"You get the opportunity to work on a proper canvas," he says. Space opera is unfashionable, but Banks couldn't care less. Frank's victims are mostly animals - but he has found time to kill a few children …īuy this book at the Guardian bookshop Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987) Instead, Auster creates his dystopia by magnifying familiar flaws and recycling historical detail: the novel's working title was "Anna Blume Walks Through the 20th Century".īuy this book at the Guardian bookshop Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)Ī modern-gothic tale of mutilation, murder and medical experimentation, Banks's first novel - described by the Irish Times as "a work of unparalleled depravity"- is set on a Scottish island inhabited by the ultimate dysfunctional family: a mad scientist and his unbalanced sons, older brother Eric, who has been locked up for everyone's safety, and Frank, the 16-year-old narrator, tormented by a freak accident that cost him his genitals.
This small hope flickers in a world where no apocalyptic event is specified. She records horrific scenes, but also a deep capacity for love. Anna buys a trolley and wanders the city, salvaging objects and information. Nobody can leave, except as a corpse collected for fuel. She finds a ruin, where buildings collapse on scavenging citizens. In this Booker prize-winning novel about novels, Atwood bends genre and traps time, toying brilliantly with the roles of writing and reading.īuy this book at the Guardian bookshop Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)Īnna Blume, 19, arrives in a city to look for her brother. Iris is 83 in the cantankerous present-day narrative, and ready to set the story straight about the suspicious deaths of her sister, husband and daughter. Published posthumously by Laura's sister, Iris, the book outrages postwar sensibilities. We assume she is Laura Chase, daughter of an Ontario industrialist, who records their sex and sci-fi stories in a novel, The Blind Assassin. On planet Zycron, tyrannical Snilfards subjugate poor Ygnirods, providing intercoital entertainment for a radical socialist and his lover. Wish-fulfilment of the highest order, the novels are a landmark in the history of science fiction.īuy this book at the Guardian bookshop Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000) Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology. One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale.
Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship.īuy this book at the Guardian bookshop Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951) Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe.
Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid Android, the computer Deep Thought, space guitarist Hotblack Desiato (named after Adams's local estate agent) and the Guide itself, a remarkably prescient forerunner to the internet.Īldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough.
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Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)