Coming of age on a hollowed-out asteroid

In 1969, competition for the Nebula Award for Best Novel was fierce. Nominees included Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Joanna Russ’ Picnic on Paradise, and John Brunner’s formidable Stand on Zanzibar - which won the equivalent Hugo Award that year. But the winning novel was by a much less familiar writer. Rite of Passage is the first novel by Alexei Panshin (1940 - 2022), better known as a prominent scholar and critic of SF. 

Set in 2198, this is a coming of age story in a science fiction setting, specifically an unusual treatment of the generation ship theme. The protagonist is Mia Havero, a young girl who must undergo a gruelling challenge on an underdeveloped colony world to prove herself an adult and a citizen. The novel explores the changing perceptions that come with growing up, the nature of life on a starship which is home to 30,000 people, and the topics of colonisation, exploitation, and justice.

Much admired at the time for Panshin’s believable portrayal of a changing teenage girl, Rite of Passage has strong contemporary relevance in its examination of what the wealthy few owe the struggling many.

A tall tale of impossible products, mutants, and parallel Earths

Rapacious capitalism exploits our world, plundering its limited resources. The resulting wealth is then distributed in incredibly unequal ways, with disastrous consequences for human beings. This system is so obviously broken that its proponents can do little more than to continually rebrand it. One example is the so-called “abundance agenda”, which rules out radical change in favour of technocratic tinkering. Its pursuit of “supply-side progressivism” ignores our planet’s ecological limits, and deploys fanciful ideas right out of science fiction, like drug factories in low-earth orbit. 

But what if true abundance was available to us? What if instead of one Earth, with its troublesome limited resources, there were instead thousands or millions of untouched Earths just within reach? The US SF writer Clifford D. Simak imagined just this scenario in his novel Ring Around the Sun (1953). In this playful, fast-paced tall tale, the emergence of seemingly impossible new products is a clue to the discovery of many parallel universes, each with their own untouched, pristine Earth. 

As we know, capitalism is based not on abundance, but on scarcity. In Simak’s novel, the protagonist comes up against the powerful corporate interests threatened by discovery of the new Earths. Desperate to preserve their ability to profit, and to keep the masses under control, they will go to any lengths - even if it means provoking World War III.

Entropic tales from the end of time 

In the far future, Cinnabar is the only city that remains on a ruined Earth. At its core is the sentient supercomputer Terminex, powered by the vast energies of a captured black hole. The city's people are few, but long-lived - with the time and resources at their disposal they can plumb the depths of hedonism, or pierce the veil of time itself. The world may be an entropic wasteland, but change can still occur - and with Terminex losing its mind, even ageless Cinnabar can die.

Born in New York state, Edward Bryant (1945 - 2017) was a writer with associations with both the UK and US branches of New Wave SF. A short fiction specialist, his only novel was a collaboration with Harlan Ellison. Originally published in 1976, Cinnabar is a collection of short stories set in a troubled city at the end of time. 

Mostly previously published in several anthologies and issues of Vertex magazine, the stories reflect the transgressive experimentalism of the New Wave. Dealing with sex, ennui, celebrity, and time travel, the Cinnabar stories also have intriguing connections with British SF, including the works of Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Iain M. Banks.

War’s long shadow falls on a Culture orbital

800 years ago, two stars and all the lives they supported were abruptly destroyed during the course of a single battle. Eight centuries later, the light of these ancient mistakes is about to reach Masaq' orbital, a Culture ringworld that supports billions of lives of its own. Several particular individuals are gathered there, each with their own connection to the old war. Past battles cast long shadows, and Masaq' may be about to undergo a tragic disaster of its own.

Look to Windward is the sixth Culture novel by Iain M. Banks, the last one before a long eight-year hiatus. In part a very loose sequel to Consider Phlebas (1987), the novel explores some consequences of the Idiran War. More generally, Banks examines the lingering effects of war on individuals and societies, as well as the topics of hedonism, loss, duty, and sacrifice. This is also the closest look yet at a Culture orbital, and the immensely capable AI Mind entrusted with its care.

A shocking collision of warped sexuality and twisted metal

“The author is beyond psychiatric help.” This was the famous verdict of a publisher’s reader on first contact with Crash. Written in clinical terms, J. G. Ballard’s sixth novel is a troubling diagnosis of modern civilisation, set in the overlit concrete dystopia of the real-life cityscape. It is a headlong plunge into alienated depravity, a world almost without human emotion but powered instead by bizarre sexual practices and a grim fascination with the destructive spectacle of the car crash.

Set in the contemporary West London of the early 1970s, and focused on severely damaged individuals linked by their sexualised fixation on road accidents, Crash challenges readers to process its unsettling implications. It stretches and complicates the category of science fiction, as it examines with cold precision the disturbing relationship between humanity and machines. For his part, Ballard described the novel as an “extreme metaphor”, and also “an example of a kind of terminal irony, where not even the writer knows where he stands.”

A moving story of science, intelligence, and compassion

In 2000, the US author Daniel Keyes was given the Author Emeritus award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Unusually, this honour was given largely on the strength of just one piece of work - his landmark novel Flowers for Algernon (1966). Rooted in Keyes’ experiences as a teacher, it crossed over into the mainstream, becoming a fixture of school curricula and being adapted for film.

Set in New York City, the novel focuses on Charlie Gordon, a young man with a mental disability who works in a bakery. He is recruited by a group of scientists as a test subject for an experimental treatment which hugely, and rapidly, increases his intelligence. Charlie’s worldview and relationship with others is radically altered as he becomes a knowledgeable genius. But when the previous test subject - a mouse named Algernon - quickly declines, Charlie must reckon with the possibility that his transformation is temporary.

Famously moving, Flowers for Algernon is a genuinely profound classic of 1960s science fiction which explores intriguingly the concepts of intelligence, compassion, and what it means to be a good person.

A plea for human connection in a computerised world

In John Brunner's novel The Jagged Orbit it is 2014 and the United States is in decline. The federal government oversees a patchwork of segregated city-states. White people and people of colour live in mutual suspicion, stoked in part by a powerful weapons manufacturer which floods cities with high-end firepower. Computer “desketaries” and omnipresent mass media put information in easy reach, but people live behind armoured doors, frightened to go outside.

The second of Brunner's four tract novels speculating about the issues awaiting in the 21st century, The Jagged Orbit is a caution against over-reliance on technology, a warning about the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy, and a plea for genuine human connection. Still relevant today, it vindicates Brunner's boldly predictive approach and underlines the importance of this under-recognised writer.

A moving meditation on revolution, knowledge, and human longevity 

On Mars, experienced archaeologist Hjalmar Nederland is excavating the ruins of a domed city destroyed hundreds of years earlier. Nederland knows that he is digging up his own birthplace - he is 310 years old. It is only the written record that tells him about his origins in New Houston, however. While biotechnology allows humans to live over 600 years, their memories can cover only a fraction of that time. Knowledge, then, is a site of struggle - because he who controls the past, controls the future.

Originally published in 1984, Icehenge is an early book by the American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Rather than a true novel, it is a set of three linked novellas - two of which had been published previously. While these stories are a clear precursor to Robinson's better known Mars trilogy (1993 - 1996), they have a unique power of their own. With settings that range across our solar system, Icehenge is a thought provoking exploration of the struggle for revolution, the uses and abuses of knowledge, and the personal and social effects of extreme human longevity.

The classic which helped to define hard science fiction

In the November 1957 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, the critic P. Schuyler Miller used the term “hard science fiction” in print for the first time. He had coined a term to describe SF that aspires to scientific rigour and plausibility, a term still in common use in SF circles today. But scientifically rigorous SF was not new, and one of the definitive novels in this style had been published years earlier: Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1954). 

Set on one of the most famously strange worlds in science fiction, this 1950s classic is about cooperation between humans and aliens in a uniquely hostile environment.

In which life, the universe, and everything are just a game

Cheyne Scarne is a complicated man. He is a professional gambler, who plies his trade in the many casinos and saloons of the solar system and beyond. He is also a professor of randomatics, a new science of chance and probability. Unfortunately, he has another vocation: he is an unwilling spy for the state.

The Grand Wheel is the eighth novel by the underrated British SF writer Barrington J. Bayley. It is another of the author's space operas with a difference - this time, the themes are gambling and probability. Cheyne Scarne is caught between multiple factions in a civilisation on the brink of disaster - all of them increasingly aware of a dizzying realm of mathematics that undergirds reality.