One man struggles to protect the Spanish Empire in a fragile timeline

Before he made history as the first British winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel with the massive, challenging Stand on Zanzibar (1968), John Brunner (1934 - 1995) was a prolific writer of shorter tales. Some of his strongest work can be found in his contributions to British SF magazines, some of which were repackaged for book publication in the United States. So it is with the wonderful Society of Time trilogy, three short novellas set in a world in which the Spanish Armada was victorious over the English fleet in 1588.

First collected under the title Times Without Number, these stories are not just examples of alternate history. They are also time travel tales with a unique flavour, in which time machines are the closely guarded secret of the Catholic Church and a Society of Time uses them to explore and document historical events first-hand. The trilogy follows Don Miguel Navarro, a young and earnest Licentiate of the Society who gains chilling insight into the mechanics of travel in time, and is charged with protecting the very existence of his timeline and everything in it.

Deft, thrilling, and economical, the Society of Time stories are an important and under-recognised part of John Brunner’s career. Returned to print in 2020, the trilogy is a thoroughly recommended read, a set of exciting SF adventures which in their imaginings about what time travel would mean become surprisingly moving.

Abandoning the Earth for the vast spaces of a macrostructure

Like many other science fiction writers of his generation, Bob Shaw (1931 - 1996) tended to focus on one-off novels, and seldom published series. However, there are notable exceptions in his work. The first of these is the Orbitsville trilogy, published intermittently over the long period from 1975 to 1990. These are some of the most notable examples of the concept of the macrostructure in SF. Set in the far future, the novels detail the discovery of a Dyson sphere in a distant star system with a surface area equivalent to many millions of Earths.

The sudden availability to humankind of almost incalculable, functionally infinite, amounts of living space is the dominant novum of the Orbitsville trilogy. In their own way, each book explores the implications of this idea, which profoundly affects the lives of three different protagonists. Along the way, Shaw explores faster-than-light travel, Earth’s abandonment, religious fervour, and the mystery of unknowable intelligences in the galaxy, whose inscrutable actions long ago may dictate the human future.

"Only he, among all who walk the Earth, has a story worth writing down."

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville - a collaboration that at first seems strange, then makes perfect sense, and then seems strange all over again. The star of John Wick and the writer of Perdido Street Station worked together to produce The Book of Elsewhere (2024), which Miéville described as “a story of ancient powers, modern war, and one person’s quest to find mortality and purpose.”

This collaboration was a rather unequal one. The novel is a spinoff from Reeves’ comics series BRZRKR (2021 - 2023), and he is credited with its concept; but the novel was written by Miéville. Both the comics and this novel focus on Unute or “B”, an immortal warrior with 80,000 years of bloodshed behind him, now working with a shadowy US government agency. Compared to the comics, The Book of Elsewhere has a much more enigmatic, philosophical approach in keeping with Miéville’s style. 

This is a genre-bending novel of the New Weird, fusing contemporary black ops culture with secret histories of the deep past, parascience, and philosophical speculation.

A frenzied tale of revenge in a baroque 25th century

Alfred Bester (1913 - 1987) was arguably one of the most important science fiction writers of the 1950s. Strikingly, he reached this status on the strength of only two novels and just over a dozen short stories published during the decade. As the Science Fiction Encyclopedia puts it, “Bester was never prolific in SF, which was more of a hobby than a career for him" [...] but his talents "were evident from the beginning".

His debut SF novel The Demolished Man (1953) is a tale of corporate power, murder, and psychic abilities which was immortalised by becoming the first ever winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Bester followed this with The Stars My Destination (1956), an even more spectacular saga. Again, the central novum is the existence of psionic powers, something of a trend in the 1950s. This time, Bester focuses on teleportation - an almost universal ability which transforms human society.

With its breakneck pace, improbable plotting, and larger-than-life characters, The Stars My Destination is best thought of as an SF ripping yarn. While Bester explores no themes in any depth, there is much to admire in his ability to craft a stirring adventure - and it is understandable that so many later authors have credited this novel as an influence.

A grim prediction of computer-generated slop movies

When Alien: Romulus was released in 2024, it was widely viewed as a remix of various elements from previous films in the series. The most contentious element was the inclusion of a crude and uncanny digital recreation of the actor Ian Holm, who appeared in the original Alien in 1979 and died in 2020. Wendy Ide, writing in the Guardian, described this inclusion as "ghoulish, exploitative, disrespectful, and unnecessary". The film was otherwise well-received, and made $350 million. Director Fede Álvarez said he was in no rush to make a sequel, but studio bosses felt differently. A follow-up soon began production, and the franchise juggernaut rolled on.

American SF writer Connie Willis wrote about Hollywood cynicism, digital necromancy, and the queasy future of movie-making in her short novel Remake (1995). It is set in a 21st century scenario in which film production is entirely digitised, the dead are routinely brought back to life on screen, and new films are reconstituted and remixed from scavenged fragments of old ones. 30 years on, Willis' work rhymes uncomfortably with the plastic fakeness which has infiltrated not just Hollywood, but our whole media and information environment.

All too human scientists use tachyons to speak to the past

A landmark in the science fiction of the early 1980s, Gregory Benford’s book Timescape (1980) became his “popular and critical breakthrough”, winning multiple major awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novel. It was widely celebrated for its fusion of thought-provoking science with believable and flawed characters, told across two distinct time periods. While Benford (1942 - ) is an astrophysicist, the novel instead draws largely on quantum physics, and especially the implications should tachyons - a theorised faster-than-light particle - be found to actually exist.

Timescape is a lengthy, dense, and hugely ambitious novel which may test a reader’s patience on its way to a powerful climax. While it has at its heart the fanciful notion of tachyonic communication, the book is a fascinating look at fears of runaway environmental degradation, the scientific method, and what significance individual human lives have in the unknowable flow of time and cosmic forces. Intensely human even as it deals with mind-bending possibilities in quantum physics, Timescape is a unique example of ‘80s SF.

On distinguishing the genre from the images it spawned

In the century since the term was coined, science fiction has generated a torrent of images. The robot, the alien, the mutant, the starship, the time machine: these are components of an aesthetic immediately recognisable even to those who have never read a science fiction story. Partly because those people are many, and partly because we live in an intensely and increasingly image-oriented culture, this SF aesthetic has arguably outgrown the genre which generated it.

This matters because the primacy of the science fiction aesthetic can lead to it being mistaken for, or used as a substitute for, the actual genre of science fiction. One result of this is that some people believe they dislike SF, without having read much - or any. Potential readers and lovers of the genre are missing out, because they are exposed only to the science fiction aesthetic, and not the thing itself. We can think of all this as another angle on the notoriously difficult question as to how to define science fiction. One thing that SF isn’t is its tangle of indelible images.

Four short novels from a pioneering woman in SF

In 1947, the Writer’s Digest published an article whose writer mused, "why is science fiction fun to write? At first blush, it doesn't seem attractive, particularly for a woman." That woman was Margaret St. Clair (1911 - 1995). At that time, St. Clair was just starting out in SF; her first story “Rocket to Limbo” had been published by Fantastic Adventures in November 1946. By the end of the ‘40s, she had published about 30 stories, and in the 1950s would add novels to her repertoire. As Rich Horton has put it, she “was one of the more noticeable early women writers of SF, but somehow her profile was a bit lower than those of C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Andre Norton.”

The back cover blurb applied to St. Clair’s novel Sign of the Labrys (1963) is an unedifying example of the absurd way women writers of SF could be marketed at that time:

She was likely singled out for this ridiculous description in part because of her interest in Wicca, the new religious movement into which she was formally initiated together with her husband in 1966. By that time, her career was already entering its final phase; she published no further novels after 1973 and lapsed into relative obscurity.

However, St. Clair is again becoming better known as readers of classic SF continue to revisit and explore some of the genre’s pioneering women writers. While it is often St. Clair’s short fiction which wins the most praise, this particular look at her work focuses instead on four of her novels. These four were published between 1956 and 1964, all of them acquired by Donald A. Wollheim for the historic and collectible Ace Doubles line. In them, St. Clair imagines four very different futures for humankind, taking in androids, plagues, mass deception, and a message from the beginning of time.

Two post-nuclear scenarios from a forgotten figure of British SF

He described himself as “a compulsive guesser, an addict of possibilities. And, I hope, an entertainer.” Edmund Cooper (1926 - 1982) was a veteran of the British Merchant Navy who became a prominent science fiction writer and critic. He began to write short fiction in the early 1950s, but it was as a novelist that he became most notable. He repeatedly explored post-holocaust settings in his fiction, and it has been argued that in this respect he was “probably expressing his own conviction about the future course of events.” 

What follows is a brief look at two notable novels by Cooper, both set in post-nuclear scenarios which differ dramatically. In his debut (under his own name) The Uncertain Midnight (1958), a man is woken from over a century in suspended animation and confronted by a world dominated by androids. In one of Cooper’s last novels, the much-praised The Cloud Walker (1973), society has become militantly anti-technology in the aftermath of not one, but two nuclear conflicts.

A classic showcase of conceptual breakthroughs

A quest or journey to seek answers about the world is an important recurring element in science fiction. Rarely has this been employed to greater impact than in Brian Aldiss’ debut SF novel Non-Stop (1958). A classic of its decade, it launched Aldiss’ career, which saw him become a leading figure in British SF for many years. 

Published in the United States under the title Starship, the novel is a key example of the enduring generation ship theme. Aldiss’ characters are trapped in a claustrophobic world which is as constrained conceptually as it is spatially. Their exciting physical journey is a framework for a chain of thrilling conceptual breakthroughs which transform their understanding of themselves, their world, and the universe.

Non-Stop is classic SF at its best - both an engaging adventure and a probing search for answers rooted in scientific speculation.