This is a phenomenally careful, elaborately structured and disorientatingly weird work of art.

It’s made up of three novellas of about 70, 50 and 100 pages each. They are wildly dissimilar in style and approach, and each of them is, in its own way, extremely dense and elliptical.

By elliptical I mean that Wolfe very deliberately leaves out loads of backstory. In most popular, pulp or genre fiction, either the narrator sets the scene right at the start or one or other of the characters sooner rather than later gives an explanation of what’s going on and what is at stake.

Instead, Wolfe adopts a deliberately puzzling and bewildering strategy of postponing any kind of explanation of what’s going on, indefinitely. To be honest, I never really, fully grasped exactly what was going on in any of these three stories – for example I’m not sure if the second one is intended as a fiction or a true account.

The sense of bewilderment is exacerbated by:

1. Wolfe’s unusually baroque prose style
2. the extremely weird science fantasy settings and details of the stories

The Fifth Head of Cerberus (70 pages)

A first-person account by a narrator who early on drops that he’s been in prison and is looking back at events from a distance.

It is an account of his childhood, brought up in an elaborate, Gormenghast-like establishment, La Maison, with barred windows which looked out over a front garden, and a roof garden above where parties are held, sharing a room with his brother, David, both of them being pedantically tutored by ‘Mr Million’ who, it emerges, is a kind of robot which runs on wide wheels and has some kind of hologram embedded in its metal casing, in which a human head talks to them, setting them subjects to debate, correcting and reproving them. There’s a vivid attempt to capture Mr Million on the cover of one of the SF Masterworks editions.

The boy’s life changes around his seventh birthday when his father starts calling for him every evening to be brought to his study, where the boy is held down on a chaise longue and injected with drugs while his father asks him penetrating psychological questions, IQ tests, free association sessions and so on.

We never learn the narrator’s name, and his father decides to call him Number 5. Occasionally the boy gets sight of his aunt, an upright stark figure who, in a striking scene, he realises doesn’t walk but glides, eventually realising that she doesn’t have any legs but her body sits on a kind of saddle-like device which suspends her at leg height.

From scattered remarks we are also able to piece together that the establishment he’s being brought up in is a high-class brothel, with plenty of eminent male customers in top hats and formal wear (later we learn that a visitor, Marsch, wears a top hat and a cape like a Victorian gent, p.154). Customers are greeted by girls who seem to have been surgically enhanced to have super-pert breasts, bulging eyes, and be abnormally big.

Oh, and it’s all taking place on another planet, Sainte Croix, a planet which was settled a century or more earlier by humans travellers across space. Sainte Croix circles closely around a sister planet named Sainte Anne and they are both some 20 lightyears from earth.

Piecing together casual asides, the reader deduces that the planets were originally settled by the French – hence the French names of the planets and settlements (‘the original French-speaking colonists’ -p.40) – but at some later time was violently seized from them in a war (‘the destruction of the records of the first French landing parties by the war’, p.131 – and that most of the French lost arms or legs in the war, p.132, ‘the log of that first ship was lost in the fusing of Saint-Dizier’, p.171 ‘Both were originally found and settled by the French’ ‘Who lost the war’ p.183).

And so Number 5 and his brother David go on for years, being tutored and taken for polite walks in a nearby park by Mr Million, and in the evening taken off for a regular session of drugs and intensive questioning. Slowly Number 5’s health deteriorates, he experiences extended blackouts.

On a couple of occasions he meets his unsympathetic aunt, who at one point asks if he is familiar with Veil’s Hypothesis – the theory that the Sainte Anne aboriginals could mimic the human settlers so perfectly that they killed them and took their places; in other words, that all the human characters are in fact descendants of chameleon-like aborigenes.

Number 5 is thrilled when he meets a visitor, John Marsch, an anthropologist, who has come, in fact, from earth, a place he has heard so much about. Number 5 desperately tries to keep Marsch busy and question him in the parlour but Marsch is impatient to meet Aubrey Veil, inventor of the hypothesis (p.30). You and I assume this to be Number 5’s father, so it is a big shock to all of us when Aubrey turns out to be Number 5’s aunt!

In the park one day he encounters a pretty girl, Phaedria, despite the efforts of her governess to keep them apart. Incongruously, she, he and David help set up an amateur dramatic society and put on productions all through the summer. When money runs short they decide to break into a slave trader’s warehouse – a gripping and grotesque scene, as they first go down through a floor of huge chained barking mastiffs, before getting to the floor of chained slaves.

They get past these alright but, in the small cash room, come across a grotesquely engineered human, a human creatures with four arms who attacks and nearly kills them before they can spear him and escape.

But Number 5 realises that the creature’s face bears a resemblance to him, and his father. And now he realises that this fact explains the fondness Mr Million has shown all the way through his boyhood for often stopping off at the slave market en route to or from their outings to the park. (Slaves! the slave market?) Now Number 5 really pays attention, he realises that a regular number of the slaves look like his father and him.

At some point during these events the reader realises that Number 5 is a clone and, presumably, so are the slaves he sees – hence their similar appearance. Marsch pays another visit and casually lets drop that so is his father – they’re all clones of the man whose hologram is inside Mr Million, namely his grandfather. (Sometime during the process it dawns on some readers that the narrator’s name may reflect his genetic origin: what better name for a clone than Eugene, or Gene?)

The story reaches a climax as Number 5 decides he is going to murder his father, a decision he reaches quite coolly and dispassionately. When he arrives at his father’s study for the evening drug-induced interrogation, he thinks his father sees it in him, as if this is a ritual which must be gone through.

The narration speeds up and the narrator briskly describes how he kills his father but is then discovered, arrested and sentenced to nine years of harsh imprisonment. When he is finally released he makes his way back to the big family home where, we are told, he takes his father’s place as head of the family estate.

Wow. My head is spinning and so much has been left unexplained. The slaves? The clones? Mr Million? How does it all… fit together?

‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch

This is a really out-there text. Forget it being a ‘story’ by Marsch the anthropologist in any conventional sense of story – it is a third-party account of a few weeks in the life of an aborigine dating from – presumably – before the Terrans arrived, and describing the completely alien, primitive society of the time.

We are on Sainte Anne, the sister planet to Sainte Croix. We are told of the birth of John Sandwalker, twin to another boy, John Eastwind (all boys are named John – or whatever native word ‘John’ is translated from), to their mother Cedar Branches Waving, at a holy birthing place among the rocks and barren desert.

Some indeterminate time later Sandwalker is on a quest in the fierce, barren outback to find a priest who lives in a cave under a waterfall. He is starving. All the humans are hungry. Most of them die if they don’t hunt something after three days. Many are born but most die. There is no agriculture and the beings he describes are cannibals, although hedged round with bizarre taboos.

Sandwalker, like the other ‘humans’ described, powerfully confuses or intermingles sleep and waking, sleeping dreams being full of all kinds of omens and meanings.

Sandwalker goes out to hunt and meets the Shadow Children, a strange nocturnal race who seem to be a) half the height of people b) only come out at dark c) are hard to see clearly d) appear to contribute to each other’s existence, in the sense that it takes a number of them to bring their spokesman, the Old Wise One into being.

Sandwalker appears to make some kind of peace with them, in exchange for which they share a tick-deer they have killed. Singing is a big part of both cultures and Sandwalker shares in the Shadow Children’s singing.

Walking on, he meets a girl named Seven Girls Waiting and her baby, Pink Butterflies, at a rare oasis. She has been abandoned by her people for reasons I didn’t understand. He hunts food for her and her baby. They have sex. There is an odd exchange about trees. Sandwalker points out that all people come from trees out of women. Later his tree is hard. So ‘tree’, on one appearance, seems to mean penis – but there are many more occasions when it actually seems to mean tree. And trees are holy. When he first approaches the oasis he keeps his eyes on the one and only tree as a mark of respect, and asks its permission to come closer.

Sandwalker goes hunting for more game to take to the cave under the falls. He then decides to travel down the river which flows through the story downstream towards the marshmeres and, ultimately, the sea.

Here Sandwalker, walking, trekking, singing through the outback on his own, comes across some Shadow children who he rescues from enemy marshmen who he kills. But then he learns that his mother, Cedar Branches Waving, and tribe members Leaves-You-Can-Eat and Bloodyfinger, have been captured by other marshmen and taken away. So he sets off to rescue them.

Instead he is captured and thrown into a deep sandy pit, along with the Shadow children who have followed him. Here there is a series of confusing conversations – first with a couple of his own people who have been captured and are in the sandpit – but mostly with the Shadow Children who reveal all kinds of secrets.

Confusingly, they make references to earth, or to earth culture, in a roundabout and elliptical way which seems to imply that they are the degraded descendants of colonists who might have come from earth a very long time ago.

(But if all this is happening before the planets are colonised, does this mean there was some earlier wave of space travel and colonisation? How? When?) At one point the Old Wise One mentions a string of places which mostly seem nonsense but in the middle of which are mentioned ‘Atlantis’ or ‘Africa’ as possible origins for the Shadow children. What? After such a long time, during which they seem to have mutated into another form of life completely, how would he remember those names? It’s mind-twisting.

The three men, Sandwalker’s mother and the girl are brought up out of the sandpit and forced out into the ocean where a crowd of the other tribe chant excitedly and two of Sandwalker’s group are ritually drowned. Someone explains that the ritual killing is so the dead men’s souls will enter the river and carry messages from the other tribe to the stars.

Supervising all of this and clearly a man of status in his tribe is Sandwalker’s long-lost twin brother, John Eastwind. There is absolutely no human love or affection between them, just the conflict of two beings from a culture immeasurably distant from our own.

Sandwalker and the others are taken back to the pit and thrown back down into it, although a couple of the Shadow children are killed on the way back. The cruder members of the other tribe gloat to Sandwalker how the marshmen will feast on their bodies tonight. Hunger, in fact starvation, is an ever-present fact of these people’s lives.

The next day Sandwalker, his mother, Seven Girls Waiting, and the surviving Shadow children are brought up out of the pit again, and marched the same route to the estuary of the river into the ocean to be ritually drowned except that… one of the Shadow children refuses to go quietly.

The whole text is written through the eyes of its pre-literate protagonists and so takes seriously cult and taboos and dreams and spells, to such an extent that it is often difficult to figure out what is going on. Wolfe doesn’t make it obvious or easy. He expects his reader to pay attention and put in a lot of work.

Here at the end, the story reaches an apotheosis of obscurity as two things happen.

1. One of the Shadow children refuses to go quietly and, disobeying the instructions of the by-now very wispy Wise Old One, reveals that for many years the Shadow children have projected some kind of force field out into space and so protected their world from discovery by alien races (which – we think – they were once themselves).

This Shadow child now, abruptly, decides to turn off the force, and we feel from Sandwalker’s perspective, what it feels like for a great shudder to pass over the world and it suddenly to feel much bigger.

Within moments one of the many ‘starcrossers’ which have been periodically referred to, falls from the skies, with a flare of… of what? of engines? Does this mean there’s been a busy traffic of spaceships to and fro past the planets which have been somehow been rendered invisible – and now, at the flick of one of the Shadow children’s minds, they have become somehow visible and inviting to passing astronauts? Is this event the arrival of the first (or current wave) of colonists, whose descendants feature in the first story?

Confusing? Yes, very.

2. Meanwhile, back with the crowd of marshpeople who have assembled to watch the ritual drowning, Sandwalker takes advantage of the confusion and the sense that the other tribe have lost the initiative, to seize control of the situation.

In a puzzling development he and his twin brother break the loopy roots of something like a mangrove tree which is lined with razorsharp shells, and proceed to whip to death the priest who had been supervising the ritual drownings, Lastvoice.

Then, Eastwind and his brother are debating what to do next when Sandwalker grabs his brother’s hair and is bending him backwards into the sea to drown him… when the surviving Shadow children intervene, telling him part of him will die with his twin if he kills him.

While he hesitates, a Shadow child darts forward and sinks his teeth into Eastwind’s arm and the latter’s eyes go blank. Is this because the Shadow children (we learn, latterly) are addicted to chewing a leaf which, rather like coca, appears to have powerful druggy effects? Or is it because, as he bit him, the Shadow child told Eastwind that he made him Sandwalker and Sandwalker Eastwind? Does Eastwind believe he has changed places with his brother because the Shadow child said it? Or can the child work magic?

Impatient of all this, Sandwalker abruptly drowns his passive, glazen-eyed twin. But then doesn’t know whether he is Eastwind or Sandwalker any more… Neither does the Shadow child. Neither does the reader.

The exchange of identities between the brothers is extremely confusing even to them, if it indeed happens – but it is definitely a big and deliberate theme.

In the last paragraph, as his dead brother floats in the surf, the Shadow child points out a disturbance further along the ocean shore. A green object is bobbing in the sea. Three men stand nearby swathed in leaves (does this mean, wearing clothes?) and speaking a tongue none of them understand (does this mean they are astronauts? they got her pretty quickly).

As Sandwalker walks towards them, they stretch out their hands, palms out, empty, to gesture that they have no weapons. But nobody on this planet has ever known weapons. So are we to take it these are the first arrivals from space, the first colonists? And is that the meaning of the last sentence?

That night Sandwalker dreamed that he was dead, but the long dreaming days were over. (p.122)

So were Eastwind and Sandwalker the aboriginal shapeshifters who were referred to throughout the first novella? In which case, what relation do they have to the Shadow children, who seem to come from different stock but can hardly be called human, since they are small, transparent, and barely exist as individuals? Did the Shadow children really come from earth aeons and aeons earlier? From Africa or Atlantis? Or long long before that?

How?

V.R.T.

The third of the tales is clearly linked to the first two, and is full of subtle allusions, picking up many of the threads of the first one, clearing up some questions, but creating more ones.

It is told from the point of view of a brutal security officer connected to a Sainte Croix jail who, one bored day, is presented with a big box containing all the materials relating to the interrogation of a prisoner for treason. Bored and only half paying attention, he leafs through diaries, notes, letters, transcripts of interrogations including tape recordings – at random, skipping bits, throwing sheafs of paper away, dipping in and out of various narratives.

So it’s in this manner that the reader is presented with a very jumbled assortment of texts, snippets and cuttings, none of which ‘finish’, but through which we slowly gather that the prisoner under arrest and interrogation is none other than John Marsch, the anthropologist we met in the first section and who – supposedly – ‘wrote’ the second story (though I, for one, took the story as a true account of events rather than an experiment in anthropological fiction). (Unless I’m completely missing the point somewhere.)

We learn that Marsch has been kept in prison, in solitary confinement for over a year, and the brutal security officer (we see him casually slapping and beating his ‘slave’ – then we see him brutally ‘using’ the tired woman courtesan or prostitute who services him) is now reviewing his case.

One of the texts describes in some detail an expedition Marsh undertakes, with the son of a local man, into the outback. The father jokes that the boy is part-aborigine (but then, everyone in all the stories is haunted by this idea that the aborigines never died out, but are such adept shapeshifters that they simply assumed the shape of the colonists, the most extreme theory being Veil’s Hypothesis that, in fact, there are no remaining abos for the simple reason that they murdered and replaced the colonists and then forgot the fact. The colonists who worry about and go searching for the abos are in fact… themselves the abos!)

In fact the text strongly hints that the boy is the abo he literally believes himself to be, since he a) believes he is (which may be half the trick) b) is useless with tools or anything practical, which the father says is a sign of the abos – which can appear like a man but can’t use tools, being animals.

In eerie scenes, the boy guides Marsch through the territory which we realise we’ve seen so vividly described in the previous story – namely from the brackish marshes of the big river delta (the river the colonists call the Tempus), steadily upstream to where the river is narrower and very fast, even resting at a place the boy considers holy which was almost certainly a resting place for Sandwalker, and they are, supposedly, in search of the priest’s cave under the waterfall which featured in that story.

So is the overlap because they are eerily, spookily retracing the steps of Sandwalker? Or is Sandwalker a fictonal invention, and the previous story genuinely is a conscious fiction, written by Marsch, as a kind of fictional way of theorising about the abos?

There is similar linkage with the first story, because in some of the documents, specifically a long account of his arrest, Marsch says it took place late on a night when he had attended the Cave Canem – and we know this is a nickname for the brothel run by Number 5’s father – in fact Marsch specifically mentions that the father had been asking his advice on what to do with his ‘son’. In fact, he might have been arrested on the same night that Number 5 murdered his father!

Intercut with the account of the night of his arrest (which is a parody of the arrest of Joseph K in Kafka’s novel, The Trial, right down to the scuffiness and unnerving humour of the arresting ‘officers’) is an account of Marsch being taken out by boat by an old fisherman from Frenchman’s Landing who claims to be an ancestor of one of the abos, and proceeds to confirm many of the details from the previous section.

The old fisherman is a famous drunk in the small fishing community, and scrapes a living telling tall tales about the abos and their traditions (by the way, I use the word ‘abos’ because that is the word used throughout the book; in fact in this section in particular, the anthropologist prefers to refer to them as the ‘Assenes’). So is he a useless drunk and liar? Hardly seems like it since he knows a lot about the supposed customs and appearance of the Assenes.

For example, at various points, he mentions that when they’re not shape-shifting, in rare glimpses, they look like wood, like fenceposts.

Anyway, in the fishing boat the old man and the boy take Marsch out to the very location where the first ‘starcrosser’ spaceship landed, and tell the story that this is where the first French astronauts came across the body of an abo which had been whipped to death, and then had their first encounter with Eastwind, who the fisherman claims as an ancestor.

So did those events really happen? Or is the text we read really only a fiction, a short story made up by Marsch on the basis of the old fisherman’s yarns?

Many other details of the other two stories are confirmed. For example, one of the records of Marsch’s interrogations confirms that he saw several plays put on over the summer by a company of young or child actors – which presumably refers to the company set up by Number 5 and Phaedria.

In the interrogations, we get a feel for the polite, insistent and sceptical character of the interrogator. And in the last twenty or so pages two narratives converge – the account of Marsch’s interrogation intercutting with Marsch’s diary account of the expedition into the outback he undertook with the uncanny boy – and a third element – Marsch’s diary from prison which, we learn, is pretty hellish, consisting of a concrete space wide enough to spread his arms and legs but only a little over a metre high.

To cut a confusing story short, what seems to happen is that the trip in-country with the boy becomes more and more uncanny. They find themselves trailed by animals, an enormous flesh-eating ‘ghoul’ which Marsh shoots, but also a friendly cat. The reader gets the strong impression these are uncanny, that they’re shapeshifters, or something.

Then in the climactic scenes, as they penetrate deep into the dreamtime, spooked outback, the boy seems to have an accident but… was it the boy…? Marsch’s diary records him learning lessons about anthropology quicker and quicker, copying Marsch’s handwriting… was it the boy who had an accident or…

Was it Marsch? Did the boy take over Marsch? Is it like the obscure exchange of personas between Sandwalker and Eastwind?

Flesh is put on the story by the account of the interrogator, who points out to Marsch that after years (apparently) wandering the outback, he suddenly appeared in a completely different coastal settlement, without the boy, wearing new clothes. He took up his anthropological position at a colonial university but the authorities weren’t interested in him and so he caught a shuttle to the sister planet, Sainte Croix.

The interrogator explains the difference between the planets, namely that Sainte Croix has slavery, while Sainte Anne doesn’t, and gives a twisted defence of slavery (how does a man know that he’s free, unless he’s got slaves?)

The actual charge of conspiracy is based on some figures found in the back leaves of some of the books he brought from Sainte Anne – along with the accusation – we learn on almost the last page – that he was somehow involved in the murder of Number 5’s father.

Anyway, in the last ten or so pages, two things happen:

1. It seems from the way Marsch’s diary is written that he IS the boy abo, that the boy abo did completely take over his body and mind – because Marsch’s later diary entries merge seamlessly with memories of the boy and his mother, and of the boy growing up in the household with a shapeshifter mother and terrestrial father.

2. Right at the very end of the book, we get to read the official letter from officer’s superior, who lists the charges against Marsch, and says he believes he is a spy sent by the military junta on the ‘sisterworld’ i.e. Sainte Anne. The unnamed officer through whose eyes and mind we have read all these disparate letters, diaries, journals, interrogation notes and so on, writes a brisk professional reply saying that, having weighed the evidence, he recommends that Marsch continue to be held in solitary and interrogated until the authorities ‘secure complete cooperation’ (whatever that means).

And he packs all the documents back into their crate, along with his recommendation, and gets his slave to promise to take it post-haste to ‘the commandant’ along with the message that he, the officer, stayed up all night to review the case.

In one of the many weird details about this section, we get to see the slave’s glee at being able to perform a genuinely useful service for his master, and the officer’s pleasure in giving him that glee.

Right up to the very end this book is full of unnerving and genuinely other perceptions, states and ideas.

It demands to be read at least twice, so you can notice all the intricate threads and themes and links which have been sewn through it. But even then, nothing would change the heartbreaking final pages when the prisoner – whether he is Marsh himself or the abo boy, whatever his identity – is heartlessly condemned to an indefinite further period of imprisonment in his hellish box.

After the slave has left with the crate, the officer finds a leftover spool of interview tape which had rolled behind the lamp on his table, and thoughtlessly chucks it out the window, into the neglected flowerbed outside. Because the account of his arrest is so redolent of Kafka’s Trial, I couldn’t throw off the feeling that the entire third story is suffused by the spirit of Kafka’s other, appallingly horrifying and heartless story, In the Penal Colony.

It is difficult not to be profoundly depressed by the final, complete indifference of the universe to the incredible story of John Marsch and the shapeshifting alien.

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Related links

• The Fifth Head of Cerberus on Amazon

Other science fiction reviews

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

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

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

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

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘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 narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced 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 vengeance
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

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 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
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – 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
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 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 undergo a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

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 read
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
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 which revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ original shapeshifting 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 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
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

1980s
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
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 – burnt-out cyberspace cowboy Case is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero, while the daughter of a Japanese ganster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative history Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed