Science fiction

They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God. A raft of readers hate sci-fi, and probably more sheer away at the very idea of a novel about a missionary. And yet… And yet The Book of Strange New Things works. It is in many ways extraordinary; its narrative drive, its lack of sentimentality, its occasional (emotional) brutality, its humour (albeit rare) all add up to a novel which is both intelligent, thought-provoking and as readable as a potboiler. Peter, ex-junkie, loving husband, cat-lover, sets off on a journey. The novel opens with his farewell to his wife, and

‘To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would’ writes the alien narrator of Matt Haig’s novel The Humans. Professor Andrew Martin is not Professor Andrew Martin at all, but rather a Vonnedorian sent to destroy all evidence on Earth that Martin has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. This mathematical breakthrough, think the Vonnedorians, would lead to technological advances not safe in the hands of the violent and primitive humans. They must be stopped. Martin is murdered and his laptop destroyed. His wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver, must also be killed; but perhaps a little predictably, what happens

He’d probably agree with Edward Gibbon’s assessment of history as ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’ but Ned Beauman’s instinct as to why we do what we do is a lot more basic. We’re motivated by sex: whether we’re having it or – as is more often the case in Beauman’s world – not having it. And he might have a point. Take for example Ernst Hanfstaengl who described his former buddy, a certain Adolf Hitler, as “a man who was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual… I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the

This review will not be kind. But let’s not start that way. Ground lies between. Rewind. Am I the only person to find being addressed like this intensely irritating? China Mieville’s new book Railsea is full of it. Some books are so wrought with references, intertext, allusion that can only manifest itself through repeated syntactical anomalies, that they earn themselves glowing reviews for being incomparable, perhaps perverse. Many will read Railsea and wax lyrical about it; to do otherwise could suggest that the cleverness of it all has simply washed right over. This is a risk I am willing to take. Railsea, I am informed, is a work of Weird

Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63 is drawn-out even by blockbuster standards. Critics have bemoaned its surfeit of period detail (bobby socks, Hula Hoops, big-finned cars). I rather enjoyed it. King, now an august-looking 64, is a writer of towering cleverness, whose fiction manages to appeal to a reading public both popular and serious. Much of what passes these days for literary fiction is mere creative writing. Give me genre fiction (John le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith) any day. A fiction without a story — Kings knows — is scarcely worth its weight in paper. Before

A story in Edna O’Brien’s new collection — her 24th book since 1960 — shows us a mother and daughter who are thrilled to be taking tea with the Coughlans, posh new arrivals in their rural west of Ireland parish. A story in Edna O’Brien’s new collection — her 24th book since 1960 — shows us a mother and daughter who are thrilled to be taking tea with the Coughlans, posh new arrivals in their rural west of Ireland parish. But the afternoon is a washout: their haughty hostess has a neck rash and is too distracted for chit-chat. Trudging home, the girl suddenly craves tinned peaches. No, says her

More than quarter of a century later, 1984 remains firmly fixed in the future, fiction having provided a more vivid view than our memories of the year which actually happened. Even so, a couple of things from the real, boring 1984 were memorable: Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer (with a celebrated advertisement based on Nineteen Eighty-Four) and William Gibson published his first novel, Neuromancer, which popularised the idea of ‘cyberspace’, a term he had minted. Both seemed like science fiction then. Apple’s machine, with its 128 kilobytes, now seems antediluvian. Some of Neuromancer still seems futuristic, but much of it simply describes the world we live in (often brought

Michael Moorcock’s career is indisputably heroic. Michael Moorcock’s career is indisputably heroic. At a rate of up to 15,000 words a day, rudimentarily equipped with exercise books, bottles of Quink and a leaky Osmiroid, he has written, among other things, novels by the score, some of which — The Cornelius Quartet, The Colonel Pyat sequence — are among the most ambitious, interesting and funny to have been published since the war. He is not taken as seriously as he might be, though, because most of the rest of his fiction is in the despised and dreaded genre of SF. In 1968, for example, he published not only two brilliant novels

Not long ago I had an email from a friend, wondering if I’d yet read the new Ian McEwan. Not long ago I had an email from a friend, wondering if I’d yet read the new Ian McEwan. ‘Talk about a bolt from the blue,’ she said. ‘McEwan does slapstick. I never saw that coming.’ She added (unfairly, I thought) that you might class On Chesil Beach as slapstick of an unintentional sort, but her point holds. Here, in a book around a scientific theme of considerable seriousness — global warming and renewable energy — McEwan has written the closest thing he’s ever done to a farce. Told in three

Toby Litt begins the titles of his books with consecutive letters of the alphabet and takes delight in shifting style and genre. He has now reached J, and science fiction. There has been a flurry recently of ‘literary’ writers trying their hands at SF. For the most part, the complaint raised against these efforts is that they may be better written than most of science fiction, but they aren’t much cop as science fiction. Anyway, science fiction need not be badly written: fans are fond of quoting Sturgeon’s Law (after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon) — ‘Ninety per cent of SF is crud, but then 90 per cent of