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.

A controversial psychological SF novel of crime and rehabilitation 

Paul Macy is a brand-new man. Walking down the street in a future New York, he knows that he is a kind of fiction - a personality construct designed to put a perfectly good body back into circulation. The future looks bright - until a chance encounter with a telepath allows the previous owner of his body to resurface. Nathaniel Hamlin was supposed to be destroyed, but the brilliant artist and serial rapist still exists and wants his body back.

Originally published as a two-part serial in 1971, The Second Trip is a hard-edged psychological SF novel by prolific author Robert Silverberg. Its intense depictions of misogyny and sexual violence generated intense discussion at the time, and retain their power to shock. A less discussed work of the most notable phase of Silverberg's career, The Second Trip incorporates elements from both the UK and US conceptions of the science fiction New Wave.

A unique and moving feminist post-apocalyptic tale

Generations after a catastrophic nuclear exchange, society has reorganised along simpler, sparser lines. Small communities eke out a basic existence, towns make do with basic industries, and the only known city jealously guards its advanced technology. A clan of wandering healers provide medical aid with their unusual snakes - some a product of human bioengineering, others of alien origin. When one healer loses her alien “dreamsnake” due to the fear and superstition of her patient’s family, she sets out in a desperate bid to replace it.

Written by Vonda N. McIntyre (1948 - 2019) and originally published in 1978, Dreamsnake was a major critical success. It secured the “triple crown” by winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novel. McIntyre’s work was also recognised for its notable feminist reconfiguring of the heroic quest in science fiction. However, the novel still fell out of print - there were no new English-language print editions published between 1994 and 2016. Today, Dreamsnake is a highly recommended work of feminist, post-apocalyptic SF.

The controversial, brutal dystopian novel with a language of its own

A Clockwork Orange is one of the most notorious novels of the 1960s, a detour into social science fiction by “Protean man of letters” Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993). Later adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick, the book is set in a still-shocking vision of the near future. In what may or may not be London, law and order is breaking down and the generation gap has become a yawning gulf. Gangs of brutal teenagers roam the streets, indulging in drugs, theft, and ultraviolent mayhem. All the while, they use a mode of speech all of their own: nadsat.

Burgess described A Clockwork Orange as a jeu d’esprit, something of a playful exercise which was written in just three weeks. It came to dominate his reputation and overshadow his legacy as a comic novelist and a composer. He went as far as to say that he regretted writing it, because he felt it was too likely to be misinterpreted. Despite his misgivings, it is clear that Burgess put a great deal of himself into A Clockwork Orange. It incorporates his fascination with linguistics, his love of classical music, and his dislike of the behaviorism pioneered by the American psychologist B.F. Skinner.

The novel focuses on Alex, leader of a particularly vicious gang. Upon his capture, he is subjected to a cruel and radical process designed to cure his sociopathic nature. This invites the core questions of the book - is it possible, or desirable, to alter a person’s nature? If a person can no longer choose, are they still a real or whole person?

A feminist subversion of SF adventure on a snowbound world

Paradise is a snowbound vacation world which attracts wealthy tourists. When it is drawn into a “commercial war”, a group of visitors are trapped there with no way out. Due to restrictions on technology, a special kind of agent is needed to rescue them from the harsh environment. Alyx is that agent - a thief from ancient Tyre, accidentally pulled into the future by a malfunctioning time machine. 

Picnic on Paradise is the first novel by American SF author Joanna Russ. It represents a feminist subversion of a traditional adventure story, and a precursor to Russ’ best known novel The Female Man (1975).