Three human-scale SF tales of flight that read like fantasy

Windhaven is a novel in three parts by American writers George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle. Originally published in 1981, it deals with that most definitive of human fantasies - flight. On the blustery planet Windhaven, a special elite can take to the skies using wings made from the remnants of an ancient starship. Peasant outsider Maris fights for the right to possess wings of her own, and succeeds. What goes up must come down, however, and Maris struggles also with the definitive human nightmare: falling.

A little-known, early novel for both co-authors, Windhaven is nominally science fiction but in practice it reads very much like fantasy. Due to its intense focus on human relationships and political conflict, it particularly anticipates Martin’s hugely successful later work. This fix-up novel thoroughly explores a society which is profoundly shaped by flight, and by the struggle over who is best-placed to wear wings.

An old soldier gets a radically new view of the universe.

Bob Shaw (1931 - 1996) knew how to pack ideas into his short, sleek science fiction entertainments. His third novel, The Palace of Eternity, is a good example. Shaw weaves a fast-moving tale that explores interstellar war, environmental destruction, and even the source of artistic inspiration. The narrative shifts and jukes excitingly, taking an almost outrageous cosmic turn that the SFE says “displeased some critics” but is an “effective handling of a traditional SF displacement of ideas from metaphysics…”

The Palace of Eternity was originally published as part of series 1 of the Ace Science Fiction Specials in 1969. This series was key to Shaw’s career, and he saw three consecutive novels published through it - this one was preceded by The Two Timers (1968) and followed by One Million Tomorrows (1970). It is vintage Shaw - propulsive, thought-provoking, and written to entertain.

A powerfully experimental look at inhumanity, viewed through many lives.

With his 1969 novel Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock used the science fictional device of time travel to explore the origins of Christianity and the nature of religious belief. His protagonist, the spiritually and sexually confused Karl Glogauer, travelled back in time and took on the role attributed by scripture to Jesus - with inevitable consequences.

Bold and brazen, Behold the Man reflected Moorcock's New Wave sensibilities and straddled his work in SF, literary, and experimental fiction. Three years later, he published a strange sort of sequel. Breakfast in the Ruins again focuses on Karl Glogauer - not one, but many versions of him. This eye-opening novel uses Glogauer as a refracting prism through which the cruelties of the 19th and 20th centuries are seen.

Billed as a "novel of inhumanity", Breakfast in the Ruins mixes fantasy, historical, and experimental approaches. Like the work of Moorcock's "inner space" ally J.G. Ballard, Glogauer's shattered lives force us to examine the worst that humankind can do and be. It is a harrowing odyssey into a century of screams, from the destruction of the Paris Commune to a nuked-out vision of the future, stopping to take in the atrocities of Shanghai, Kenya, and Vietnam.

An SF classic of noir paranoia, and an accessible introduction to PKD.

Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982) is that rare thing - a science fiction writer and a household name. His favoured themes are associated so strongly with his work that the term “Dickian” is used to invoke them: paranoia, identity, and simulation. Yet it is often argued that without the film adaptation released four months after his death, Dick could have fallen into obscurity. But this isn’t about that film - it is about the landmark novel that inspired it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).

By 1968, Dick had already published more than 20 novels and numerous short stories. He had explored extensively some of SF’s most favoured concepts, and Do Androids Dream returns to some of these. It is a story about robots, off-world colonies, and dystopia - but it deploys these elements in a distinctive new way. This is a cleverly disconcerting novel without easy answers, which challenges our notions about authenticity, empathy, and nature. It also plays fruitfully with the conventions of noir in a way that anticipates cyberpunk. 

It may be true that Dick would have remained an obscure figure in the general consciousness if Do Androids Dream had not been adapted for the screen. Even then, this one novel would secure him a key place in the SF canon.

A startling debut novel of linguistics, anthropology, geopolitics, and first contact.

In England, a team of scientists conduct unethical experiments on children secluded from the outside world. In Brazil, American engineers threatened by left-wing guerilla fighters attempt to complete a massive new dam. In the rainforest threatened by the dam, an enigmatic tribe awaits the birth of a new messiah. In deep space, an alien intelligence receives and analyses transmissions from Earth. The world stands on the brink of an incredible breakthrough, but will it be transformative - or destructive?

As David Pringle wrote, “it seemed in the mid-1970s that the world was Ian Watson’s oyster”. He began his SF writing career with “Roof Garden Under Saturn”, a story published in New Worlds magazine in 1969. Published by Gollancz in 1973, The Embedding is Watson’s striking and sometimes shocking debut novel. As the SFE put it, the book “very early confirmed his stature as an SF writer of powerful intellect”. 

Very much a novel of the “soft” sciences, The Embedding has a complex plot which braids together narratives dealing with linguistics, anthropology, colonialism and resistance, as well as first contact with alien life. Watson explores language, perception and the pursuit of meaning on various scales - from a closed-off lab, to an Amazon village, to an alien civilisation which journeys the cosmos on the shifting tides of space itself.

The sixth standalone Humanx Commonwealth novel details an underwhelming struggle over alien artefacts on an ocean world.

Originally published by Del Rey in January 1997, The Howling Stones is the sixth standalone novel in the Humanx Commonwealth setting by Alan Dean Foster. It represented a belated return by Foster to this set of books, coming 12 years after Sentenced to Prism (1985). 

This entry is set in the year 558 AA - that is to say, 558 years after the human and insectoid thranx species bound their fates together into the Humanx Commonwealth. This benevolent interstellar association has recently discovered the planet Senisran, an ocean world with thousands of mostly tiny islands. The Commonwealth is working to befriend the many tribes of local sentients, in a bid to gain permission to exploit the planet’s bounty of mineral wealth. Unfortunately, the lizard-like and warlike AAnn have also arrived with the same intentions.

The novel follows two human xenologists working for the Commonwealth to try to broker a trade deal. Pulickel Tomochelor and Fawn Seaforth do their best to understand the local culture, while avoiding conflict with the AAnn. What both sides fail to account for is the mysterious stones which the locals revere, and which prove to have extraordinary properties.

A brief look at the author’s last novel of the 1970s, which focuses on a metaphysical road to “anywhere and anywhen”.

Roger Zelazny’s best-known work from the 1970s is his five-volume Chronicles of Amber fantasy series, but he wrote numerous other books during those years. Zelazny had quit his job in 1969, so the ‘70s were his first decade as a full-time professional writer. His books show, and were arguably sometimes compromised by, his need to write commercially and earn a living. For example, he bowed to editorial pressure to restructure his novel Today We Choose Faces (1973) because as he put it, “I was younger then and more in need of the money at the time.”

Roadmarks was Zelazny’s last novel of his productive 1970s. Dealing with a metaphysical, magical road to “anywhere and anywhen”, it is a kind of contemporary fantasy structured as a road trip. To those few able to access it, the Road stretches infinitely backwards and forward in time, and its access points connect a fertile multiverse. Zelazny’s protagonist meets a version of Adolf Hitler, looking for a world where Nazi Germany won World War II. Elsewhere, the Marquis de Sade obtains a gadget that gives him control over a tyrannosaurus rex. It is a setting with tremendous potential.

A rock-solid SF adventure rooted in the author's abiding interest in vision and optics.

Bob Shaw (1931 - 1996) was one of SF's true entertainers. The Northern Irish writer and fan published three notable series, 15 standalone novels and many short stories over the course of his award-winning career. Shaw channelled his professional background and personal interests into brisk, exciting plots rooted in clever scientific speculations.

His breakthrough was the much-loved story "Light of Other Days" (1966), in which he came up with the concept of "slow glass", which permits viewing of the past. He followed this with his first novel, Night Walk (1967). This fast-paced chase story delivers interstellar thrills, while also exploring Shaw's fascination with vision and optics.

A classic, foreboding example of British New Wave science fiction that uses outer space to explore inner space.

Writing in New Worlds magazine in 1962, J.G. Ballard made the case for science fiction to explore not outer space, but “inner space”. This emphasis on the workings of the human mind, and what Ballard called the “interzone” between external reality and the inner world, was foundational to British “New Wave” SF. This tendency coalesced in and around New Worlds, then edited by Michael Moorcock.

The Black Corridor is an important early novel by Moorcock, with significant uncredited contributions from Hilary Bailey (then married to Moorcock). Published in 1969 as part of the first series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, it is one of Moorcock’s relatively few “straight” SF novels. It is a fine example of the New Wave ethos, a thorough exploration of inner space in an outer space setting. 

A businessman and family man named Ryan has escaped a dying Earth, on a stolen starship with his family in suspended animation. His aim is to land on a habitable planet and restart human society - but three years into the voyage, loneliness and guilt impose an intolerable strain on his fractured psyche.

There are schemes within schemes at two medieval courts in a striking stylistic shift in the fifth Culture novel.

If one were to read Inversions without any context at all, it would come across - at least at first - as a broadly conventional fantasy novel. It is a story of kingdoms and fiefdoms, ruled by feudal monarchies. The level of technology is perhaps late medieval, with sexual politics to match. The plot is driven by intrigue at court, and by wars fought over the remnants of a collapsed empire. It is steeped in many of the outward trappings of fantasy.

There is no magic in this world, however - no strange beasts, no objects of power, no heroic quests. There are intimations of a quite different element lurking at the edges of the scene. The old empire was destroyed by rocks that fell from the sky. In one kingdom there is a loyal doctor - a woman! - whose bearing and methods seem too foreign, too unworldly. And over the mountains, in another court, there is a bodyguard who tells fanciful stories of a place where every man is a king, every woman a queen.

Inversions is not, in fact, a fantasy novel - but a science fiction novel in disguise. It is the fifth entry in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, and his effort to write “a Culture novel that wasn’t.” This is the boldest stylistic shift yet in the series, one which immerses Culture citizens fully into a primitive civilization, to better explore Banks’ most abiding question: is it ever right to intervene in the affairs of another society?