A transitional 1950s novel of colonisation

I'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.

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A beginner’s guide to her groundbreaking SF setting

Between 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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 of Time tasked with protecting the integrity of the timeline. They are fine examples of Brunner's hugely entertaining and thought-provoking early work.

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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 (1990).

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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 purpose."

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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.

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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, about a Hollywood system completely devoid of creativity and trapped in a grim cycle of reinventing and remixing old successes instead of doing anything new. It is also a story about computer-generated slop, made up of ground-up fragments of older works, and passed off as something new. It's fair to say that Remake has some eerie connections with the way the 21st century is actually going.

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