I told my son (21 and a science fiction fan) the title of this book and, even before I’d begun to summarise the plot, he said, ‘So it’s about a new ice age’ – which pretty much sums it up. But with a lot of unexpectedly strange and odd aspects.

Like the same author’s Death of Grass (1956: virus kills all edible grasses i.e. wheat, oats etc plunging the world into famine) or John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951: the whole world goes blind) or J.G. Ballard’s two eco-disaster novels, The Drought (1964: fresh water runs out) and The Drowned World (solar flares warm the atmosphere and melt the icecaps; published, incidentally, the same year as this novel, 1962) The World In Winter takes the premise of one simple but huge catastrophe hitting the world, and then studies the effects of the resulting social collapse through the eyes of a handful of middle-class characters.

Part one – London

1. The sun cools

The Big Disaster is that the amount of radiation (i.e. heat) coming from the sun declines – not hugely, by about 10%, but that is enough. The formerly temperate latitudes become uninhabitably cold, which includes England and the city where the story is (rather inevitably) set, London. It’s called the Fratellini Effect after the Italian scientist who first reported it.

2. The middle-class characters

are as follows: Andrew Leedon works on a documentary TV show (presumably for the BBC). He is married to Carol, they live in Dulwich and have two boys both away at boarding school, Robin and Jeremy. Leedon’s job as a journalist makes him cognate with the protagonists of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, journalist and documentary scriptwriting couple Mike and Phyllis Watson. It’s an obvious and handy device, especially for a disaster/apocalypse novel, because it means your characters work in a newsroom and so directly or through colleagues, learn about events from all round the world, allowing the author to describe global developments from a panoptic point of view, while saving selected ones for your characters to go and experience in person – very much the procedure of The Kraken Wakes.

But Christopher is notably more gritty than Wyndham. It’s emphasised that Leedon’s marriage is not full of love; Carol is more selfish than he realised, although stunningly good looking.

Andy’s Editor-in-Chief, McKay, introduces him to a senior civil servant in the Home Office, David Cartwell, posh, charismatic and married to rather plain Madeleine (this is emphasised and important to the plot). The two couples, the Leedons and Cartwells, socialise a few times, then, one night when David is tied up with work, he encourages Andy to pop round and see Madeleine (‘Maddie’).

It takes 40 pages or so for Andy to discover his wife, Carol, has started an affair with charismatic David, and David is none-too-subtly encouraging him (Andy) to start an affair with his wife, Maddie. Carol comes to meet David off a flight at Heathrow, to tell him in the bar that she’s having an affair.

Andy still loves his wife and hopes that either Carol or David will tire of the other, but this is because he hasn’t grasped that they are both promiscuous by nature. He is shattered when she tells him she’s already had three or four affairs behind his back. Poor Andy carries on clinging to the hope that Carol will take him back, long after he’s been forced to move out of the marital home and gone to live in a hotel. He pops round to see Maddie regularly, to pour out his woes and cry on her shoulder. At first he is distraught and she is upset and they share their unhappiness. Eventually the inevitable happens and they start a relationship, but it is sort of half-hearted, born out of their mutual plight rather than mutual attraction.

So the main surprise in the book is the amount of effort Christopher devotes to analysing this four-way affair in great detail before any of the Big Disaster arrives.

3. Stages of social collapse

Christopher’s aim is to establish the very boring, mundane, ordinary lives of some rather nice, upper-middle-class professionals. Only intermittently do any of them discuss what is at first only one news story among many others, the minor story about some boring-sounding meteorological changes, which one or other of the men is occasionally involved in writing about or discussing at civil service meetings. We are fed more information about the Fratellini Effect, about the volume of heat which reaches the earth and estimates of the percentage by which it appears to be declining…

When The Big Collapse comes, it comes fairly fast, over the course of an autumn and increasingly severe winter in England. First snow falls heavily in the south of England, including London. The Thames freezes over as far as Chiswick and then the Pool i.e. the centre of trade in and out of the country. Transport becomes difficult. The government asks people to ration coal and food.

David invites Andy for a drink (they have carried on being drinking associates, David in the carefree charming manner of the eternal public school winner, Andy in the angry sulking mode of the eternal cuckold). David advises Andy to take Carol and the boys to Africa, probably to one of the old colonies. Andy thinks David is joking. He’s not. A week or so later, meeting again down the pub, David hands Andy an envelope from Carol. It tells him that she really has a) taken the boys out of school b) sold their family house c) flown to Lagos. Andy is scandalised. David says it’s going to get a lot worse.

Troops start patrolling the railway termini. Glasgow is in the hands of a mob. Later Andy and Carol are walking in Hyde Park when they get caught up in a riot inspired by agitators at Speakers’ Corner, a mob which rampages off to Harrods to loot it for food. Andy says he’d better move in with Maddie. Save money, energy, and to protect her.

David explains to Andy that the government is setting up a security fence around central London, marked by barbed wire, policed by the army with guns – to be called the Pale. In the last scene of part one, Andy goes on a tour of the perimeter fences with a patrol of two armoured cars led by Captain Chisholm, tall, early twenties, Yorkshire accent. When one of the cars breaks down in heavy snowdrifts outside Kings Cross an ugly crowd gathers which Chisholm disperses with tear gas.

Moving on, Andy persuades them to take a slight detour through the snowdrifts to St Bart’s hospital. The hospital is half-wrecked with plentiful broken windows and frozen corpses in the deep snow around the main entrance. They hear screams and down a side alley discover a nurse in the process of being gang-raped. They come to her rescue, shooting one of the three rapists dead and helping her into the armoured car, where she sits sobbing quietly. But when they come to the barbed wire barricade at St Paul’s the lieutenant in charge won’t allow her to be admitted into the Pale. Orders are orders. There isn’t enough food to feed the current inhabitants of the Pale. While the two men argue, the nurse gets out of the car and, without a word, turns and trudges off through the heavy snow. I think it’s meant to be an image of utter resignation and despair.

Back within the Pale, David pays Andy and Maddie a last visit. They are both permanently dizzy from hunger, they are eking out supplies of coffee with 2 or 3 cups a week. David says he is in charge of the evacuation plan and can get them on one of the last flights out of England. It’s now or never. Maddie initially says no but David blackmails them by saying, in that case, he won’t go and all three of them will stay and starve in snowbound London. So Maddie agrees to leave.

Part two – Nigeria

Which means that part two opens and remains set, rather unexpectedly, in Nigeria circa 1962. Now, Nigeria had only gained its independence from Britain in 1960, so… Well, presumably the recentness of independence from colonial mastery feeds into Christopher’s characterisations and plot. Throughout this part I was trying to gauge how much is straight disaster novel and how much is liberal satire on the white colonial master brought low.

Andy and Carol arrive and check into a hotel only to discover most of the menial staff are poor European whites. Andy goes to see Carol who, you will recall, left some months earlier. She is nicely ensconced in a flat and has sent the two boys to boarding school in Ibadan; some people always come out on top. They meet in a bar, which has been recently decorated with murals of frozen Europe. Carol warns Andy conditions are hard here in Nigeria. Would he consider a job in the army training Nigerians? Rumour has it there’s going to be a pan-African war against apartheid South Africa, but Andy is not that kind of man. As he’s leaving he loiters to chat to the poor white doorman and accidentally sees Carol re-entering the club on the arm of a prosperous-looking Nigerian dressed in evening suit. Aha. She has found a sugar daddy. His name is Adekema. She was always that kind of woman i.e. resourceful, resilient and adaptable.

When Andy and Maddie go to the bank to change the savings they had wired ahead, an unnecessarily gleeful assistant manager tells them that a Nigerian government edict has recently declared Sterling non-existent. There is no money for them to extract. They go to complain to the British Embassy but discover the embassy staff are in the same plight. From now on all Brits are going to have to sell what possessions they have or get whatever jobs they can, from a standing start. Like Carol, the embassy guy suggests Andy tries to get a job in the Nigerian army.

Maddie and Andy walk down to the beach with their few possessions, lie under the stars and Andy finds himself crying for the old world and the lives they have lost. Maddie undoes her blouse and bra and cuddles him to her bosom where he cries his eyes out. This exactly recalls the scene in The Kraken Wakes in the Caribbean island where, after seeing the exploding anemone creatures snaring people all round the square in their sticky cilia and drawing them together into mulched balls of flesh, the male protagonist Mike Watson finds himself uncontrollably weeping and having to be consoled by his tougher wife, Phyllis. So much for ‘boys don’t cry’ (page 96).

The embassy recommended they try a man named Alf Bates, so Maddie and Andy go see him. Unlike the pukka protagonists, Alf is working class, as indicated by his name, his accent and by the terms he uses to describe the locals, which include ‘blackie’ (which I don’t think I’d hear or read before) and other, less flattering terms, which you can guess.

Alf suggests to Maddie that she becomes an escort in a bar on the lagoon, which Andy angrily rejects. Then he fits them up with somewhere to stay, although he warns them it is a slum, a bad, African slum. And it is, indeed, one room with loose floorboards, one of which you pull up to poop into the space under the building, a roof made of leaky corrugated iron, a bed made of greasy sacking, no other furniture. It is Maddie’s turn to have a moment of utter misery and Andy tries to comfort her (page 113).

Andy applies to join the Nigerian Army. Though he is told he is too old, at 37 (page 105) for a combat role, he is eligible to become a trainer based on his National Service in the Tank Regiment. However it’s only at this point of the process that the civilised Nigerian interviewer reveals that he will have to pay £120 dash or bribe. Andy doesn’t even have ten pounds. So that option closes.

On Alf’s advice Maddie has wangled a job at the local hospital. Not even as a nurse, but a cleaner. Andy comes down with a fever. Paying a local woman to tend to him while Maddie’s at work and paying for medicines uses up the last of their money. Now they have to survive on her salary and the occasional scraps she can filch from the hospital kitchen.

Thus these two former prosperous, middle-class white people are living in abject poverty when, one day, Andy is approached in a local market by a well-dressed Nigerian who asks him if he’ll appear in a documentary about poor white refugees. There’s a pound in it for him so Andy jumps at the chance and is duly filmed buying some tat from a stall for the cameras. A few days later Andy is visited by a polite and smartly dressed Nigerian who he recognises as an African intern who he was kind to when he and some peers visited Andy’s TV studios back in England, way back at the start of the novel. He recognised Andy’s face, and now he is repaying Andy’s favour.

His name is Abonitu. His uncle is the Chairman of the Television Board. Abonitu is a producer and he’s looking for an assistant. Would Andy like to be his assistant? Andy leaps at the chance! So on this wonderful day, he is whisked from insanitary poverty to a penthouse room in a hotel. He has new clothes, a new pad, good food, he and Maddie can afford to take a maid. Their lives are transformed out of all recognition. Suddenly they are back in middle class-land, eating at restaurants, drinking in clubs, fussing about the vintage of wines or whiskeys.

But the Carol-David-Maddie plotline continues. Carol invites him for a drink. She tentatively suggests that, as and when David finally leaves London and arrives in Lagos, Maddie might get back together with him. In which case… she hesitantly suggests, do you think there’s any possibility of her and Andy getting back together? Andy is torn between scorn and the embers of love for Carol.

Later there’s a visitor to Andy and Maddie’s apartment. It is a Brit, Wing-Commander Peter Torbock. He confirms that things in England are finished. The royal family and government have fled to the West Indies. He reveals that David (still in London, remember) asked the wing-commander to smuggle a letter past the censorship to Maddie here in Nigeria. In it David says he isn’t coming after all. He hates change. He’s going to stay in London. Torbock shares a drink or two, discusses his own future: he fancies settling in South Africa, even if it does mean fighting in the war with the rest of Africa which everyone is talking about. He’ll be flying back to London one last time then that’s it.

Next morning when Andy wakes up there’s a note on the table and breakfast nice and neatly laid for one. Maddie has abandoned him. She left bright and early and harassed Torbock into taking her with him on the flight back to London. Despite all they’ve been through, and what they’ve meant to each other, she’s decided she wants to be with David.

Cut to Andy getting plastered on a bar crawl down by the marina, Lagos’s entertainment hotspot. There’s a very loud jazz band and three strippers onstage while Abonitu informs a very drunk and surprised Andy that several African countries are mounting expeditions not just to northern Europe, but to Britain in particular. Egyptian and Algerian ones are leaving in the spring but the Nigerians plan to steal a march on them by setting off this winter. Abonitu is going as documentary-maker to the expedition: does Andy want to go too? What has he got to lose – he says yes.

Part three – Back to England

Part three is long and packed with scenes and descriptions. The African expedition sails to Brittany where the pack ice makes further progress impossible, so they unload the fleet of hovercraft they’ve brought with them, in order to travel over the solid ice covering the English Channel.

Guernsey Andy and Abonitu are in the slowest hovercraft which falls astern and loses the others in a dense mist. They end up completely lost and come ashore on Guernsey, sticking up out of the surrounding ice. They are immediately surrounded by men with guns and an imposing man on a carthorse.

This man claims to be the Governor of Guernsey, takes them through the snowdrifts to a former hotel, asks to be called Emil, ignores Abonitu (because he’s black) and continually humiliates a man he calls ‘the Colonel’, the former governor of the island. Emil spends the evening getting steadily more drunk as he holds court to his captives, but a little after they’ve been shown up to a spare bedroom the ‘Colonel’ sneaks in and helps them escape. They go down through a drain to the beach, where they take by surprise the guard of Guernsey men standing over the hovercraft with guns. Having crept aboard the hovercraft and overpowered the Guernsey guards on it, they fire up the engine and, while the African soldiers pick off the men on the quay who are now alerted to their getaway, Andy steers the hovercraft over one of the fishing boats Emil’s men had used to block the harbour (tense moment!) and out onto the open ice.

Andy helped save Abonitu’s life and so the pair are now blood brothers.

Mainland England They find eventually rejoin the main convoy and continue round the Isle of Wight and up the River Itchen to Winchester. From the beginning there have been tensions among the Nigerians and between Abonitu and the thuggish leader of the expedition, Mutalli. On several occasions Abonitu makes good decisions and humiliates Mutali in front of the others. For example, he suggests that the sentries being set weren’t sufficient and were lazy into the bargain, so he insisted they be doubled and monitored.

Fight Next morning the only other two whites on the expedition, two technicians, were found to have absconded. It’s this which triggers a showdown between Mutalli and Abonitu which quickly escalates into a knife fight. The Africans form a circle and the two men go for each other. Just like in the movies the bigger, stronger man, Mutalli, is initially winning, and cuts Abonitu a couple of times, before he fatefully slips on a patch of ice and, as he tries to regain his balance, Abonitu is able to head butt him to the floor, then kick him in the head, then kneel over him and stab him repeatedly.

Thus Abonitu becomes the expedition’s de facto leader and institutes much tighter discipline. Having crossed ‘country’ (locked under the pack ice) the expedition of hovercraft arrive at the Thames valley and make their way downstream towards London. At Chiswick they come across what looks like a battlefield, with the ice spiking what look like thousands of bodies strewn across a field. Some of the ice has been hacked away and bits of body chopped off, obviously to be eaten. That’s how things are, now, in ice-bound England.

Frozen London The craft pass a frozen Battersea Power Station and the Tate, the latter shows signs of having been on fire, most of the marketable art was sold long ago, the enjoyment of these kinds of scenes deriving from the frisson of seeing places you’re so familiar with (well, if you’re a Londoner) transformed by disaster and ruined. They finally stop at the Palace of Westminster and create a base there. All kinds of ironies about the former colonial masters, now having an expedition of Africans venture into their ruined territory…

The expedition attacked But the expedition is attacked almost immediately by men with guns. In fact, the expedition comes under continual attacks, mounted in shifts, and then snipers start up, firing from the spires of Westminster Abbey. Eventually the Africans are forced to create a laager of hovercraft out on the Thames. They abandon all thought of peacefully exploring the streets of London. They are under siege.

Colonial ironies The sniping continues and then the natives start to push metal protection walls out onto the Thames creating a series of firing shields. Throughout all this Andy repeatedly asks Abonitu why they’re even there, what the point of the expedition is, and no really convincing answer is given. It felt to me more as if the author enjoyed the symbolism of civilised high-tech Africans returning to the ruined, dead heart of the old empire which once (very recently) ruled and dominated and defined them. This topic results in a lot of conversation about savages and empire and colonialism and barbarians, which is quite ‘witty’ and ironic, but doesn’t quite justify the actual story, the narrative.

Parlay Eventually it dawns on both of them that maybe someone should go and parley with the natives and, well, since Andy is the only white man in the entire expedition… So Andy sets off walking across the frozen Thames towards the embankment, waving a white flag and, to his relief, they stop shooting.

The Governor of London The natives throw down a rope ladder onto the frozen ice, heave him up over the embankment, identify him as white and unarmed, and take him along the Embankment to Charing Cross, up and across Trafalgar Square. Here he is blindfolded before being led into some building, and up some carpeted stairs, and into a room where he hears the voice of the person his captors tell him is ‘the Governor of London’ and…. it is none other than his old frenemy, David Cartwell!

Now there is one of those Big Reveal scenes, where Dr No or Goldfinger or whoever the Baddie Mastermind is, explains the true nature of the situation our hero has been trying to piece together.

Thus David explains to Andy why he likes it here in deep-frozen London and how he came to be in complete control of what was once defined as ‘the Pale’, lording it over the surviving men and women. He puts a proposition to Andy: hack through the cables powering the lights on the hovercraft, give the attacking English just five minutes to overwhelm the Africans and he will be rewarded. Andy is openly sceptical: what, be rewarded with a pitiful existence in a deep freezer? Not very appealing.

David replies that they have evidence that the Fratellini Effect has bottomed out. Not only that, but the weather is stabilising and improving. They’re hoping for a partial thaw next summer, when they may be able to grow things and get the country ‘back on its feet’.

Enter Maddie Andy says he’ll think about it but then David plays his ace and orders someone else to join their tete-a-tete, the someone else being none other than his former lover, Maddie! and they proceed to have a gushy lover’s reunion. Rather absurdly, she declares that it was Andy she really loved all along; in fact Andy is the first to admit that the whole thing feels like a fairy tale (page 222).

At first Andy accuses Maddie of only being so lovey-dovey to him because David put her up to it in order to persuade him to betray the Nigerians. But Maddie says that as soon as she arrived back in London she regretted ever leaving because she realised it’s him she loved all along. At which point she removes her thick fur coat and reveals that she is pregnant. The baby is his. ‘Oh darling I love you.’ ‘Yes I love you, too etc.’ For me, by this point, the novel had ceased being credible or interesting. Hollyoaks on ice.

Andy is taken back to the Embankment and freed to walk back across the frozen Thames to the hovercraft.

All through this part three, Abonitu has been referring off and on to England as his ‘queen’, who needs to be taken, owned, possessed and ravished. Now, when Andy tells him he saw Maddie, these metaphors go into overdrive and I realised the author intends us to see both men as being on personal quests for quixotic females: Andy for ever-changeable Maddie, Abonitu for the remnants of colonial Britannia. This seems quite attractive when I summarise it, but in the actual reading, seemed heavily contrived.

Abonitu says they should set up base in the Tower of London, it would be more ‘symbolic’, and from there they can storm and burn their way westward, as if it really were turning into some kind of medieval allegory.

Anyway, the climax of the story is that, as Abonitu is debriefing Andy on his conversation with David, Abonitu turns his back to get some more brandy, Andy leans over and grabs his rifle and then clobbers him over the head with the rifle butt. Abonitu falls unconscious and then Andy makes his way sneakily around all the hovercraft, pulling out the cables which feed the floodlights, as per David’s instructions. When the night-time English attack begins, the Nigerians find none of their floodlights work, so they can’t illuminate the frozen Thames, so they can’t see where the attackers are, with the result that the Londoners they easily storm the African hovercraft.

Christopher appears to be a bit bored by his own ending. The last chapter is two pages long and finds David, the victor of the Battle of the Frozen Thames, dictating terms to Abonitu, the loser. He announces that he will let Abonitu and his men return to Africa in one of the hovercraft, retaining the other 10 for himself. He tells him to tell the African nations that Britain is still a sovereign state and will not accept colonial status, and so that, when and if he (Abonitu) returns, it should be as ambassador to an equal country.

In the end, the novel hasn’t been much about the new ice age, but about middle-class relationships and adultery, and about national and ethnic identities and loyalties. In the end, Andy is true to his country and his race. I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be deeply ironic, satirical, or straight-on patriotic.

Thoughts

It’s an odd book. Lots of it is very well described – the crappy one-room slum shanty in Lagos, in particular, stays in my memory as an emblem of immiseration. But many elements stick out as odd: leaving aside the basic premise (sun cools, new ice age etc) the prolonged focus on the tangled affairs of the two middle class couples and the way they become so central to the story, in particular the way David the smooth civil servant ends up becoming Governor of a post-disaster London, all this seems…

Then the wholesale removal of the action to Nigeria is an unusual and disconcerting development, particularly the way the protagonists are plunged into such utter poverty and misery.

And then there’s the bizarreness of the African expedition to darkest England (does Nigeria possess lots of hovercraft?) which is made even weirder by the protracted episode with the drunken Governor of Guernsey and his vicious mistreatment of the former governor, the now-humiliated ‘Colonel’.

Some of these sound good in theory, in a high level summary, but read very oddly in the flesh, when written out into sentences and paragraphs of narrative. At moments it seems more like a bad dream than a realistic narrative.

The book is as deliberately and consciously far from gee-whizz ray guns and rocket-ship space opera as Christopher can make it and has men crying in despair and a fairly serious analysis of the shifting moods and emotions in a complex menage-à-quatre, it has a multi-tiered depiction of race both within a former imperial colony and among the former colonised who find themselves in the position potential colonisers, at which point the novel becomes a meditation on race relations much more pregnant with meaning than the original sci fi disaster.

And yet…. somehow, all these powerful and fierce images and elements, somehow they don’t all quite add up, lots goes on but it doesn’t cohere and, despite the adult themes, it doesn’t feel… fully grown-up. 

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Credit

The World In Winter by John Christopher was published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1962. All references are to the 2016 Penguin paperback edition.

Reviews of other John Christopher novels

• The Death of Grass (1956)
• The World In Winter (1962)
• A Wrinkle In The Skin (1965)
• The White Mountains (1967)
• The Guardians (1970)
• John Christopher on the changing face of science fiction (2003)

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 latter’s invention, an anti-gravity material they call ‘Cavorite’, to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites, leading up to its chasteningly moralistic conclusion
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 and they rebel
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, an 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 unimaginable strangeness

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 vastest 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, where mysteries and adventures unfold

1940s

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern 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 vanished 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
1951 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – the whole world turns out to watch the flashing lights in the sky caused by a passing comet and next morning wakes up blind, except for a handful of survivors who have to rebuild human society while fighting off the rapidly growing population of the mobile, intelligent, poison sting-wielding monster plants of the title
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psycho-historian 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  Foundation Trilogy, which describes 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 fast-moving 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 one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1953 The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham – some form of alien life invades earth in the shape of ‘fireballs’ from outer space which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of ships passing over the ocean deeps, gruesome attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements around the world and then, in the final phase, the melting of the earth’s icecaps and global flooding
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 who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1954 Jizzle by John Wyndham – 15 short stories, from the malevolent monkey of the title story to a bizarre yarn about a tube train which goes to hell, a paychiatrist who projects the same idyllic dream into the minds of hundreds of women around London, to a chapter-length dry run for The Chrysalids
1955 The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – hundreds of years after a nuclear war devastated North America, David Strorm grows up in a rural community run by God-fearing zealots obsessed with detecting mutant plants, livestock and – worst of all – human ‘blasphemies’ – caused by the lingering radiation. But as he grows up, David realises he possesses a special mutation the Guardians of Purity have never dreamed of – the power of telepathy – and he’s not the only one, but when he and his mind-melding friends are discovered, they are forced to flee to the Badlands in a race to survive
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
1956 The Death of Grass by John Christopher – amid the backdrop of a worldwide famine caused by the Chung-Li virus which kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) decent civil engineer John Custance finds himself leading his wife, two children and a small group of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism, in order to reach the safety of the remote valley where his brother owns a farm where they can plant non-grass crops and defend themselves
1956 The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham – 11 science fiction short stories, mostly humorous, satirical, even farcical, but with two or three (Survival, Dumb Martian and Time To Rest) which really cut through and linger in the memory
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham – one night a nondescript English village is closed off by a force field, all the inhabitants within the zone losing consciousness. A day later the field disappears and the villagers all regain consciousness but two months later, all the fertile women in the place realise they are pregnant, and nine months later give birth to identical babies with platinum blonde hair and penetrating golden eyes, which soon begin exerting telepathic control over their parents and then the other villagers. Are they aliens, implanted in human wombs, and destined to supersede Homo sapiens as top species on the planet?
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
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1959 The Outward Urge by John Wyndham – a relatively conventional space exploration novel in five parts which follow successive members of the Troon family over a 200-year period (1994 to 2194) as they help build the first British space station, command the British moon base, lead expeditions to Mars, to Venus, and ends with an eerie ‘ghost’ story

1960s

1960 Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham – ardent feminist and biochemist Diana Brackley discovers a substance which slows down the ageing process, with potentially revolutionary implications for human civilisation, in a novel which combines serious insights into how women are shaped and controlled by society and sociological speculation with a sentimental love story and passages of broad social satire (about the beauty industry and the newspaper trade)
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
1961 Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham – Six short stories dominated by the title track which depicts England a century or so hence, after a plague has wiped out all men and the surviving women have been genetically engineered into four distinct types, the brainy Doctors, the brawny Amazons, the short Servitors, and the vast whale-like Mothers into whose body a bewildered twentieth century woman doctor is unwittingly transported
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
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 World in Winter by John Christopher – the amount of heat emitted by the sun suddenly declines; not totally, but enough to plunge the temperate zones, specifically northern Europe, into a new ice age, and so all Europeans who can afford to, flee to Africa. Here the novel acquires black characters who accompany the main protagonist on a colonising expedition back to frozen England – the entire novel told through the tangled love affairs of two middle-class London couples
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
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
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
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds and the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
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
1968 Chocky by John Wyndham – Matthew is the adopted son of an ordinary, middle-class couple who starts talking to a voice in his head; it takes the entire novel to persuade his parents the voice is real and belongs to a telepathic explorer from a distant planet
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes in the style of a scientific inquiry, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe and starts spreading uncontrollably
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
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

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
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same pattern, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
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 his 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’ shape-shifting 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 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
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
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1973 The Best of John Wyndham 1932 to 1949 – Six rather silly short stories dating, as the title indicates, from 1932 to 1949, with far too much interplanetary travel
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
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
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 The Alteration by Kingsley Amis – a counterfactual narrative in which the Reformation never happened and so there was no Enlightenment, no Romantic revolution, no Industrial Revolution spearheaded by Protestant England, no political revolutions, no Victorian era when democracy and liberalism triumphed over Christian repression, with the result that England in 1976 is a peaceful medieval country ruled by officials of the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians in the so-called ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
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 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself ‘President Manson’, revived an old nuclear power station to light up Las Vegas and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
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 actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
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 Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – his breakthrough book, ostensibly an autobiography focusing on this 1930s boyhood in Shanghai and then incarceration in a Japanese internment camp, observing the psychological breakdown of the adults around him: made into an Oscar-winning movie by Steven Spielberg: only later did it emerge that the book was intended as a novel and is factually misleading
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’: Turner is a tough expert at kidnapping scientists from one mega-tech corporation for another, until his abduction of Christopher Mitchell from Maas Biolabs goes badly wrong and he finds himself on the run, his storyline dovetailing with those of sexy young Marly Krushkhova, ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’ who is commissioned by the richest man in the world to track down the source of a mysterious modern artwork, and Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’ and computer hacker
1987 The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard – strange and, in my view, profoundly unsuccessful novel in which WHO doctor John Mallory embarks on an obsessive quest to find the source of an African river accompanied by a teenage African girl and a half-blind documentary maker who films the chaotic sequence of events
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 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Running Wild by J.G. Ballard – the pampered children of a gated community of affluent professionals, near Reading, run wild and murder their parents and security guards
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 Angie 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 been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s

1990 War Fever by J.G. Ballard – 14 late short stories, some traditional science fiction, some interesting formal experiments like Answers To a Questionnaire from which you have to deduce the questions and the context
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining 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
1991 The Kindness of Women by J.G. Ballard – a sequel of sorts to Empire of the Sun which reprises the Shanghai and Japanese internment camp scenes from that book, but goes on to describe the author’s post-war experiences as a medical student at Cambridge, as a pilot in Canada, his marriage, children, writing and involvement in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 70s: though based on  his own experiences the book is overtly a novel focusing on a small number of recurring characters who symbolise different aspects of the post-war world
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop-with-a-heart-of-gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1994 Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard – a sort of rewrite of Lord of the Flies in which a number of unbalanced environmental activists set up a utopian community on a Pacific island, ostensibly to save the local rare breed of albatross from French nuclear tests, but end up going mad and murdering each other
1996 Cocaine Nights by J. G. Ballard – sensible, middle-class Charles Prentice flies out to a luxury resort for British ex-pats on the Spanish Riviera to find out why his brother, Frank, is in a Spanish prison charged with murder, and discovers the resort has become a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour – i.e. sex, drugs and organised violence – which has come to bind the community together
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – second novel in the ‘Bridge’ trilogy: Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson – third of the Bridge Trilogy in which main characters from the two previous books are reunited on the ruined Golden Gate bridge, including tough ex-cop Rydell, sexy bike courier Chevette, digital babe Rei Toei, Fontaine the old black dude who keeps an antiques shop, as a smooth, rich corporate baddie seeks to unleash a terminal shift in the world’s dataflows and Rydell is hunted by a Taoist assassin

2000s

2000 Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard – Paul Sinclair packs in his London job to accompany his wife, who’s landed a plum job as a paediatrician at Eden-Olympia, an elite business park just outside Cannes in the South of France; both are unnerved to discover that her predecessor, David Greenwood, one day went to work with an assault rifle, shot dead several senior executives before shooting himself; when Paul sets out to investigate, he discovers the business park is a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour i.e. designer drugs, BDSM sex, and organised vigilante violence against immigrants down in Cannes, and finds himself and his wife being sucked into its disturbing mind-set
2003 Pattern Recognition by William Gibson – first of the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set very much in the present, around the London-based advertising agency Blue Ant, founded by advertising guru Hubertus Bigend who hires Cayce Pollard, supernaturally gifted logo approver and fashion trend detector, to hunt down the maker of mysterious ‘footage’ which has started appearing on the internet, a quest that takes them from New York and London, to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris
2007 Spook Country by William Gibson – second in the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set in London and featuring many of the characters from its immediate predecessor, namely Milgrim the drug addict and ex-rock singer Hollis Henry
2008 Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard – right at the end of his life, Ballard wrote a straightforward autobiography in which he makes startling revelations about his time in the Japanese internment camp (he really enjoyed it!), insightful comments about science fiction, but the real theme is his moving expressions of love for his three children

2010s

2019 Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns – sensitive and insightful biography with special emphasis on a) Wyndham’s wartime experiences first as a fire warden, then censor, then called up to serve in Normandy, and b) Wyndham’s women, the strong feminist thread which runs through all his works