Machines run amok in a comic disaster ahead of its time

In the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann did theoretical work on the idea of an artificial entity which - in imitation of nature - would be able to manufacture copies of itself: a self-replicating machine. In the 1980s, the engineer K. Eric Drexler speculated about the application of this concept to tiny nanomachines. He imagined nano-scale robots entering into an endless loop of self-replication, consuming all of the Earth’s biomass in a reproductive frenzy. To Drexler’s consternation, this doomsday notion was popularised as the “grey goo scenario”, in which the planet would be reduced to a lifeless nanite sludge.

The American writer John Sladek (1937 - 2000) took up von Neumann’s ideas and pre-empted Drexler with his comic science fiction novel The Reproductive System (1968). In Sladek’s anarchic full-length debut in the SF field, it is macro-scale robots - what Drexler would later call “clanking replicators” - that run amok. The product of what used to be a failing Utah toy company, these insatiable machines soon set their sights on the metallic feast of Las Vegas, and beyond. 

A showcase for Sladek’s playful, manic style of SF satire, The Reproductive System is a breakneck comic inferno which skewers the military-industrial complex, consumerism, and scientific hubris. While Sladek is now little known, his absurd novel is seriously relevant in a time of careless pursuit of dangerous technologies in the name of profit.

Is the man from the future a fake, a messiah, or a threat?

The 20th century is coming to an end, and a new millennium is about to begin. A millenarian cult, the “apocalyptists”, believe that the world is about to end and indulge in dionysan orgies of careless pleasure and general mayhem. Others, including the world’s governments, are searching for signs of future stability and order. Into this perilous moment arrives the enigmatic Vornan-19. He claims to be from the future, the year 2999, and quickly becomes the centre of a whirlwind of speculation, suspicion, and awe. Has Vornan really travelled back a thousand years, and if so are his intentions benign, or dangerous? Does humanity have a future at all?

The Masks of Time (1968) is a novel of Robert Silverberg’s prolific and acclaimed peak period, generally said to have lasted from 1967 to 1975. With this story, Silverberg uses the mysterious figure of Vornan as a lens to examine a troubled near-future society. The novel is also an exploration of our fixation on both scenarios of the future, and visions of the end of the world. It also dwells on the potentially frightening power of the charismatic individual, who becomes a focus of a society’s diverse hopes and fears.

An extraordinary and “exceptionally nightmarish” dystopian vision

The “Hitler wins” scenario is a popular fixture of alternate histories. As the SFE puts it, it has long been an “enjoyable creative exercise” to imagine the dark consequences of an Axis victory in World War II. Swastika Night is something quite different. This deeply bleak novel is set 700 years after Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have defeated the Allied powers, and sought to annihilate all traces of the past. This extraordinary novel was written long before the war, in 1935 - and then published in 1937. 

Although credited to the pseudonym Murray Constantine, Swastika Night was actually written by Katharine Burdekin (1896 - 1963), a British writer of fiction for children and adults. She was only unmasked as the true author in 1985, over two decades after her death. This chilling novel is not an alternate history, but rather a terrifying vision of a fascist future history, written when Hitler had only been in power for a short time.

Looked back on today, Swastika Night can be seen as a precursor to to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and to the feminist dystopias from later writers like Margaret Atwood, Suzy McKee Charnas, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Joanna Russ. The novel also remains troublingly relevant in an era of resurgent fascism, and still serves as a powerful indictment of that ideology as a vile dead end for culture, freedom, and the human spirit.

One man struggles to protect the Spanish Empire in a fragile timeline

Before he made history as the first British winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel with the massive, challenging Stand on Zanzibar (1968), John Brunner (1934 - 1995) was a prolific writer of shorter tales. Some of his strongest work can be found in his contributions to British SF magazines, some of which were repackaged for book publication in the United States. So it is with the wonderful Society of Time trilogy, three short novellas set in a world in which the Spanish Armada was victorious over the English fleet in 1588.

First collected under the title Times Without Number, these stories are not just examples of alternate history. They are also time travel tales with a unique flavour, in which time machines are the closely guarded secret of the Catholic Church and a Society of Time uses them to explore and document historical events first-hand. The trilogy follows Don Miguel Navarro, a young and earnest Licentiate of the Society who gains chilling insight into the mechanics of travel in time, and is charged with protecting the very existence of his timeline and everything in it.

Deft, thrilling, and economical, the Society of Time stories are an important and under-recognised part of John Brunner’s career. Returned to print in 2020, the trilogy is a thoroughly recommended read, a set of exciting SF adventures which in their imaginings about what time travel would mean become surprisingly moving.

Abandoning the Earth for the vast spaces of a macrostructure

Like many other science fiction writers of his generation, Bob Shaw (1931 - 1996) tended to focus on one-off novels, and seldom published series. However, there are notable exceptions in his work. The first of these is the Orbitsville trilogy, published intermittently over the long period from 1975 to 1990. These are some of the most notable examples of the concept of the macrostructure in SF. Set in the far future, the novels detail the discovery of a Dyson sphere in a distant star system with a surface area equivalent to many millions of Earths.

The sudden availability to humankind of almost incalculable, functionally infinite, amounts of living space is the dominant novum of the Orbitsville trilogy. In their own way, each book explores the implications of this idea, which profoundly affects the lives of three different protagonists. Along the way, Shaw explores faster-than-light travel, Earth’s abandonment, religious fervour, and the mystery of unknowable intelligences in the galaxy, whose inscrutable actions long ago may dictate the human future.

"Only he, among all who walk the Earth, has a story worth writing down."

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville - a collaboration that at first seems strange, then makes perfect sense, and then seems strange all over again. The star of John Wick and the writer of Perdido Street Station worked together to produce The Book of Elsewhere (2024), which Miéville described as “a story of ancient powers, modern war, and one person’s quest to find mortality and purpose.”

This collaboration was a rather unequal one. The novel is a spinoff from Reeves’ comics series BRZRKR (2021 - 2023), and he is credited with its concept; but the novel was written by Miéville. Both the comics and this novel focus on Unute or “B”, an immortal warrior with 80,000 years of bloodshed behind him, now working with a shadowy US government agency. Compared to the comics, The Book of Elsewhere has a much more enigmatic, philosophical approach in keeping with Miéville’s style. 

This is a genre-bending novel of the New Weird, fusing contemporary black ops culture with secret histories of the deep past, parascience, and philosophical speculation.

A frenzied tale of revenge in a baroque 25th century

Alfred Bester (1913 - 1987) was arguably one of the most important science fiction writers of the 1950s. Strikingly, he reached this status on the strength of only two novels and just over a dozen short stories published during the decade. As the Science Fiction Encyclopedia puts it, “Bester was never prolific in SF, which was more of a hobby than a career for him" [...] but his talents "were evident from the beginning".

His debut SF novel The Demolished Man (1953) is a tale of corporate power, murder, and psychic abilities which was immortalised by becoming the first ever winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Bester followed this with The Stars My Destination (1956), an even more spectacular saga. Again, the central novum is the existence of psionic powers, something of a trend in the 1950s. This time, Bester focuses on teleportation - an almost universal ability which transforms human society.

With its breakneck pace, improbable plotting, and larger-than-life characters, The Stars My Destination is best thought of as an SF ripping yarn. While Bester explores no themes in any depth, there is much to admire in his ability to craft a stirring adventure - and it is understandable that so many later authors have credited this novel as an influence.

A grim prediction of computer-generated slop movies

When Alien: Romulus was released in 2024, it was widely viewed as a remix of various elements from previous films in the series. The most contentious element was the inclusion of a crude and uncanny digital recreation of the actor Ian Holm, who appeared in the original Alien in 1979 and died in 2020. Wendy Ide, writing in the Guardian, described this inclusion as "ghoulish, exploitative, disrespectful, and unnecessary". The film was otherwise well-received, and made $350 million. Director Fede Álvarez said he was in no rush to make a sequel, but studio bosses felt differently. A follow-up soon began production, and the franchise juggernaut rolled on.

American SF writer Connie Willis wrote about Hollywood cynicism, digital necromancy, and the queasy future of movie-making in her short novel Remake (1995). It is set in a 21st century scenario in which film production is entirely digitised, the dead are routinely brought back to life on screen, and new films are reconstituted and remixed from scavenged fragments of old ones. 30 years on, Willis' work rhymes uncomfortably with the plastic fakeness which has infiltrated not just Hollywood, but our whole media and information environment.

All too human scientists use tachyons to speak to the past

A landmark in the science fiction of the early 1980s, Gregory Benford’s book Timescape (1980) became his “popular and critical breakthrough”, winning multiple major awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novel. It was widely celebrated for its fusion of thought-provoking science with believable and flawed characters, told across two distinct time periods. While Benford (1942 - ) is an astrophysicist, the novel instead draws largely on quantum physics, and especially the implications should tachyons - a theorised faster-than-light particle - be found to actually exist.

Timescape is a lengthy, dense, and hugely ambitious novel which may test a reader’s patience on its way to a powerful climax. While it has at its heart the fanciful notion of tachyonic communication, the book is a fascinating look at fears of runaway environmental degradation, the scientific method, and what significance individual human lives have in the unknowable flow of time and cosmic forces. Intensely human even as it deals with mind-bending possibilities in quantum physics, Timescape is a unique example of ‘80s SF.

On distinguishing the genre from the images it spawned

In the century since the term was coined, science fiction has generated a torrent of images. The robot, the alien, the mutant, the starship, the time machine: these are components of an aesthetic immediately recognisable even to those who have never read a science fiction story. Partly because those people are many, and partly because we live in an intensely and increasingly image-oriented culture, this SF aesthetic has arguably outgrown the genre which generated it.

This matters because the primacy of the science fiction aesthetic can lead to it being mistaken for, or used as a substitute for, the actual genre of science fiction. One result of this is that some people believe they dislike SF, without having read much - or any. Potential readers and lovers of the genre are missing out, because they are exposed only to the science fiction aesthetic, and not the thing itself. We can think of all this as another angle on the notoriously difficult question as to how to define science fiction. One thing that SF isn’t is its tangle of indelible images.