I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor, and essayist–and a frustrated fiction writer–fascinated by ‘the fantastic’ in art or in life. Answering that fascination, I wrote Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), and I’ve written two books for the BFI Film Classics series on two great movies of the fantastic, Rosemary’s Baby (2020) and It’s A Wonderful Life (2023). I also edited three anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy, The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (2010) and Victorian Fairy Tales (2015), and now an anthology, Origins of Science Fiction (2022) for Oxford World’s Classics.
Before the term "science fiction" became established, nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers pursued strange new subject matter: time travel and dystopian futures; alien encounters and cosmic invasions; mad scientists and desperate experiments; future realms and apocalypses.
My book gathers together seventeen such stories by classic writers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
I fell in love with this book when I was eleven years old, and I still love it now. That’s despite the fact that I now see just how corrupt and vicious the first human visitors to the moon truly are.
Yet there are moments here that still hold the old enchantment. There’s the instant when the "hero" grasps that night is falling on the moon, and as the shadow of a new, strange "sunset" starts to lengthen that he has perhaps only minutes to live, or there’s the encounter with the Selenites and the realization that he faces an absolutely alien consciousness with no connection to his own.
No-one outdoes Wells in making the fantastic utterly real to the reader.
When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford the invention makes possible one of the oldest dreams of humanity: a journey to the moon. With Bedford motivated by money, and Cavor by the desire for knowledge, the two embark on the expedition. But neither are prepared for what they find - a world of freezing nights, boiling days and sinister alien…
I recently re-read this book, and it returned me at once to the joy and strangeness of the first time I read it.
Lewis offers up the theory that perhaps what we know in this world as myth and archetype exists in reality on other planets. The book brings that thought to vivid life. It detonates all the power and perplexity of the first chapters of "Genesis" and replays "Paradise Lost" on the floating blissful islands of Venus.
Though the endnote is one of glorious joy, few have been as good at depicting evil as Lewis was. Written at the height of the horrors of the Second World War, the Un-Man has haunted my nightmares for much of my life.
The second novel in Lewis's science fiction trilogy tells of Dr Ransom's voyage to the planet of Perelandra (Venus).
In the second novel in C.S. Lewis's classic science fiction trilogy, Dr Ransom is called to the paradise planet of Perelandra, or Venus, which turns out to be a beautiful Eden-like world. He is horrified to find that his old enemy, Dr Weston, has also arrived and is putting him in grave peril once more. As the mad Weston's body is taken over by the forces of evil, Ransom engages in a desperate struggle to save the innocence of Perelandra...
Though I admire her classic work, The Left Hand of Darkness, it’s The Word For World Is Forest that most lingers in the mind.
Ursula Le Guin worried that the book was too simple and that its portrait of the mad colonialist soldier, Captain Davidson, was too unshaded a vision of militarist evil. Well, perhaps. However, men like Davidson can be found in equally brutal forms in accounts of the European invasion of the Americas or in Roger Casement’s report on the Belgians in the Congo.
But it is the otherworldly Selver who possesses my imagination, that archetypal ‘little green man,’ that strange new god of a person, poised between the innocent world he seeks to protect and the violence he must unleash to ensure its survival.
When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.
Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But in defending their lives, they have endangered the very foundations of their society. For every blow against the invaders is a blow to the humanity of the Athsheans. And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.
It was Star Trek, Star Wars, and, most of all, Doctor Who that first made me fall in love with science fiction.
Some will think it an odd choice to include this novelization of Terry Nation’s television story, The Genesis of the Daleks, but Terrance Dicks is a much-underrated writer, and this portrait of war-devastated Skaro offers a fantastic image of humanity and inhumanity. Just as much as C. S. Lewis in Perelandra, the book has the Nazis on its mind, and the bunker where Davros creates his army of autonomous half-machine warriors replays the Berlin bunker where Hitler awaited the end.
In the midst of it all, the Doctor himself stands for goodness, for good humor, for compassion–a compassion that even includes at the climax of the book, the Daleks themselves. Aged ten, the Doctor was to me an image of what it might be to be a proper grown-up, and looking back, I don’t think my choice so absurd.
The Time Lords have a mission for the Doctor. Together with Sarah and Harry, he finds himself stranded on the war-torn planet Skaro where the conflict between the Thals and the Kaleds has been raging for a thousand years. Chemical and biological weapons have started a cycle of mutation among the planet's inhabitants that cannot be stopped. But Kaled scientist Davros has perfected a life support system and travel machine for the creature he knows his race will ultimately evolve into - the Dalek.
The Doctor must stop the creation of the Daleks, or perhaps affect their development so they…
It’s a strange confession to make, but after my formative reading of this book, I can’t help but feel there’s something mystical about the number ‘forty-two.’ As you remember, ‘forty-two’ is the computer Deep Thought’s answer to the question, "What’s it all about, life, the universe, and everything?".
It fits Adams’ skepticism that this baffling ultimate answer sends everyone back to rethinking what the ultimate question might be. It’s questions, not answers, that count here.
Adams simply makes me laugh, or rather complexly makes me laugh. Depressive Marvin, the paranoid android, with his "brain the size of a planet"; the horror that is Vogon poetry; even the fact that the most useful item for a space-traveler to pack would be a towel, it’s so wonderful, and Adams does as good a job as Lewis or Le Guin at catching the wonder of things.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.
Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…
