The Science Fiction Encyclopedia states that "there is a false belief that SF and humour do not mix." The SFE does concede, though, that the two are more successfully fused in short stories rather than in the novel form. Like Douglas Adams, Harry Harrison, and Robert Sheckley, John Sladek was a writer who was able to make it work. The Reproductive System (1968) is Sladek's first SF novel, originally published in 1968. This frenzied satire is built on the comic potential of robots...

The definitive time travel story, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895), focuses on a protagonist who visits the extremely far future. Across over a century of time travel tales, in most cases it is the people of our own time who visit either the past or the future. Rather less commonly, the contemporary world plays host to a visitor from another era. The Masks of Time (1968) is one of those exceptions. This Robert Silverberg novel is set in the year 1999. A mysterious visitor, apparently a ...

Published in 1937, Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night is a chilling depiction of a far-future fascist dystopia, in which the triumph of Nazism also represents oblivion for humanity and freedom. A precursor to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), this is an under-recognised and chilling vision of the future which is troublingly relevant today. Get in touch with a text message! For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, ...

Originally published in 1962, John Brunner's Society of Time stories are set in an alternate Britain in the 1980s. It is 400 hundred years since the Spanish Armada was not defeated, and the Catholicism of the Spanish Empire rules much of the world. The Empire possesses the gift of time travel, though only a new pope is given the ultimate privilege of going back to witness the life of Jesus Christ... These fantastic stories follow the adventures of Don Miguel Navarro, an agent of the Society ...

It was British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, not US physicist Freeman Dyson, who first imagined the "Dyson sphere" - an immense macrostructure which would enclose and harness the entire energy of a star. Beginning with his BSFA Award-winning novel Orbitsville (1975), Northern Irish SF writer Bob Shaw explored this dizzying concept in a trilogy of novels. This episode explores not only Orbitsville but also its belated sequels Orbitsville Departure (1983) and Orbitsville Judgement (199...

An unusual detour into contemporary SF, this episode is a look at the thoroughly strange The Book of Elsewhere (2024), a collaboration between Hollywood icon Keanu Reeves and British flag-bearer for the New Weird, China Miéville. The novel is a spinoff from Reeves' comic book series BRSRKR, about an immortal warrior with 80,000 years of bloodshed behind him. For his part, Miéville called the novel "a story of ancient powers, modern war, and one person’s quest to find mortality and purpos...

The Count of Monte Cristo make not seem like the likeliest template for an SF novel, but Alfred Bester was able to take this 19th century French classic and turn it into the basis for his 1956 book The Stars My Destination. This frenetic, fast-paced adventure also begins with a kind of parody of the opening to Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. It's a hectic, baroque tale of revenge, and one of the most praised SF novels of the 1950s. Get in touch with a text message! For more classic SF reviews ...

Connie Willis is known for her stocked awards cabinet and for her lengthy novels in the "Oxford Time Travel" series. But this major figure of US SF has not always been concerned with exploring the past, or with doorstop-sized tomes. Remake (1995) is one of her less discussed novels, short enough to sometimes be categorised instead as a novella. This is story set in what was then the near future, and is now the recent past - potentially the year 2018. This is a story about the movie business,...

Time travel is, if scientists are to be believed, impossible. That has never stopped science fiction writers, who have made it one of their most frequently used and popular concepts. But if time travel is impossible, can it at least be made plausible? With his novel Timescape (1980), Gregory Benford sought to do just that. This believable SF epic draws on Benford's own professional experience as a scientist, and is rooted in the prevailing theories in theoretical physics of that time. This a...

Science fiction is famously difficult to define. In 1952, the writer and editor Damon Knight famously wrote that "science fiction is what we point to when we say it." But what if what we point to is just the surface, just an aesthetic, and what really matters is what is underneath? This episode is a brief exploration of what I see as the important gap between two linked, but different things: the living, breathing genre of SF, and the host of images that it has spawned and carried with it thr...

This is an exploration of four short novels by a neglected female writer of SF who sought to subvert the genre from within. One happy development in recent years is the growing awareness of the contribution of women writers to the development of classic science fiction. Today, writers like Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, and Andre Norton are fairly well known in genre circles. Readers and explorers of past decades continue to rediscover women writers, and to- hopefully - bring their work to grea...

Edmund Cooper is hardly a familiar name today, but he was once a significant presence on the British science fiction scene. For 23 years, he reviewed new SF books for The Sunday Times, and one of his short stories was adapted into the 1957 film The Invisible Boy - which featured the second screen appearance of Robby the Robot, introduced in the more famous Forbidden Planet. More relevantly, Cooper was also a novelist who had an abiding interest in post-nuclear war scenarios. This episo...

The generation starship is a classic concept in science fiction. Other stars are hugely far away, and our spacecraft are slow - why not condemn several generations of our descendants to live on board ship, in the hope of reaching a new world in hundreds of years' time? What could possibly go wrong? Brian Aldiss, who became a major figure in British SF, made his novel debut with a unique exploration of this theme. Non-Stop, published in 1958, is a generation ship classic and also a superb ex...

Back in episode 131, we looked at The Embedding, Ian Watson's startling debut novel published in 1973. Watson was soon to ascend to new heights, winning the BSFA Award for Best Novel for his second effort, 1975's The Jonah Kit. Like his debut, this is a kaleidoscopic, multi-threaded novel set in multiple countries and asking big questions about consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of the universe. What does all of this have to do with the sperm whale? Get in touch with a text message! ...

The backwoods of Wisconsin may not seem like the likeliest place for humanity's future in the stars to be decided, but only outside of a Clifford D. Simak story. Wisconsin was his preferred setting, particularly the woodsy Wisconsin of his youth. With his novel Way Station, he parlayed this nostalgic affection into the 1964 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Get in touch with a text message! For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates...

Rather than looking at a specific work of classic SF, this episode takes a wider view. It's my personal introduction to five concepts which I think can help enhance your science fiction reading, to boost your understanding and appreciation. Most of these concepts are highly specific to SF, and represent aspects of what makes it a unique genre with its own particular traditions and effects. Get in touch with a text message! For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. T...

Science fiction icon Philip K. Dick is such a well known figure now - over 40 years after his death - that it is possible to lose sight of the struggles he faced in his career. Back in the 1950s, he longed to break into the mainstream fiction market but was frustrated at every turn. His lifeline was Ace Books, for whom he produced a string of short novels. Time Out of Joint, which takes its title from a line in Hamlet, was one of Dick's efforts to escape his situation. Published in hardcover...

Science fiction has seen many audacious heroes who use their wit and guile to overthrow dictatorships, bring the truth to light, and save the world. While this kind of wish fulfilment has its place, so too do stories in which protagonists know only too well that they cannot change the status quo. Maureen F. McHugh made her name with a story of this type, with her 1992 debut novel China Mountain Zhang. In 2001's Nekropolis, McHugh built a story around another outsider protagonist, this time l...

A soulful sequel to The Soul of the Robot (1974) In episode 119, I took a look at The Soul of the Robot from 1974, the best-known novel by the little-known British SF author Barrington J. Bayley. As I continue to explore Bayley's strange, anarchic works, it is time to address his only sequel. Published in 1985, just before Bayley went on a long hiatus, The Rod of Light continues the adventures of the bronze-black robot Jasperodus, the only one of his kind to be blessed - or cursed - with a so...

A clash of the deep past and the near future Featured in episode 107, Pat Murphy's 1986 novel The Falling Woman was one of my favourite reads of 2024. This episode covers her debut novel, The Shadow Hunter, originally published in 1982. While fairly obscure, it is every bit as good as The Falling Woman, and arguably deserves to be seen as a classic of the early 1980s. In this story of clashing worlds, a time machine is used to drag a young Neanderthal boy hundreds of thousands of years into ...