In the irregular light the bounty hunter seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office. (p.173)
This is the novel which director Ridley Scott made into the smash hit movie Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford at his charming, tough-guy best. The novel is a lot less glamorous, more puzzling and more worrying, than the movie.
Background
On the first page we learn that it is January 1992, as we meet Rick Deckard, android hunter and his bad-tempered wife, Iran. Within a few sentences they are discussing that central Dick topic, mental illness, depression and despair. It’s what his wife woke up feeling. Being a modern couple they have a Penfield Mood Organ on which they can dial any number of moods or feelings which the machine instantly stimulates the hypothalamus in their brains to make them experience.
Aha. What is ‘real’? What is ‘reality’? Another major Dick theme.
Oh, and a few years back there was a nuclear war which devastated large parts of the country. The chatty TV weather forecast includes predictions for the levels of today’s fallout.
After the war a radioactive dust covered the world. Nobody sees the sun any more. As many people as possible have migrated to colonies on the other planets of the solar system, Mars being particularly popular. Those who remain undergo regular DNA tests. Those whose DNA is acceptable remain ‘regulars’. But a steady number are diagnosed with radioactive mutations, and categorised as ‘specials’. Those who have undergone significant mental damage are nicknamed ‘chickenheads’ or ‘antheads’.
One such chickenhead is John Isidore, a mental defective who works for the Van Ness Animal Hospital owned by Hannibal Sloat, himself a man falling apart due to radiation poisoning.
Mood
So that gives you a flavour of the mood. Depressed. The entire novel labours under a black cloud of radioactive dust, with people dying or being mutated by radiation, with most animals (all birds) having been killed off, with everyone depressed at not being able to emigrate off-world or at the general plight, with people using drugs to alter their mood or escaping altogether via Mercerian fusion (more on this in a moment).
The plot
So as always Dick has created a very dense and thick texture of themes and subsidiary ideas within which to embed the big central idea.
This is that in the future, despite the war and dying off of most animals etc, humanity still retains advanced technologies and in particular has been refining better and better androids – artificial humans, with human minds, intelligence and reflexes.
Mostly these are used as slaves on the off-world colonies. But a small number rebel against their masters and jump ferries back to earth where they try to hide. As a matter of law and order, and also because they can behave unpredictably and violently, these escaped androids need to be tracked down.
Rick Deckard is an android bounty hunter. He tracks down rogue androids or ‘andys’, which have escaped from one of the off world colonies, usually killing their master in the process, in order to come to earth illegally. When he finds them, Deckard ‘retires’ them i.e. destroys them. He gets paid a grand per andy.
Deckard has barely finished dealing with his depressed wife before he gets a call from his boss, Harry Bryant. Eight andys have escaped from Mars and come to earth. Deckard’s fellow bounty hunter Dave Holden ‘retired’ two of them and was in the middle of interviewing a third when it shot him with a laser blaster. (Laser blasters are tubes you hold in your hand and do what they say on the tin, blasting a hole through a body or wall, and exploding people’s heads.)
Bryant hands him the task of finishing the job, getting the one that shot Holden plus the other five, six in all.
But there’s a problem, the sophistication of modern android brains. Just recently they’ve introduced the Nexus-6 electronic brain, the most complex and ‘human’ yet. It makes the job of identifying andys – and of distinguishing them from humans – almost impossibly difficult.
The only tool bounty hunters like Deckard have is the Voigt-Kampff test. This is designed to monitor the emotional reactions of those being tested. A patch is applied to the side of the testee’s face and wired up to the testing box, while a light is shone into the pupil of the eye. Then the interviewer asks a number of rather disturbing questions, a lot of them revolving around the plight of animals. Normal humans’ skin and eyes give immediate, unconscious responses to the questions. Androids have to think about them for a few milliseconds, and sometimes miss the emotional cue altogether. That’s what distinguishes humans from androids. At least up to now. Now some andys are giving borderline human responses. It’s getting difficult to tell them apart.
Deckard’s boss sends him up to Seattle, to the headquarters of the Rosen Corporation which invented the Nexus-6 brain. Here he meets the harassed owner, Eldon Rosen, and his striking 18-year-old niece, Rachael. They were meant to have lined up a mix of androids and humans for Deckard to test, as a test both of the Rosen androids, and of the test itself.
But Eldon insists that Deckard first of all test his niece. This leads to a prolonged scene in which Deckard at first comes to doubt the test because her reactions are all wrong – and then realises, with a shock, that the ‘niece’ is in fact an android. Eldon admits as much in front of her. (We are left to think through the emotional impact of thinking you are a human being and then being told, like this, that you are in fact a robot. With a limited life span. Later we’re told they last four years.)
Deckard flies back from Seattle in his hovercar, shaken and with serious doubts about the future of the Voigt-Kampff test. His boss calls him on the vidphone and tells him a Russian cop, Kadalyi, has flown in from the WPO (never spelled out but presumably some international police organisation).
Kadalyi arrives in a helitaxi and gets into Deckard’s hovercar, but they’ve barely begun talking before Deckard realises he’s an android, Max Polokov, the one who zapped Holden. Polokov pulls out his ‘laser tube’ to kill Deckard but, fortunately, Deckard’s hovercar is fitted with a device which emits a ‘sine wave’ which ‘phases out laser emanation and spreads the beam into ordinary light’ (p.74). Handy, eh? Deckard pulls out an old fashioned handgun and shoots Polokov’s head off.
Deckard phones his wife, who has relapsed into a prolonged and profound depression. He flies on to the San Francisco Opera House where Bryant has told him the next android, Luba Luft, is working as an opera singer.
Deckard loves classical music. He loves opera. When he walks into the auditorium a rehearsal is going on and he hears Luba Luft sing an aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute. She has a beautiful voice and he is genuinely moved. He goes to her dressing room and starts giving her the Voigt-Kampff test but she objects that it’s all about sex and calls a cop. Five minutes later this cop, Officer Crams, arrives and arrests Deckard.
There then follows a genuinely weird and disorientating passage, for the Crams tells him he’s a long-time officer from the new San Francisco police station downtown. Crams says he knows all the bounty hunters and has never heard of Deckard. Deckard says this is all wrong and tries to call Bryan, who seems to appear momentarily on the vidphone but then it goes dead. When Crams calls the same number he gets through to someone who says that isn’t police HQ and there’s no-one called Bryant there.
Crams takes Deckard in his police hover car to the new Hall of Justice which is on Mission Street, which is a genuine police station, full of bored front desk officers processing drunks and crooks, uniformed cops hanging round and everything. The reader shares in Deckard’s delirious hallucinatory panic, his fear that…. maybe Deckard is the android. Maybe the entire story we’ve read to date has involved fake memories, is a delusion programmed into him for some reason. Maybe there is no police HQ where he thinks it is, maybe there is no Inspector Harry Bryant, maybe his ‘wife’ is part of the delusory programming.
This sense of vertigo doesn’t let up. Deckard is taken into the presence of Inspector Garland who is told all about him pestering some opera singer with a cock and bull story about being an android bounty hunter. Into the office comes the station’s best android bounty hunter Phil Resch. Deckard has never heard of him. Resch has never heard of Deckard. Has he stumbled into a parallel universe?
Everyone in the room accuses everyone else of being an android, with both Resch and Garland suggesting that Deckard must be. Deckard holds out but part of him is thinking: Is he?
Anyway, Resch is dispatched to go and get the test these guys appear to use for detecting androids, the Boneli Reflex-Arc Test. While he’s out of the room, Garland confides in Deckard that Resch is an android, the poor sap. As Resch returns with the test equipment in his hand, Garland makes a move with his laser tube, at which Resch drops to the floor and shoots his head in half. Deckard had also dropped and now regards the scene with shock.
So is Resch a genuine bounty hunter who he’s never heard of operating out of an HQ he didn’t know existed? Or is Resch, like Garland, an android, but doesn’t realise it? While he’s worrying about it Resch says they’d better get out of the cop station – it’s infested with andys – and he pretends to put cuffs on Deckard and walks him briskly to the lifts, up to the roof, and into his hovercar.
They return to the opera house where they’re told Luba Luft has gone to the nearby museum. They go there and find her examining the pictures of Edvard Munch, standing in front of Puberty. They now jointly arrest her but she continues the bewildering confusion by accusing Resh of definitely being an android, and she should know. Resch defends himself to Luba and to Deckard, claiming that he has a squirrel, a pet squirrel, and cares for him, so he has empathic response, so surely that means he’s human, right? Right?
By this time Deckard, and the reader, really don’t know. What definitely happens is that as they accompany her to the lift Luba continues to deliberately wind Resch up into a frenzy with her accusations that he’s a robot till he pulls out his laser tube and fires. because she pulls away he only wounds her in the stomach, so Deckard immediately finishes her off. The lift arrives at the ground floor, to the horror of museum goers.
They report the killing to Bryant at headquarters and continue the bizarre conversation about whether Resch is or is not a damn android. Finally he agrees for Deckard to give him a test (p.111). To Deckard’s surprise Resch is human. Resch, for his part, is surprised that Deckard is so upset about killing Luba. Her voice was divine. What harm, was she doing anyone? For the first time Deckard doubts his vocation.
Resch gives Deckard some parting advice. He says he had trouble with Luft because he was attracted to her. Callously, Resch says, instead of retiring an andy and then being attracted to her, how about the other way round – have sex with her first, then retire her. Byee.
Deeply traumatised and shaking, the only way Deckard can calm down at the end of this pretty tough day is by going over to Animal Row, where the pet shops are, and after some (quite amusing) haggling, buying a fine black Nubian goat, making a down-payment and signing a contract for crippling ongoing monthly payments (at 6% interest!). Maybe it’s time to explain about the animals.
Rare animals
Since the nuclear war almost all animals have died out (it might occur to sensible readers to wonder how any form of food can be cultivated if all animals – including the ones vital for pollinating crops –have perished, but Dick’s books are less novels than visions, and you don’t quibble about facts or details in a vision, you let yourself be transported).
So all the characters are obsessed with owning one of the few remaining examples of each species. Deckard is extremely jealous of his neighbour in their apartment block because he owns a horse. Deckard can only afford the very second best option of owning an electronic animal, in his case an android sheep, which he pathetically pretends is real. Almost every other character has, or longs for, just one animal to own.
Dick invents a whole culture built around the trading of live animals, and the lesser market in manufactured android ones. For example, many of the characters keep a copy of the standard handbook of live animals, Sidney’s Animal and Fowl Catalogue (with monthly updates), which gives exact market prices for each species.
This is why Deckard, feeling shattered and confused, decides to blow the bounty money he’s made by retiring three androids (Kopolov, Garland – who he’s claiming, and Luba Luft) on a live black Nubian goat.
When he gets home his wife is awestruck and hugs and kisses him for the only time in the book.
Hence the title of the book – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – is a little less fanciful than at first sight. There really is an electric sheep in the novel. And the title sort of implies that Deckard may himself be an android who owns an electric sheep. Maybe…
More plot
His wife is at first thrilled with the Nubian goat until Deckard sort of admits he didn’t buy it for her but to manage his mood, his depression (his panic, I’d have thought, after such a confusing day).
She persuades him to have a go on the empathy machine. Grasping the twin handles he is immediately transported to become one with old man Mercer, in his Biblical robe, endlessly struggling up the desert hillside. He senses all the other people who are fusing at that moment, but is caught on the head stone by one of the Enemy, and releases the handles, re-emerging into ‘reality’. Ah. I’m going to have to explain Mercerism.
Mercerism
Mercerism is a new religion which appears to have eclipsed all the traditional Western religions, which are never mentioned. Followers possess an empathy box. Whenever they need to, they grab the two handles of the empathy box and are immediately transported into the mind of Wilbur Mercer who is depicted as an old man, wearing Biblical robes, who is endlessly, endlessly struggling up a steep rocky hill in the desert, with unseen Opponents jeering and throwing rocks at him.
The follower is keenly aware that thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of other followers are experiencing the same things at the same moment. The followers’ minds are joined together and they each experience tremendous empathy with others, and relief from their own anxieties. This experience is called ‘fusion’.
The Mercer experience is repeatedly described but still remains mysterious, especially the way that the gruelling ascent is only the start of the much worse experiences Mercer has to undergo once he has reached the summit of the hill.
In a hard-to-understand sequence, when the chickenhead Isidore activates his empathy box we appear to see some of Mercer’s backstory, that he was a mutant found abandoned in a raft, was adopted, and proved to have awesome powers, capable of reversing time in order to raise the dead! This motif appears a couple of times but always in the context of mind-bending ‘fusion’ so it’s difficult to know how ‘real’ it is.
More plot
While he was experiencing fusion one of the opponents, the enemy, the killers, threw a rock at Deckard which hit him on the ear and drew blood. A peculiarity of the empathy box is that physical wounds incurred while doing it persist back into ‘real life’.
Deckard’s wife, Iran, puts a bandage to the cut ear to stop blood, then Bryant phones and says he wants the remaining three andys retired today, this evening. Dazed Deckard is reluctant, but finally agrees.
Deckard hasn’t been able to get Rachael out of his mind, the young android he had tested up in Seattle. In a throwaway remark to him, as she was walking him to his hovercar, she had said she might be able to help him track down the three remaining andys.
Deckard realises his faith in himself is shaken. He empathised with Luba Luft, and found Lesch repellent – just the opposite response than logic demanded.
He realises he needs Rachael to help him. He gets through and asks her. It’s late and she’s reluctant but eventually agrees to come and see him (it only takes an hour to fly by hovercar from Seattle to San Francisco – for most of the novel it’s easy to forget there’s been a nuclear war which has wiped out cities and animal life: the opposite – everyone seems to be using impressive futuristic gadgets as if benefiting from a highly advanced economy).
Deckard arranges to meet her in the St Francis, the last decent hotel in San Francisco (p.144). Rachael arrives wearing what appears to be a see-through top revealing her bra, skimpy shorts, and bearing booze, the hard-to-get-hold-of bourbon. They drink and they argue.
She is disgusted by the fact that she’s an android. She hates the other androids. She says one of them is identical to her, they’re no more people than identical bottletops coming off a production line. She assesses his chances against the three andys, tells him she’ll come and take out one of them, reducing his task to just two. She strips and gets into bed. He is struck by her weird shape, lean, without real breasts. He kisses her. She is cold. In the end she demands that he go to bed with her and he does. My God. This is just what Phil Resch predicted…
Later they get dressed and go to find the three remaining andys. A word needs to be said about J.S. Isidore.
The andys at the chickenhead’s apartment
This summary has so far concentrated on Deckard. But almost every other chapter cuts away to the activities of the chickenhead J.S. Isidore. There’s a minor plotline about an electronic cat he takes along to his boss at the Van Ness Animal Hospital. But the main thing is he discovers someone else living in the huge ruined apartment block where he lives in a rundown flat.
It’s a young woman named Pris Stratton. She’s living in some squalor. It takes a little while for the reader to realise this is one of the andys. During that interval there are a number of passages where we see her odd, detached android manner, though the eyes of Isidore who is himself mentally retarded. In other words, Dick makes fiction from the interaction of two deviant types of mind. Some of it is straightforward sci-fi thriller but some is weird.
That Pris is an andy is confirmed when two other andys turn up, Roy and Irmgard Baty. She short and dark, he wide, stock, eastern European looking. Isidore is persuaded to carry all their stuff up into his flat, which they’re going to use as a hideout. Vaguely he senses he’s being taken advantage of, but is mostly just happy that he’s got some new friends.
More plot
Deckard and Rachael are in his hovercar heading to Isidore’s apartment building.
(A logical flaw in the book is the way the androids are supposed to be in hiding, but Inspector Bryant simply phones Deckard up and tells him where they are. It’s just one example of the way the book isn’t really meant to be read logically or consistently. Plot logic is secondary to the puzzles about the nature of consciousness which it is designed to throw up.)
They have another big argument which takes a chilling turn when Rachael reveals that she has slept with a number of android bounty hunters and does it deliberately because after sleeping with her, they become incapable of killing other androids.
She only slept with Deckard in order to neutralise his professional instinct to kill andys. It turns out she knows Pris and Roy and Irmgard, she helped them from the start – and provoked him into calling her, and then offered to help him and generally lured him into bed in order to destroy his andy-killing capacity.
Deckard is stunned. Cold. Goes numb. He had been flying the hovercar to the apartment building but now turns round and takes her back to the hotel. The argument takes a grim turn when she asks him to kill her, right there, right now, and he reaches out to do it and she says just one shot through the occipital bone, that would do it, if you’re going to do it, do it now. But suddenly he’s overcome with disgust at how easily androids just give up.
He kicks her out onto the hotel roof, then turns and flies to the apartment building where the remaining andys have been reported. On one level, what happens is straightforward. Isidore is at the main entrance to the building and tries feebly to put him off. Deckard ignores him and uses machinery to confirm their presence, goes slowly up the stairs to their floor. Pris tries to surprise him on the darkened stairs and he zaps her with his laser tube. Then he goes on to Isidore’s apartment, knocks and pretends to be the chickenhead. They tentatively open the door and he barges in, avoiding Roy Baty’s laser gun shots, and quickly killing both Roy and Irmgard.
What’s eerie, and would be unaccountable if this were a realistic novel, is that Deckard meets Mercer on the stairs. As he walked down a dark and derelict corridor, Mercer appeared out of the shadows, told him what he was doing was wrong but he had to do it anyway, and then warned him that the most dangerous one was coming up the stairs behind him. It was Pris. It is only because of Mercer’s warning that Deckard turns, ducks, fires and kills her before she can shoot him.
But Mercer, how can he be there, how did he get there, is it a vision, or has Deckard ‘fused’ enough to have visions of Mercer almost at will? Whatever the explanation, how does the phantom of Mercer know Pris is sneaking up on Deckard?
Buster Friendly
Especially as something equally unexpected happens just before the final shootout.
Throughout the book many of the characters are shown watching the non-stop, 24/7 TV show featuring your hilarious host Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends, with his mad laughter track and inane chatter with the same cast of c-list celebrities.
Androids was published 15 years after Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, another novel dominated by the horror of American commercial television (and, incidentally, in which the freewheeling protagonist feels he is having a transformative experience which can’t be understood by his conventional narrow-minded wife.)
Incongruously, against all the logic of the idea that Buster and Mercerism are twin foundations of this weird future society, Buster has been predicting he would make a big revelation on tonight’s show. And so he does. Just a few minutes before Deckard arrives, Buster reveals that the religion of Mercerism is a fake. That Mercer is just an out of work bit-part actor, he was hired years ago for a shoot in the desert where they dressed him up in Biblical clothing and generally shot all the scenes which followers of Mercerism ‘experience’, that even the desert isn’t real. If you close up on the so-called desert you can see it’s all a painted backdrop. They even have an interview with the actor, an alcoholic, who cheerfully admits it’s all a fake.
This comes as a shock to the chickenhead Isidore when he watches it with Roy and Irmgard and Pris, just before Deckard arrives. It comes as a surprise to me, since I have read how the experience of the empathy box is genuinely undergone by all the characters.
But it becomes plain incomprehensible that, if this man and his religion are a cheap fake, he nonetheless magically appears to Deckard in the apartment hallway and saves his life. How does that work?
Into the wastes
Deckard flies home to check on his wife but is so restless and upset at the day he’s had that he takes off again and blindly heads north, he doesn’t know why, he is at an extremity of fatigue, he flies up into the forbidden zone where there is nothing but dust and lifelessness.
He parks the hovercar and in a kind of trance stumbles up a hill and realises that… he is becoming Mercer. He is Mercer. To make the illusion complete someone, the enemy, the killers, throws a rock at him which draws blood on his cheek. But he is far gone in this transcendental religious illusion to look for the throwers… it is the intensity of the fusion with Mercer which is transforming him.
Just as suddenly he realises he has to get away, and blunders back down to the hill to the parked hovercar. He is sitting, head lolling, exhausted, half in and half out of the hovercar, when he notices movement on the ground. It is a toad! It is the first live animal he has ever seen in the wild! He carefully packs it in a box and flies back to San Francisco.
Here he carefully presents the toad to his wife who is as thrilled as he is. Unfortunately, in playing with its tummy, she discovers the clip which opens the flap to reveal the electric innards. It is a fake animal. Oh well.
Too tired to talk, Deckard lies on the bed and falls asleep. Will he dream of electric sheep?
Gizmos and consumer culture
When Deckard wants to enter one of the andys’ apartments he uses an ‘infinity key’ which fits every known lock in the universe.
Coming from reading four novels by Arthur C. Clarke whose writing is characterised by a careful attention to scientific and technical plausibility, Dick fits with the line of American sci-fi writers who, if their characters need one, just invent a gizmo to do it. Anti-gravity drives, space warps, anti-death drugs, hovercars, mood organs, infinity keys, “you wan’ it, we got it, baby”.
Dicks’ novels satirise the superficiality of American consumer culture, but the glibness of detail in his sci-fi novels comes right out of the same bubblegum, ‘do you want fries with that?’ mentality.
The Penfield Mood Organ
If you can afford one of these gadgets then you plug yourself in and the organ activates different parts of the cerebral cortex to create a wide range of moods. Each mood has a specific number. Numbers, and moods, which are mentioned, include:
- 3 – motivation to dial a number
- 382 – despair
- 481 – awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future
- 594 – pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters
- 888 – desire to watch TV no matter what’s on
Every home should have one.
Credit
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick was published in 1968. All references are to the 2017 Orion paperback edition.
Related links
Philip K. Dick reviews
- The Man in the High Castle (1962)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
- Ubik (1969)
- Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)
Other science fiction reviews
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
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
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 London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
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 – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion 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 passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring 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 Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to 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
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
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
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 by Ray Bradbury – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down 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 ‘trilogy’ describing 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
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling tale of the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke – a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of quicksand-like moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
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 New York
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke – 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
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
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, namely the 1950s
Books & Boots 