#179 Walk like thunder: the mammoth trilogy (1999 - 2001) by Stephen Baxter
Published between 1999 and 2001, the Mammoth trilogy is a fascinating set of linked SF novels by Stephen Baxter. In reality, mammoths died out 4,000 years ago but Baxter imagines a different fate for them. Thoroughly researched and at times quite moving, these are fine examples of science fiction which does without major human characters, and has readers view the world through the eyes of a very different creature.Get in touch with a text message!For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.
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#178 The new Argonauts: West of the Sun (1953) by Edgar Pangborn
A transitional 1950s novel of colonisationI'm somewhat sympathetic to Robert Silverberg's suggestion that the 1950s were the real "golden age of science fiction". In any case, that decade is notable for its fascinatingly transitional works, as SF shifted from the sometimes naive adventurism of the 1930s and 1940s, towards the more contemplative uncertainties of the 1960s and 1970s.Originally published in 1953, West of the Sun is a good example of this transition. The debut SF novel by Edgar Pangborn, it is a colonisation novel of an intriguingly unusual type.Get in touch with a text message!For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.
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#177 Other ways to live: introducing the Hainish stories by Ursula K. Le Guin
A beginner’s guide to her groundbreaking SF settingBetween 1966 and 2000, Ursula K. 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.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. Get in touch with a text message!For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.
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#176 Silicon and steel: The Reproductive System (1968) by John Sladek
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 gone awry, consuming everything in their path and remaking the world in their own image. As absurd as it is, there is something surprisingly prescient about what the novel has to say about the high-tech world we live in, decades later.Get in touch with a text message!For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.
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#175 Collision with the future: The Masks of Time (1968) by Robert Silverberg
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 time traveler from the year 2999, arrives in Rome and brings chaos with him. This is the beginning of an unusual kind of time travel story, in which the contemporary characters try to make sense of this enigmatic figure and what his hints about his own time imply about the future of humankind.Get in touch with a text message!For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.
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