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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A clash of the deep past and the near future

Featured in episode 107, Pat Murphy's 1986 novel The Falling Woman was one of my favourite reads of 2024. This episode covers her debut novel, The Shadow Hunter, originally published in 1982. While fairly obscure, it is every bit as good as The Falling Woman, and arguably deserves to be seen as a classic of the early 1980s.

In this story of clashing worlds, a time machine is used to drag a young Neanderthal boy hundreds of thousands of years into his future. His arrival into a ecologically and spiritually degraded world is used by Murphy to explore the costs and perils of technological, cultural, and commercial progress. By colonising the moon and the asteroid belt, and building vast gleaming cities, how does humankind impoverish itself?

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.

Confinement and culture shock in a hyper-urban world

Recent projections suggest that the human population will peak somewhere around 2085; it could even occur, according to some models, as early as 2060. But what would society look like if it was governed by an obsessive push to increase population - to strain against every social and ecological obstacle?

Originally published in 1971, The World Inside is Robert Silverberg's exploration of extreme human population growth and density. It is set in the 24th century, at a time when the world government is close to achieving a population of 75 billion.

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.

A personal struggle with cosmic consequences

Some people are their own worst enemy - that's particularly true for John Breton. One night, he finds himself confronted with an identical, rival version of himself - who has crossed over from another timeline.

Originally published in 1968, The Two-Timers is the second novel by Bob Shaw, a follow-up to his debut Night Walk which was covered in episode 129. Both a painful exploration of a collapsing marriage, and an SF story about a threat to the integrity of the universe, this book combines the domestic and the cosmic with powerful effect.

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.

Coming of age on a hollowed-out asteroid

The critic Algis Budrys said of this novel, "one feels a real shock as one realizes that Panshin after all has never been a girl growing up aboard a hollowed-out planetoid". He was praising Rite of Passage, Alexei Panshin's 1968 novel which went on to win the Nebula Award for Best Novel while up against tough competition.

A part of the first series of Ace Science Fiction Specials edited by Terry Carr, Rite of Passage is both a powerful coming of age story in a science fiction setting, and a challenging allegory for the world economic system.

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.