Confronting a time mystery as a new ice age looms

At some point in the 21st century, global temperatures begin to plummet. A new period of rapid glaciation begins, and ice sheets advance ominously from the poles. While societies confront the likely arrival of a new ice age, a small group of investigators at an isolated, frozen base puzzle over a different mystery. Objects and mangled corpses are falling from the sky, seemingly from thousands of years in the past.

Originally published in 1974 and out of print since 1984, Ice and Iron is one of the more obscure novels by the American writer Wilson Tucker (1914 - 2006). Revisiting some themes from his earlier books like The City in the Sea (1951) and The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970), this novel is in part an interesting 1970s example of climate fiction. Specifically, it is inspired by theories of global cooling, a significant minority view at that time but now discredited.

Understandably little-known compared to Tucker's more prominent novels, Ice and Iron is still an intriguing science fictional mystery.

Another comic inferno from another stupid timeline

John Sladek’s first science fiction novel, The Reproductive System (1968), is a comic inferno of self-replicating machines running amok. For his second trick, the UK-based American writer doubled down. The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) is a radical intensification of Sladek’s approach, a manic satire bursting at the seams with more, more, more of everything: crazed characters, strange technologies, witty wordplay, and bizarre happenings - all in more settings, viewed from more warped perspectives.

In Sladek’s madcap near-future plot, several individuals and factions scramble to acquire and use a set of four tapes containing the fractured personality of corporate drone Bob Shairp. These tapes are put to various uses, from animating a robot duplicate of a fanatical evangelical preacher to powering a dangerously dysfunctional U.S. Army logistics system. While Shairp, reduced to pure mind, attempts to pull himself together, Washington D.C. comes under assault from an army of idiotic white supremacists.

Even more so than Sladek’s first novel, The Müller-Fokker Effect captures something of the spirit of today’s deeply stupid timeline, depicting an America collapsing under the weight of ignorance, racism, and rogue technologies.

Corporate warfare becomes deadly as the state crumbles

Science fiction has frequently depicted corporate power in the ascendancy, a theme particularly associated with the cyberpunk that came of age in the 1980s, alongside the ruinous logic of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. SF writers like William Gibson imagined vast corporate concerns displacing the power of the state, imposing their will on the population against a backdrop of rapidly advancing technology. Immense corporate power is one aspect of cyberpunk which resonates troublingly with today’s reality.

Originally published in 1977, Robert Asprin’s debut novel The Cold Cash War was written before the emergence of cyberpunk but shares its emphasis on corporate dominance. Set in a future 1990s, the novel imagines a world bent to the will of a few sprawling monopolies with sweeping control over whole segments of the economy. These private combines begin to wage covert simulated wars to more efficiently adjudicate conflicts over resources and markets. When one battle spills out onto American streets and into the public eye, it triggers a deadly conflict between corporate power and government authority.

The Cold Cash War is a product of a particular moment, after the humiliating U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War and before the rise of the corporate culture of the 1980s. While dated and flawed in a number of ways, Asprin’s novel is an interesting precursor both to cyberpunk and today’s landscape of new corporate monopolies.

The definitive travel guide to a place that never existed

A unique hub of trade, cultural exchange, and historical ferment and yet little known to the outside world, Hav was an ideal subject for Jan Morris (1926 - 2020). A veteran travel writer, by the mid-1980s she had visited and reflected on places as diverse as Venice, Oxford, New York, Oman, South Africa, and Spain. Then, she made a surprising sideways move, because Hav is an entirely fictional place.

Published in 1985, Last Letters From Hav is an extraordinary fusion of travel writing and yes, science fiction. Drawing on her rich experience, Morris created in this unique novel a special type of imagined location. Hav is simultaneously both impossible and plausible, a wild flight of fancy and uncannily real. Morris’ eye for detail, and stature as an established travel writer, led some readers to believe that Hav was an actual place. 

Writing in 2006, Ursula K. Le Guin made a persuasive claim that Last Letters From Hav should be regarded as science fiction, “of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality.” 20 years on, the novel is still outstanding, the allure of its fictional city as powerful as ever, even when our experience of the world is so different.

The influential classic of enhanced intelligence with a breakneck pace

In the opening to Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave (1954), a rabbit becomes caught in a trap. At first, it is paralysed by panic just as every past rabbit would have been in every past trap, since the first one was laid by humans long ago. This rabbit, however, is different. Its little brain works faster, more efficiently, than had ever been possible before. Soon, the rabbit has thought of a way to escape, and scampers out into the woods. 

Animals everywhere slip their nets, jump their fences, and nose open gates they had never thought to challenge. Elsewhere, a young boy fascinated by numbers and bored at home, picks up pen and paper and is soon well on his way to re-inventing differential calculus. These are not isolated cases, not flukes of random genius. In every creature with a brain, intelligence is suddenly on the up - way up.

One of Anderson’s earliest longer works, Brain Wave was initially to be serialised in the short-lived magazine Space Science Fiction. The publication folded after just eight issues, leaving the story incomplete. The full version, still startlingly brisk, emerged as a book in 1954. While dated in some ways, Brain Wave is a major and memorable novel on the topic of intelligence, and one which inspired better-known later works by Daniel Keyes and Vernor Vinge.

As a companion piece to my top ten SF reads of the year, I have put together a comprehensive roundup of everything published on Classic SF with Andy Johnson in 2025. That comprises 42 essays, each with an accompanying audio version. As well as serving as an eligibility post - of course I would love to be nominated for the Hugo for Best Fan Writer! - this is also a handy point of access to everything I have written during the year.

Again, thank you for your interest in my writing on classic SF in 2025, and I hope to connect with you in 2026. 

It has been a successful year for Classic SF with Andy Johnson. I was able to publish 42 podcast episodes over the year, most of them audio versions of published articles. Without getting too inside baseball about it, podcast downloads doubled in 2025, and website visits more than doubled. Reaching more people who are interested in classic science fiction is a good thing in itself and these numbers are a good foundation to build on. With that being said, really connecting with others is more important and I want to go much further in that during 2026 - more on that, later.

I read at a very similar rate to last year, and got through about the same number of books. As planned, I explored more deeply into the work of writers like Bob Shaw, Robert Silverberg, and Liu Cixin. I continued to broaden my familiarity with classic SF by women, focusing particularly on Margaret St. Clair and also having first encounters with the work of Connie Willis, Joan D. Vinge, and Justina Robson.

While I will conclude with some rough plans for next year, what follows is the main event: my top ten SF reads of 2025 in no particular order, with an intermission consisting of five honourable mentions.

Seeing a changing world through the eyes of mammuthus primigenius

Of all the countless extinct species catalogued by science, mammuthus primigenius - the woolly mammoth - is one of those with the firmest hold on our collective imagination. Unlike the distant dinosaurs, which were destroyed tens of millions of years before humans evolved, the last mammoth is thought to have died only around 4,000 years ago. For the vast majority of human existence, for perhaps 300 millennia, mammoths walked the Earth at the same time as our ancestors. Of course, humans hunted mammoths, and played a part in the extinction of these extraordinary animals.

Originally published between 1999 and 2001, the Mammoth trilogy is a set of three science fiction novels by the British writer Stephen Baxter. Each novel features a different mammoth as its protagonist, and the books represent an extended love letter to the species. In Baxter’s depiction, mammoths have near-human intelligence and a sprawling oral history known as the Cycle. Each of Baxter’s three mammoth heroes has a critical place in this grand story, which explores evocatively the struggle for survival against a changing climate, deadly natural hazards, and the rise of homo sapiens.

A transitional 1950s novel of colonisation

Upon crash-landing on a distant planet, six humans change and are changed by the alien societies they encounter in West of the Sun. Published in 1953, this is the first science fiction novel by Edgar Pangborn (1909 - 1976), better known for his World Fantasy Award-winning A Mirror for Observers (1954) and the post-apocalyptic Davy (1964), which Joachim Boaz has described as a masterpiece.

In 1953 Pangborn was no neophyte; he was 44 years old and had published his first novel, the mystery A-100, way back in 1930. His sudden emergence into the SF world came in 1951, with the story “Angel’s Egg”. West of the Sun employs a familiar set up, of humans finding themselves stranded on an alien world and encountering intelligent life there. However Pangborn’s treatment of this plot is unusually mature, reflective, and melancholy.

One of Pangborn’s characters states what could be the novel’s central thesis: “humans are neither good nor bad [...] but they can tip the balance.” The castaway crew of the Earth starship have profound effects on the communities they encounter, and are changed irrevocably in turn. This little-known novel of the early 1950s stands some comparison with later works, especially in terms of its depiction of gender, survival, and war.

A beginner’s guide to her groundbreaking SF setting

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018) imagined that humans did not evolve on Earth, but rather on a world of her creation - Hain. The people of this distant planet achieved starflight, and reached numerous other habitable worlds. The colonists they left behind on these planets developed distinct cultures of their own, and evolved separately. In time, they were drawn back together, first in the League of Worlds, and later in the Ekumen, an interstellar affiliation centred on Hain itself. 

Between 1966 and 2000, Le Guin published seven novels and 17 stories in the Hainish setting, which together comprise a large proportion of her science fiction. Collectively, they have won numerous major awards and sparked a large and growing body of scholarship. Le Guin’s work is frequently invoked in discussions of feminism, anthropology, sociology, and gender in science fiction. She was and remains a major figure in so-called soft SF, and the Hainish stories have a strong anthropological bent. 

The Hainish stories resist easy organisation into a rigid series. Le Guin said of them that “they aren’t a cycle or a saga [...] they do not form a coherent history.” What they do share is a setting, certain peoples and technologies, and a particular feel. Very often, these novels and stories are about the interaction of different cultures, and the challenges this contact can produce. 

This is serious-minded SF, a conscious departure from pulp formats and sureties that had long prevailed in the genre. Le Guin’s hostility to violence, openness to change, and call for understanding are everywhere in these pages. The Hainish stories have little in the way of physical action, but are rich with ideas - at their frequent best they are thought-provoking and even moving. What follows is a beginner’s guide to the Hainish stories.