A challenging novel of mysticism, power, and alien contact

Starships and faster-than-light travel are load-bearing elements of science fiction, convenient narrative devices to put characters in close contact with the alien other. Ian Watson’s fourth novel Alien Embassy, originally published in 1977, explores an altogether different means of communing with the galaxy. Set in a post-disaster future in which western technology has been largely abandoned, this is a story rooted instead in eastern mysticism. Free of its “mad urge to conquer space with machines”, humankind can instead use the power of the mind to bridge the gap between the stars.

Continuing Watson’s run of challenging, idea-packed novels, Alien Embassy also develops his fascination with communication, our limited grasp of reality, and the fraught quest for transcendence. Like The Embedding (1973) and The Jonah Kit (1975) before it, this is bracing and ambitious SF, arguably best suited to readers with a strong grounding in the genre. Short on physical action but long on sweeping conceptual breakthroughs and deep philosophical speculation, Alien Embassy is a powerful example of Watson’s under-recognised contribution to British SF in the 1970s.

An influential classic of power and revenge on Venus

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore were one of the preeminent power couples in science fiction. Coming to prominence as writers individually in the 1930s, they met through the circle of figures around H. P. Lovecraft and married in 1940. They formed a highly prolific and unusually close collaboration, working together so intricately that their contributions were often inseparable. Their stories became a fixture of Astounding magazine during World War II, under the editorship of John W. Campbell Jr. Much of their work was credited to the pseudonyms Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell.

Fury is one of the duo’s most famous collaborations, although also one of their most unequal - Moore estimated that she wrote only around one eighth of the text. The novel was serialised in the May, June, and July 1947 issues of Astounding and credited to O’Donnell. It built on an earlier story, “Clash by Night” (1943). When it was first published in book form in 1950, it was credited to Kuttner alone and most subsequent editions have preserved this misleading impression.

An enduring classic of the so-called golden age of science fiction, Fury is interesting for its entertainingly old-fashioned depiction of Venus, its ruthless antihero, and its influence on later works.

An entertainingly wild aquatic adventure on two worlds

Originally published in 1977, Medusa’s Children is a mid-period novel by Northern Irish SF writer Bob Shaw. Out of print since 1988, it is an aquatic adventure which exploits one of Shaw’s most outlandish concepts to bring together two narrative threads set in radically diverse environments. 

By 1977, Shaw was a well-established writer in fan and professional circles. He had recently published Orbitsville (1975), which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel, and then A Wreath of Stars (1976), which the writers of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia have described as “perhaps his finest” individual novel. 

While not quite at the level of Shaw’s formidable best, Medusa’s Children is beguilingly strange and inventive, weaving together biological speculation, matter transmission, and even ancient aliens.

On the run in the networked society

Nickie Haflinger is a product of the system. Extensively trained in a covert U.S. government facility, he has been moulded to operate in a highly computerised future “tightly webbed in a net of inter-locking data-channels”. Having witnessed other government experiments which disturb him, Haflinger goes rogue. Picking up and discarding identities in quick succession, he sets out on a chase from Ohio to California, with his former overseers on his trail.

Published in 1975, The Shockwave Rider is the fourth and final in John Brunner’s famous sequence of “tract novels” which reflect the author’s thinking about the challenges to come in the 21st century. While Brunner’s previous efforts had confronted overpopulation, environmental degradation, and urban violence, The Shockwave Rider explores computerisation and the prospect of a networked world. 

By turns prophetic and arguably naive, Brunner’s novel is an intriguing look at a digital future, written when ARPANET was the most sophisticated extant computer network. Brunner correctly foresaw the privacy and security threats implicit in a networked society, as well as our desire to assume different personas online. However, his hope that people could choose to disentangle themselves from overbearing systems clashes with the rigid, heavily surveilled landscape of today’s Internet.

Can hope exist in a scientific city of total suspicion?

Long before George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), another novel depicted repressive totalitarian states locked in struggle, saturated in total surveillance and immersed in a corrosive atmosphere of mutual suspicion. The strong similarities must be coincidental, however, because the earlier book was published in Swedish and not translated into English until 1966. 

Kallocain (1940) was written by the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye (1900 - 1941). Her only work of science fiction, it is a gloomy dystopia influenced by her visits to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Hailed by one contemporary critic as “a significant and lasting work of art”, it would be Boye’s last, as she died a year after its publication in the spring of 1941.

Like Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night (1937) before it, Kallocain is a landmark in the history of dystopian fiction by women. It follows Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) in the great chain of 20th century dystopian novels. Profoundly shaped by its specific political and historical context, it is a statement by a troubled writer on the necessity of life and hope in the face of pervasive terror.

The faithful preserve the past, and the future, after a nuclear war

On 15 February 1944, the United States military bombed the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, southeast of Rome. Mistakenly believing that the abbey was being occupied by German troops, the Americans dropped over a thousand tons of explosives on the structure, which had been built in 529 AD. The abbey was obliterated. The Cardinal Secretary of State described the act as “a colossal blunder … a piece of gross stupidity”.

One life permanently changed by the bombing was that of Walter M. Miller Jr. (1923 - 1996). He was a tail gunner whose aircraft was one of those which destroyed the abbey at Monte Cassino, and he was profoundly affected by it. Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War (1975), wrote that Miller “had post-traumatic stress disorder for 30 years before it had a name”. 

After the war, Miller studied engineering and converted to Catholicism in 1947. Between 1951 and 1957, he published over three dozen science fiction stories, which were often influenced by his faith. Of these, three were gathered and adapted into the only novel published in his lifetime: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). 

Long one of the most celebrated SF novels of the 1950s, the book deals with the efforts of monks in what was once New Mexico to preserve knowledge in the millennia after a devastating nuclear war. Told in three parts each separated by six centuries, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a powerful meditation on knowledge, faith, progress, and the hope and risks that come with science and technology.

Should the Culture intervene in the struggle for a shellworld?

Sursamen is no ordinary planet. Entirely artificial, it is a vast construct of concentric spheres, each layer a world unto itself. Its days and nights are determined by synthetic stars which run on rails along its colossal ceilings. Built for an inscrutable purpose by a long-extinct species, it is home to various intelligent races, from the humanoid Sarl to the monthian megawhales. A new discovery threatens the balance between even more formidable factions from outside - including the Culture.

Matter (2008) is the seventh novel in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. On publication, it had been eight years since the previous Culture novel Look to Windward (2000). This novel opens the final phase of Banks’ beloved series, a trio of lengthy works long on epic spectacle. The biggest Culture novel so far, Matter is a bold tale which fuses flavours from its precursors: the grand conflicts of Consider Phlebas (1987), the subterfuge of Use of Weapons (1990), and the fantasy adjacent trappings of Inversions (1998).

Matter is a grand-scale SF adventure, and a continuation of Banks’ use of the Culture series to explore questions of agency and intervention.

Confronting a time mystery as a new ice age looms

At some point in the 21st century, global temperatures begin to plummet. A new period of rapid glaciation begins, and ice sheets advance ominously from the poles. While societies confront the likely arrival of a new ice age, a small group of investigators at an isolated, frozen base puzzle over a different mystery. Objects and mangled corpses are falling from the sky, seemingly from thousands of years in the past.

Originally published in 1974 and out of print since 1984, Ice and Iron is one of the more obscure novels by the American writer Wilson Tucker (1914 - 2006). Revisiting some themes from his earlier books like The City in the Sea (1951) and The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970), this novel is in part an interesting 1970s example of climate fiction. Specifically, it is inspired by theories of global cooling, a significant minority view at that time but now discredited.

Understandably little-known compared to Tucker's more prominent novels, Ice and Iron is still an intriguing science fictional mystery.

Another comic inferno from another stupid timeline

John Sladek’s first science fiction novel, The Reproductive System (1968), is a comic inferno of self-replicating machines running amok. For his second trick, the UK-based American writer doubled down. The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) is a radical intensification of Sladek’s approach, a manic satire bursting at the seams with more, more, more of everything: crazed characters, strange technologies, witty wordplay, and bizarre happenings - all in more settings, viewed from more warped perspectives.

In Sladek’s madcap near-future plot, several individuals and factions scramble to acquire and use a set of four tapes containing the fractured personality of corporate drone Bob Shairp. These tapes are put to various uses, from animating a robot duplicate of a fanatical evangelical preacher to powering a dangerously dysfunctional U.S. Army logistics system. While Shairp, reduced to pure mind, attempts to pull himself together, Washington D.C. comes under assault from an army of idiotic white supremacists.

Even more so than Sladek’s first novel, The Müller-Fokker Effect captures something of the spirit of today’s deeply stupid timeline, depicting an America collapsing under the weight of ignorance, racism, and rogue technologies.

Corporate warfare becomes deadly as the state crumbles

Science fiction has frequently depicted corporate power in the ascendancy, a theme particularly associated with the cyberpunk that came of age in the 1980s, alongside the ruinous logic of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. SF writers like William Gibson imagined vast corporate concerns displacing the power of the state, imposing their will on the population against a backdrop of rapidly advancing technology. Immense corporate power is one aspect of cyberpunk which resonates troublingly with today’s reality.

Originally published in 1977, Robert Asprin’s debut novel The Cold Cash War was written before the emergence of cyberpunk but shares its emphasis on corporate dominance. Set in a future 1990s, the novel imagines a world bent to the will of a few sprawling monopolies with sweeping control over whole segments of the economy. These private combines begin to wage covert simulated wars to more efficiently adjudicate conflicts over resources and markets. When one battle spills out onto American streets and into the public eye, it triggers a deadly conflict between corporate power and government authority.

The Cold Cash War is a product of a particular moment, after the humiliating U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War and before the rise of the corporate culture of the 1980s. While dated and flawed in a number of ways, Asprin’s novel is an interesting precursor both to cyberpunk and today’s landscape of new corporate monopolies.