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.

Get in touch with a text message!

For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.

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.

Get in touch with a text message!

For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.

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?

Get in touch with a text message!

For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.