#166. LAND UNDER ENGLAND By Joseph O’Neill

Published : 1935
Pages : 296
Overall Mark : 6/10

While searching for his missing father, Anthony Julian embarks on a terrifying journey into the Earth’s interior. There he discovers a subterranean world where descendants of the Roman Army suffer under a totalitarian regime in which individualism is completely obliterated by telepathic means. Refusing to join this rigidly controlled society, Anthony must fight to save his father and find a route to the surface – or perish.

JOSEPH O’NEILL (1878-1952)
Joseph O’Neill was an Irish educationist and author. He worked as the Permanent Secretary to the Department of Education, Irish Free State, between 1923 and 1944. Although not strictly an SF writer, O’Neill used SF instruments to make cultural and political points with great eloquence. Land Under England (1935), about an underground world where citizens are controlled by telepathy, is a satire on Hitlerian totalitarianism.

VERDICT
This is a bit of an odd concept, and I’m surprised it was considered so highly. It seems to take two completely separate ideas; a lost Roman civilisation and a race of telepaths, and combines them in an unusual way that shouldn’t work, yet it does, I didn’t feel myself questioning the concept as I read, nor how these people became telepaths in the first place, which just goes to show that it must have been reasonably well written for me to not think of this when I was reading. Instead I became immersed in Anthony’s search for his father, a search that we pretty much know from the start is not going to be successful.

#165. CRYPTOZOIC! By Brian Aldiss

Published : 1967
Pages : 224
Overall Mark : 8/10

In the year 2093, human consciousness has expanded to the point that man can visit the past using a technique called ‘mind-travelling’. Artist Edward Bush returns from e lengthy ‘trip’ to the Jurassic period to find the government overthrown by an authoritarian regime. Given his mind-travel experience, he is recruited by the new regime to track down and assassinate a scientist whose ideas threaten to topple the status quo. However, the job of an artist is not to take orders but to ask questions…

BRIAN ALDISS (1925-2017)
Brian Wilson Aldiss was born in 1925. He was a highly decorated science fiction author who achieved the rare feat of acceptance as a writer of real significance by the literary establishment in his lifetime. As well as his many award-winning novels he has been a hugely important anthologist and editor in the field. He also wrote the pre-eminent history of the genre (with David Wingrove), Billion Year Spree (later expanded and revised as Trillion Year Spree). He died the day after his 92nd birthday.

VERDICT
This started off well, with some entertaining and well written back and forth between Ed Bush and the rest of the characters, but then it gets a little confusing, especially at the end where it’s hard to tell what exactly we are expected to believe has happened so far in the narrative. Fans of classic sic-fi will enjoy this, but it can get a little bogged down at the end by trying not to explain to obviously what has happened throughout.

#164. THE EMBEDDING By Ian Watson

Published : 1973
Pages : 254
Overall Mark : 6/10

In a quiet British research institute, Chris Sole is investigating a strange language whose grammar could open up the vast psychic potential of the human mind.

In the depths of the Brazilian jungle, an Indian tribe is discovered, speaking a rhapsodic drug-induced tongue.

And in Earth’s orbit, alien beings monitor our planet, effortlessly mastering the proliferation of human languages. What they offer is extraordinary. But will their price be too high?

IAN WATSON (1943-)
Ian Watson graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, and lectured in English in Tanzania and Tokyo before beginning to publish SF with ‘Roof Garden Under Saturn’ for the influential New Worlds magazine in 1969. His work has been frequently shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and he has won the BSFA Award twice. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg. Ian Watson lives in Spain.

VERDICT
This was a fun story, though it takes a little while to really get going. I liked the comparison between how the people involved were treated, and how they tried to balance the price of knowledge against the price of a life. Watson makes this satire on the human condition funny and thought provoking, but I would have liked it to be a little more consistent.

#163. RAISING THE STONES By Sheri S Tepper

Published : 1990
Pages : 453
Overall Mark : 8/10

When the human settlers arrived on Hobbs Land, the native Owlbrit were almost extinct, but before the last one died, the humans learned a little of their language, ideas and religion. And it seemed that maintaining the last Owlbrit temple, with the strange statue that was its God, led to peace and prosperity. But then men from the harsh patriarchal religion of Voorstod came to Hobbs Land in pursuit of a refugee and determined to impose their own way…

SHERI S. TEPPER (1929-2016)
Sheri S. Tepper was the author of several resoundingly acclaimed novels, including The Margarets and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, both shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Aware, A Plague Of Angels, Sideshow and Beauty, which was voted Best Fantasy Novel of the Year by readers of Locus. She is one of the few writers to have titles in both the SF and Fantasy Masterworks lists. She died in 2016.

VERDICT
This was an interesting story, showing how many religions around the world have based their foundation on weak facts and disinformation. That is the fun side of the story, though the darker side focusses more on the wars that result from these religions as well as the persecution of certain sectors of society for no other reason than it was apparently dictated by religion. A solid read that never gets to the point of becoming dull, even though it can at times feel like it is dragging out an otherwise simple and succinct premise.

#162. THE DOOMED CITY By Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

Published : 1989
Pages :
Overall Mark : 8/10

It is a mysterious city with an artificial sun, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants have been plucked from different time periods of twentieth-century history and left to govern themselves, advised by the inscrutable Mentors. This is the Experiment, seen through the eyes of Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer from 1950s Leningrad, whose rise through the political hierarchy has a devastating effect.

ARKADY STRUGATSKY (1925-1991)
BORIS STRUGATSKY (1931-2012)
The Strugatsky brothers began to collaborate in the early 1950s. Arkady worked as a technical translator and editor, and Boris was a computer mathematician at Puklova astronomical observatory. Their work includes Hard To Be A God, Definitely Maybe, The Snail On The Slope and Monday Starts On Saturday. Andrei Tarkovsky's much admired film, Stalker, was based on their most famous work, Roadside Picnic.

VERDICT
I do secretly like the Strugatsky’s, though Roadside Picnic was never a favourite. This is up there with likes of Monday Starts On Saturday, though not as obviously funny. Instead this takes the political satire end of the comedy spectrum – something that was definitely risky in the time it was written – and goes with that by parodying the ideas that were so prevalently observed in the former Soviet Union.

#161. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME By H G Wells

Published : 1933
Pages : 424
Overall Mark : 4/10

When Dr Philip Raven, a diplomat working for the League of Nations, dies in the 1930s, he leaves behind a book of dreams outlining the visions he has been experiencing for many years, detailing events that will occur on Earth for the next two centuries. This fictional ‘history of the future’ proved prescient in many ways, as Wells predicted events such as the Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare, climate change and the growing instability of the Middle East.

H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)
Born in Bromley, Kent, the third son of a shopkeeper, Herbert George Wells was apprenticed to a draper before becoming a teacher-pupil at Midhurst Grammar School and winning a scholarship to study under T.H. Huxley. Through his trail-blazing works of science fiction, his prophetic imagination and his championing of socialism, science and women’s rights he became a hugely influential figure of international renown.

VERDICT
To be perfectly honest this was not only a struggle to read but also something of a let-down. I was expecting to read a brief history of the world spanning from 1933 to 2106, but instead I got around 300 pages focussing almost entirely on the twenty years following the publication of the book and then some random excuses for why the history was so incomplete. I thought, with Wells at the helm, that this would be a clever look at our future, but its focus is so tight compared to what it claimed it would show that it couldn’t be anything but a disappointment.

#159. THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS By Ursula K Le Guin

Published : 1969
Pages : 304
Overall Mark : 8/10

Genly Ai is an ethnologist observing the people of the winter-world Gethen. The people there are androgynous, normally neuter, but they become male or female at the peak of their sexual cycle. He becomes drawn into the complex politics of the planet and, during a long tortuous journey across the ice with a disgraced, outcast politician, loses his professional detachment and reaches a painful understanding of the true nature of Gethenians and, in moving and memorable sequence, even finds love…

URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929-)
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the finest writers of our time. Her books have attracted millions of devoted readers and won many awards, including the National Book Award, the Hugo and Nebula Awards and a Newbery Honour. Among her novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the six books of Earthsea have already attained undisputed classic status. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

VERDICT
In comparison to the rest of her Hainish stories, this one in my opinion gives the best background to the race of androgynous aliens. There is much more in-depth descriptions and explanations of exactly what their society is like, whereas the other books seemed to assume you already know. Of the series that I have read, this is probably the best one so far.