Classic SF with Andy Johnson

What is 36,000 kilometres long, made of a super-strong material that doesn't exist yet, and replaces rocket launches? It can only be a space elevator, a speculative mega-engineering project that has been a fixture of science fiction since 1979. That was the year that SF superstar Arthur C. Clarke popularised the concept with his novel The Fountains of Paradise. 
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During Robert Silverberg's well-known peak period from 1967 to 1976, he put his own spin on various familiar SF tropes, from psychic powers to robots. One that he returned to frequently was time travel, and Hawksbill Station is an important example. In this short novel, expanded from a successful novella, time displacement is redeployed as a punishment. For anti-government rebels condemned to live in the Cambrian period, life is a hard, constant struggle to stay sane in a time period hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved.
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20 years ago, Alfonso Cuaron's film Children of Men was released to some acclaim. Today, its depiction of a decaying, paranoid UK is often described as chillingly prescient. Less discussed is the central concept - of a sterile world, a world without children being born. The film was loosely based on P.D. James' 1992 novel, which itself has been described as "derivative" of Greybeard - a 1964 novel by British SF legend Brian Aldiss.

This episode takes a close look at Greybeard, which was written as means for Aldiss to process a difficult time in his personal life and which is a powerfully effective entry in the tradition of the British catastrophe novel.

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This episode returns to the work of Michael Moorcock, and to one of his many trilogies - the playful, baroque books that make up The Dancers at the End of Time. Strongly influenced by the writing and art of the 1890s, these are tales of superpowered, decadent immortals living at the end of everything. 
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Fateful encounters in the long dawn of early humanity

Neanderthals seem to have been a recurring theme here lately. They have shown up in Pat Murphy's The Shadow Hunter (episode 157), in Stephen Baxter's Mammoth trilogy (episode 179), and most recently in Wilson Tucker's novel Ice and Iron (episode 185). 

This episode focuses on one of the most notable examples of prehistoric SF, William Golding's 1955 novel The Inheritors. What was a secondary element of Baxter's novels - the conflict between Neanderthals and early humans - is at the core of this novel, Golding's follow-up to his better known 1954 debut Lord of the Flies. 

Described by the Science Fiction Encyclopedia as having "considerable, even hallucinatory, force", this is a striking novel from the alien perspective of our own ancestors.
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