All posts tagged Martian Chronicles

John Christopher on the changing face of science fiction (2003)

Christopher’s preface

When his young adult novel The White Mountains was reissued by Penguin in 2003, John Christopher was asked to write a new introduction to it. The resulting preface is only eight pages long and mostly explains a bit about the book’s conception and execution. But it also includes quite a passage describing how science fiction developed during his lifetime, which I think is worth publicising and pondering.

Christopher tells us that he was a well-established author of a dozen or more novels for adults when he received a letter from his agent telling him a publisher was asking whether he would consider writing a novel for children.

But what sort of book was it going to be? The publisher obviously wanted science fiction, but I was getting tired of destroying the world – by famine or freezing or earthquakes – and I was no longer interested in exploring the universe outside our planet. There was a reason for that.

When I was the age of the boys and girls for whom it was now proposed I write, I’d been very excited about the possibilities of space travel, but those had been different days. In the early thirties we knew just about enough about the solar system for its possibilities to be a magnet to the imagination. The moon might be cold and dead, but the planets offered scope for dreaming. Mars, for instance, was colder than our earth and had a thinner atmosphere, but possibly not too cold or airless to support life.

And Mars had those canals. An Italian astronomer called Schiaparelli, looking through his telescope in the nineteenth century, said he had seen canali on Mars’s rust-red surface. In Italian that just means ‘channels’, but it got translated as ‘canals’, which was much more intriguing. Maybe in that thin but breathable atmosphere there were long waterways, built by an ancient race of Martians, dotted with Martian cities that were lit by day by a smaller sun and at night by the magic gleam of two low-lying moons. An ancient race, because one might suppose that on that chillier planet the process of life’s evolution had been in advance of ours. Apart from being older, the Martians might well be wiser and able to pass on to us the fruit of their knowledge. Or, if they were so ancient as to have become extinct, the ruins of their cities might still be there to be explored.

Then there was Venus – closer to the sun and much hotter than the earth – with its permanent blanket of clouds. What might lie beneath the clouds? Perhaps a planet in an earlier period of evolution, as Mars was in a later one. Something like our own Carboniferous era, perhaps. Did tropical swamps teeming with dinosaurs and hovering pterodactyls await the arrival of our first spaceship?

Because that was something else we felt confident about: early experiments with rockets had already made the eventual conquest of space more than plausible. It could happen in our lifetime, and with it bring unthinkable wonders. It was a bit like being in Elizabethan England, reading stories about what might be found in the new world which was opening up on the far side of the barely explored western ocean.

But in three short decades everything changed. By the 1960s we knew more about the universe and the solar system – but what we’d learned was much less interesting than what we’d imagined. We knew that Mars was not just cold but an altogether hostile environment, Venus a choking oven of poisonous gases. The chance of any kind of life existing on either planet – or anywhere within reach of our probing rockets – was incredibly remote.

A couple of years after I wrote The White Mountains, space itself was finally conquered. The landing on the moon was televised around the world, timed to coincide with prime-time US television viewing. That meant the early hours of the morning in the Channel Islands, where I then lived. The boy I had been at fourteen would never have believed that I couldn’t be bothered to stay up to watch.

I had seen the future, and found it disappointing: so what remained? Well, there was the past. The colour which had bleached out of our interplanetary speculations was still bright in human history and there was life there, and romance and action… The publisher wanted the future: I was more interested in the past…

The Tripod trilogy reconciles future and past

Christopher then goes on to explain how he conceived a way of combining the two, the publisher’s request for science fiction with his own disillusion with science fiction tropes and growing fondness for past history, by imagining an earth set in the future and which has been conquered by futuristic machines, the tripods (very similar to the Martians of H.G. Wells’s War of The Worlds) but the invaders have realised the best way of controlling human society is to take it back to the Middle Ages, by creating small rural communities of serfs obeying the local lord of the manor who in turn owes fealty to the king who is himself guided by the tripods.

And hence the odd atmosphere of Christopher’s Tripod trilogy, which combine futuristic alien masters with a society which is thoroughly feudal and medieval in feel.

Disillusionment with space travel

So much for the origins of this particular novel, but the point of quoting his words in full is to convey Christopher’s eye-witness testimony to how young science-fiction-minded writers’ attitude changed massively between, say, 1930 and 1970.

The just-enough knowledge of the solar system which he describes in the 1930s is the imaginative backdrop to the Flash Gordon, space rocket and ray gun, bubble gum sci fi stories of the 1940s, 50s and on into the 60s. It explains the early space fiction of John Wyndham, two of whose novels are set on a Mars where humans can breathe the ‘air’, can settle and meet the native ‘Martians’, as they do in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, the first of which was written as long ago as 1946, and as they do in thousands and thousands of other travelling-to-Mars and colonising-Venus stories.

I wonder if we could delve deeper and locate just when that sense of disillusionment kicked in. Immediately after the Second World War science fiction received a boost from at least two specific inventions: one was the atom bomb, with its ramifications for new ‘atomic power’ which imaginative writers speculated could be turned into engines which could power spaceships across the solar system; the second was the practical application of rocket technology by the Nazis, who developed their big V1 and V2 rockets, both of which are prototypes for the countless cigar-shaped rockets to the moon, to Mars or to Venus which infest the science fiction magazines of the period.

And behind specifically sci fi-friendly inventions there lay the enormous psychological boost of America’s post-war economic boom, when cars and bras got bigger and bigger, the consumer revolution of fridges, washing machines and so on, which fuelled the widespread expectation that pretty soon gadgets would be developed to solve every household or lifestyle problem – including ones for teleporting round the planet or jetting off to the stars.

Is it possible, I wonder, to date precisely when the sense of disillusion which Christopher so eloquently describes, began to kick in? Or did it happen to different people at different times? I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s and remember watching Tomorrow’s World with James Burke who also covered the Apollo moon landings, and there was still plenty of optimism about building a space station and using it as a jumping off point for Mars and all the rest of it.

J.G. Ballard was a relatively lone voice when he declared in about 1973 that the Space Age was over. That seemed a mad thing to say but what he was specifically referring to was the fact that the later moon landings were not covered live by American TV because ratings fell off. By the last moon mission, the Apollo 17 trip of 1972, the moon landings and the TV series that presented them to a worldwide audience, had been cancelled.

People were bored. Although we then went on to decades of the space shuttle and the creation of the international space station (the 1980s and 90s) Ballard was, I think, right to realise that these developments no longer captured widespread popular attention. They relapsed into being the special interest of a diminishing band of fans, with occasional flare-ups of wider interest whenever a rocket or shuttle blew up (January 28, 1986) or the occasional landing of a little buggy on Mars (as with the current Mars rover mission).

Anthropomorphism and Western chauvinism

But more than just shedding light on the trajectory from optimism to indifference about space travel in the mind of Christopher and by extension his generation (he was born in 1922), this passage also tells us something else about the sociological shape of the human imagination.

What I mean is the incredibly anthropomorphic nature of the speculations Christopher found so exciting. He expected there to be cities, or ruins of cities, or ‘wise old civilisations’ which could teach us newbies the secrets of the universe. Or maybe Venus would be at the other end of the evolutionary scale and just like earth in the age of the dinosaurs.

Either way you can see how these are obviously entirely human, anthropomorphic imaginings.

Digging a bit deeper, the notion that there might be ‘ruins’ on Mars is not only anthropomorphic but very Anglocentric. The 1920s and 30s were a great era for finding ruins of lost civilisations, crystallised by the publicity surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. But the point is that these, along with discoveries made along the Silk Road in Asia or aboriginal holy sites in Australia, or Inca and Aztec sites in Central America, or the imperial cities of Zimbabwe or Chad, these were all discoveries made by Europeans and Americans, and so became part of our culture, the relics were brought back to our countries and became part of our colonial ownership of the rest of the world.

The ruins might be in Central America or Asia but they were made by white men, written up in white men’s journals for white men organisations and popularised through the newspapers, tabloids and magazines of the West, percolating down to schoolboys like Christopher and his contemporaries as controlled and ordered and structured into heroic narratives of Western exploration and discovery and understanding.

And it’s this ordered, directed, pro-Western structuring of narratives of discovery which underpin thousands and thousands of science fiction planetary stories from the 30s, 40s and 50s. Underpinned by the basic assumption that we earthlings, generally American earthlings, have a God-given right to colonise, inhabit, discover, communicate with, define and categorise and generally own the rest of the solar system if not the galaxy.

Which makes all the narratives which share this basic underpinning or ideological framework – no matter how disturbing their surface details and gaudy monsters might be – at their core, reassuring and comforting because they reinforce the notions of order and civilisation and morality and hierarchy and category which underpinned Western discourse (i.e. the aggregated total of the news media, scientific research, history and the humanities and all types of fiction) during that era.

Christopher’s young notions about the solar system and aliens were human-friendly and Western friendly.

Moving from adult to children’s fiction

In this respect Christopher’s transition from writing for adults to writing for children at just the time he did makes perfect sense, because the adult world, at the end of the 1960s, was ceasing to be the homogenous world of the 30s, 40s and 50s, and morphing into something else, something harsher and more fragmented.

Of course the Great Depression of the 1930s and then the vast calamity of the Second World War were physically and economically much more disastrous than anything which happened in the 60s and 70s. But the late 1960s and 70s saw the breakdown of the ideological, moral and cultural consensus which had dominated the West since 1945.

John Wyndham’s science fiction novels are ‘cosy’ because the protagonists all share the same values and worldview, even when they’re taking potshots at each other – to take a tiny example, Croker, the ostensible ‘baddie’ who staged the attack on Senate House in Day of The Triffids, later candidly admits it was the wrong solution to the plight of a world gone blind, and ends up becoming the leader of a new community. Deep down everyone is on the same side, believes the same things, shares the same values.

J.G. Ballard’s fiction represents, from the start, the collapse of this consensus. In Ballard’s early works the characters go mad, have psychotic breakdowns. To be precise, his characters’ response to some environmental catastrophe is to withdraw into private worlds and fantasies and to cease altogether to share values with anyone else. The moral consensus apparent in all Wyndham’s novels vanishes like morning dew leaving a ruined landscape of wandering psychotics – not psychotic killers, just people living entirely inside their own heads, to their own made-up values.

In the mid- to late-1960s, Ballard’s novels featured a lot of casual sex and violence and psychological breakdown which outraged the philistines and traditionalists. What is not so often commented on is that, as the 1970s progressed, the decade Tom Wolfe labelled the Me Decade (‘characterised by narcissism, self-indulgence, and a lack of social concern’) Ballard’s fictions came to seem prophetic of the widespread collapse of communitarianism and the rise of atomized individualism widely observed in that decade.

By the time Reagan and Thatcher were elected in 1979, although he’d carried on writing pretty much the same kind of thing, society had so completely transformed its values that Ballard came to seem like the prophet of smug, gated, amoral, rich sybarites, the subjects of his final (and, to me, deeply unsatisfying) novels, Running Wild (1988), Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006).

These all describe ‘transgressive’ behaviour among upper-middle-class professional types. They’re often described as satires, but they’re not, they’re more like shopping lists or role models for the era of the Sunday Times rich list and the never-ending series of lifestyle magazines which arose during the 1980s.

Thus to read in chronological order the novels of John Wyndham in the 30s, 40s, 50s, of John Christopher in the 50s and 60s, the optimistic techno-novels of Arthur C. Clarke from the 1950s through the 1970s, and then onto the stories and novels of J.G. Ballard is to watch the decline of Western optimism and consensus, to observe the death and burial of any sense of shared values and morals.

Now we are living in the aftermath of that collapse, with ever-increasing fragmentation of Western societies into angry tribes all convinced that they are the hard-done-by ones, and demanding restitution, justice and compensation from everyone else – the splintering of shared progressive ideas on the left into a welter of special interest and identity groups which itself mirrors the anger of right-wing communities who perceive their own white ethnic and traditional (cis-) gender identities under attack.

Sometimes reading the media, especially social media, feels like watching wild ferrets snapping at each other’s throats, against the darkening backdrop of the never-ending pandemic and the relentless environmental catastrophe of global warming.

We have come a long, long way from the innocently triumphalist vision of space-suited chaps rocketing off to colonise Venus and Mars. Now, far from colonising any other planets, it looks like we don’t even know how to hold democratic elections any more, and can’t agree what they’re for (this piece was written soon after the Proud Boys invaded the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021).

We certainly don’t know how to manage the planet we live on, let alone set ourselves up to ‘conquer’ and run others.

Reviews of other John Christopher novels

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Posted by Simon on April 9, 2021

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The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham (1956)

Ten of John Wyndham’s science fiction short stories – a couple from the 1940s, most from the first half of the 1950s, mostly humorous, satirical, even farcical, but two or three (Survival and Dumb Martian and Time To Rest) which really cut through and linger.

  • Chronoclasm (1953)
  • Time To Rest (1949)
  • Meteor (1941)
  • Survival (1952)
  • Pawley’s Peepholes (1951)
  • Opposite Number (1954)
  • Pillar To Post (1951)
  • Dumb Martian (1952)
  • Compassion Circuit (1954)
  • Wild Flower (1955)

Foreword by John Wyndham

The brief foreword by Wyndham himself is disappointing if you were hoping for insights into his practice as a writer. The two thin pages of this little foreword focus on just one issue, namely how constrained writers were in the 1930s by the demands of the editors of popular science fiction magazines that sci-fi stories be exciting, edge-of-your-seat adventure narratives, packed with cliffhangers and plot twists.

These editors’ sole motivation was commercial, the conviction that the public wouldn’t buy anything other than bubblegum sci fi adventures stories, and Wyndham makes it clear how constrained he felt by these inflexible formats. Even now, 25 years later, i.e. in the mid-1950s, Wyndham laments how so much science fiction – whether in written, TV or movie form – is still limited to the thrills-and-spills tradition and ‘the cliff-hanger class’.

But Wyndham goes on to say that the situation loosened up a bit after the war and this gave him a bit more leeway to experiment. And so comes round to explaining that each of the stories in this collection was an experiment ‘in adapting the science-fiction motif to various styles of short story’. They’re all experiments in approaching science fiction themes through the lens of different types of short story.

The last line contains a throwaway idea. He thanks the various editors who have encouraged him to write stories on the theme: ‘I wonder what would happen if…’ – and you realise that’s quite a good working definition of many kinds of science fiction story:

I wonder what would happen if Martians landed in Woking; if a man made himself invisible; if someone invented a time machine; if the power of the atom could be tapped to create monstrous bombs; if a doctor carried out experiments to build half-animals, half-humans…Yes, what would happen if…?

Chronoclasm (1953)

Deliberately written in the ‘comedy-romantic’ mode to, as Wyndham, put it, ‘break away from the science fiction enthusiast’.

A chronoclasm is ‘An interference with the course of history caused by time travel.’ Gerrald Lattery is the standard Wyndhamesque good bloke. Once across a street he glimpses a beautiful woman. A stranger comes up to him in the street and addresses him as Sir Gerald and is then covered in confusion.

What slowly emerges is that the woman is named Octavia and that she is from the 22nd century when humanity has invented time travelling machines (they call them history-machines) which look like wardrobes. Even in the future there’s only a handful of them and use is strictly controlled after the first few reckless experiments altered history. (Wyndham gives an amusing list of real-world anomalies which could be explained by the initial rash use of these history machines, including Leonardo da Vinci inventing parachutes when there was nothing to jump out of.) The history machines of the future are restricted to use by real historians who use them only for careful research purposes.

One of these scrupulous historians is Dr Gobie. Tavia is Gobie’s niece, who has done a History degree, specialising in the mid-twentieth century. She has ‘borrowed’ the time machine  a couple of times because she knows that she will fall in love and marry Lattery. She knows this because he has written her a letter, back in 1950-something, describing how she suddenly appears in his life, they fall in love and get married and live in bliss in  his Devon cottage, and then one day she’s gone, leaving no message, never to be seen again.

She ‘goes’ because she’s been kidnapped by the time police from the future, simply because she risks changing everything. They make a couple of attempts to seize her from Lattery’s cottage, in fact the first time is the first time they properly meet, when she comes beating on his door and then begs to be hidden. When three men in futuristic ski jackets come knocking, Lattery tells them to bugger off, then punches the front one in the stomach. You can tell this isn’t a modern story, because he is winded and the other two help him away. Then he turns to this strange young woman and asks her to explain…. and it takes a while for the narrator to get his head round the paradoxes inherent in time travel.

Then Uncle Donald Gobie appears, introduces himself to Lattery and makes the grown-up, man-of-the-world case to Lattery, why Tavia must go back with him, with Tavia there in the room. They drink tea while he tries to persuade her – she refuses. Gobie leaves. A week later,  the time policemen try again, Lattery is more determined, brandishes a shotgun and, when they don’t back down, shoots one in the stomach. Again his colleagues help him away.

Tavia announces to Lattery that she is pregnant. It suddenly becomes really important for her to remember the precise date on which he will write his letter to her, but she can’t. Then he comes home one day and she is gone. Since he knows it is discovering the letter a hundred and fifty years later which triggers the whole cycle, the story ends with Lattery sitting down to write it, addressing it to ‘My great, great grandniece, Miss Octavia Lattery…’

It is indeed written as a comedy-romance, with Wyndham deliberately overdoing the lovey-dovey dialogue of the happy couple, ‘Yes darling, I know darling, I love you so much darling’. It’s odd, his taste for the twee and the domestic. It’s present throughout his short stories and strongly flavours The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos.

It’s a striking fact that three of the four greatest English science fiction writers were capable of astonishing leaps of the imagination when it came to time travel and aliens etc and yet, when it was a question of human interaction, their imaginations were oddly old fashioned, traditional and cosy.

Wyndham is often compared with H.G. Wells because their strongest fictions have the primal, lasting quality of myths or archetypes. But people forget that a really important aspect of Wells’s fiction is its routine homeliness, its sometimes embarrassing domesticity, and its frequent broad humour. The main appeal of The Time Machine may be the vision of the Morlocks and Eloi, but just as important is the cosy late-Victorian setting of the velvet-curtained dinner party, complete with candles and servants, where the time traveller first introduces his device to his well-fed guests.

Time To Rest (1949)

Slightly more unsettling is this portrait of one of the unhappy men on Mars. It is a Mars very like the one described in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, which has an atmosphere which humans can breathe and so they have freely colonised and easily move around the red planet without space suits except that… they have found it a strange, haunted and haunting place. Same here. Men can move about freely without any spacesuits, breathe and eat and talk, but…

Bert is a forlorn wanderer along the endless canals of the red planet, endlessly travelling on across the bleak arid flatness, occasionally stopping in at settlements of the Martians, basically human in every particular except slighter and weaker. They themselves live in the shadow of the Great Ones who long ago vanished from the planet, leaving their ruined cities and great works for the Martians to do their simple farming among.

But the real point of the story is the revelation that earth has blown up. Bert was 21 and four days into his first rocket ship into space when he was woken up and taken to the observation window where he and the rest of the crew watched the earth riven by fissures out of which exploded melting rock and fire and the entire planet disintegrated into a million rocky fragments which flung outwards to create a new asteroid belt.

At the time of the disaster there were already a handful of colonists on Mars, and some on Jupiter and Venus, who came to join them. Now they hunker down in a handful of settlements, drinking too much and getting morose about the blue skies of earth. There had been two women in the original colony but Wyndham says they were the cause of so many fights and murders that, in the end, they were themselves quietly done away with.

So it was to get away from the human settlements and try to deal with his bottomless mourning that he chugs along the canals of Mars in his homemade boat. At the settlement where he stays for a few days, and is the setting of the story, he is made welcome and notices that the youngest daughter has grown up and is nubile and marriageable. But he describes his pain at the death of his planet to her mother and she understands when, next day, he leaves without a word.

Meteor (1941)

Aliens from a dying planet build a set of vast spaceships to carry entire communities across space to new worlds they hope to settle. We are given the hopeful diaries of one of these valiant pioneers who intend to share their culture and civilisation and technical achievements with the inhabitants of where they land.

Unfortunately, when they land on the promising ‘blue planet’ which is clearly Earth, they and we the readers, realise they are tiny compared to us, their ‘vast’ spaceship is about two feet in diameter and they seem to use like a curious type of woodlouse only with four legs instead of six.

With the result that the ‘meteor’ is dug up by curious farmers and stashed in their barn, where the aliens are first of all terrorised by a cat, which they manage to kill with their tiny laser weapons, but when they ‘sting’ one of the farmer’s womenfolk, he promptly gets a can of insect spray and wipes out the entire ‘infestation’ of aliens, who choke and expire.

Having just finished reading The Midwich Cuckoos I can see how this slickly conceived, rather teenage story harps on one of Wyndham’s persistent themes, which is a fascination with how two intelligent life forms would manage to communicate or try to live together – and the inevitability of disastrous misunderstandings. The impossibility of their co-existence is the deep theme of Cuckoos, The Chrysalids, The Karen Wakes and, in its way, Day of the Triffids.

Survival (1952)

A deliberately gruesome shocker.

Everyone including her parents disapprove of young Alice accompanying her new husband David Morgan on the rocket ship Falcon heading to Mars. Her mum and dad, her husband, the other crew members, they all think it’s inappropriate for a feeble woman to go on the trip.

Anyway, a little into the trip they try to fire the lateral rockets which completely fail and the ship is hurtled into an uncontrolled head-over-heels motion. Captain Winters breaks it to the crew and passengers that they might just about be able to wangle themselves into an orbit around Mars, but not to land. Best hope is to orbit and wait for a recovery ship to be sent.

In order to survive they’ll have to go onto strict rationing of food and water. Well, as you might expect, the weak and feeble Alice turns out to be stronger than all the rest of the men, especially after the central scene where she confronts the captain and insists that she MUST have extra rations because she is pregnant! (p.84)

Not only does she show steely resolve then, but at several other key moments, for example when there is an armed raid on the food store, she appears to shoot several of the crew. And a lot later when their number has been reduced to eight who agree to draw lots to see who will die for the good of the others, Alice makes a powerful, cynical speech pointing out that all the press back home have picked up on her story, ‘Girl-Wife In Doom Rocket’ and ‘Woman’s Space Wreck Ordeal’ (p.91), she’s taken care to give radio interviews and so on. Point being, that when the ship is eventually recovered, any of the men can claim any number of the other men were killed attempting repairs or whatever. They’re entirely dispensable. But her, the Girl-Wife in the Doom Rocket? She is the only one the press will be gagging to know about and the survivors will never have a convincing story of why she died. Everyone will suspect she was murdered and so whoever survives will face hanging or the electric chair. Reluctantly, they have to agree she’s right, and she’s left out of the lottery.

Weeks, maybe months later, we jump to the perspective of the rescue ship as its crew attempt the difficult docking manoeuvre with the Falcon, carefully winch open the airlock, reflate it, and enter the dark and echoing ship. The climax of the story is wonderfully grisly, for softly they hear coming from a distant cabin, the sound of crooning and make their way through a detritus of cups and plates and wrappers and – nauseatingly – a human bone or two, till they hear it is the voice of a woman singing a lullaby. They turn the corner into Alice’s cabin and there she is, gaunt and starved, while her baby is bouncy and well fed. As the three members of the rescue crew look on in amazement, gaunt, skeletal Alice raises a pistol from her bed and says to her giggling baby: ‘Look baby! Look there! Food, lovely food!’ Oooh, what a ghoulish finale!

This story can be taken as a footnote or addendum to the great debates about men and women and fertility and childbirth and gender difference and maternal instinct which run so loudly through The Midwich Cuckoos.

Pawley’s Peepholes (1951)

‘A satirical farce.’

Inhabitants of a town, Westwich, start noticing ghostly people appearing out of walls, their top halves sticking up out of pavements, bodiless legs walking through the ceiling. The narrator, Jerry, has a (stroppy) girlfriend, Sally, he discusses the strange events with. She wonders if it’s the Russians testing out a new weapon. And a conspiracy theory colleague who works in the next office, Jimmy Lindlen, who every day tells him about the latest events reported in the newspapers, starts plotting them on a map and comes up with the theory of transportation, that the strange apparitions of people are being beamed from a location he’s determined to track down.

But this turns out to be wrong, when the apparitions take a more organised form and appear on floats, kind of trolley cars, blazoned with big posters and billboards. These make it crystal clear that they are a) from the future b) are taking part in a kind of fairground attraction named Pawley’s Peepholes (p.105).

More and more of these phantoms of the future start to infest the town but it is typical of Wyndham’s brand of ‘whimsical realism’ that he (very realistically) sees the future as just as tawdry, commercialised and downmarket as the present, in the sense that the people who can part-transport back from the future are encouraged by the sideshow owners to take part in a number of challenges worthy of a tabloid newspaper.

Some of the ‘floats’ are festooned with big fairground signs saying not only ‘Visit Romantic 20th Century’ but ‘Big Money Prize If You Identify Your Own Grandad’. And this gives rise to the phantoms from the future coming up to citizens of the town in the street, holding sheets of paper, presumably old newspaper cuttings or photos or family heirlooms with photos of their ancestors, as the people of the future try to identify their forebears in the present.

The entire idea is satirical, farcical, comic. As is the denouement. Jerry and Sally go for a stroll in the town park to get away from the phantom visitors, but a couple pop up brandishing the by-now customary piece of paper. Irritated, Jerry gets up, walks over behind the pair and looks over their shoulders. He has a disconcerting revelation. They are holding a browned old newspaper which contains a photo of Sally holding two babies with the big strapline ‘Twins for Town Councillor’s Wife’. Town councillor? Is that what is to become of Sally. Oh. Glumly he goes back to sit next to Sally but doesn’t share what he saw.

Well, things go from bad to worse and the newspapers and town council and women’s groups and churches are up in arms about the relentless increase in the number of ghostly visitors from the future, racking their brains about how to deter them. You can shout, but they don’t hear. You can swear and make threatening gestures but they just fall about laughing at the quaint old-timers.

Finally, it’s Jerry who has a brainwave. He takes out ads in the papers of all the neighbouring towns inviting tourists from the present to come to Westwich and see their ancestors. Look into the future, laugh at your descendants’ silly clothes’, say the ads. The citizens of Westwich charge a nominal admission fee to make it seem worthwhile and soon the town is packed with sightseers who do to the phantom visitors what they’ve been doing for so long, namely mock them, copy them, ridicule, point and mock their silly outfits, mimic their expressions and gestures and generally, in every way, make them feel uncomfortable.

And it works, the phantom trolleys appear with fewer and fewer people and then… stop. Jerry is the hero of the hour. Next time he meets Sally she tells him how popular he is throughout the town. People are saying they’re going to elect him to the council. Meaning he will become a councillor. Meaning that headline he saw in the ghostly newspaper will come true and he is due to marry Sally and have twins… ‘Things shimmered a bit’, and then he realises this is the moment when he has to pluck up the guts to propose to her.

Thus it definitely has a science fiction premise, but you can see how the real point of the story is its gentle mocking humour, its mild social satire and, above all, the relationship between bashful Jerry and his strong-willed girlfriend Sally.

P.S. Westwich? Any relation to Midwich?

Opposite Number (1954)

‘Attempts the light presentation of a complicated idea’. Talking of taking familiar science fiction tropes and giving them a whimsical and romantic spin, or even applying sci fi tropes to what are, in essence, romantic love stories, here’s another prime example.

The narrator, Peter Ruddle, is a researcher at the Pleybell Research Institute (p.123). One day he sees a strange man leading his former love, Jean, through the grounds of the institute and decides to follow. To cut to the chase the couple turns out to be his former love Jean and himself! Jean’s father had devoted himself to studying time, despite every researcher who ever worked with him concluding he was barking up the wrong tree.

Now, when Jean’s father died, two years before the story began, Jean and Peter were going through his equipment in what had become known as ‘old Whetstone’s Room’, Jean hoped Peter would continue her father’s work but he demurred and their disagreement quickly escalated into a row, where Peter found himself saying the old man’s research was a waste of time and Jean becoming very angry. They both said words (including ‘callous’ and ‘obstinate’ and ‘selfish’) which led them to break off the engagement and, in the two years since, Peter went on to marry ‘that Tenter woman’ while Jean married Freddie Tallboy (p.126).

The point, the crux, the focus of the story is that Jean and Peter 2 now tell the narrator that in their timeline, the couple did not have a falling out. Instead Peter vowed to continue Jean’s father’s work and, in doing so, won Jean’s love and they got married. Peter 2 now explains that the old man’s work was wrong in many respects, but it opened up new avenues of investigation. To be precise, Peter 2 has discovered that at every second – at numerous moments per second – time branches according to decisions we or anyone or anything else makes, creating an almost infinite number of parallel timelines (explained on pages 129 to 130). Based on this insight Peter 2 has spent the past two years building a device which can jump between timelines.

Peter 2 has built a kind of time travelling machine which doesn’t travel forwards or backwards in time but laterally, across timelines. They call it a ‘transfer-chamber’ (p.135) and it looks much like ‘a sentry box with a door added’ (p.134).

So this is their first journey. Peter 2 and Jean 2 have travelled from their timeline to Peter 1’s timeline, arriving in old Whetstone’s room and then set off round the campus looking for him, Peter 1, only to be amazed to discover that in this timeline, Peter and Jean argued and went off to marry other people.

Peter 2 explains all this calmly and logically to Peter 1, but Jean keeps getting overwhelmed with emotion at the thought that in this world they had such a row and Jean went off and married someone else. Persistently, throughout the boys’ scientific conversation, Jean keeps telling Peter 1 that she, the Jean in this world, has never stopped loving him. She knows this because she is the same person.

And so it is that when Jean 2 and Peter 2 eventually get back into the transfer-machine which vanishes silently, without any fuss, a slightly dazed Peter 1 potters round the old man’s dusty lab for a bit and then decides to go and visit Jean, the Jean in his timeline who married someone else.

And so it is that, as in a romantic movie, when she opens the door to him at the family home she shares with her husband, he is conveniently out. Peter is on tenterhooks to declare that he loves her and has never stopped loving her but they are both frightfully English, and neither manages to actually say it. Instead he fumblingly says he’s come to collect keys to some of the stuff in her father’s room and she says they’re upstairs, so they go and rummage among his old drawers and are coming downstairs, when Jean’s husband walks in… finding them in what, for the 1950s, was a compromising situation…

And here we come to the punchline of the story, Not only because Wyndham has planted a kind of practical joke throughout the text. Because he’s made sure that the couple – Peter 1 and Peter 2 – in their wanderings around the campus to find Peter 1 are seen by almost the entire staff walking hand in hand; then when Peter 1’s wife comes home she finds them, as a couple, in Peter 1’s house; when they go to a cafe to discuss atomic splitting, they are seen by various witnesses together. And finally, Jean’s own husband finds them coming back downstairs from what… from having done what?

And the story concludes with the comic admission that all these sighting were enough evidence to satisfy a divorce court of the couple’s adultery i.e. Jean’s husband drew the wrong conclusion that the couple had had sex and has sued for divorce, and it ends with the comic conclusion that, yes, the evidence is certainly all in his favour, and, in any case:

We have both decided that nothing could be further from our wishes than to defend… (p.139)

Thus the story contains: 1. a fairly familiar science fiction trope, on which is based 2. an equally familiar trope, of the couple who marry the wrong partners but remain secretly in love, but taken from a completely different genre, of slush romance; and then 3. the kind of practical joke Wyndham has seeded throughout the story which leads up to its comic punchline and happy ending, that Jean is being sued for divorce but is perfectly happy about it since it will enable her to marry the love of her life after all.

Pillar To Post (1951)

Most of this thirty-page narrative consists of an account written by Terry Molton of his adventure. He was hit by shellfire during the war which resulted in all of one leg and half the other being amputated. He has spent four years in constant pain and misery only made bearable by morphine and painkillers. One night he takes a particularly powerful dose and wakes up in a very strange bed in a very strange room, and is quickly attended on by a strange looking woman in very strange clothes. And he has legs, two legs, two arms, a fit and healthy young body!

In a nutshell, he has swapped bodies with a man from the far distant future. The woman tending him is named Clytassamine. She tells him he is in a place named Cathalu. She gets him dressed, then they travel in the future’s strange slow-moving hovercars for miles into a pure unspoilt countryside which looks like an eighteenth century park to a vast building where he is questioned by scientists of the future, via Clytassimine who has learned something of the archaic language he speaks.

What’s the news from the far future? Well, humanity has run out of steam. The futurians live almost forever by swapping bodies with the healthy ones of lower class humans when their current one is wearing out. Clytassamine is on her 14th body (p.143). So the technology exists to move souls or spirits between bodies, but her partner / boyfriend Hymorell had been working for some time to develop a technology which could do that across time.

But fewer babies are being born and the younger generation just don’t have the same determination as their forebears. She wonders if the human race is simply winding down, its time is done.

The man from the present and the woman from the far future have the kinds of conversation you might predict. He is desperate to know what happens to our current civilisation and she disappoints him by saying it fizzles out. There are huge gaps in her historical records but it looks like humanity tried to wipe itself out at least five times. Nobody from our civilisation did space travel, but the next civilisation which arose did, in fact they bred different types of human for specialised tasks, but in the end became so specialised that when some kind of disaster came along all the specialised humans were wiped out leaving only a few hundred basic model humans – who had retained the ability to adapt and change – to start over.

This theme, the acceptance of change as the one constant of life, is the philosophy propounded by Uncle Alex in The Chrysalids where he speculates that the attempt to keep things just so and as they are, according to fixed models and forms, is futile because the essence of life is change. Clytassamine says our civilisation died out because it was too addicted to fixed forms.

But all good things come to an end. One day Terry wakes up back in his broken body in bed in the 20th century. Hymorell has managed to manufacture a soul transporting machine from resources available in 1950, and has left it by the bedside. What happens next is a sequence of pinging and ponging back and forth between bodies, for Terry manages to fix the transporter and transport back to Hymorell’s body but he realises the body, Terry’s old body, must be destroyed after he leaves it (obviously not before) so he constructs a booby trap using a gun pointing at his body in bed, to be triggered a few hours after he plans to transport.

So he uses the device Hymorell built to successfully transport back in the far future (where, incidentally, he discovers Clytassamine has been brutalised by Hymorell, whose character has been traumatised by the experience of intense and unending pain in Terry’s body – the inhabitants of Cathalu never experience any pain or discomfort). He has some weeks there, living in high anxiety, then wakes one morning back in his bed, back in the old body. (For some reason the transference process can only take place when the mind is completely at rest and detached from the nervous system of the body it inhabits i.e. during sleep.) The big jar of liquid morphine is by his bedside but he immediately suspects Hymorell will have poisoned it, so he throws it away and gets the doctors to (grudgingly) give him a new prescription.

It’s weird and unsettling and funny. On one of his last visits to Cathalu he suddenly sees Clyta as she really is, immensely old and tired, and realises she is bored of him and wants Hymorell back. Finally, fed up of this ping-ponging Hymorell affects some kind of triangulation whereby Terry’s mind is sent back but not into his broken old body, instead into the body of a ‘mental defective’ named Stephen Dallboy, whose mind, presumably, is sent into Terry’s broken painful body. That’s the end of the mind-travelling to the far future and the last page of Terry’s narrative describes how he’s got used to being in the body of a complete stranger (after all, he’s done it once already).

And now the top and tail of the story make sense, for the main narrative we’ve just read was introduced by a letter from Jesse K. Johnson, Medical Director of the Forcett Mental Clinic, Connecticut, writing to a firm of lawyers and giving the background to the ‘case’.

For reasons Johnson doesn’t understand the mental defective Stephen Dallboy, who has been an inmate at the home has undergone a complete change of character, is suddenly alert and intelligent, articulate and educated. However, he insists that his name is not Stephen Dallboy, it is Terry Molton and he even appears to know the names and loads of personal facts about genuine friends of Terry Molton, all of whom, however, claim never to have met this Stephen Dallboy. The letter concludes that the whole thing is a remarkable example of ‘a well-integrated hallucination’ (p.168) and that the clinic will keep Dallboy in care for a time to allow them to dispel ‘the whole fantasy system’ but will release the patient in due course.

Dumb Martian (1952)

It is the future. Interplanetary travel is common. Duncan Weaver has got a five-year contract as Wayload Station Superintendant on Jupiter IV/II, which is a rocky asteroid circling Callisto, one of the moons of Jupiter. It’s a lonely job on an isolated outpost, so while he’s still at Port Clarke on Mars he shops around for a Martian woman to, in effect, be his slave for the five years. In the end he pays £1,000 for Lellie.

Weaver is a redneck, an uneducated bully. They take a space ship to the wayload station. The guy finishing his contract, who Weaver is scheduled to replace, shows them round the shabby two pressurised domes, which contain books or music records to pass the time, then he leaves on the rocket ship, leaving Weaver and Lellie alone together.

Quite quickly Weaver gets irritated and frustrated by Lellie’s inflexible expression, her inability to pronounce English properly, the permanent expression of surprise that Martians have on their faces. There’s no hint at all of sex, just his frustration. He tries to teach her to use cosmetics to ‘look more like a proper woman’, but she doesn’t know how. Eventually he beats her. He tries to force her to pronounce simple English words, like yes, correctly and when she struggles but can’t, he slaps and punches her as she cowers crying out, ‘No no no.’

Everything changes when the next scheduled rocket brings with it an unexpected cargo, a scientist who’s been assigned to the way station for a year, Dr Alan Whint. Whint is intelligent, he’s brought a lot of books with him, he respects Lellie from the start, in fact he starts to teach her how to read. It is no accident at all that the first time Lellie speaks of her own volition, it is to look up from the book Whint has given her and ask the two men, ‘What is “female emancipation”?’

Resentment between the two men simmers for months and then breaks out into an open confrontation, Whint calling Weaver a bullying pig. You can’t really have a fight in low gravity, so both men are forced to bottle it up, but Weaver gets to paranoid fretting about Whint and eventually sabotages his little space hopper so that the scientist sets off to prospect some site on the other side of the asteroid and never returns.

By this stage I’ve realised that the story is, to some extent, a portrait of a low-class, uneducated, paranoid man who’s quick to anger and violence. Having dispensed with Whint he then spends weeks anxiously worrying that Lellie will react somehow, anger, tears, violence. But she is a ‘Mart’, one of a race who appear (from this story) to be an utterly inert, impassive race, half humanoid (although with disconcerting physical differences).

Lellie carries on making him food and cleaning the place impassively, but otherwise shows no sign of distress and doesn’t mention the fact that Whint has never returned. Instead, she takes to reading intensively and becomes more educated about lots of things, including some of the basic engineering of the dome and related equipment.

Right from the start the story has shown how mercenary and money-minded Weaver is and her sudden interest in self-education prompts him to think she’s becoming more valuable, he’ll probably be able to sell her at a tidy profit when his five-year assignment finishes and he returns to Mars.

Till one day he sees off the latest routine cargo rocket from the launch pad, returns to the dome and discovers that… the airlock is closed. Not only closed, but locked, unopenable.

This is the final phase of the story, in which Weaver tries, with increasing desperation, to break back into the dome, eventually, in desperation, deciding to use a kind of oxy-acetylene kit to burn through both sealed walls of the some. OK the air inside will rush out, but once inside he can fix it and restore pressure. However, Lellie has anticipated his plans: now we realise why she has been reading so intently, especially about the dome and all its equipment – it has been a slow-burning plan for revenge.

She comes on the radio intercom and tells him not to try and breach the dome wall and when he looks through an observation window, sees that she has rigged up a bomb set to go off automatically if the air pressure drops: then they’ll both be killed. Weaver has one last, desperate hope. In the warehouse are cargo canisters which have their own propulsion units. He can rig one up with lots of padding to carry him inside and then launch it towards Callisto, the moon his asteroid circles, not too far away, which has its own outpost on and will pick up the incoming pod on radar. It’s a bit desperate but it might work.

But while he’s in the middle of adjusting the padding and figuring out the logistical problems he starts to feel cold and looks at the power gauge on his spacesuit. Suddenly it’s collapsing, the heating element is failing. Lellie must have fixed this, as well. Now he has only a matter of minutes till the temperature inside his suit matches the absolute zero outside, so he reverts to plan A and takes giant weightless strides back to the dome and tries to resume work with the burning tool, but he can’t even bend to lift it and the last few lines describe how Weaver’s body is overcome by extreme cold, first the hands and feet, then his arms and then, in a great rush, he breathes in freezing air which freezes his lungs and heart.

Impassively, from inside the dome, Lellie the ‘Mart’ who he bought and beat and abused, watches his lifeless body in its space suit gently float a few feet off the ground. Not such a dumb Mart after all.

The story dramatises more than any other Wyndham’s feminism and real hatred of the way so many women let themselves be bought and sold, moving from passive obeyers of their fathers to passive punchbags for abusive husbands, all leading up to the domestic slavery of endless pregnancies and child-rearing. Well, not for young Lellie!

Compassion Circuit (1954)

‘Short horror story.’ It’s the future. Robots are commonplace, from angular mechanical machines which do ugly everyday tasks to impressively humanoid-shaped bots which can acts as companions and carers.

Janet has been in hospital. She is ill with what, it is implied, is a terminal illness, becoming weaker and weaker every day. Her husband George Shand is desperately concerned. She is very reluctant to have a robot helper, she’s a traditionalist. But after her most recent stay in hospital, the doctors recommend complete rest and advise one, so she eventually agrees.

She and George take delivery of a big heavy box, which the robots from next door help to carry into the house. They unpack it and there’s some fuss about locating her activation panel. In a fit of prudishness, Jane insists that her husband not fiddle with the robot’s clothes and ‘body’.

And then, once she’s found the ‘On’ switch’, the robot helper stands up, impressively tall (5 feet ten inches) perfectly skin and hair, but not attractive (Janet had specified that when she and George selected from the catalogue), dressed as a traditional ‘parlourmaid’. Janet names her Hester and Hester quickly becomes invaluable, doing all the housework, carrying Janet from the bed to the lounge sofa and back again, while George is at work. Over the next four months she becomes Janet’s closest confidant. Her eyes and skin are perfect, her body is immaculately designed, but cold, so cold to the touch.

They have many conversations, during which Janet laments having a weak and feeble body and Hester gives a brisk, no-nonsense replies, agreeing that humans’ bodies are remarkably inefficient, a big chemistry set bits of which are forever going wrong, ‘uncertain and fragile’; whereas Hester is designed to perfection, never tires or weakens or gets ill. Sometimes Janet feels so feeble she cries at how unworthy of George she is in her dying body, and Hester rocks her to sleep like a child.

And this leads into the short story’s denouement: One day George gets a message at work that his wife has fallen ill again and been rushed to hospital. He himself hurries there but is told she is too weak to see him. The robot on the desk gives him a form to sign for emergency operation which, after some hesitation he signs.

Days later, he gets another message at work that Janet has been taken home. He rushes home and up to the bedroom where she is lying quietly in bed tended by Hester with the sheets up to her neck. He sits by her, ‘Janet darling’ etc, and reaches to touch her hand under the sheet… and is shocked to discover it is cold, everso cold. He reaches up along her arm to her shoulder, cold, all cold. He shrieks in horror! They have transplanted her head onto the body of a robot!

George runs out the bedroom, trips at the head of the stairs and falls down the entire flight. Janet walks calmly to the bottom and assesses the damage. Looks like he’s broken various minor bones but more importantly broken his back. Maybe he’ll never be able to walk again. Unless, of course, he has the same operation as Janet. Calmly she rings for an ambulance and begins to make the preparations…

Wild Flower (1955)

‘Where one has encouraged science fiction to try the form of the modern short-story.’ This short short story is clearly an attempt at something different. The plot concerns Felicity Fray, a teacher. She dislikes the modern world with its noisy machines. She wakes up in a floaty diaphanous mood, resenting the noise of diggers and lorries and traffic, trying to focus on clouds and sky, walks to work and takes a class of children. She is struck and moved that they have picked a flower for her which is in a vase on her desk.

It is a strange-looking flower, one Florence has never seen before. One of the smallest prettiest girls, Marielle, explains she found it among a clump of flowers. Oh, where? asks Felicity. Up at the site of the plane crash, Miss.

This is the core of the story. A year ago, on a beautiful midsummer evening, Felicity had been walking through the field, her mind full of poetry, when she was disturbed by the droning of a plane overhead. Then something went wrong, she could tell by the sound, looked up, and saw a big explosion and the silver shape disintegrate into fragments which came plummeting towards the earth at terrifying speed. She fell to the ground and cowered amid the grass, as fragments large and small of the plane fell all around her, as she prayed to God to be spared. A hundred yards away a large section landed and exploded sending shrapnel in all directions. Something else fell with a sickening thud nearby (it is implied that these are bodies, or parts of bodies).

She stayed like that, pressed into the ground and shaking, till the rescue party came, lifted her into the ambulance and took her to the hospital. Shock, and the modern reader is now familiar with the expression post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps the entire attitude which flavours the story reflects her ongoing trauma.

Felicity asks Mariella to take her to the site where she found the flowers and they walk out to the fields. For a long time the site was fenced off. Not only was it a crash site but the plane had been carrying radioactive cobalt ostensibly for hospital equipment in the Middle East. Somehow it leaked. The army sealed the site off and the scientists cleared it, but the implication is that these flowers are radioactive mutations. This seems to be a very naive view of radioactivity i.e. that it triggers viable forms of organic life which are just deviant or mutated. I thought the current understanding is it just kills things rather than produce an array of florid new forms.

Anyway, when they arrive at the field, Felicity and Marielle discover one of the sons of the farmer who owns it is there with some canisters of a new pesticide. He has just comprehensively sprayed the entire area. He doesn’t want these mutated flowers taking over his crops. For Felicity this is piling desecration on desecration. Even the new forms of life struggling to exist after a nuclear calamity must be obliterated by the never-ending destructiveness of male science.

So the girls can pick these beautiful flowers but farmer’s son has just condemned them to death. At this moment yet another jet plane screeches overhead and the little girl Marielle raises her eyes to the sky and shouts, ‘I hate them, I hate them’. Felicity tries to comfort her. Yes, she hates them too, but she holds in her hand a remedy, an elixir, the power of flowers. Despite all the attempts of male science to destroy the world and beauty, women and nature will triumph.

Thoughts

Range There’s a lot of range isn’t there. Most of the stories deal with familiar science fiction tropes – Mars (3), time travel (2), space travel (Meteor and Survival) and robots, all familiar stuff – but it’s striking how Wyndham succeeds in applying different approaches and tones to them.

Possibly the two dominant threads are humour and romance, meaning many of the stories are cast in a humorous mode, in a way to encourage dry smiles and a chuckle at their black humour or comic contrivances. Or concern husbands and wives or courting couples and spend as much time on the minutiae of dating and romantic dialogue as on the supposedly science fiction trappings. I’m thinking of the love story at the heart of Chronoclasm, the light-hearted romance at the centre of Pawley’s Peepholes, and the happy-ending love story at the centre of Opposite Number, in particular.

Gender And, at the risk of sounding modish, Wyndham is consistently interested in the issue of gender i.e. the stereotyping of the sexes. The point of Survival is that everyone disapproves of young Alice Morgan accompanying her husband on a flight to Mars because she is only a weak and feeble woman and yet, when calamity strikes, she turns out to be by far the most ruthless survivor, and ends up killing and eating all the men. In a very different way, Felicity Fray may be a stereotype of the poetry-loving schoolmistress and yet Wyndham goes out of his way to be on her side.

Nowadays the thousands of studies with titles like ‘Gender and identity in the novels of X’ all too often amount to an imposition of ideological and literary theory onto authors and works which don’t necessarily justify them. In Wyndham’s case, though, his work is crying out for a thoughtful exploration of his attitude to gender and the social stereotyping around men and, especially, women in the 1940s and 1950s, as this is a really obvious and dominating feature of his work.

Voices It’s worth noting the effort Wyndham takes to distinguish his characters through their narrating voices. This was true of the stories in Jizzle which included a wise-guy working class circus operator, and is true of some of these, too. Only three of the stories have first-person narrators – Pawley’s Peepholes, Opposite Number and Terry Molton’s account in From Pillar To Post but Wyndham makes an effort to distinguish the voices, especially the larky, jokey tone of Jerry in Peepholes. Maybe the most obvious attempt at characterisation is not in a first-person account but the character of Duncan Weaver in Dumb Martian, who is successfully depicted as an uneducated brute and bully through the description of his paranoid, small-minded mental processes. The traumatised, distant character of Bert, in grieving for lost planet earth in Time To Rest is another distinct voice and presence.

Again, by concentrating on the sci fi minutiae it would be easy to overlook the care Wyndham took to craft and individualise each of these stories.

Related link

John Wyndham reviews

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 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 conventional space exploration novel in five parts which follow successive members of the Troon family over a 200-year period (1994 to 2194) as they help build the first British space station, command the British moon base, lead expeditions to Mars, to Venus, and ends with an eerie ‘ghost’ story

1960s

1960 Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham – ardent feminist and biochemist Diana Brackley discovers a substance which slows down the ageing process, with potentially revolutionary implications for human civilisation, in a novel which combines serious insights into how women are shaped and controlled by society and sociological speculation with a sentimental love story and passages of broad social satire (about the beauty industry and the newspaper trade)
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1961 Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham – Six short stories dominated by the title track which depicts England a few centuries hence, after a plague has wiped out all men and the surviving women have been genetically engineered into four distinct types, the brainy Doctors, the brawny Amazons, the short Servitors, and the vast whale-like mothers into whose body a twentieth century woman doctor is unwittingly transported
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, 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 who it takes the entire novel to persuade his parents is real and a telepathic explorer from a far distant planet
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes in retrospect, 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
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

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Posted by Simon on March 12, 2021

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The Best of John Wyndham 1932 to 1949 (1973)

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

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

The Lost Machine (1932)

Wyndham’s second science fiction story.

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

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

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

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

The Lost Machine by John Wyndham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man from Beyond (1934)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Perfect Creature (1937)

Science fiction comedy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trojan Beam (1939)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vengeance by Proxy (1940)

A genuinely thrilling horror story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentary

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

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

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

Adaptation (1949)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentary

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

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

Summary

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

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

Credit

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

Related link

John Wyndham reviews

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian

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

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

1900s

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

1910s

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

1920s

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

1930s

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

1940s

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

1950s

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

1960s

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

1970s

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

1980s

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

1990s

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

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Posted by Simon on March 1, 2021

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