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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The author’s breakout novel helped make SF respectable, and is an integral part of the British disaster novel tradition.

In an opening chapter ominously titled “The End Begins”, John Wyndham starts to unveil an unforgettable depiction of disaster. His protagonist, Bill Masen, wakes up in hospital, his eyes covered by bandages. He knows it to be a Wednesday, but the quiet outside makes him think of Sunday. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Carefully exposing his eyes, Masen realises that the hospital, all of London, the whole of the country and perhaps the world, have fallen into chaos. Due to a cosmic event the previous night, almost everyone has been rendered blind. Society has collapsed, and civilization is all but gone. What is worse, a new plague is spreading and a strange type of plant is adapting to become a deadly threat to the survivors. It seems the era of humankind is over, giving way to The Day of the Triffids.

Two collaborators imagine a world dominated by a monolithic insurance company, and threatened by tyranny and nuclear terrorism.

Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth formed a key collaboration in 1950s American science fiction. Their string of novels written together, beginning with The Space Merchants (1952), helped to establish the tradition of satirical, social SF in that decade. 

Preferred Risk is a direct successor to those landmark collaborations, with Lester del Rey filling in for Kornbluth. It is a clever variation on the template established by The Space Merchants, depicting a world dominated by a single, nearly all-powerful insurance company. It is a lesser novel, but an interesting one in its own right. 

Over the years, though, the content of Preferred Risk has been overshadowed by the strange and unedifying story of its creation. That is because this novel was the winner of a sham contest, and was originally credited to a made-up scientist.

A debut novel which deals with guilt, art, and suspicious happenings on a troubled colony founded on matter transmission.

Originally published in 1992 - and out of print for many years - Meridian Days is the debut novel by British SF author Eric Brown (1960 - 2023). Following on from a string of successful stories, the novel is connected to Brown’s wider “Telemass” setting. 

Meridian is a planet over 20 lightyears from Earth, which orbits the star Beta Hydri. Its colonisation by humans has been made possible by advanced technology; a huge sunshield which dampens the star’s intensity, and an interstellar matter transmission system which permits trade with distant Earth. The novel’s protagonist is Bob Benedict, a former spacecraft pilot with a drug habit, a guilty conscience, and a desire for solitude. 

Slowly but surely, Benedict is drawn into the tangled affairs of a prominent artist, Tamara Trevellion, and her troubled family. The former pilot becomes determined to establish the facts of a case which may have dramatic implications for the future of Meridian itself.

The landmark novel from the Northern Irish writer combines his interest in optics with an anti-neutrino planet and an unusual African setting.

Originally published in 1976, A Wreath of Stars is a standalone science fiction novel and the ninth to be published by Northern Irish author Bob Shaw (1931 - 1996). 

Set in the near future, the story is a chain of events triggered by the invention of a groundbreaking new kind of lens. This makes possible the discovery of a previously unknown type of planet, one which is hurtling towards Earth. Fortunately, “Thornton’s Planet” is composed of anti-neutrinos. Being insubstantial, it poses no threat. Some time after the initial panic subsides, ghost sightings are reported in the depths of a diamond mine in East Africa. Something links these strange occurrences, and humanity’s view of its place in the universe is about to be challenged like never before.

A Wreath of Stars is a brisk, exciting SF novel in the dependable tradition of the 1970s. While its scientific backdrop is dubious - especially today - Shaw weaves the sciences of optics and astronomy, alien life, and Earthly conflict into a compelling tale.