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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A soulful sequel to The Soul of the Robot (1974)

In episode 119, I took a look at The Soul of the Robot from 1974, the best-known novel by the little-known British SF author Barrington J. Bayley. As I continue to explore Bayley's strange, anarchic works, it is time to address his only sequel. Published in 1985, just before Bayley went on a long hiatus, The Rod of Light continues the adventures of the bronze-black robot Jasperodus, the only one of his kind to be blessed - or cursed - with a soul.

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