This is a lovely biography, a sensible, balanced account of a sane and lovely man.
Boyhood in Birmingham
Born in 1903, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris had a difficult boyhood. His parents were mismatched. His father, George Harris, was an ambitious young man from south Wales who was a successful lawyer with a promising career ahead of him right up to the moment in 1898 when, at a society dance, he was discovered in a side-room with a young lady on his knee who screamed when other partygoers opened the door. Whether this was simply because she was startled or because he was molesting her was never made clear, but it was enough of a scandal to force young George to quit his job and leave the principality, moving to England and setting himself up for a second attempt at being a lawyer, in Birmingham. Here he met and fell in love with Gertrude Parkes, the daughter of a successful and wealthy ironmaster, John Israel Parkes, several notches above George’s family in terms of income and class.
Gertrude was no innocent virgin, she had already been married once, at age 24 to Thomas William Hunt, then aged 32, who managed to a) die from a cold caught on their honeymoon which fatally exacerbated his tuberculosis, but not before b) giving her venereal disease. John Israel liked her new suitor, George, well enough but disapproved of him as a potential son-in-law and refused to give permission for the couple to marry. But George was determined and eloped with Gertrude to the Lake District, where they were married by special license in 1902.
But George’s law practice failed to prosper and he began to sink into the character of a failure and a bully. He was forced to rely on business and handouts sent his way by his rich father-in-law, and began to resent him and his wife. He pestered the female servants and drank to excess.
This was the unhappy home atmosphere Wyndham was born into. His parents separated in 1908 and his mother, Gertrude, sold the family home and went on to spend the rest of her long life in a succession of provincial hotels and resorts i.e. from the age of just 5 young John had no settled home. He had a younger brother, the writer Vivian Beynon Harris (1906 to 1987) who he was very close to all his life.
Three of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris’s names are explained by his parents’ names: George Beynon Harris and Gertrude Parkes. It’s not entirely clear why he was given the name Wyndham. Binns shares two theories: one of George Harris’s many brothers was named Windham, with an i; but Windham Wyndham-Quin, Fourth Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl was an eminent figure in Glamorgan, the county surrounding Cardiff, and giving the name to his first-born son may have been an attempt by George to curry favour or, alternatively, simply claim association with this eminent family, much as he later claimed, in books he later wrote about himself, to have (entirely fictitious) aristocratic connections. It was an eccentric decision, which was to impact the world of books 60 years later (p.22).
Bedales
John, known to his friends as Jack, was sent to a succession of prep schools where he was bullied and unhappy and never had a settled family home to return to. He only found a measure of happiness at the unconventional and pioneering experimental school, Bedales, near Petersfield in Hampshire (which he attended 1918 to 1921) where he didn’t particularly excel but was happy. Binns devotes a large section to Bedales with a full explanation of the progressive thinking behind it, the broad curriculum, the daily routine which included cold baths, outdoor exercise and open windows, and an extended profile of the visionary who founded it and was its headmaster, John H. Badley. This is fascinating social history in its own right.
Thirty years later, Wyndham named the leader who emerges in the chaos after the global blinding in The Day of The Triffids and who ends up leading the survivors out of London to found a new community, Beadley – a name which combines Bedales and Badley, and testament to the pioneering headmaster’s profound impact on him (p.194).
Jack left Bedales at the age of 18 without any qualifications. He didn’t go to university so, after leaving Bedales in 1921, he tried a succession of jobs, spending a few years with a sheep farmer (!) before getting shorter jobs as a trainee lawyer and in advertising. The sheep farming experience reappears in the attempts of Bill Masen to set up a farm in the second part of Day of the Triffids.
Writing
In 1925 Jack decided to try and make a living as a writer and from then till the outbreak of war 14 years later produced a series of short stories and three novels. It was to take him a long time to find his voice. His first book was a cheap detective novel, The Curse of the Burdens (1927), which sounds like a farrago and didn’t sell.
Binns applies the same brisk, thorough and riveting approach to the ‘birth of science fiction’ as she did to his parents’ ill-fated marriage and to Bedales (pages 82 to 98). She explains how the first American science fiction magazine publisher was Hugo Gernsback, editor of Science and Invention and Radio News. He coined the term scientifiction and published stories on this new subject in his magazines. These stories proved so popular that he set up the first magazine devoted entirely to the genre, Amazing Stories, in April 1926, with garish covers supplied by illustrator Frank R. Paul.
As soon as he started making money, Gernsback spent it on the high life with the result that Amazing Stories went bankrupt and was sold to creditors. Gernsback promptly set up Amazing Science Stories in 1929, followed six weeks later by Air Wonder Stories. You can’t hold a good man down. Since his creditors now owned the copyright of the term ‘scientification’, Gernsback came up with a new term, ‘science fiction’, and thus the name and the genre were born. (Previous to this the works of someone like H.G. Wells were referred to as ‘scientific romances’.)
Back copies of Gernback’s colourful, cheap and cheerful magazines started trickling into England because, believe it or not, they were used as ballast to fill half-empty cargo ships returning from the States. Wyndham, casting around for a direction, noticed the new genre and decided to write for it.
(In a further footnote on the genre, Binns tells us that Walter Gillings (1912 to 1979) a UK journalist and editor, published seven issues of a fanzine, Scientifiction in 1937 to 1938. This led on to his becoming editor of the first true UK sci-fi magazine, Tales of Wonder (1937 to 1942). His use of the term ‘science fiction’ on the cover of issue number one, June 1937, is taken by scholars to mark the first appearance of the phrase to describe the contents of a UK professional magazine or book. Surprisingly late, isn’t it?)
Jack’s first published short story was Worlds to Barter, published in 1931, and between then and the start of the Second World War in 1939 he had about 20 short stories published. He published three more novels: another murder mystery – Foul Play Suspected (1935) – and two science fiction novels, The Secret People (1935) and Planet Plane (1936).
Jack used different combinations of his names, publishing as John Beynon or John Beynon Harris. Binns thinks the fact that he a) wrote in several genres b) under different names, prevented him establishing a clear ‘brand’ and helps to explain his pre-war lack of success. But there is a third reason. The stories are sort of OK, in a classic pulp sci fi way, but the novels aren’t at all good.
The Penn Club
Jack’s life during this period is quite a bit more interesting to read about than his writings. As soon as he went to live in London, Jack’s attentive mother asked friends to recommend a boarding house or hotel and she was told about the Penn Club, located in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, central London. This had been founded in 1920 with surplus funds left over from the Friends Ambulance Unit, active during World War I. The club was founded by pacifists and conscientious objectors with a strong association with the Quakers (page 61). In fact there was a close connection with Bedales; many old boys roomed there and it hosted Bedales Annual Reunions.
Jack joined in 1925, taking a single room at a cost of £2.50 per week. His room contained a bed, washstand, dressing chest, table and chair, with a cold lino floor and a coin-operated gas heater. Not all the rooms even had running water. But its combination of spartan lifestyle with a friendly, high-minded, liberal-left membership was like a cosy continuation of Bedales.
Jack was always a liberal and satirised the hard-core communist element at the Penn Club, especially when their world was turned upside down by the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939; and then again in 1942 when Hitler invaded Russia and what he called ‘the fatheaded communists’ of the Penn Club (page 213) had to do more mental gymnastics to accept that Stalin had now allied himself the hated British ruling class, instead of, as they hoped, doing everything he could to foment revolution in Britain.
Grace Wilson
It was at the Penn Club that Jack met and fell in love with the woman who was to become his lifelong companion, Grace Wilson, a young English teacher just down from Oxford. They slowly, shyly embarked on a love affair, a few years later acquiring adjacent rooms in the Club, but for many years they didn’t marry, partly because of the marriage bar, which would have meant that, if they had married, Grace would have had to quit her job as a teacher (!).
Binns makes the point that both Jack and his brother Vivian reacted against their parents’ unhappy marriage by a) having long-lasting and faithful relationships with one woman for their entire lives, b) not getting married.
Grace was every inch Jack’s equal but much more passionate about politics and equality. In 1930 she went on a high-minded visit to the Soviet Union which confirmed her opinions about the workers’ paradise, something Jack gently teased her about. But their unshakable love is reflected in the profound closeness of the married couples at the centre of his major novels, and Binns points out that Grace is the model for all the strong-minded, give-as-good-as-they-get women in Wyndham’s post-war fiction:
- Josella Playton, the intelligent and unconventional heroine of Day of the Triffids
- Phyllis Watson, independent-minded scriptwriter and journalist in The Kraken Wakes
- Rosalind, the strong, resourceful young woman heroine of The Chrysalids
- the Sealand woman, tough harbinger of a new race of telepathic humans in The Chrysalids
- Diana Brackley, biochemist and successful entrepreneur, central figure of Trouble With Lichen
- Dr Jane Waterleigh, the intelligent and resourceful heroine of Consider Her Ways
Second World War (1939 to 1943)
Jack and Grace were deeply in love by the time war broke out and at the heart of this biography is the huge trove of letters Jack wrote to Grace throughout the conflict. There are some 350 of these and Binns quotes from them at length. They convey a wonderful innocence and freshness and love. Grace was evacuated to the south of England but as the conflict developed she and her school were moved to rural England and then to Wales, it’s hard to keep track of her constant movements. Whereas Jack stayed in London, in his old room at the Penn Club, for the duration. Women and children precious, men expendable.
Jack worked as a firewatcher and his letters describe incident after incident from the Blitz which make for very vivid reading, detailed descriptions of air raids, the sounds of the different kinds of bombs, the flash and boom of a direct hit on a German bomber overhead. Sometimes there was an odd lull when a raid had finished and the German planes droned into the distance, when the guns fell silent, but there were no streetlights. Then Jack looked out from his firewarden rooftop over a London completely black and completely silent. Eerie visions which were to lend depth to his descriptions of the empty London in both Triffids and Kraken.
Half way through the war Jack got his first proper job working as an official censor, censoring hundreds of letters a day in a team, first in the Prudential building, then his department was moved to the seventh floor of the University of London’s Senate House, behind the British Museum (page 134). He got to know the building very well and made it the centre of Beadle’s attempt to gather together the sighted survivors of the catastrophe in Day of the Triffids. (Jack was working there at the same time as the wife of George Orwell, who famously used the tower as the model for his Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty Four, published just two years before Triffids)
From the writerly point of view, there were two key aspects of the experience:
1. In his letters Jack repeatedly tells Grace how unreal it was to be walking through the familiar streets and squares of Bloomsbury while the sky flashed with anti-aircraft lights and flak and bombs fell all around. He felt it was a dream, he describes himself as not being himself but some other person altogether, walking in another world. This is captured in a letter dated 7 October 1940.
Why do I write these things in such detail? I don’t know quite. It’s not a desire to harrow. More than anything, I think, to convince myself that these fantastic things are happening in these prosaic spots. (Quoted page 111)
2. Working in the censors department was Jack’s first real job and he was forced to get along with a far wider range of people – from the really hoity-toity officers to more working-class characters – that he hadn’t met either at liberal Bedales or the pacifist-feminist Penn Club (page 115). Binns makes the point that coming into contact with a much wider range of people was one of the decisive factors which contributed to his breakthrough novel, Day of the Triffids, where the protagonist, Bill Masen, is forced to deal with and handle a random cross-section of Londoners who have survived the great catastrophe (page 116).
In action (November 1943 to October 1946)
In November 1943, Jack was called up and sent for training in Northern Ireland. In March 1944 he was posted to 11 Division Armoured Signals, which contained 15,000 men and 343 tanks, as lance corporal in a cipher section. Within days of the D-Day landings the division was deployed to Normandy where Jack was close to the front line. His division took part in the brutal fighting for Caen, then the body-strewn fighting around Falaise. He saw the exhausted, defeated soldiers coming back from the failure that was Operation Market Garden.
Binns quotes Jack’s letters at length from this time and they give a graphic impression of the mixture of boredom, horror, disbelief and weary disgust with a catastrophe which keeps going on and on. Increasingly he is worried what the world will be like after so much killing. His letters describe his sense of the shallowness of so-called civilisation. Belgium, Holland, and dead bodies everywhere. Can there ever be an end to the killing, he wonders? How come, after all these centuries, the only counter to brutality is brutality? Is that all there is?
And so on via Operation Veritable into North Germany, to Bremen, where he hears the news that Hitler has killed himself, Berlin has fallen to the Russians, and then the end of the war. It takes well over a year for him to be released from the army, a year he spends in a barracks in Harrogate.
The Days of the Triffids (1946 to 1951)
Binns gives a fascinating overview of the state of science fiction, as a genre, after the war. The handful of British sci fi magazines had closed down as their editors were conscripted. In America, 22 SF titles had been reduced to just seven, and the beginnings of post-war McCarthyism meant that editors weren’t prepared to take risks. They wanted action and monsters with tentacles threatening scantily clad women, all ‘bulging brassieres and provoking panties’ as Jack himself put it (quoted page 190).
Finally demobilised in 1946, Jack returned to living at the Penn Club, in a room next to Grace’s, and returned to the anxiety of a freelance writer’s life. He managed to place a few stories, including Time To Rest, an elegiac story set on Mars which clearly reflects his exhaustion after the war (and contains a nihilistic vision of the entire planet earth exploding), along with Technical Slip and the cheesy Adaptation, but wasted a lot of time producing a farrago titled Plan for Chaos, which was so poor it wasn’t published during his lifetime.
He had another go at advertising, but was appalled at its culture of lies, and at the way it was coercing women into the new profession of ‘housewife’, a proto-feminist view he would return to in Trouble With Lichen and Consider Her Ways (p.191).
Jack still had an allowance left him by his father but its value had diminished and his mother, 70, was ailing and would soon incur the costs of a care home. Grace had a full-time job, had been promoted to Head of English at Roan’s school, but after the war experienced a series of health scares, first with a duodenal ulcer, then breast cancer. In 1949 he made a grand total of $25 as a writer (page 196).
The odd thing is that Jack had finished a good draft of Day of the Triffids by 1948 but failed to place it anywhere. Binns gives a detailed account of its gestation, showing how different elements derive from earlier stories. The idea of killer plants goes back to a story called The Puffball Menace from 1933. The idea of isolated communities surviving a disaster was anticipated in an unfinished story about a Pacific island which was protected by fog from flashing lights in the sky.
But Triffids brought to this pulp material a new realism and psychological depth resulting from his war experiences and its situating in an England he really knew, instead of made-up rockets and space stations. The streets the hero walks after the disaster are those around the Penn Club. The meeting of the sighted is held at the Senate House which he knew intimately. The farmhouse in the Sussex Downs is based on the surroundings of Bedales which he knew so well. All this gives the story the depth of real experience.
Binns explains the crucial role was played by the American novelist and editor Frederick Pohl. Having tried and abandoned several other stories, Jack dusted off the manuscript of Triffids and sent it to an agent he hadn’t tried before, Walter Gillings, representative of a New York agency. Gillings sent it on to the Dirk Wylie agency, where it was read by sci fi novelist and editor, Frederick Pohl, Pohl immediately realised it’s potential but it is amazing to learn how different it was from the novel we know today. This initial version is set 30 years in the future when humanity has colonised the solar system. The triffids are seeds brought back from Venus, and the bright lights in the sky are suspected by earthlings, as being an attack by some of the other-world colonists.
Pohl objected to all this saying it ruined the novel’s sense of unity. Jack agreed and promised to drop all the solar system stuff and give the triffids an entirely terrestrial origin (in the final version they are the result of genetic engineering in the Soviet Union). At the same time it was in correspondence with Pohl that Wyndham decided to drop his previous bylines, associated as they were with pre-war pulp, and create a new name to associate with his new style of more realistic post-war fiction, John Wyndham. It is in their correspondence that the name is finalised and agreed to.
Then came a stunning break. In November 1950 Pohl wrote to Wyndham (as he is now referred to) that he had managed to sell the now-rewritten story to the up-market Colliers magazine as a five-part serial for the staggering sum of $12,500. This equated to £4,500. At the time the average British annual wage was around £100. In other words it represented financial and literary success beyond Jack’s wildest dreams (p.199).
Pohl sold it to Colliers to serialise and to the reputable publisher Doubleday to publish the novel. In England Jack visited Sir Robert Lusty, Deputy Chairman of the publisher Michael Joseph, who read the manuscript overnight, was excited, and offered Jack a publishing deal straightaway. It was published in America and Britain in 1951 and, although the reviews were lukewarm, it sold. Its terrifying storyline, presented with complete realism, tapped into the Cold War anxiety of the time. It went on to sell millions, be translated into 11 languages, read out on BBC radio in 1953, adapted to a radio drama in 1957, Cubby Broccoli bought the film rights in 1956 (though it wasn’t till 1962 that a movie version was released), and it became an acknowledged classic of the genre.
Jack had special notepaper created with John Wyndham heading, and began to receive a trickle and then a steady stream of fan mail, which he replied to courteously and sometimes at length, explaining his ideas and stories. He had found his voice and the next decade saw an explosion of short stories, which were snapped up by magazines, and sometimes turned into radio or TV adaptations, alongside a series of major novels.
The golden decade 1951 to 1961
- 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)
Wyndham’s women
Binn devotes a chapter to considering Wyndham’s female protagonists from various angles, as tough heroines, survivors, non-conformists, the shrewd and intelligent ones in married couples, as partners, lovers, sisters and mothers.
All Wyndham’s novels consistently feature strong independent women (as listed above) but not just the famous ones; a more pulpy novel from the 1930s, Stowaway to Mars, features Joan, the doctor’s daughter from his second ever published story, The Lost Machine, and in this novel-length sequel she not only stows away on a spaceship to Mars, but is the only member of the crew to properly engage with the Martians when they get there. Then there’s Alice Morgan who outlives all the men on a crippled space flight to Mars, and Lellie, the ‘dumb Martian’, who is strong and determined enough to take revenge on her cowardly, bullying master.
Plenty of women but no mothers, no actual babies. It is notable that in Consider Her Ways, although Jane is ‘transposed’ into the body of a ‘Mother’, a breeding machine of the future whose sole purpose is to have babies, there are no actual babies in the story. Similarly, the primary womenfolk in Midwich Cuckoos manage to dodge the bullet of having babies, who are only observed at a distance and quickly turn into toddlers and then adolescents.
Binns speculates this has two reasons 1. It reflects the Wyndham’s resentment at the lack of real mothering he ever had from his mother who, at an early age, abandoned him to a series of prep schools, and then boarding schools and since she herself took to a peripatetic life of living in hotels, never provided a stable home for him.
2. The deeper issue which is, How to reconcile feminism with motherhood. The central issue for intelligent women is how to reconcile achievement in their chosen sphere, profession or activity, with the primordial instinct to have babies. Of course it’s more possible than ever before in human history thanks to various technologies, and to equality laws, and to social conventions which have changed immeasurably since Wyndham’s day. But to breed or not to breed is still the central issue for all women today and will continue to be for all time, because we are not products of university gender studies courses, we are animals, members of the class mammalia, who have evolved over tens of millions of years to reproduce sexually, as have countless hundreds of thousands of other species. We’re just one more sexually reproducing animal species which happens to have evolved a mind, a consciousness, and the contradiction between the two elements has been the subject of hand-wringing and puzzlement ever since records began. Feminist ire at the female plight is just a subset of all humans’ bewilderment at the human plight.
What emerges from Binns’ account, what is so striking and unexpected, is the way these eternal issues are so thoroughly aired and fluently articulated by a chronically shy, ex-public schoolboy, who only had one significant love affair in his entire life.
The rest of his life
Binns covers the rest of Jack’s life and his post-Triffid writings quite quickly, devoting far less space to it than she did to the wartime letters, which may be fair enough, since so much more of it is in the public domain due to the high profile of his writings and through interviews. Mind you, these were pretty rare, Jack kept a deliberately low profile leading to the jokey description of him as ‘the invisible man of science fiction’, compared to peers who were happy to step into the media limelight such as Arthur C. Clarke.
For me a major theme which emerged from my rereading of his novels is the question of whether two intelligent life forms can inhabit the same planet; his big four novels boil down into existential struggles between two such intelligent species: triffids versus humans; alien invaders versus humans in Kraken; humans versus new breed of telepathic humans in Chrysalids; humans versus alien children in Midwich. When he was asked in a rare television interview (1960) whether the Midwich children were evil he said no. They are just trying to survive, like we are. Binns summarises:
To him, the Midwich Cuckoos, like the Chrysalid telepaths and the [unnamed] monsters of the deep, were just another species engaged in the bloody struggle for survival. They might be the enemy, but he still had sympathy for them. (p.229)
Binns makes the neat point that The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) are mirror images of the same story: what to do about telepathic children? In Chrysalids they are the heroes, we are on their side in the struggle to survive; in Cuckoos they are the enemy and we are on the side of the humans who struggle to liquidate them before it’s too late.
It doesn’t escape her notice that both stories are about children, the problem of children, the disturbing qualities of children – see the problems of feminism, mentioned above. There is something eerie about children at the best of times, and to a non-parent like Wyndham, something almost other-worldly. She relates it to the mid-50s anxiety about the phenomenon of ‘the teenager’, unruly, rebellious, destructive. And she connects it to Arthur C. Clarke’s classic, Childhood’s End, which also sees children as unearthly harbingers of the end of the old order (p.223).
In this respect, his final published novel, Chocky, is like a late echo of the same theme. The story itself is fairly straightforward, what makes it a good read is the social history detail of childhood in the 1960s and, above all, the reactions of the parents to their son who seems to be going mad. As my own children have had mental health issues, I sympathise very strongly with the parents in this book.
Late marriage
On 26 July 1963 John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris married Grace Wilson at Russell Square registry office. She had retired as a teacher and marriage could no longer harm her career. For a decade Wyndham had been a polite and shy part of London’s science fiction community, which gathered for sociable evenings in the White Horse pub off Fleet Street, and they were all astounded at the news. Binns quotes fellow sci fi authors Arthur C. Clarke and Sam Youd (who wrote under the nom de plume John Christopher) as being amazed to learn that Jack even had a girlfriend, let alone a fiancée (p.257).
After living there for 40 years, Jack was tired of London. He and Grace bought a house in Sussex, in the village of Steep, not far from Bedales, the school which made him. Jack was a very practical man and enjoyed DIY and fixing things. He lived in this modest house, Oakridge, for the rest of his life, very quiet and understated considering the fortune he made from his books. Triffids continued to sell as did all of its successors, plus the film rights to Triffids (filmed 1962) and Midwich (made into the cult classic Village of the Damned in 1960. Binns says he was making about £8,000 a year in royalties, equivalent to maybe £160,000 nowadays.
Binns gives a characteristically sensitive reading of Chocky, seeing the 12-year-old protagonist, Matthew Gore, as a boy blessed with a vivid imagination and forced, by a hard and uncaring world, to be careful how much of it he reveals, guarding his every word. Binns sees it almost as the successful adult Jack reaching back to his boyhood self, shy, withdrawn, imaginative, anxious, and reassuring him that everything will turn out alright.
This is a beautiful and moving book about a kindly, sensitive man who crafted some of the most haunting fictions of his day.
Credit
Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns was published by Grace Judson Press in 2019. All references are to the 2019 paperback edition.
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 latter’s invention, an anti-gravity material they call ‘Cavorite’, to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites, leading up to its chasteningly moralistic conclusion
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 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 the planet Mars, where mysteries and adventures unfold
1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
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 – the whole world turns out to watch the flashing lights in the sky caused by a passing comet and next morning wakes up blind, except for a handful of survivors who have to rebuild human society while fighting off the rapidly growing population 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 psycho-historian 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 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’ from outer space which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of ships passing over the ocean deeps, gruesome attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements around the world and then, in the final phase, the 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 a bizarre yarn about a tube train which goes to hell, a paychiatrist who projects the same idyllic dream into the minds of hundreds of women around London, to a chapter-length dry run for The Chrysalids
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 the 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, but when he and his mind-melding friends are discovered, they 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 – amid the backdrop of a worldwide famine caused by the Chung-Li virus which kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) decent civil engineer John Custance finds himself leading his wife, two children and a small gang of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism in order to reach the remote valley which his brother had told him he was going to plant with potatoes and other root vegetables and which he knows is an easily defendable enclave
1956 The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham – 11 science fiction short stories, mostly humorous, satirical, even farcical, but two or three (Survival, Dumb Martian and Time To Rest) which really cut through and linger.
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 platinum blonde hair and penetrating golden eyes, which soon begin exerting telepathic control over their parents and then the 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 relatively 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 century or so 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 bewildered 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, 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 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
1968 Chocky by John Wyndham – Matthew is the adopted son of an ordinary, middle-class couple who starts talking to a voice in his head; it takes the entire novel to persuade his parents the voice is real and belongs to a telepathic explorer from a distant planet
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes in the style of a scientific inquiry, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe and starts spreading uncontrollably
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 pattern, 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 his 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…’
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 interplanetary travel
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 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 in the so-called ‘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 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’, revived an old nuclear power station 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 Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – his breakthrough book, ostensibly an autobiography focusing on this 1930s boyhood in Shanghai and then incarceration in a Japanese internment camp, observing the psychological breakdown of the adults around him: made into an Oscar-winning movie by Steven Spielberg: only later did it emerge that the book was intended as a novel and is factually misleading
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’ who is commissioned by the richest man in the world to track down the source of a mysterious modern artwork, and Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’ and computer hacker
1987 The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard – strange and, in my view, profoundly unsuccessful novel in which WHO doctor John Mallory embarks on an obsessive quest to find the source of an African river accompanied by a teenage African girl and a half-blind documentary maker who films the chaotic sequence of events
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 Running Wild by J.G. Ballard – the pampered children of a gated community of affluent professionals, near Reading, run wild and murder their parents and security guards
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; 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 War Fever by J.G. Ballard – 14 late short stories, some traditional science fiction, some interesting formal experiments like Answers To a Questionnaire from which you have to deduce the questions and the context
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
1991 The Kindness of Women by J.G. Ballard – a sequel of sorts to Empire of the Sun which reprises the Shanghai and Japanese internment camp scenes from that book, but goes on to describe the author’s post-war experiences as a medical student at Cambridge, as a pilot in Canada, his marriage, children, writing and involvement in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 70s: though based on his own experiences the book is overtly a novel focusing on a small number of recurring characters who symbolise different aspects of the post-war world
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
1994 Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard – a sort of rewrite of Lord of the Flies in which a number of unbalanced environmental activists set up a utopian community on a Pacific island, ostensibly to save the local rare breed of albatross from French nuclear tests, but end up going mad and murdering each other
1996 Cocaine Nights by J. G. Ballard – sensible, middle-class Charles Prentice flies out to a luxury resort for British ex-pats on the Spanish Riviera to find out why his brother, Frank, is in a Spanish prison charged with murder, and discovers the resort has become a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour – i.e. sex, drugs and organised violence – which has come to bind the community together
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – second novel in the ‘Bridge’ trilogy: 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 – third of the Bridge Trilogy in which main characters from the two previous books are reunited on the ruined Golden Gate bridge, including tough ex-cop Rydell, sexy bike courier Chevette, digital babe Rei Toei, Fontaine the old black dude who keeps an antiques shop, as a smooth, rich corporate baddie seeks to unleash a terminal shift in the world’s dataflows and Rydell is hunted by a Taoist assassin
2000s
2000 Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard – Paul Sinclair packs in his London job to accompany his wife, who’s landed a plum job as a paediatrician at Eden-Olympia, an elite business park just outside Cannes in the South of France; both are unnerved to discover that her predecessor, David Greenwood, one day went to work with an assault rifle, shot dead several senior executives before shooting himself; when Paul sets out to investigate, he discovers the business park is a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour i.e. designer drugs, BDSM sex, and organised vigilante violence against immigrants down in Cannes, and finds himself and his wife being sucked into its disturbing mind-set
2003 Pattern Recognition by William Gibson – first of the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set very much in the present, around the London-based advertising agency Blue Ant, founded by advertising guru Hubertus Bigend who hires Cayce Pollard, supernaturally gifted logo approver and fashion trend detector, to hunt down the maker of mysterious ‘footage’ which has started appearing on the internet, a quest that takes them from New York and London, to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris
2007 Spook Country by William Gibson – second in the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set in London and featuring many of the characters from its immediate predecessor, namely Milgrim the drug addict and ex-rock singer Hollis Henry
2008 Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard – right at the end of his life, Ballard wrote a straightforward autobiography in which he makes startling revelations about his time in the Japanese internment camp (he really enjoyed it!), insightful comments about science fiction, but the real theme is his moving expressions of love for his three children
2019 Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns – sensitive and insightful biography with special emphasis on a) Wyndham’s wartime experiences first as a fire warden, then censor, then called up to serve in Normandy, and b) Wyndham’s women, the strong feminist thread which runs through all his works
Books & Boots 