Published between 1999 and 2001, the Mammoth trilogy is a fascinating set of linked SF novels by Stephen Baxter. In reality, mammoths died out 4,000 years ago but Baxter imagines a different fate for them. Thoroughly researched and at times quite moving, these are fine examples of science fiction which does without major human characters, and has readers view the world through the eyes of a very different creature.

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A transitional 1950s novel of colonisation

I'm somewhat sympathetic to Robert Silverberg's suggestion that the 1950s were the real "golden age of science fiction". In any case, that decade is notable for its fascinatingly transitional works, as SF shifted from the sometimes naive adventurism of the 1930s and 1940s, towards the more contemplative uncertainties of the 1960s and 1970s.

Originally published in 1953, West of the Sun is a good example of this transition. The debut SF novel by Edgar Pangborn, it is a colonisation novel of an intriguingly unusual type.

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A beginner’s guide to her groundbreaking SF setting

Between 1966 and 2000, Ursula K. Le Guin published seven novels and 17 stories in the Hainish setting, which together comprise a large proportion of her science fiction. Collectively, they have won numerous major awards and sparked a large and growing body of scholarship. Le Guin’s work is frequently invoked in discussions of feminism, anthropology, sociology, and gender in science fiction. She was and remains a major figure in so-called soft SF, and the Hainish stories have a strong anthropological bent.

This is serious-minded SF, a conscious departure from pulp formats and sureties that had long prevailed in the genre. Le Guin’s hostility to violence, openness to change, and call for understanding are everywhere in these pages. The Hainish stories have little in the way of physical action, but are rich with ideas - at their frequent best they are thought-provoking and even moving. What follows is a beginner’s guide to the Hainish stories.

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