A science fictional processing of personal pain

In his sombre, powerful novel Greybeard, Brian Aldiss (1925 - 2017) imagines a world in which a nuclear accident in orbit has sterilised the human population. Set in the Thames Valley in southern England, the story unfolds decades after the “accident of 1981”. With no children having been born for many years, a dwindling population of elderly people eke out a basic living in the ruins of civilization. Led by the pragmatic Algy Timberlane - the “greybeard” of the title - a small group of wanderers journeys down the Thames by boat in search of purpose.

Originally published in 1964, Greybeard is Aldiss’ unique take on the British catastrophe novel. It presents a distinctive view of disaster, one characterised not by a sudden cataclysm, but by a slow, mournful descent into likely extinction. With subtlety and restraint, Aldiss depicts a world brought low as much by heartbreak and hopelessness as by the collapse of institutions. Influenced by some difficult experiences the writer went through, Greybeard is a reflection on the absence of children, the effects of disaster on the human and natural worlds, and our need to seek meaning and purpose in our lives.

The personal resonance for Aldiss

By the early 1960s, Aldiss’ career as a science fiction writer was beginning to take off, following the success of his novels Non-Stop (1958) and Hothouse (1962). His personal life, however, was a different story. In 1959, Aldiss’ marriage was beginning to fall apart and his wife took their two children to live on the Isle of Wight. The writer was “bereft” at this turn of events, and began Greybeard largely as a means to process his feelings about it - imagining a world completely without children. 

In this way, this is a science fiction novel built on a personal sadness, which explains its sombre tone. At the time, Aldiss was concerned that the book would be too miserable to be a success, but realised that it could resonate with others who had experienced traumas like his own.

After the accident

Aldiss’ imagined future is shaped by the “accident of 1981”. At that time, numerous atomic weapons were detonated in Earth’s orbit. These disrupted the Van Allen radiation belt, otherwise held in check by Earth’s magnetosphere, and twice bathed the planet in ionising radiation. Mass short-term illness was the immediate result, but it gradually became clear that there was a horrifying long-term effect: global human sterility.

Aldiss describes starkly the effect of this:

Greybeard begins in 2029, nearly five decades after the “accident of 1981”. Algernon Timberlane is in his mid-50s, and among the youngest people on Earth. Together with his wife Martha, he lives in the (fictional) English village of Sparcot. Without a government, proper amenities, or a younger generation to support them, a small community of older people are reduced to a basic existence. Algy, known as “Greybeard”, has long planned to leave the village, and a new impending disaster triggers his exodus, together with Martha and a few other aging travelers.

Greybeard’s aim is to reach the sea, which he has come to view as a source of hope and possible contact with the outside world. Traveling by boat down the Thames, Greybeard’s group encounters various strange communities, each struggling in their own ways with the reality of a world apparently without a future. Aldiss alternates the main narrative with flashbacks to the earlier parts of Algy’s life, including his own unhappy childhood.

Greybeard and the catastrophe novel

Greybeard fits within the tradition of the British catastrophe novel, alongside John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). One of Aldiss’ best-known contributions as a science fiction critic was his coining of the term “cosy catastrophe”, particularly in relation to Wyndham’s work. That label could arguably be applied to Aldiss’ own novel. Algy and Martha do suffer in their travels, but not unbearably so, and in a world of the old there are few people with the energy to threaten the characters with violence.

The novel also has a significant ecological angle. Aldiss had read Rachel Carson’s landmark environmental book Silent Spring (1962) and found it to be “extraordinary, beautiful, and chastening.” Right from its opening, Greybeard frequently remarks on the dramatic ecological changes since humans became sterile. Many species of birds, fish, and small mammals have grown rapidly in number, upending the balance of life. This fierce abundance recalls the prolific growth of plants in both Non-Stop and Hothouse, and connects the novel with works like Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) by Kate Wilhelm.

Some of Aldiss’ most beautiful prose comes when Greybeard reflects on the coinciding decline of humans and the flourishing of the natural world. “The world would go on”, he thinks at one point, “man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.”

The local angle

Greybeard is strongly rooted in real locations that Aldiss knew well. Although the novel opens in the fictional village of Sparcot, the other settings include Eynsham, Oxford city centre with its decaying colleges, the industrial suburb of Cowley, and the area around Little Wittenham in south Oxfordshire. 

Aldiss imagines how the nuclear catastrophe and dwindling population might affect the physical environment of the Thames Valley. In reality Oxford is prone to river and groundwater flooding, and in Greybeard parts of the city are submerged due to the abandonment of flood defences. Similarly, towards the end of the novel the wanderers encounter two islands in the swollen Thames. These are actually Wittenham Clumps, two notable hills turned into islands by the rising waters.

While Greybeard and his group are in Oxford, Aldiss references the city’s “town and gown” conflicts, and satirises the tradition-bound ways of the university, vainly trying to cling to an old and dying world.

Desolation and exhilaration

As the 1960s wore on, Aldiss would become associated with the New Wave science fiction movement, albeit in a somewhat uneasy way. For example, he was instrumental in securing a grant from the Arts Council which helped New Worlds magazine to survive for a few more years, during its experimental period under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. 

In its interrogation of Algy’s state of mind, Greybeard connects with J. G. Ballard’s view that SF writers should explore “inner space”, which was so influential on the New Wave. Algy experiences complex and mixed emotions inspired by the changing world around him. At one point, he feels a sense of “exhilaration” at the prospect of one day becoming the last living human being. 

Later, he decides to be “brutally frank” and speaks of some benefits he sees in the post-disaster world. “For all that everyone has lost since the terrible Accident back in 1981”, he says, “one thing at least we have gained - there is no longer any need for the hypocrisies and shams of civilisation; we can be our natural selves.” These are quite Ballardian sentiments, which echo the protagonist of The Drowned World, who essentially revels in the descent of a flooded London into apocalyptic murk.

The legacy of Greybeard

The elephant in the room where Greybeard is concerned is that there is a much better known novel - and its film adaptation - exploring a very similar theme. In 1992, P. D. James published her novel The Children of Men, which was adapted to film in 2006 by Alfonso Cuáron. Adam Roberts has written that James “committed nothing short of larceny on Aldiss’ (much better) novel and then failed to make anything much of its swag.”

Greybeard deserves better. Lauded by the SFE as “perhaps Aldiss’ finest single SF novel”, it is a beautifully written and powerful piece of work, processing personal pain in a way that only science fiction can.

A comic, multiversal tribute to the late 19th century

Almost all of Michael Moorcock’s many novels are braided together into his vast multiverse. His myriad characters like Elric of Melniboné and Jerry Cornelius each have their many entrances and exits, and the stories make up a sprawling web, with no true beginning nor final end. In his fertile 1970s, Moorcock introduced a new series focusing on one particular ending for the multiverse, or at least one version of Earth - the baroque adventures of The Dancers at the End of Time.

Published between 1972 and 1976, the Dancers books are generally described as a trilogy, but may be better thought of as a single long novel issued in three volumes. These are An Alien Heat (1972), The Hollow Lands (1974), and The End of All Songs (1976). One of very few multi-volume works included in David Pringle’s book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985), these books are set millions of years in the future, a time when the stars are dimming, entropy is closing in, and a small community of immortal, godlike humans live out their lives in frivolous fancy.

These are some of Moorcock’s most humorous books, inspired by the fiction of the late 19th century. Though written with a light touch and seemingly with low stakes, the Dancers books also explore morality, mortality, the purpose of life, and what it means to be in love.

From the End of Time to Bromley

It is the End of Time. The Earth has grown old and nature has withered away. Life remains, however, in the form of a small community of humans. These eccentrics have lived for thousands of years, sustained by the vast energies stored in the “rotted cities” built by their forgotten ancestors. These dancers at the End of Time command almost unlimited powers, channelled through special rings; they can manipulate gravity, create and destroy objects at will, change their own bodies on a whim, and even resurrect the dead. Their only challenge is finding new experiences to keep them amused.

Jherek Carnelian is an oddity in this frivolous world - he is one of very few people to have been born, rather than made. This may explain his own peculiar fancy. Upon meeting Mrs. Amelia Underwood, who has been abducted from Bromley in Kent in 1896, Jherek revolves to fall in love with her. Initially, this is just another idle affectation - but Jherek’s love grows, and when Amelia is returned to her own time, the immortal follows her into the past. Jherek fancies himself an expert on the 19th century, but his knowledge is flawed to say the least and even Amelia’s moral rectitude may not save him from the hangman’s rope…

The Dancers at the End of Time is in large part a humorous love story. Jherek and Amelia navigate various comic scenarios both in 19th century Britain and in the technicolour dreamscape of the End of Time. Both periods are populated with a host of bizarre characters, and the would-be lovers become entangled with the fate of their world, and of time itself.

The entropic playground

The End of Time is one of Moorcock’s most distinctive settings, rich with potential for grand spectacle and comic situations. The last remaining humans have used their powers to create a synthetic environment for themselves, one as changeable as their whims. They build and live in grandiose follies, like immense castles or palaces at the bottom of lakes. As Jherek puts it, “the long history of mankind, if it has a purpose at all, has found complete fulfilment in us.” For his part, he travels in a flying steam locomotive which belches multicoloured smoke. While the dancers could travel into space with ease, they regard such adventurism as rather gauche.

Moorcock populates the End of Time with a gallery of loveable rogues, true eccentrics in a very English tradition. Among others there is Jherek’s mother, the Iron Orchid; the Duke of Queens, always eager to impress; the gloomy Lord Mongrove, the time-scientist Brannart Morphail, and Argonheart Po, “the inventor of the savoury volcano.” They while away the centuries in meaningless recreation, from building entire cities to various brief sexual flings in many combinations. Moorcock’s plot disturbs this idle Eden with two new developments which may be linked - Jherek’s love for Amelia, and the impending end of everything.

Culture clash

Much of the humour in The Dancers at the End of Time comes from the contrast between the two main settings and their respective cultures. The denizens of the End of Time have amusing misconceptions about the deep past. The Duke of Queens, for example, believes that the neon lights of ancient New York “were protective talismans [...] to ward off the forces of darkness.” Inspector Springer, an upright London copper, is utterly perplexed when he is dragged into the End of Time. After meeting a group of belligerent aliens called the Lat, he becomes convinced they are instead “Latvians”. 

Moorcock’s playfulness is everywhere. During one of his sojourns to 1896 Bromley, Jherek has an encounter with one H. G. Wells, who was born in the town (and described it as a “morbid sprawl of population”). Later, the Time Traveller from Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) makes an appearance, his presence alone making it clear that multiple planes of the multiverse are intersecting. 

Moorcock has stated that the Dancers series was intended as a tribute to Wells and the whole late 19th century period. Other writers he has cited include George Meredith, William Pett Ridge, and two who - in stark contrast to Jherek and his friends - died very young: Aubrey Beardsley (25) and Ernest Dowson (32). The people of the End of Time tend to exhibit late-Victorian mannerisms, reinforcing the idea that these books are as much about the past as they are about a wild, imagined future. The citizens of the End of Time resemble superpowered Decadents, living in a world of excess and artifice. 

Beginning at the end

One irony about The Dancers at the End of Time is that although they are about the end of the world, they are a good starting point for newcomers to Moorcock’s work. Light and witty, they are more refined than some of his earliest work but not as challengingly literary as his later novels. While there are connections with the wider multiverse which will reward experienced Moorcock readers, no prior knowledge of his work is necessary. In Jherek and Amelia, Moorcock created two of his most likeable characters, and the books produce great pleasure from their comic clash of cultures.

The Dancers at the End of Time is one of the strongest threads in Moorcock’s constantly engaging multiverse, and a consistently entertaining work in its own right.

Fateful encounters in the long dawn of early humanity

The British teacher and writer William Golding (1911 - 1993) is seldom closely associated with science fiction, being best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954). A regular fixture of school curricula, his commentary on isolation, power, and civilization had sold over ten million copies by 2015. It was Golding’s second novel, though, which would remain his favourite for the rest of his life. While not marketed as such, The Inheritors (1955) is clearly science fiction - a novel built on paleoanthropology, or the study of the development of early humans.

Begun just weeks after Lord of the Flies was published and written in under a month, The Inheritors focuses on a tight-knit family of Neanderthals in a wooded location which Golding based on Savernake Forest in Wiltshire. The Neanderthals encounter a new presence in their world - strange people with incomprehensible tools and who use hollowed-out logs to navigate the river. As readers, we recognise these strangers as the inheritors of the title: homo sapiens, humans, us. The seeds of Neanderthal extinction have been sown, and the rise of humankind is at hand.

While moving and tragic, The Inheritors is not a simple story of straightforward replacement of Neanderthals by human beings. Instead, it uses the techniques of science fiction not only to help us view the world through the alien eyes of our predecessors, but also to realise that the Neanderthal legacy is a part of us still.

Hunger and change

The novel is set at an indeterminate time in the deep past, at least several thousand years ago. It focuses on Lok, an adult male at the centre of a Neanderthal family. Besides Lok there is Mal, the aging male leader; his partner “the old woman”; other adults Nil, Ha, and Fa; the child Liku, and the baby known simply as “the new one”. The family is their only unit of organisation; there is no wider community. Under Mal’s faltering leadership, the family are in a constant battle with hunger, seeking to find food wherever they can.

The arrival of “the new people” in the area is a tremendous shock to Lok’s family, what Iain M. Banks might have called an outside context problem for which they have no frame of reference. This sudden intrusion both repels and fascinates the Neanderthal group, even after it contributes to deaths and disappearances within the family. As time goes on, Lok and Fa in particular try to reckon with the situation, but unlike the humans their ability to cope with change is highly limited.

Like us, and unlike us

At the core of The Inheritors is a tension in the way Golding portrays his Neanderthal characters. On the one hand, Lok’s family are presented as an Other, profoundly unlike us in the way that they perceive the world, think, act, and communicate. At the same time, Golding allows us to sympathise with the Neanderthals and their plight, arguably by idealising and humanising them in certain respects.

In a way that is characteristic of accomplished science fiction, Golding achieves a feeling of cognitive estrangement by immersing the reader fully into his imagined Neanderthal perspective. We perceive the forest, the family, and “the new people” as Lok does. For example, at one point a human attempts to kill Lok by using a bow and arrow. This is a technology entirely outside of the Neanderthal experience, so it is perceived by him as a tree he is standing next to suddenly growing a new twig.

Writing to mark the 60th anniversary of the novel, Golding’s daughter Judy commented that her father used “our language to show the lives of people who don’t really have it.” The novel at times has a dreamlike feel, which reflects a writing style designed to capture Golding’s premise that Neanderthal thought was not “sequential or logical.” This is a highly effective display of science fictional alienation, a means of helping us to see the world differently.

Conversely, the novel also portrays Lok and his people as quite similar to us in certain ways. There is a clear love between the family members, and they practice familiar rituals such as the burial of their dead. Judy Golding felt strongly that Lok’s family were based closely on her own relatives, which itself helps to humanise the characters. As David Pringle put it in his book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, “the Neanderthals are people; we feel for them.”

The Inheritors has been seen as a response to earlier depictions of Neanderthals as brutish cavemen, including H.G. Wells’ story “The Grisly Folk”, published in 1921. Writing in 1999, the archaeologist Clive Gamble stated that for Wells, the Neanderthals “were little more than beasts best exterminated by our ancestors as they arrived in Europe.” For Golding, though, “the loss of the last Neanderthal was a huge blow to our humanity.”

Them and us?

The science of paleoanthropology has continued to advance in the years since The Inheritors was published in 1955. In some ways, these advancements have arguably vindicated some aspects of Golding’s imagined view of Neanderthals. It now seems clear that there was a lengthy period when Neanderthals and early modern humans not only co-existed, but also interbred. For this reason, a small percentage of DNA of Neanderthal origin is still present in the genomes of many contemporary human populations.

The Inheritors, then, is not only about them (Neanderthals) and us (humans). It is not so much about a clean break between these species, but a critical moment of fusion. While Neanderthals and other pre-human hominids became extinct, they left a legacy that remains within us. Reading The Inheritors, we can see ourselves in Lok; but we may also see Lok within ourselves. 

Although Golding was working outside SF as a marketing category, he deployed the techniques of science fiction to powerful effect, challenging us to consider the differences - and similarities - between ourselves and our distant ancestors.

Humans attempt to communicate with aliens - at any cost

Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006) was once probably the most widely read science fiction writer in the world; this was all the more remarkable given that he wrote in Polish. Today, he is best known for his mid-career novel Solaris (1961), which has been adapted to the screen multiple times. Lem’s career as an SF novelist ended with a much less well known book published 25 years later: Fiasco (1986).

As its title implies, Fiasco is - like Solaris - one in a string of pessimistic takes by Lem on the theme of first contact. It follows the crew of the human starship Eurydice, dispatched to the distant star system Zeta Harpyiae. Scientists have detected evidence that an intelligent species resides on the star’s fifth planet, dubbed Quinta. After a long journey, the humans are set on establishing contact with the Quintans. When their efforts are ignored, the crew of the Eurydice resort to increasingly extreme methods.

Complex, disgressive, and philosophical, Fiasco is Lem’s exploration of the difficulty - even impossibility - of establishing relations with alien species. It also deals at length with the limitations of artificial intelligence, game theory, and the human desire to impose a sense of order on the universe.

Context of the novel

Unusually, Fiasco was not undertaken independently by Lem but was commissioned by the German publisher Fischer Verlag. For this reason, the German edition was the first to be published. The English edition followed in 1987, translated by the acclaimed Michael Kandel who translated numerous Lem works.

Fiasco was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, then in its second year of existence. The eventual winner was The Sea and Summer, by the Australian writer George Turner. Lem would write no more novels, dedicating himself to non-fiction for the remainder of his life.

Returned to life

The novel opens with a lengthy initial chapter titled “Birnam Wood”, a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Apparently intended at one point to be published separately as a novelette, the chapter is set on Saturn’s largest moon Titan. A spacecraft is redirected to a spaceport on the moon. Its pilot, Angus Parvis, volunteers to rescue some missing personnel partly because one of them, Pirx, is a friend of his. (Pirx is the protagonist of numerous earlier stories by Lem.)

Parvis pilots a huge mech and journeys across Titan’s surface. While he finds another severely damaged mech, he does not locate the missing officers. Struck by a new disaster, he is forced to use a “vitrifax” device to place himself into suspended animation, hoping that he can be revived at a later time.

Eurydice and Hermes

Over a century later, the vast starship Eurydice is assembled in orbit around Titan. Its mission is to visit the (fictional) Zeta Harpyiae system, and its fifth planet Quinta, to follow up on signs of life. A body found on Titan is reanimated to join the mission: it never becomes clear whether he is Parvis or Pirx, as he suffers from amnesia.

The Eurydice crew arrive at Zeta Harpyiae and exploit a nearby black hole to conceal themselves and shield themselves from time dilation. A crew of ten approaches Quinta in the smaller ship Hermes. They find the Quintans to be extremely enigmatic and reluctant to communicate. The humans, in discussion with their supercomputer DEUS, elect to use increasingly extreme methods to provoke contact. The mission devolves into the tragic fiasco of the title.

Closed for business

Fiasco is primarily a pessimistic exploration of first contact, one of the most enduring topics in science fiction. The novel presents an alien race which simply refuses to engage with human attempts at communication. The humans eventually hypothesise that the planet they have called Quinta is locked into an intractable worldwide war which may explain their total isolationism. Some readers have interpreted this as a commentary by Lem on the apparent futility of the Cold War, then ongoing in 1986.

Lem’s human crewmen - and they are all men, in a novel without any role for women at all - refuse to accept the Quintans’ silence. The analytical equivocation of DEUS does not dissuade the more militant members of the crew from initiating attacks on Quinta designed to provoke a response. Exploiting their formidable technology, the crew of the Eurydice destroy a ring of ice that encircles Quinta, causing devastation on the surface.

The well-meaning and enlightened nature of the humans does not survive the Quintan silence. Lem writes that the “nearness of the alien civilization [...] became a separating distance that mocked their attempts to get to the heart of it.” Feeling mocked in this way, the humans abandon diplomacy and resort to catastrophic force which accomplishes nothing. In Lem’s pessimistic view of interstellar travel, humankind has learned little despite the traumas of Earth’s history. 

Lem reminds us that violence has always been a part of the human experience: “the phenomenon that in the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries was called the ‘arms race’ came into the world with the paleopithecanthropus, when he employed the long thighbones of antelopes as clubs…”

Style and substance

Fiasco is a challenging and at times frustrating novel to read. Lem’s style is freighted with technical language taken from biology, astrophysics, computer science, and game theory. His characters frequently use Latin phrases, which are never explained - an approach which seems both unlikely and a little pretentious. The novel’s relatively dry prose recalls Arthur C. Clarke and the later work of Liu Cixin. 

Perhaps even more so than with those writers, Lem’s characters are scarcely worthy of the term. These figures are instead mouthpieces for various philosophical perspectives. The papal delegate Father Arago presents the theological point of view; the Japanese physicist Nakamura exhibits a sort of Zen equanimity, and the practical, no-nonsense pilot Harrach rapidly becomes an advocate for indiscriminate use of force. 

Much of Fiasco is taken up with Lem’s numerous and varied digressions. These cover topics such as whether God intends his creations to meet across the gulf between the stars, the purposeless beauty of rock formations on Titan’s surface, and the design of the Eurydice (which combines laser propulsion and a variation on the Bussard ramjet). While at times these discussions can seem superfluous, at their best they are fascinating. One example is a discussion of physics and causality, during which crewman Lauger describes physics at one point as “a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp.”

There are some fascinating details in the novel which reinforce Lem’s gloomy view of the future. One example is the “vitrifax” machine used by the stranded pilots. A crude design built more in hope than in expectation, it brutalises the body of the person it is designed to save - smashing their teeth as it forces in a nutrient tube and exchanging their blood for a preservative fluid. The pilot who is taken to Quinta is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, assembled from parts salvaged from frozen corpses. Later, Lem describes a “gracer” (gravity amplification by collimated excitation of resonance), a kind of gravity gun which, like all the humans’ tools, is pressed into service as a nightmarish weapon.

The last word

First contact was an abiding fascination for Stanislaw Lem and Fiasco has been described as a culmination of this interest. Lem’s growing disinterest in writing science fiction at the time may be detectable in the novel’s digressive and philosophical nature. What it lacks in characterisation or a stirring plot it makes up for in its multi-faceted, intense, and pessimistic view of the limits of human knowledge and our role in the universe.

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.

“Ecstasy, not hydrazine”

The year is 2170 and the world has undergone vast change over the course of two centuries. It is an unenlightened time, and few people are aware of how the new order came about - following a catastrophic population crash in the 1990s. Only a few advanced technologies are used: computer-controlled ocean vessels, solar panels for electricity generation, and implanted “contracapsules” to keep the population in check. Aircraft are very rare, and even the notion of long-distance travel is frowned upon.

Lila Makindi is a young woman living on the coast of Tanzania. After undergoing rigorous testing, she is recruited to join “Bardo” - the Space Communications Administration operated by the world government. Her selection and training takes her first to semi-abandoned Miami, and later to Lhasa, high in the mountains of Tibet. Lila is to become a “pilot”, exploiting her natural talent to undergo a form of astral travel to worlds orbiting distant stars. 

Lila and her colleagues are inducted into the strange world of Bardo, and into its rigid sexual, reproductive, and spiritual strictures. They are to be the vanguard of humanity’s newfound destiny in space. As Lila puts it, “ecstasy, not hydrazine, would be our rocket fuel to the stars.” In time, though, Lila and her fellow pilots begin to suspect that they are being misled by the state. Peeling away layer after layer of deception, Lila becomes increasingly troubled by what Bardo has in store.

Conceptual breakthrough as power structure

In at least one key way, Alien Embassy marks a break with Watson’s earlier work. “My first three novels all had triple story lines”, he recalled in 2008, “then with [..] Alien Embassy, I shifted to [a] first person narrative in the mouth of a black African woman (which I suppose was innovative at the time, and maybe still is).” Lila is something of an everywoman, told she is special by a government agency she is increasingly suspicious of but has little power to oppose.

Like Brian Aldiss’ novel Non-Stop (1958), Alien Embassy is a formidable showcase of the conceptual breakthrough. As the story progresses, Lila experiences a chain of breakthroughs in her understanding of Bardo, their methods and goals, and even the nature of the universe. In Aldiss’ novel, passage from one conceptual frame to another is a question of position. This is also true in Watson’s story, as Lila’s arrival in new locations exposes her to further revelations. However, the breakthrough is also a function of power: in Alien Embassy, the higher Lila’s status, the more complete and disturbing her view of reality becomes.

Sex and spirituality

Also disturbing to some is Watson’s emphasis on sex, which is a key part of the novel’s first half in particular. In order to achieve astral spaceflight - the projection of mind beyond Earth’s embrace - Lila and her fellow recruits are paired with strangers for spiritually charged sexual unions. It is the fusion of male and female psychic energies, the pilots are told, which allows their thoughts and perceptions to travel over interstellar distances. As this is a science fiction novel, this is a less than strictly accurate explanation.

Alien Embassy is not just steeped in eastern mysticism but also in the opening up of discussions about sexuality in the decade of The Joy of Sex. Watson’s work has provoked revulsion over its sexual content, but this is arguably explained in part by the general “dis-ease” with sex as an SF subject observed by Peter Nicholls in the SFE.

“I can know the ways of heaven”

One of the most striking aspects of Alien Embassy is its depiction of a society based around the rejection of real experience, and on a kind of manipulative sophistry about psychic “action at a distance”. In the novel, ideas from Tibetan thought are transformed by Bardo into a repressive dogma, restricting knowledge to a chosen few. Travel, and experience of the real world, is highly restricted. “What did flying ever bring people”, Lila is asked, “but a few handfuls of dust from the next-door world?” It is easy to make a ready comparison with the inward-looking retreat into vapid fakeness that is such a visible strain of 21st century culture.

A Times reviewer was quite right to say that Alien Embassy “hums with notions as a hive of bees”. Lila’s experiences see her not only join an interstellar sex cult, but also meet birdlike aliens in an identity-scrambling symbiotic relationship with trees, and crystalline creatures that communicate using natural lasers. This is an intellectually intense novel written in a fine literary style, and a worthwhile part of Watson’s legacy.

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.

Venus envy

From today’s perspective, one of the most striking aspects of Fury is its depiction of Venus, which is fairly typical for SF in the first half of the 20th century. At that time, knowledge about conditions on Venus was limited, and the planet was often felt to be a likely candidate for extraterrestrial life and habitability. These hopes were dashed in the 1960s, especially by the Soviet probe Venera 4, which indicated that the planet’s atmosphere is toxic and extremely hot.

In Fury, Venus has a hostile but lush jungle environment. Its air and soil are rife with aggressive microorganisms, its seas teem with ravenous creatures, and ferocious land predators lurk within its prolific vegetation. Kuttner and Moore confine their imagined human population to the ocean depths - the immense engineering challenges these cities would present is waved away by the invention of the miracle metal impervium.

The depiction of Venus’ surface seems to have been a clear inspiration for Harry Harrison’s excellent novel Deathworld (1960). That title has since been used to describe similarly hostile planets in various SF contexts, including Warhammer 40,000. The irony, of course, is that the real Venus is more deadly than any science fictional “deathworld”; but its brutal heat, pressure, and toxicity which forbid any form of life are hardly storyable.

Bad before Bester

The setting of Fury is not its only influential element. The character of Sam Harker, vengeful antihero, has also left his mark on later science fiction. In particular, he is a clear precursor for Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester’s better known novel The Stars My Destination (1956). While Bester’s novel takes inspiration from The Count of Monte Cristo (1856), it was also very likely influenced by the work of Kuttner and Moore. Both antiheroes are mutilated, betrayed, and abandoned; both act out of selfishness and a desire for vengeance, but inadvertently trigger wider changes that affect all of humankind.

Between stagnation and the stars

Fury depicts the Keeps as a stagnant society, frozen in meaningless pleasure and directionless labour. Kuttner and Moore imagine a civilisation in which the power of the few is so entrenched, so beyond challenge, that the human spirit itself is threatened. The Keeps are a void, without hope of change; conversely, Sam Harker is an agent of change, a catalyst for upheaval. This kind of conflict is one which writers of SF - a genre acutely concerned with change - have relitigated many times over the decades; but Fury does so engagingly even after all the years that have passed since its publication.

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.

Squid goals

For around half of the novel, Shaw alternates between two very different perspectives. Later, these merge as the story approaches its climax. 

The novel opens in a bizarre underwater environment. Myrah is part of a small community of humans living submerged in a giant ball of water, essentially a liquid planet. To survive, they must constantly scavenge for bubbles of air which they trap within special helmets. Their society is primitive, with no technology to speak of. Their lives are nasty, brutish, and short due to rampant disease and the predations of an aggressive squid-like species.

Meanwhile, Tarrant is a not-terribly-competent aquafarmer operating in the Pacific Ocean. A former pilot and deserter, his aims are to keep a low profile and to romance Beth, a young woman who lives nearby. His efforts are frustrated by Beth’s controlling, conservative parents. Worse, his farm is threatened by an aggressive squid-like species…

Meeting the siphonophore

Although Shaw’s two watery worlds are obviously connected from early on in the novel, part of the charm of Medusa’s Children is the outlandish idea which links them. 

Both Myrah and Tarrant grapple, quite separately, with the same monstrous creatures - which Myrah’s people know as Horra. It is also apparent that Myrah’s bleak, submerged home cannot be on Earth, due to its lack of dry land and its very low gravity. The puzzle of where Myrah’s people are, and how they got there generations ago, is the main driver of the book’s first half. 

The explanation is easily one of Shaw’s wilder ideas, and when it comes, Medusa’s Children steps up a few gears. It transpires that Tarrant and Myrah each live close to one end of an extraordinary piece of ancient alien technology. Millions of years previously, long-departed aliens set up a matter transmission system as a means of regulating and stabilising Earth’s sea levels. 

Excess seawater was transported across the solar system and into space, kept liquid to form a glob of ocean held loosely together by a weak gravitational force. It is implied that Myrah’s community are the inbred descendants of unfortunate travelers, inadvertently caught in the device’s transmission field in a kind of Bermuda Triangle scenario generations earlier. 

Shaw also introduces a vast, sentient sea creature which evolved from Earth animals also caught by the alien device. Known as Ka by Myrah’s people and worshipped by some of them as a god, this immense entity is a hyper-evolved form of a siphonophore, some of the strangest species in Earth’s oceans. Through this element, Shaw explores interesting concepts about evolution, distributed intelligence, and unusual methods of survival.

A liquid world

Of the two halves of Medusa’s Children, the second is easily the strongest. In the first half, Tarrant’s down-to-Earth story is not particularly compelling, and his efforts to form a relationship with Beth go nowhere, existing largely to pad out the page count. While the sexual politics of the novel are dubious, they are interesting and Shaw even briefly flirts with body horror as Ka demonstrates his ability to extend his influence.

It is when Shaw begins to unfurl his mysteries that the novel improves, and while it never reaches the level of a novel like A Wreath of Stars or The Palace of Eternity, it is definitely entertaining. It may not be the best entry point into Shaw’s body of work, but established fans would do well to pick it up, should a copy cross their path.

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.

The “tract novels”

John Brunner’s writing became increasingly mature and sophisticated in the mid-1960s. He gradually moved away from pulp story formats, and mined science publications and grey literature to imagine the world of the relatively near future. This culminated with his landmark novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968). Written in a panoramic style strongly influenced by the USA trilogy (1930 - 1936) by John Dos Passos, this work made Brunner the first British winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. 

Although Stand on Zanzibar was not particularly successful in commercial terms - likely in part due to its huge length for a novel at that time - Brunner wrote three further books in a relatively similar style. The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider each posit a different 21st century scenario, based on Brunner’s extrapolation of trends he observed in the world around him. Unfortunately for us, Brunner’s predictive methods were sometimes quite sound.

Super phreak

Much of the book covers Haflinger’s period as a fugitive, hunted by his government handlers. When the heat is on, he uses his computer skills to assume new, invented identities and to erase all traces of his previous guises. To describe this, Brunner coined the term “computer worm”, later adopted by computer scientists.

During his time on the run, Haflinger lives as a fringe preacher in Toledo, Ohio and then as a wealthy computer consultant in Kansas City, Missouri. There, he meets Kate, a bright young perpetual student who sees through his false identity. Together they move on to find a home in Precipice, one of several new communities that have sprung up to house refugees from an earthquake that destroyed San Francisco. 

Inspired by his new friends in California, Haflinger transforms from fugitive to would-be hacker revolutionary, bent on tearing down the veils of government secrecy and exposing the corruption of a decadent elite.

Information overload

Classic science fiction should not be judged on its predictive accuracy; but if it were, The Shockwave Rider would rate quite highly. Brunner’s depiction of a computer-reliant, highly networked society is quite striking and reflects his awareness of recent technological progress. In Stand on Zanzibar, the monolithic supercomputer Shalmaneser guides corporate decision-making. The Shockwave Rider depicts a much more distributed and interconnected model of computing, influenced by the development of ARPANET. 

Crucially, Brunner imagines a future in which distributed computer networks, processing vast reams of data, are accessible to all. Citizens access the continental net through their landline phones, and Haflinger’s manipulation of this system resembles phreaking, the analogue precursor to computer hacking. Brunner anticipates a version of today’s prediction markets, termed “Delphi pools”, after Pythia, the famous Oracle of Delphi. Conducted over the continental net, these exploit the predictive potential of the “wisdom of the crowd”.

Typically for Brunner’s work, The Shockwave Rider does not linger on technology but focuses instead on its social effects. Many people practice the “plug-in lifestyle”, a kind of highly mobile existence made possible by a combination of computerisation, cheaper transport, and consumer fads. This terminology recalls James Tiptree Jr.’s story “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), an influence on William Gibson and cyberpunk. In some ways, these plugged-in people resemble an early form of today’s digital nomads. As a child, Haflinger was transferred from family to family, essentially as a kind of lifestyle accessory. He credits this experience with preparing him for a world of constant change.

Brunner was strongly influenced by Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock (1970), which posited that people could suffer trauma from “too much change in too short a period of time”. In The Shockwave Rider, some people - notably Haflinger - are afflicted by “overload”, a kind of trauma inflicted by over-exposure not so much to change, but to information. Even in this Brunner was only a few steps removed from the kind of derangement people experience today, affected by online misinformation, deepfakes, propaganda, and the bizarre counterfactuals spat out by LLMs.

The cyber novel

As with The Jagged Orbit, The Shockwave Rider is written in a more grounded style than Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner’s deployment of futuristic neologisms is kept to a relative minimum, and there are fewer settings. Brunner prided himself on his ostensibly authentic use of American locations and dialogue, and these are quite effective. In keeping with the other “tract novels”, The Shockwave Rider is quite talky, and the characters express themselves far more through dialogue than through physical action. This is a thought-provoking, rather than exciting, piece of work. 

The novel has often been described, not unreasonably, as a precursor to cyberpunk. It can certainly be thought of a “cyber” novel, deeply immersed in the social implications of then-advanced computer technology but lacking the gritty cynicism and violence found in the later, true cyberpunk of Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Brunner, with his clipped English accent and love of folk music, was nobody’s idea of a punk - but certainly The Shockwave Rider influenced cyberpunk writers. One of these was Pat Cadigan, who met Brunner at the University of Kansas in 1975.

Digital democracy

The crux of The Shockwave Rider is in its comparison between its imagined mainstream future society - and especially the cruel government labs - and the almost utopian lifestyle of Precipice. In the refugee town, Haflinger and Kate find genuine community and solidarity of a type which Brunner suggests is fatally undermined by the computerised society. Set on his revolutionary course, Haflinger defines absolute evil: “it consists in treating another human being as a thing.” Based in Precipice, Haflinger uses the ultimate worm to turn the continental net against its overseers, and give the people the chance to define their own idea of the good society.

Part of the message of the novel seems to be that the risk of a networked world is that it better enables the powerful to treat human beings as things. As computer technologies are increasingly used by repressive states as tools of misinformation, cruelty, and violence, The Shockwave Rider remains relevant despite the rather pat simplicity of its prescriptions.

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.

Better oppression through chemistry

At some point in the future, the so-called World State has control over a large portion of the Earth. While almost all culture and history have been obliterated, there are hints that the old world was ruined by a devastating war and the extensive use of chemical weapons. The World State is governed by a bleak, oppressive regime. People are not considered individuals, merely cells in the great organism of the State. This is a militarised society, in which each person refers to others as “Fellow Soldier”, and everyone must participate in military drills. There is almost no freedom of movement, of association, or of communication. Even in the home, domestic helpers double as spies, monitoring the actions of every family unit. Surveillance cameras and microphones are everywhere. 

Leo Kall is a chemist working in Chemistry City No. 4, a World State settlement dedicated to his field. Devoted to the World State, he is excited to make a major breakthrough - a powerful truth serum he calls Kallocain. His elation is dented when Rissen, a superior whom Leo suspects of having an affair with his wife Linda, is assigned to evaluate the research project. Later, both men become embroiled with the World State’s immensely powerful police ministry, which sees Kallocain’s potential to destroy the last possible site of resistance against the State - the free thought of the individual.

Personal and political 

Born in Gothenburg in 1900, Boye initially came to prominence as a poet, publishing her first collection in 1922. Six years later, she visited the Soviet Union for a three week study tour, which according to translator David McDuff “seems to have consisted mainly in a drab pilgrimage between various state institutions, factories and collective farms.” Her first novel appeared in 1931. At around the same time, she began to undergo psychoanalysis, in part to come to terms with her homosexuality. This took her to Berlin, where in 1932 and 1933 she witnessed the rise of Nazism firsthand.

By the time Boye began work on Kallocain in the autumn of 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in a non-aggression pact in the early stages of World War II. In that conflict, Sweden was neutral. Boye and other Swedish writers had to tread carefully, as censors were watchful for any material that could trigger a German invasion. McDuff writes that Kallocain’s “mechanised, dehumanised landscape is a composite, bearing the traits of both Nazi and Soviet society.”

Boye ended her own life in the spring of 1941, just a few months before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. These two repressive states, combined into the inspiration for Boye’s World State, became engaged in total war which ended with the destruction of Hitler’s Germany in 1945.

As Vowles go on to note, however, there are distinctive elements to Kallocain. One is the particular nature of the repression it depicts, which in some ways seems even more pervasive and total than in Orwell’s Airstrip One. While rooted in the Nazi and Soviet systems, the culture of mutual suspicion, informing, and denunciations anticipates the grimly paranoid atmosphere that was fomented by the Stasi in East Germany.

The depiction of the state as the agent of oppression is, as Vowles notes, typical of this era of dystopian fiction. Today, it is increasingly private corporations which appear to want to know everything about our lives.

…the individual is nothing

Early on in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is stated that “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” Leo Kall’s development of his truth serum - the most clearly science fictional element in the novel - becomes a weapon which the World State can use to threaten even this small bastion of freedom. Again, this makes the atmosphere in Kallocain even more sinister, even as the novel lacks any overt scenes of violence. Kall’s initial delight at what his drug is capable of demonstrates his seemingly unshakeable support for the regime.

Early in the novel, Kall - whose name means “cold” in Swedish - makes a speech at a public event which causes him to be reprimanded by the authorities. He is forced to apologise on the radio: “I committed a serious error [...] affected with a false compassion, of a kind that results from sympathy with the individual, and a false heroism…” Again, it is striking that some of today’s antisocial billionaires have inverted the logic of the World State, pushing a “war on empathy”, an atmosphere of absolute individual selfishness, an abolition of any notion of solidarity or community.

A lost dystopia?

Kallocain makes for an interesting comparison with Swastika Night (1937), an earlier dystopia written by Katharine Burdekin using the pseudonym Murray Constantine. Burdekin’s novel is much more explicit, violent, despairing, and bleak than Kallocain - and in some ways arguably more effective. Swastika Night is explicitly about Nazism, a fierce statement of anti-fascism that was possible in pre-war Britain, and not so in neutral Sweden in 1940.

Kallocain is little-known in the English speaking world, in part due to its relatively late translation from Swedish. Another reason may be that, as Vowles put it, “ideology and police violence, while they exist, fall outside the perimeter of [Boye’s] fiction.” Steeped in ideology and violence, and arriving in the anxious post-war period, Orwell’s novel was well placed to make an indelible impact. While its plot and characterisation leave something to be desired, Kallocain is nevertheless a fascinating entry in the dystopian canon.

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.

After the Simplification

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic novel focusing on the long, slow recovery of civilisation after a nuclear exchange at some point in the 20th century. At the centre of the book is the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, based at an abbey in the deserted wasteland of post-nuclear New Mexico. The monks there venerate I. E. Leibowitz, an electrical engineer who survived the “Flame Deluge”, and sought to preserve knowledge during the mass book burnings and purges of intellectuals that followed. In an irony lost on the faithful, Leibowitz was a weapons engineer whose work may have helped make the nuclear war possible.

This is a “fixup novel”, made up of three parts - a common form in the 1950s. Each part is an expansion of a story published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (or F&SF) between 1955 and 1957. Perhaps surprisingly, it did not dawn on Miller that he was writing a serialised novel until he was writing the third part. 

In “Fiat Homo”, a 26th century novice stumbles on a fallout shelter which contains a blueprint which Leibowitz had worked on. Brother Francis Gerard makes it his life's work to copy and try to understand this relic, a mission which causes great trouble for him inside and outside the abbey - but which also presents new hope for the future. In “Fiat Lux”, it is 3174 and the abbey is surrounded by petty fiefdoms. Thon Taddeo, a secular scientist from the city of Texarkana, visits the abbey while regional tensions are on the rise. Finally, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” is set in 3781, and new states have far surpassed the technical achievements of the distant 20th century. In the time of Abbot Zerchi, the abbey must confront the possibility of a second nuclear conflict.

Rites and rituals

Writing in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Brian Stableford and David Langford stated that “familiar definitions of SF imply that there is nothing more alien to its concerns than religion”. However, they go on to identify a “spectacular boom” in stories “which cut straight to the heart of theological matters” in the period following World War II. They describe A Canticle for Leibowitz as the “single most impressive work” of this period.

The monks in the novel practice a sort of corrupted form of Catholicism, shaped by the nuclear disaster of the Flame Deluge. Their community is steeped in Latin scripture, but has its own saints, rites, and rituals. In the surprisingly funny “Fiat Homo”, Miller exploits this for some dark humour, in one instance articulating the logic of nuclear deterrence in the language of the Bible:

To play the Phoenix

Early on in “Fiat Lux”, the scientist Thon Taddeo asks Abbot Dom Paulo, “How can a great and wise civilisation have destroyed itself so completely?” This is one of the key questions which animates A Canticle for Leibowitz. Across the arc of its three parts, the novel suggests that the human race is trapped in a tragic cycle of invention and destruction, capable of incredible feats but doomed to undo them in atomic hellfire, senselessly wasting billions of lives, time and again. As Abbot Zerchi muses in the novel’s final part, 
“Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?”

One monk’s initial answer to the scholar’s question is to suggest that the people of the 20th century were “materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” This implies a spiritual lack, a spiritual failing in humankind. Over the centuries, the monks become the guardians of technical knowledge they cannot understand. The novel invites the question: if those at the abbey understood the great promise and the dire threat of the “treasured fragments of a dead civilisation”, would they keep them or cast them into the fire?

It is striking that the loss of worldly knowledge begun by the Flame Deluge, the nuclear war, is completed by mobs deliberately seeking out and destroying written information, and hunting down first intellectuals, and then anyone who could read. In this aspect, Miller’s novel connects with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), also about a mania for illiterate “simplification”. In Bradbury’s work, book burning does not follow a nuclear war, but rather precedes it.

The long shadow of Saint Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is one chain in a cycle of many other SF novels dealing with the tension between faith and progress, including Pavane (1968) by Keith Roberts and The Cloud Walker (1978) by Edmund Cooper.

Following the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. ceased to publish. He experienced depression and eventually became a recluse, allowing no-one to see him - not even his agent, Don Congdon. Some months after the death of his wife, Miller ended his own life on 9 January, 1996. 

At Miller’s request, the writer Terry Bisson (1942 - 2024) completed Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997), Miller’s relatively little-known sequel to his classic novel. In the SFE, John Clute reflects that the original novel “remained a singleton for decades, and retains that autonomy for most readers.” Certainly A Canticle for Leibowitz retains and deserves its classic status, in part as a humane and troubling examination of humankind’s linked capacity to create and to destroy.