

Whereas the sex fantasies in Crash are harsh and brutal, the ones here are so exaggerated as to be laughable, almost sweet.

By coupling with [the elderly patients waiting outside the closed clinic], with the fallow deer in the park, with the magpies and starlings, I could release the light waiting behind the shutter of reality each of them bore before him like a shield. (Chapter 14)

At some moments the text’s endless circling around this little town with its high street, church and recurring characters reminded me a little of Under Milkwood and the endlessly recurring sexual urges are so fantastical as to seem fantasies, harmless.

I dreamed of repopulating Shepperton, seeding in the wombs of its unsuspecting housewives a retinue of extravagant beings, winged infants and chimerised sons and daughters, plumed with the red and yellow feathers of macaws, antlered like the deer and scaled with the silver skins of rainbow trout, their mysterious bodies would ripple in the windows of the supermarkets and appliance stores. (Chapter 14)

Semen everywhere

That said, anyone who is uncomfortable with the word ‘semen’ should avoid reading this book, semen is a recurring substance, especially in the middle chapters. Here Blake abruptly turns into a stag, antlers sprout from his head and he proceeds to mount every deer in sight, which is quite a few, his semen sticking to their fur and his.

In the next chapter, restored to human form again, Blake walks through Shepperton naked and masturbating pretty much continually, scattering his semen across the pavement and wherever it lands wreaths of vibrantly coloured tropical flowers burst from the pavement.

People turning into birds

‘There’s a vulture on the lawn. Look, two white vultures.’

In Ballard’s early story, Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer (1965) the narrator dresses in the eviscerated thorax, wings and feathers of a giant seabird. An unexpected element of High Rise (1975) is the fact that up at the top of the eponymous building its architect, Anthony Royal, tends a flock of seagulls which perch along the railings and antenna of the building, waiting for scraps of food, sometimes swooping down inside the building to terrify the traumatised inhabitants.

Well, birds are to the fore here again, in the dazzling chapter where, in the depths of the night, Blake is transformed into a giant bird and flies up over the rooftops of Shepperton, and finds himself joined by the night-time bird forms of all the town’s sleeping inhabitants. Next morning unusual birds are everywhere in evidence, a brutal fulmar, a colourful macaque, pelicans, two white vultures, orioles and so on, and from then until the end of the book, vivid and exotic birds throng the town and the text.

Over-excitement

I noticed in My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (1975) that the word ‘calm’ is used a lot. The narrator needs to be ‘calmed down’ a lot, the implication being that he becomes unhealthily over-excited, a symptom of his mental disturbance. Same here: every couple of pages someone else is trying to calm Blake down or he himself realises he’s becoming feverishly over-excited and attempts to calm himself down.

Abandoned planes in Ballard’s fiction

Small flying machines seemed to be important to Ballard at this period: My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (1975) is all about a mentally disturbed astronaut who becomes obsessed with digging a ruined World War Two bomber out of the sand dune where it’s become buried. Low-Flying Aircraft (1975) as the name suggests, rotates around a character who takes off from a half-ruined airfield each day to herd the few surviving unmutated cattle to a safe zone up in the mountains. The Ultimate City (1975) is told by a narrator who builds and flies a glider from his post-industrial commune into the heart of the abandoned city and there persuades a gifted engineer to help him on the promise that he will teach him how to fly; which is how the story ends, with the engineer flying off in the reconditioned glider.

So this story about a disturbed young man who steals then crashes a small plane fits right in to the theme which seemed to concern Ballard at this period.

LSD and light imagery

Ten feet from me the sand glittered with silver light, a dissolving mirror leaking into the river.

When you take acid, light and the quality of visual stimuli assume a power and importance which is impossible to convey to people who haven’t experienced it. It is a transcendent, shattering experience. Most of the hallucinations are visual, a deep sense of dazzlingly bright colours fragmented into an infinite number of points or cells, pulsing and rotating like a living kaleidoscope which seem to enter your central nervous system directly without the need of any external senses. The multicoloured lights are right inside your brain, they are the fabric of your existence.

Each leaf was a shutter about to swing back and reveal a miniature sun, one window in the immense advent calendar of nature. I could see the same light in deer elms.

The text of The Unlimited Dream Company is continually reverting to descriptions of the light, sunlight, light off water, light is continually depicted as unnatural, weird, intense, angled and refracted and dazzling, even minor details are acid-tinged, throughout.

The lawn glistened like chopped glass.

The book reads like a description of one extended, madly delirious acid trip.

Repetition

I think the most harmful aspect of the book is its repetitivity. Maybe if you consciously decide to write a book which will be a phantasmagoria, which will proceed with a dreamlike logic instead of a rational narrative, then one part of that is rising above the traditional narrative need for forward momentum, and for individual events to be unique and have a special significance. Not to be afraid, in other words, of things recurring, as they very often do in dreams.

Thus the reader begins to get the sense that some things happen over and over – like humans changing into birds or Blake absorbing other people. Certainly the narration circles round and round and round the same parts of central Shepperton.

But for the reader who is not on drugs it got a little boring when Blake was alive, then dead, then we’re told he’s alive, then he’s shot dead, except he’s still alive.

Repetition may be what happens in dreams, and when you’re in a dreamlike state can seem rather wonderful – but when you’re fully awake and alert, repetition can quite quickly become just plain boring.

Thus the scene where Blake incorporates another human being into his own body, not by eating her but by kind of pressing her against him till she merges into his body – that scene could have been the centrepiece of a horror or science fiction story by a different writer. But here it is just one among many marvels and – crucially – it happens multiples times.

He does it once, he does it twice and then at some point he appears to do it to the entire population of Shepperton which, as a result, he appears to be carrying around inside the capacious landscape of his body, and then… he lets them all out again, one by one, emerging stunned into the acid-bright sun and the multi-coloured foliage… except for a handful of children he keeps inside, much to the brief anger of their mothers… and then, later, he does it again, luring a teenager into the back of a limousine in the town’s multi-storey car park (shades of Crash) and does it again.

My point being this extraordinary event doesn’t seem to have any consequences, doesn’t lead anywhere, unhappens as easily as it happened, and then happens again for no particular reason. Eventually this sense of complete inconsequentiality wears the reader down and I really struggled to care enough about any of the characters or the narrative to manage to finish reading it.

In the end Blake is shot dead hovering above the altar, but carries on living although a lot of his magic seems to desert him. He staggers to the grave the three handicapped children made for him some chapters earlier. The authorities are trying to get into Shepperton with helicopters hovering overhead and the army around the perimeter trying to break through the thick barricade of bamboo and other tropical plants which by this stage surround and infest the little town. Then Blake lets all the townspeople go, I think.

The Unlimited Dream Company is an extraordinary farrago, it’s amazing his publishers let it be published, and it signals some kind of mental watershed. Ballard really let himself go in this book, he gave in to a kind of carefree, heedless side of his daemon, stopped worrying about plausibility or narrative logic.

The absence of any logic or restrain make you realise how important those qualities of restraint and discipline had been to his earlier books, which all felt taut and focused and driven and so capture the reader and drive us along with the narrative.

The Unlimited Dream Company marks the start of a steep decline in the quality of Ballard’s writing which, from this point onwards, becomes increasingly lightweight, silly, self-parodic and long.

If the Atrocity Exhibition is gripping because it consists of condensed novels, his books from the 1980s onwards feel increasingly expanded – extended, uncondensed, long and inconsequential.

Related links

• The Unlimited Dream Company on Amazon

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Drought (1964)
• The Crystal World (1966)
• Some style features of the early novels of J.G. Ballard
• J.G. Ballard’s literary experimentalism
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
• Preface to the French edition of Crash
• Crash (1973)
• Pornography, simile and surrealism in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Hello America (1982)

Short story collections

• The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
• The Terminal Beach (1964)
• The Disaster Area (1967)
• Vermilion Sands (1971)
• Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
• The Venus Hunters (1980)
• Myths of the Near Future (1982)

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 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 an era of wisdom and fairness, 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 change
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
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, 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…

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 most sweeping 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 the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew 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 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
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 masterpiece, 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 breathless 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 a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
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 to solve a murder mystery
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
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

1960s
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
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, 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, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite 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
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
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 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 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 sexuality 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…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the 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 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 his 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 new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves 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 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’
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 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 is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her 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, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as 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