Picture: Gift, by Kenneth Noland 1962 - Tate Gallery, London

Ringworld by Larry Niven (Ballantyne Books, 1970) Cover by Dean Ellis

This is the definitive work on really big engineering. Asimov's Trantor pales into a piffling little ball-bearing in comparison with the structure described in this book. I have heard that some smart students have debunked the possibility of such a structure being stable, but who cares about that? Think big, think big. Niven himself is at his best when dreaming up the technologies against which his stories are set. In the case of Ringworld one had a feeling that it was too big to actually use as a stage for a story. There was a little bit of exploration, but somehow the sheer size of the thing didn't impinge on the story other than as a great mystery. His stories are at their most entertaining when the technologies are firmly at the centre of the story. Neutron Star, a collection of short stories is a worthwhile read, in which you will come across his famous Puppeteers, an advanced species of herbivore who make and sell advanced technology. One story about two mysterious deaths in an impervious hull has almost the best solution of any mystery story I ever read. Only beaten by a Conan Doyle story about a train - not a Sherlock Holmes story.

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

This was a marvelous book - a fantasy purportedly written by Adolf Hitler in an alternative universe in which his political career never got off the ground. He supposedly took to writing science fiction, and this is the result. Of course it involves racial theories, stormtroopers and all the other paraphernalia of the Nazis. A people called Doms represents the Jews. The Doms set out to surreptitiously control the world starting with the land of Helder where the book is set. Only the hero is able to spot them and unmask their plans. By the end of the book perfect cloned specimens of the master race leave the earth to people the whole galaxy. The only problem with the book is that it tries to make a joke of something which isn't really very funny, and which still has a few proponents in the slums of political thought. Read it if you can find it, but don't start getting interested in Nazi regalia, will you? Spinrad had no book of his in print in English when I last heard from him, which was in the last couple of years. He lives in Paris, and is justifiably bitter about his treatment by the commercial literary world. He is, in my opinion, one of the best two or three SF writers of all time. Try Bug Jack Barron or the Men in the Jungle if you can find them.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin (Panther SF 1973), Cover uncredited

Ursula LeGuin achieved a lot of literary acclaim with this book. It is set on a world of hermaphrodites that are usually more or less male, but can become female in certain situations. It is told through the eyes of an ambassador from Earth and deals with a period of unrest. It is very compelling, and I heartily recommend it. If it has a flaw it is that the hermaphrodites are so male in their ambience that I found it impossible to suddenly see one as a woman when he changed into one. Not enough work was done on the female side, I thought. One of the strengths of the book was that the world on which it was set lives as a planet. Firstly the descriptions are almost painterly, so that one sees, feels and smells a real firmament. Secondly it doesn't have that parochial feel of a tiny stage for a tiny play, painted in garish hues that many interplanetary settings seemed to have.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

Heinlein was another doyen of SF (Can one have two doyens?). He was sometimes execrated by critics as some sort of closet fascist, but I found that very unfair. This book was probably the one that set off that kind of thinking. It won a Hugo in 1959 (Best SF of the year). It was made into a film quite recently, so most people know what it was like. Tough military type guys - and gals - going in tight-lipped purposeful pursuit of some nasty spider type critters who have been doing some bad things around the universe. The main object is some sort of genocide, which is not very PC these days, even when the aliens concerned do seem to be the most utter rotters who one would absolutely not, repeat NOT, want to marry one's sister - or brother come to that - or even one's cat. It’s a great read, though, if you can suspend your sensitivities for an hour or so.

Galactic Empires by Brian Aldiss, (Futura Orbit Book, 1976), Cover uncredited

Aldiss wrote a number of excellent novels in this era. Perhaps the most haunting was The Dark Light Years. He probably went one step beyond what most SF fans could relate to in Report on Probability A, which was rather like one of the French "Nouveau Roman" which had bored everyone stiff a decade earlier. But he seemed to be able to keep up a stream of very inventive and readable works during the era, and ranked with the best of Americans. He also edited some collections, and I chose this one because it has a lot of stories from the post-war era, and partly because I wrote one of the stories in it. Also because of the excellent cover for which artist did not receive a credit. Aldiss edited other collections in this series, including Space Opera, and Space Odysseys.

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