I was explicable only on paper, only by fictionalisation… (p.112)

Priest is a boring, dull and flat writer of prose, and entire passages of this book – like the description of the home life of the narrator’s sister Felicity and her husband James and their two children and their dog Jasper in a nice middle-class estate on the edge of Sheffield; or the description of the flat in Kentish Town the narrator shares with his neurotic girlfriend, Gracia – are of a stupefying, mind-numbing dullness.

Nonetheless, as with the previous book of his I’ve just read, Inverted World, it’s worth sticking with it because the very mundaneness of his prose has an insidious effect on the imagination. Precisely because his descriptions of early 1980s England are so unloveably flat and prosaic, it means that when the narrative begins to take a strange turn, you are imperceptibly led along with it.

Peter Sinclair

In a way the story is simple: Peter Sinclair (boring humdrum name) is 29, lives in London with his sexy but neurotic girlfriend, Gracia, when his life falls apart. His father dies. He is made redundant and can’t find a new job. And after a bitter row at the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker Street Gracia walks out of his life.

By chance he bumps into a middle-aged friend of his parents who happens to mention that he and his wife have bought a holiday cottage on the border of Herefordshire and Wales. One thing leads to another and they agree that Peter can get away from it all and go and live in the cottage rent-free, on the understanding that he renovates it, does the garden and interior, supervises rewiring, replastering and so on.

From the first sentence Sinclair has fretted about how to write his story and this turns out to be the theme, the subject of the novel: writing. My son read this book and recommended it to me. He’s a) young b) doing a science degree so doesn’t read much fiction whereas I am a) old b) have spent a lifetime reading fiction, and so am all-too-familiar with books about writers writing books about writers writing books about writing.

Take the Nathan Zuckerman novels of Philip Roth, who also appears in some of his fictions as a character. As does ‘Martin Amis’ in some of Amis’s novels. And so on.

Anyway, it occurs to Sinclair that, to really understand what’s going on in his life, he needs to write it all down. He does a long first draft and then, as writers are prone to do, picks it up and starts to reread it and realises it’s all wrong.

He has another stab, buying a typewriter and writing out a more systematic account of his entire life, in between comprehensively doing up the cottage he’s staying in. He is particularly proud of completely redecorating the main downstairs room, cleaning, plastering and painting it a lovely white colour. Here he sits at a table and chair in the middle of the white room, with the french windows open every day of that long summer, smelling the scent of the honeysuckle he’s planted and writing a long, thorough account of his life to date.

One day, in the middle of a rainstorm, Sinclair’s grown-up sister, Felicity, arrives, driving her swanky Volvo, bangs on the door and demands to be let in. Because he’s been telling us about his life we by this stage know that Sinclair harbours a resentment of his sister for being a few years older than him and always playing the wise, sensible older role.

But it is quite a shock to the reader to see the cottage through Felicity’s eyes and to discover that… Peter has not decorated the living room, and is not living in a rural idyll. Felicity furiously points out that he has done no decorating, the walls are peeling and lined with mould, the garden is an overgrown jungle, the kitchen is a squalid dump of unwashed dishes and rotting food, she recoils in horror from the toilet which is still blocked as it was when Sinclair arrives, and when she opens the door into the room he’s using as a bedroom she finds just a filthy sleeping bag on the floor surrounded by well-used porn mags. And then there’s the bottles of booze, Scores of empty whiskey and wine bottles. He’s obviously been completely out of control, living in squalor, drunk all the time, wanking himself to sleep in his crappy dirty sleeping bag.

This all comes as a shock to the reader because we had been lulled by Sinclair’s account of living in a rural paradise, of being clean, calm, disciplined and efficient.

Sinclair resents Felicity seeing and describing the reality of the cottage partly because it is humiliating, but mostly because it interferes with the mental reality he has created. He doesn’t complain that she’s pointing out the squalid reality. He whines that she just doesn’t see it like he does.

So we are introduced to the fact that Sinclair is not just what the English teachers call ‘an unreliable narrator’ but is a full-blown fantasist, and this prepares us for what happens next.

In the ‘real’ world Felicity insists on loading all Sinclair’s stuff into her big Volvo and driving him back to her happy middle-class family home on the outskirts of Sheffield, where they bathe and shave him, wash all his clothes and he has to settle into a respectable routine, not least because of the presence of the two school-age children.

But while he’s here he conceives a new notion, a way of taking writing the story of his life to a new level. What the prosaic accounts he’s written so far lack is the roundedness of story. Now he is inspired to write his life, but as a fantasy.

The Dream Archipelago

And so next thing we know we are watching Sinclair consciously set out to create an alternative world (p,27). In this world there is a large island named Faiandland whose capital city is Jethra. To the south of Faiandland lies a vast archipelago of smaller islands stretching out into the Tropics – the Dream Archipelago – which the inhabitants of staid, conservative Faiandland regard as places of escape and exotic adventure.

The protagonist is still named Peter Sinclair and, in this alternative reality, he has just won the lottery. Why? Because the prize is a trip to the island of Collago where they carry out a process called athanasia which means – you will live forever!

With many misgivings the narrator collects the paperwork proving he’s a prizewinner, including tickets for ships heading south, and heads south, giving us increasingly detailed descriptions of the cruise ship he’s on, all the other passengers, the cabin and eating arrangements and so on. The descriptions of his otherworld are much more enjoyable than those of rainy Sheffield or ‘London’s damp awfulness’ (p.206) and so, easily swayable as I am, I much preferred Sinclair’s fantasy story.

The final stop for this ship is the port of Muriseay, where Sinclair has to check in with the officials of the lottery. To cut a long story short, he falls in love with the woman administrator, Seri, a warm, clever and passionate woman of the south.

Seri v. Gracia

By this stage the novel’s effects have become complex, because Priest carefully alternates descriptions of the time he spends in fantasy land with Seri, with the much tougher time he has with Gracia, who one day re-enters his life, appearing unexpectedly in a car park for a visitor attraction near Sheffield (the caves at Castleton) in a meeting which turns out to have been set up by his sister, Felicity – ever-scheming to try and get Peter to grow up and accept his responsibilities.

Surprisingly, Gracia invites him to move in with her in London, so he does and we have some more flat and boring descriptions of the tube and buses and polluted streets. BUT, unsurprisingly, more of the narrative is devoted to the fantasy world in which Peter, now hooked up with Seri, continues his journey to the island where the athanasia procedure will be carried out.

And now, over half way through, Seri reveals a big thing about the athanasia procedure which is – that it consists of refreshing every cell in the body, refreshing and repairing and treating in some way so that they will always refresh and renew and never grow old, but the catch is – Amnesia. Your memory is wiped.

The way they get round this is get winners to complete a massive questionnaire detailing every single aspect of their past lives. Then, when the treatment is done and the patient has a blank mind, the therapist which they’re each assigned, uses the questionnaire answers to rebuild their memory from scratch.

The post-amnesia patient becomes what they’ve written.

This is a clever, logical extension of the whole idea of trying to find out who you are by writing an account of your life which the novel began with and you can see why casting it in the science fiction genre allows for this more absolutist treatment of the theme of writing and reality.

But Sinclair points out that he has already written the story of his life – the 200-page manuscript he’s been carting around with him in his bag. So the sci-fi setting is going allow to Sinclair to really test the premise that an autobiographical account can contain everything which is important about a person…

Alternate realities

The novel moves forward on two tracks: in some passages Peter is with Gracia in rainy London, trying to keep their relationship afloat; but in others – by far the more interesting passages (and this might be part of Priest’s intention – to show how beguiling lies are more attractive than dull reality) – he arrives at the island of Collago, is checked into the clinic and then has last-minute doubts, doubts about truth and reality, fiction and lies, and the merits of eternal life versus a normal fixed-term life, which he discusses in some detail with his partner Seri, and with a new character, the middle-aged nurse-therapist assigned to him, Lareen Dobey.

The decision is clinched when a full medical check-up reveals that Sinclair has a dangerous aneurysm in the brain which might blow at any moment and kill him. There follow more debates about mortality and eternal life at the end of which, inevitably, he takes the treatment.

Things get more knotty because all these scenes in fantasyworld are interspersed with the ‘reality’ of his relationship with Gracia which, once again, slowly grinds onto the rocks. This is because, in scenes which become increasingly spooky, Sinclair has started to see the characters from his fantasyworld in the ‘real’ world.

In one well-imagined scene, Sinclair thinks himself in a sunny tropical café watching the trams of Collago go by and having an increasingly heated argument with Seri while – like a TV flickering between channels – the prose is suddenly interrupted by ‘real’ descriptions of shabby London and the waiter – slick and graceful in fantasyland – in Londonville asks him please to leave – we realise that Peter is a schizophrenic, sitting by himself in a shabby transport café, shouting to his invisible friends (p.173).

In the most vivid example of fantasy invading ‘reality’ we see Sinclair  in bed with Gracia and actually having sex, when his mind is invaded by images of Seri, who favours a different sexual position, and thoughts about her interfere with his sexual performance in this world to such an extent that Gracia notices and it upsets her (p.164).

Gracia’s suicide attempt

Then, right on the brink of his fantasy self undergoing to athanasia treatment in the fantasy world, Sinclair returns to the flat one day and discovers Gracia has made a really serious attempt to kill herself, slashing her wrists so that  arterial blood has spattered all over the carpet, bed and walls (p.175). He sees the much-treasured manuscript beside the bed and covered with blood. She has read it and come across the character Seri and the prolonged passionate declarations of love for Seri which it contains.

Sinclair applies a tourniquet and calls an ambulance, follows on to hospital and answers questions from an over-worked social worker.

But back in the fantasy, Sinclair has the treatment and – a new chapter opens with a persuasive first-person account of what it feels like to have no memory of anything. He has to relearn language, speech, English grammar and vocabulary, slowly make sense of sounds, then music, of food then taste, rediscovers his bodily functions, the joy of farting, peeing and pooing, quickly discovers masturbation until Seri takes this over for him (the novel is frankly candid about sex all the way through – ‘She sucked me until I was ready, and then a little longer’, p.164: note that even when he’s writing about sex, Priest manages to be flat and lifeless).

And yet he has doubts. Even as Lareen and Seri take him through his biography, as written in the famous manuscript, he realises there is some kind of discrepancy. They tell him he grew up in a city called Jethra on the island of Faiandland but, just now and then, Seri slips and mentions another place, a place called ‘London’ in a country called ‘England’. And that his sister isn’t named Kalya but something called ‘Felicity’.

So the reader is aware that, within the fantasy world Sinclair has created, the fictional character of Peter Sinclair who has his mind is erased, is being made accidentally aware of another world – from his perspective an unreal fantasy world – containing ‘London’ and ‘England’.

By now you can see how the flat, mundane, colourless nature of Priest’s prose which, to begin with, you’re tempted to think of as a flaw or drawback – actually emerges as a merit, a strength. Something about the very boringness of the way he describes London, Sheffield or Jethra or Collagio, paradoxically makes them appear more ‘real’, mundane and believable – and so the increasing contortions and paradoxes he submits both to, all the more persuasive and absorbing.

All this has happened by page 200 of this 250-page book and so I was really intrigued to find out how these different stories were going to pan out.

The final straight

What happens is that Sinclair realises the women – Seri and Lareen – are teaching him about  his old life from the manuscript, but tactfully changing the names from ‘London’ and ‘Felicity’ to ‘Jethra’ and ‘Kalia’, the names they are familiar with in their world. But Sinclair grows impatient, demands to see the manuscript and, when he reads about his Uncle Billy – who features early in young Peter’s life, as a glamorous and mercurial presence, with a foul-smelling pipe and a fast car – when he reads this passage,written by his real-world counterpart, suddenly it tugs Sinclair out of his athanasia. Suddenly he remembers Gracia and her suicide attempt. But this mind – conscious of the ‘real’ world – is still stuck in fantasy world.

He sneaks out of the clinic leaving Seri behind, sleeping, makes his way down into the port and next morning catches the first ferry to a nearby island, and then on, and on again, putting distance between himself and the clinic and Lareen and Seri. Somehow he must get back to ‘London’, to the city which contains a Baker Street and Marylebone Road and where Gracia is lying in hospital attached to life-support tubes.

The final fifty pages are thoroughly mixed up with Sinclair switching between fantasy and London almost at will. In the most haunting sequence he sees Seri going down into the Underground at Marylebone Road and then follows/chases her, as she changes platform and train, continually ahead of him, leaving the  tube at Chalfont and Latimer, following her through the streets and out into fields – she, like a white-bloused ghost – always one step ahead as Peter finally gives up and lies down on the cold night field but then…

He discovers he is looking down a sloping headland to the sea, and the islands of the Dream Archipelago stretching out ahead of him. He continues down the sloping headland to the beach where he finds a warm cove and sleeps for the night. When he wakes in the morning there is a neat pile of clean clothes next to him and Seri is swimming in the sea. She comes out of the sea, up the beach and lies down next to him. They make love. All is well.

The travel by ferry through more islands at an increasingly feverish pace but all the time he knows he must go back to London and confront the real him and the real Gracia and, in another vivid and quietly terrifying passage, he finally does shake off Seri and her world and reappear in London and catch the train to Kentish Town and finds himself outside their flat and looks down into the basement window and sees Gracia laughing with another woman, waits till she’s left, and then tentatively lets himself in with his ld key.

She is in the shower and is horrified to see him when she emerges, and they have a cold and distanced conversation, slowly getting to know each other again… until Sinclair insists on reading her the manuscript, to tell her how he really feels, to make her see what it’s all really about… at which he finally forces from Gracia the agonised accusation that there’s nothing there… the wretched manuscript which he has dragged through two different worlds and all versions of his story is blank…  (p.227) just like the beautiful white room at the country cottage turned out to be derelict and peeling…

Even the existence of the manuscript on which so much time and energy has been lavished is here, right at the end, thrown into doubt. When Gracia points out that Sinclair is filthy and unwashed, we glimpse the real reality… that all the time he was fantasising about the islands so powerfully and convincingly, he has in fact been sleeping rough in the muddy countryside outside London…

His delusions reduce Gracia to panic and tears and we see how this must have been the pattern of their relationship: that it is his mental illness which makes any relationship untenable and pushed her over the edge last time. Now she rings her friend, Steve, and says she needs to come round and stay, makes her apologies to Sinclair and leaves him alone in the flat, sitting on the bed, pondering…

Till he packs all his clothes in a hold-all, along with the manuscript and sets off through the night-time streets of Kentish Town, finally huddling in a shop window till he realises he must find his purpose among the islands and… stands up and strides purposefully off through the streets of London, a new reality rippling out from his mind, the smell and the sounds and the feel of the tropical islands almost within reach…

Conclusion

The book breaks off in mid-sentence, just – as, the author has emphasised time and time again – his manuscript does – obviously implicating the novel itself in the same process of incompletion, delusion and self-deception which his precious manuscript so patently does to Peter.

Three thoughts:

1. Priest’s novels really are slow-burners. He has one or two big ideas and he follows them through with a kind of quiet, slow, unflashy thoroughness which ends up persuading the reader of them, entirely, which become completely hypnotic.

2. My girlfriend’s best friend’s brother, and mother, were diagnosed schizophrenics. When I met them, over a period of time, especially when the (grown-up) brother came to stay for weekends, I realised how deeply damaged really mentally ill people are. The description of Peter’s illness and fantasies are amazingly well-wrought but, at the end of the day, felt far too neat and shapely to bear any resemblance to the mental illness I’ve met, which his utterly lost, bewildered and terrified. Peter is, at almost all times, calm and rational in his delusions, as calm and lucid and pedantic in his English prose as his author. Thus it is a terrifyingly intense novel but I’m not sure how much, if any, resemblance it bears to actual schizophrenia.

3. Despite appearing to be about lots of to her things, in the end the novel rotates round and round the protagonist’s relationship with the ill-fated Gracia and, especially in the final scenes when Peter arrives back at her flat after sleeping rough, and sees how happy she is, new haircut, place done up and tidy, laughing with the social worker before the latter leaves.. and then quickly descends into stressed anxiety and finally tears of misery as it becomes clear that Peter is no better… well, it made me consider the vast amount of crap which women put up with in their more or less deranged, obsessive, and unhealthy menfolk.

Why?

Related links

• The Affirmation by Christopher Priest on Amazon

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shapeshifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages

1980s
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actua life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed