A startling debut novel of linguistics, anthropology, geopolitics, and first contact.

In England, a team of scientists conduct unethical experiments on children secluded from the outside world. In Brazil, American engineers threatened by left-wing guerilla fighters attempt to complete a massive new dam. In the rainforest threatened by the dam, an enigmatic tribe awaits the birth of a new messiah. In deep space, an alien intelligence receives and analyses transmissions from Earth. The world stands on the brink of an incredible breakthrough, but will it be transformative - or destructive?

As David Pringle wrote, “it seemed in the mid-1970s that the world was Ian Watson’s oyster”. He began his SF writing career with “Roof Garden Under Saturn”, a story published in New Worlds magazine in 1969. Published by Gollancz in 1973, The Embedding is Watson’s striking and sometimes shocking debut novel. As the SFE put it, the book “very early confirmed his stature as an SF writer of powerful intellect”. 

Very much a novel of the “soft” sciences, The Embedding has a complex plot which braids together narratives dealing with linguistics, anthropology, colonialism and resistance, as well as first contact with alien life. Watson explores language, perception and the pursuit of meaning on various scales - from a closed-off lab, to an Amazon village, to an alien civilisation which journeys the cosmos on the shifting tides of space itself.

The sixth standalone Humanx Commonwealth novel details an underwhelming struggle over alien artefacts on an ocean world.

Originally published by Del Rey in January 1997, The Howling Stones is the sixth standalone novel in the Humanx Commonwealth setting by Alan Dean Foster. It represented a belated return by Foster to this set of books, coming 12 years after Sentenced to Prism (1985). 

This entry is set in the year 558 AA - that is to say, 558 years after the human and insectoid thranx species bound their fates together into the Humanx Commonwealth. This benevolent interstellar association has recently discovered the planet Senisran, an ocean world with thousands of mostly tiny islands. The Commonwealth is working to befriend the many tribes of local sentients, in a bid to gain permission to exploit the planet’s bounty of mineral wealth. Unfortunately, the lizard-like and warlike AAnn have also arrived with the same intentions.

The novel follows two human xenologists working for the Commonwealth to try to broker a trade deal. Pulickel Tomochelor and Fawn Seaforth do their best to understand the local culture, while avoiding conflict with the AAnn. What both sides fail to account for is the mysterious stones which the locals revere, and which prove to have extraordinary properties.

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 quite different science fiction novels both explore religious themes in troubled future scenarios.

Neither Let the Fire Fall by Kate Wilhelm nor Strength of Stones by Greg Bear are among the best-known or best-regarded of their authors’ works. In both cases, they were written well before those authors reached the peak of their success in SF. What they share is a focus on religious themes, albeit approached in very different ways.

Published in 1969 and out of print since 1974, Let the Fire Fall is the fourth novel by Kate Wilhelm (1928 - 2018). Beginning with a contemporary setting, its narrative extends out decades into the future. That future is profoundly changed by the arrival of an alien starship which lands in rural Ohio. While only one infant alien survives, the incident triggers the emergence of a sinister new religious movement which throws the United States into chaos.

Published in 1981, Strength of Stones is the fourth novel by Greg Bear (1951 - 2022). It is a revised extension of two previously published stories. In this far future tale, a confederation of faith groups - exiled from Earth after a series of brutal religious wars - have colonised the planet God-Does-Battle. Intelligent, mobile cities were created to fulfil their every need but humans were declared unworthy and cast out of these machines for living in. A thousand years later, the humans again try to lay claim to the decaying cities.

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 haunting lunar mystery with deep psychological and philosophical implications.

Rogue Moon is a standalone science fiction novel by the Lithuanian-American author and critic Algis Budrys (1931 - 2008). Today, it is one of the most praised SF novels of the 1960s, and appears on several “best of” lists. 

The story has a contemporary setting. Few know that a mysterious structure of alien origin has been discovered on the far side of Earth’s moon. Extreme steps are taken to explore it. With funding from the United States Navy, Continental Electronics has secretly devised an extraordinary machine which can duplicate matter and transmit it over large distances. Unfortunately, visitors to the lunar structure suffer a terrible fate and only a uniquely qualified man can possibly unlock its mysteries.

While perhaps better known as a prolific critic of SF, Budrys made a major impact with this unique novel, known for its strong characters, profound questions, and extended meditation on death, the self, and transcendence.