Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Fifties

Now it's getting hard.

The fifties was when sci-fi really took off. The age of the Atom Bomb and the Space Race people were split into believing we were on the verge of curing all the world's ills, or else that we would blow ourselves to oblivion. In the end we did neither, but we did write a lot of good books.

This was the decade that defined sci-fi, and for me four authors stand out.

Firstly there was Bob Heinlein, an all American right wing individualist nut job, but a first rate writer. Starship Troopers is scarily fascistic, but pretty much gave us the well known Star Trek future of minimal states with massive navies as well as Avatar-style power armour.


Then there was Ray Bradbury, who this decade wrote The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury though was more of a stylist than an ideas man, so he only gets the bronze medal.

So this leaves the two giants of the fifties to battle it out: Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. It's a tough choice, in no small part because both have written an awful lot of guff over the years.


Asimov gave us the big picture, the fall and rise of space empires in the Foundation Trilogy , time travel in The End of Eternity, space opera whodunnits in The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun and robots by the bucket load.

Clarke, the man who invented the communications satellite, eventually became the master of the 'nuts and bolts' style of realistic near-future stories. However in the 50s he was writing about broader topics and his great books of this decade are The City and the Stars, Childhood's End and the short story The Sentinel - which eventually turned into 2001 A Space Odyssey.



It's a close call, and I'm tempted to give the award to Asimov's Foundation for the breadth of its vision. However the sheer 1950ishness of a space empire with atomic powered spaceships and a filing system based on microfilm lets it down and, to be honest, it's not that well written.

So maybe it's just patriotism, but I'm going to give the award to the Englishman for Childhood's End. Clarke may not have predicted the future of space travel, but he did predict the future of sci-fi as he gave us giant alien spaceships hovering over our cities and the world's children being rounded up to give to the aliens fifty years before District 9 and Torchwood: Children of Earth.

Winner: : Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke (1953)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Fourties

Funnily enough there weren't all that many great sci-fi books written in the 1940s.

Partly his was because H G Wells died in 1946, a year after the war he predicted had been brought to an end in a flash of heat rather similar to a Martian death ray.

The winner then is rather obvious. It is of course George Orwell's 1948 taster of what life might be like during the Cold War - Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A sombre book made even darker by the fact that Orwell died just after finishing it. It appears to be his last will testament, a pessimistic look back at his life's futile struggle against totalitarianisms from Barcelona to the Blitz.

But of course he didn't mean to die when he did. "Don't let it happen" was his motto, and he certainly didn't want anyone who read his book to give up and let Big Brother take over.

Optimists have even seen hope in the essay on Newspeak at the back of the book. It's written in the past tense, so does that mean it was written after the time of Big Brother?

Neither was he sure that English Socialism would mutate into IngSoc. His near contemporary essay The Lion and the Unicorn sets out a curious vision of a post-war England after the Revolution in which the judges still wear wigs and the pubs still serve warm beer.

Compared to Huxley's globalised world of trivial hedonism and slick advertising, the world of Big Brother seems rather old fashioned. Doublespeak is mere crude propaganda compared to the delights of the Feelies. But

Orwell still packs his punch.

Maybe the future of 1984 came crashing down with the Berlin Wall, but maybe not.

We are still Airstrip One, 'Compassionate Conservatism' and 'Blue Labour' show Doublespeak is alive and well but today called Triangultion. Rupert Murdoch does a good line in Prolefeed and despite the Credit Crunch the Ministry of Plenty is still trying to convince us we've never had it so good. Perhaps today we call the Ministry of Truth Fox News, Room 101 Guantanamo Bay, and as for English Socialism? Well, it has clearly been to see O'Brien and now thinks two plus two equals five.

Winner: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Thirties

Sci-Fi is primarily a literary medium as frankly the pictures are better, so having done Sci-Fi films I thought I'd have a look at books. I've started 20 years earlier as literary sci-fi is at least a decade or two ahead of the cinema.

Had a started this list earlier the thirties would have been the first decade since the 1880s not to be won by H.G. Wells, but it would be a close call. Wells published The Shape of Things to Come in 1933, his last great book, in which he predicted a devastating world war beginning in January 1940, and ending with the world run from an air base in Basra. Hmmm.


There was also Olaf Stapledon who in 1930 published Last and First Men, a history of the entire future of the human race over the next two billion years and which included in its predictions the prominent death of a British Princess in Paris. He followed that in 1937 with Star Maker, a history of the entire universe. He didn't exactly do kitchen sink drama, and his books aren't exactly easy to read either, but they are dizzying in their perspective.

A slightly left field choice would be pulp horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's Shadow Out of Time. Loecraft may have been possibly insane, potentially a Nazi and certainly a bit of a weirdo, but he could write. Most of his work is clearly fantasy or horror, but this book, whilst set in the Cthulhu Mythos universe, can count as sci-fi as its the one about the body swaping, time travelling Great Race of Yith. The final scene where the hero, now back in his own body, discovers an ancient manuscript in his handwriting would make a pretty good Doctor Who scene.

However despite the stiff competition I will, rather predictably, give the prize to Aldrous Huxley's Brave New World. The idea of a future that is trivial, uniform and soulless must have seemed pretty boring compared to the grand adventures of Wells and Stapledon. But lets face it - this is what we've got.

Huxley was a strange chap, and although always described as a dystopia, I suspect he was rather ambivalent about the future he created, at least when it comes to the sex and drugs. His later utopia, The Island, quite a lot of both as well.

But that's not the main point of the book. Instead Huxley looked at how industrialisation had changed the workplace, and imagined those forces being set to work on society. He realised that the best best way to hide the truth was not to ban books, but to deluge us with trivia.

Huxley released that the prison we need to really fear does not have walls made of the things we hate and fear, but bars forged from the things we crave and desire. The book is hilariously funny in places, but also unrelentingly grim as Huxley describes a world that is shockingly familiar to us. When the hero finally hangs himself, you can see why.

Winner: Brave New World by Aldrous Huxley (1932)

Is Cameron finished?

It takes a lot to get rid of British Prime Minsters - just look at how Major, Brown and Blair clung on despite all that was thrown at them, but with men and women taking and hits and going down all around him, the PM must be vulnerable.

I'm going to take a shot myself and say that this is it for the former Bullingdon boy, and here's why.

1. Cameron was Murdoch's puppy

We all knew Cameron wasn't a real politician, just a former PR man. However I think we're only just beginning to realise quite how much of a News International PR man he remained after taking office.

Maybe he's just a very sociable chap, but the number of engagements he's had with NI staff does raise a few eyebrows. That Rebekah Brooks should be the only person to visit Chequers twice, or that Coulson visited two month after his second resignation does raise a few eyebrows. And that's just the official stuff, there's also the weddings, the horse riding, the high fives when he meets old NI mates etc etc.

This may not be breaking any rules, but one thing is sure though; whoever gets nicked next, whether it's James Murdoch or the tea boy, Cameron will turn out to have been one of their bestest buddies.

2. He's pissed off the wrong people

Cameron can take flak from lefties like me all day long, but when his own side starts shooting at him he's in trouble.

The Police can usually be relied on to bend a few rules, and arms, to keep a Tory PM in power, but it seems the good will has dried up. Sir Paul Stephenson's resignation letter clearly stated that his embarrassing friend, Neil Wallace, was considerably cleaner than Cameron's. There was also a hint - and it's no more than a hint - that the presence of Coulson in Cameron's inner circle prevented the Commissioner being completely candid with the PM about the investigation. Potentially explosive stuff.

More serious is what his old NI chums are up to. No doubt they are currently denying everything and telling Plod nothing, but if this becomes an untenable position they may start to squeal like canaries. I mean look at them, would you trust that lot to keep their gobs shut if you were all in a fix and only one of you could get out? If they had principles they wouldn't be in this mess.

3. The Lib Dems aren't going to bend over and take it forever.

Hard to believe now but the Lib Dems were once the party of the honourable uncommitted, the people who hated party bias in the press. New Labour suddenly forgot they hated Murdoch when he backed Blair and although he howls now, Brown did everything biologically possible to keep News International on side.

Going into the coalition has seen all that flushed down the toilet. When Vince Cable declared war on Rupert Murdoch, in a secretly recorded comment to an undercover journalist, he wasn't praised for being so honest, but lambasted for caving in the next day with an apology. The Lib Dems now have a chance to make amends.

Games Theory says Clegg should wield the knife - right between the shoulder blades. As the junior partner they're getting all the flak (the Tory voters love the cuts) and backing Cameron will just make it worse, and the revenge of the voters more deadly. On the other hand by doing the decent thing he could regain the support of the uncommitted middle of British politics. The constitution is a bit vague on the exact situation, but he could even be the one the Queen asks to become PM.

4. Nobody ever liked him much anyway.

Cameron has been making right wing Tories uneasy for a while. His posturing on Climate Change (and we know it was only posturing - but they don't), his easy going attitude to gays and black people and his platitudes about the NHS have been getting them shifting uncomfortably in their seats for a while. They put up with him because he seemed about to win them a General Election.

That he spectacularly failed to do. Instead he allied with the fake Tories in the Lib Dems so he could hold at bay the very real ones on his back benches. I doubt many true blue Conservatives want to make this crisis any worse, but the temptation to ditch Cameron may eventually get too strong.

So that's it, Cameron is toast. Maybe. Possibly.

The problem is the mechanism. The Judge led inquiry will let him off the hook, just like Hutton whitewashed Blair. The Lib Dems aren't going to want to No Confidence him as they'd be out on their ear too. Neither will Labour lead a popular crusade as most of this sh*t happened on their watch.

Possibly it will be the Men in Grey again, just like with Lady Thatcher.

Or maybe he will just eventually disappear up his own arse?

We can hope.

Meanwhile you will note that I'm not going to say 'when' it will bring him down. Let's not forget, between Watergate and Impeachment Nixon managed to get himself re-elected.

Six Decades of Sci-Fi Films

Nothing dates like the future, as you can see by this trawl through the best of sixty years of science fiction films.

We were going to travel to the stars, be devoured by aliens, replace ourselves with replicants, disappear into cyberspace or be landed with a ship load of space refugees.

Instead the shuttle has been paid off, the aliens are silent, the clones don't work, cyberspace crashes if you move too far from the base station and if we don't do something about Climate Change the refugees will be us.

But lets ignore grim reality and look to back at the future as presented on the silver screen.

The Fifties: The Forbidden Planet(1956)


Well you know you're in the the fifties when you watch Forbidden Planet. Spaceships that look like flying saucers, computers the size of tower blocks, and women relegated to the housework.

But what a great film this is. Having grown up in the seventies watching corny CSO special effects on Doctor Who, I couldn't believe a film that looked this good could be made so long ago. As a prediction of the future it is probably pants, but as a vision of how we hoped the future would turn out, it's fantastic. Great style doesn't date, and neither does the look of this film.

As a take on Shakespeare its interesting too, with the Krell's supersized superscience replacing magic and a bit of Freud creeping in for good measure to impress pseudo-intellectuals like me.

And yes, that is a young Leslie Nielson of Police Squad! as the romantic lead.

The Sixties: 2001 A Space Odyssey (1969)


The first time I watched this film I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I then read Arthur C Clark's novelisation and realised it was obvious. I then watched the film again and thought, hang on a minute, it's not clear at all.

And that's what's fantastic about Kubrick's film. He took Clark's nuts and bolts sci-fi story of heroic space exploration and benevolent aliens and turned it inside out. Now the aliens teach the ape-men to make clubs that turn into orbiting nuclear bombs, and the shiny future is full of charmless, corporate yes-men who lie to the public and miss their daughter's birthday.

And then there's Freud again. I mean, look at the sperm shaped Discovery One, swimming towards the black hole and then giving us the Star Child. Hmmm.

True, you need to be on pot to really want to watch a film this pretentious, this long and this slow, but then this is the sixties and most of the audience apparently were.

The Seventies: Alien (1979)


If you were expecting Star Wars then you're reading the wrong blog. Alien is the genre defining film of this decade.

Now you could argue that the genre concerned is the slasher movie, but it is sci-fi really. Here we have space not as mysterious and exciting, but as the boring, everyday workplace of a bunch of interstellar truck drivers.

Apparently J.G.Ballard was approached to write the novelisation of Alien, but he looked at the monosyllabic dialogue and turned the offer down, only to realise his mistake when he saw the film. You can see where he went wrong though. The script is okay, but it's Ridley Scott's direction and H.R.Giger's designs that make it a classic.

And of course Freud is there in bucket loads too, as this alien doesn't just eat you, it impregnates you and you give birth to its off spring. Yuck.

The Eighties: Blade Runner (1982)


Blade Runner almost gets my vote as best movie of all time.

Almost, but not quite, and the reason is a rather annoying one.

Everyone knows the debate about whether Decker is a replicant. It seems fairly clear director Scott intended him to be, and every time they retouch the film and release a new version this becomes clearer. But, and its a very big but, no matter how they tweak it they can't get round the fact that Harrison Ford was clearly not trying to play a replicant. It's not a bad performance by Ford, but that's part of the problem. His Blade Runner is too human.

But Ford isn't the star of the show. That is clearly Rutger Hauer. This is Mr Guinness's finest moment. He is handsome, noble and menacing throughout the film, in the way that only Robert Shaw could equal. He murders his father (Freud again, need I say) bumps off the nice J.F. Sebastian, is really mean to Decker, and then ends the film with one of the best soliloquys in cinema.

Ultimately Blade Runner may not amount to a hill of beans, but so well made, well acted and well designed is this dystopian classic that you'll come away thinking it was more profound than Proust.

The Nineties: The Matrix (1999)


In the nineties computerised special effects arrived and the only limit to what could be shown on screen was human imagination.

Unfortunately that turned out to be a fairly serious limitation, and mostly we just got superhero stories, but we did get the Matrix.

Okay, so the sequels have reduced the concept to utter silliness, and the idea (and the name) were both nicked from a Tom Baker Dr Who story (1976's The Deadly Assassin), but it was still a jaw dropping film when it came out.

Not that it's an optimistic film, along with the runner up for this decade, Terminator II, it shows a pretty grim future. Alien and Blade Runner may have shown that the future doesn't hold much for those at the bottom of the social ladder, but these films suggest that the only things that can look forward with optimism are our PCs.

The Noughties: District 9 (2009)


The special effects continued to get better, but whilst this has revitalised the fantasy genre and TV sci-fi, in the movies it was largely the same backward looking stuff, as epitomised by that vapid rubbish Avatar, which refought the Vietnam war with ten foot high smurfs three and half decades after everyone else had moved on.

There were a few exceptions though, and chief amongst them were Moon and District 9. I could have gone for either, but I'll go for the stunningly original South African film. The hero who becomes more humane as he becomes less human, and the alien racism analogy had been done before, although possibly not done better.

However the invasion by crap aliens was new. Previously First Contact was either a Very Bad Thing or a Very Good Thing. Here it's just a hassle; another problem for the UN, another opportunity for the evil corporations.

Summary

So what have we learnt in sixty years of sci-fi films? Don't trust corporations or computers certainly. Believe in Freud, maybe.

In the fifties and sixties we looked forward to boldly going in search of adventure and excitement, admittedly in the service of some sort of quasi-fascistic state.

In the seventies and eighties it became apparent that this Brave New World wasn't for everyone, and that there'd be a lower strata of workers either to be used as alien-fodder for the corporations or abandoned on a dying earth whilst the elite moved to Mars.

Then in the nineties the future was given over to the machines, and any aliens we met were in a worse state than.

But if this list is anything to go by what has gone from science fiction is the optimism, and in many ways the vision. It seems we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than a change in our current social and economic system.

In the fifties we may have gone into space with a rigid hierarchy and submissive women, but there was no doubt that humanity had got there by overcoming our murderous cave man instincts.

All told I'd rather be back in the fifties.

The Best of Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor

Well this should be easy. Paul McGann, the Doctor for one night only. What's his best story then?

Well, I could cheat and consider media other than TV, in which case I'd go for the animated version of the Douglas Adams story Shada that he voiced.

But that would be cheating.

So we're left with his only canonical entry in the classic series, Doctor Who The TV Movie, an attempt to revive the series by setting it in the USA, something it notably failed to do.

It's not so much that the story is actively bad, it just has a complete absence of anything good in it. This is Doctor Who by numbers with lines such as "Would you like a jelly baby?" (groan), "Don't mind him he's English" (cringe) and "I'm half human" (roll around on floor going 'nooooooooo!').

Eric Roberts makes a passable villain, although he's clearly not The Master, and Daphne Ashbrook makes a passable companion.

There's certainly been worse stories on US television, but is it Doctor Who? Only just. Yes there's a blue box, but where is the multi-layered plot, the monsters who turn out to have hearts of gold, the moral dilemmas etc etc.

But enough of the plot, what about McGann? Well, before I answer that lest have a quick recap of the debut stories of the various Doctors. William Hartnell was of course perfect from the word go, Patrick Troughton's first outing is, alas, lost forever whilst Jon Pertwee spent most of his first story out cold in a hospital bed. Tom Baker left us for a while in the TARDIS leaving Sarah Jane to carry the story whilst Peter Davidson spent most of his debut in a box. The less said about the intial appearances of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy the better.

So you'd have to say McGann's debut performance was probably the best since The First Doctor's thirty three years earlier. He was The Doctor straight out of the box. Debonair and romantic.

His only role and hence the only entry.

That is until five minutes ago, when as part of the fiftieth anniversary special wee have the on-line mini episode Night of the Doctor. It may only be seven and a half minutes long, but it is brilliant.

This is not an uncertain McGann saddled with a limp script, but the McGann who honed his character in the audio adventures given decent lines.

And doesn't he deliver them well? Could any other Doctor have delivered the line "Physician heal thyself" as well?

So having starred in both the longest and the shortest episodes, it is quality that wins out on quantity.

The Best of Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor

If any actor who played the Doctor has grounds for asking for his money back its Sylvester McCoy.

Originally recruited to clown around with Bonnie Langford in a series of embarrassingly bad episodes, it seems he'd been taken on by an out-of-touch production team to see out the twilight of the series in some pre-CBBC slot for adolescents who haven't the energy to change channels. It was so bad you really did want to hide behind the sofa.

But then Andrew Cartmell took over as script editor. He couldn't save the write off that was McCoy's first series, but for the show's 25th anniversary series he got to work on his Master Plan. Out went the comedy Time Lord and Bonnie Langford, and in came a darker Doctor and a companion with a back story.

Now you can argue that if you were going to do this you wouldn't really want to do it with actors of such limited range as McCoy and Sophie Aldred, but that's what happened and, to be fair to the two leads, they did their best and, if nothing else, their genuine affection for each other did show through.

McCoy's second season began with a bang with Ben Aaronovitch's Remembrance of the Daleks, which took us back to Foreman's Scrap Yard in 1963, gave us duelling Dalek factions in league with the National Front and introduced us to UNIT's forerunner The Intrusions Counter-Measures Group.

The series then went off the rails a bit before coming back strongly with the pointless, baffling but wonderfully surreal Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Don't ask me what it's about, but menacing kites and a killer bus conductor work for me.

McCoy's third series though was his best. Four top notch stories and not a bad episode amongst them. The show had been throwing up at least one utterly cringe worthy script a year since Tom Baker hung up his scarf, so this was the best series since the Key to Time.

First there was Battlefield, a welcome return for UNIT and the Brigadier as they fight an honourable foe in the form of Jean Marsh's Morgaine and her dimension shifting knights. Fortunately UNIT are all tooled up with their new ass-kicking female Brigadier and a range of bullets for all eventualities.

Then there was Ghost Light, which was very much in Sapphire and Steel territory being set in a Victorian mansion populated by strange characters and evolutionary throwbacks.

Next we had The Curse of Fenric, set in Northumberland in World War II and featuring code breakers, a Viking curse, Russian commandos, vampires, Nicholas Parsons as a consience troubled vicar, and lots of hints that the Doctor is now 'more than just a Time Lord'. Okay, so it was a vampire story film during the day due to technical limitations, but it really was on location in the north of England (Yorkshire standing in for Northumbria).

Finally there was Survival, in which Anthony Ainsley as The Master finally stops doing a poor impersonation of Roger Delgado and becomes the feral predator I suspect he always wanted to play.

And that was that. Literally. The BBC canned the series and it was all over.

So what's the best Seventh Doctor story then? Well I'd have liked it to have been Battlefield, but the pacing is a little uneven thanks to it being stretched from three episodes to four episode and the knights look cheap (because they were). Still it was nice to see old Lethbridge-Stewart doing all right, married to the previously invisible Doris and living in a huge mansion. How he paid for it I've no idea. Maybe he pocketed a few of the gold bullets.


So the winner has to be The Curse of Fenric. Had it featured a more iconic Doctor and a more iconic monster it would be a contender for the best ever story, I'm sure. Watching it now I realise that thanks to Cartmell the jump from the old series to the new wasn't that great after all.

With a contemporary theme (pollution), the Doctor hovering in the background letting his companion do all the work and poor old Ace gets put through the emotional wringer, this could have been an RTD script. But whereas the new series likes to paint it characters in black and white, here we are in shades of grey again and there is no Ghost in the Machine ending, but instead a complicated denouement that I would explain to you if only I could remember it.

Shortly after broadcast Doctor Who was no more, but at least the old series went out on a high.