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.

The definitive travel guide to a place that never existed

A unique hub of trade, cultural exchange, and historical ferment and yet little known to the outside world, Hav was an ideal subject for Jan Morris (1926 - 2020). A veteran travel writer, by the mid-1980s she had visited and reflected on places as diverse as Venice, Oxford, New York, Oman, South Africa, and Spain. Then, she made a surprising sideways move, because Hav is an entirely fictional place.

Published in 1985, Last Letters From Hav is an extraordinary fusion of travel writing and yes, science fiction. Drawing on her rich experience, Morris created in this unique novel a special type of imagined location. Hav is simultaneously both impossible and plausible, a wild flight of fancy and uncannily real. Morris’ eye for detail, and stature as an established travel writer, led some readers to believe that Hav was an actual place. 

Writing in 2006, Ursula K. Le Guin made a persuasive claim that Last Letters From Hav should be regarded as science fiction, “of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality.” 20 years on, the novel is still outstanding, the allure of its fictional city as powerful as ever, even when our experience of the world is so different.

The influential classic of enhanced intelligence with a breakneck pace

In the opening to Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave (1954), a rabbit becomes caught in a trap. At first, it is paralysed by panic just as every past rabbit would have been in every past trap, since the first one was laid by humans long ago. This rabbit, however, is different. Its little brain works faster, more efficiently, than had ever been possible before. Soon, the rabbit has thought of a way to escape, and scampers out into the woods. 

Animals everywhere slip their nets, jump their fences, and nose open gates they had never thought to challenge. Elsewhere, a young boy fascinated by numbers and bored at home, picks up pen and paper and is soon well on his way to re-inventing differential calculus. These are not isolated cases, not flukes of random genius. In every creature with a brain, intelligence is suddenly on the up - way up.

One of Anderson’s earliest longer works, Brain Wave was initially to be serialised in the short-lived magazine Space Science Fiction. The publication folded after just eight issues, leaving the story incomplete. The full version, still startlingly brisk, emerged as a book in 1954. While dated in some ways, Brain Wave is a major and memorable novel on the topic of intelligence, and one which inspired better-known later works by Daniel Keyes and Vernor Vinge.

As a companion piece to my top ten SF reads of the year, I have put together a comprehensive roundup of everything published on Classic SF with Andy Johnson in 2025. That comprises 42 essays, each with an accompanying audio version. As well as serving as an eligibility post - of course I would love to be nominated for the Hugo for Best Fan Writer! - this is also a handy point of access to everything I have written during the year.

Again, thank you for your interest in my writing on classic SF in 2025, and I hope to connect with you in 2026. 

It has been a successful year for Classic SF with Andy Johnson. I was able to publish 42 podcast episodes over the year, most of them audio versions of published articles. Without getting too inside baseball about it, podcast downloads doubled in 2025, and website visits more than doubled. Reaching more people who are interested in classic science fiction is a good thing in itself and these numbers are a good foundation to build on. With that being said, really connecting with others is more important and I want to go much further in that during 2026 - more on that, later.

I read at a very similar rate to last year, and got through about the same number of books. As planned, I explored more deeply into the work of writers like Bob Shaw, Robert Silverberg, and Liu Cixin. I continued to broaden my familiarity with classic SF by women, focusing particularly on Margaret St. Clair and also having first encounters with the work of Connie Willis, Joan D. Vinge, and Justina Robson.

While I will conclude with some rough plans for next year, what follows is the main event: my top ten SF reads of 2025 in no particular order, with an intermission consisting of five honourable mentions.