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 time travel novel with a difference, and one which matches mind-bending science with vivid portraits of scientists at work.

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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 through the years - its aesthetic.

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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 greater prominence. Today's focus is on one such writer - Margaret St. Clair.

The Ace Doubles line was a long-running and now highly collectible fixture of western, crime, and SF publishing from 1952 to 1978. Published in the unusual dos-a-dos format, they bound together two novels, generally by two different authors. Of the eight novels that St. Clair published, half saw print in this special format - one of them joined with an early book by Philip K. Dick.

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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 episode examines two novels with quite different approaches to this theme - one is his 1958 debut (under his own name) The Uncertain Midnight, and the other is his 1973 late-career highlight The Cloud Walker.

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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 example of how writers can deploy a chain of conceptual breakthroughs, transforming their characters' view of the world.

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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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 in 1959, and belatedly in paperback a few years later, it is an SF novel which was intended to help him break into a new market. While this was a failure, this novel of deception and paranoia is a precursor to some of the writer's most celebrated works.

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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 living in a bleak vision of near-future Morocco.

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