Classic SF with Andy Johnson – Details, episodes & analysis

Machines run amok in a comic disaster ahead of its time

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia states that "there is a false belief that SF and humour do not mix."  The SFE does concede, though, that the two are more successfully fused in short stories rather than in the novel form. Like Douglas Adams, Harry Harrison, and Robert Sheckley, John Sladek was a writer who was able to make it work.

The Reproductive System (1968) is Sladek's first SF novel, originally published in 1968. This frenzied satire is built on the comic potential of robots gone awry, consuming everything in their path and remaking the world in their own image. As absurd as it is, there is something surprisingly prescient about what the novel has to say about the high-tech world we live in, decades later.

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The definitive time travel story, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895), focuses on a protagonist who visits the extremely far future. Across over a century of time travel tales, in most cases it is the people of our own time who visit either the past or the future. Rather less commonly, the contemporary world plays host to a visitor from another era.

The Masks of Time (1968) is one of those exceptions. This Robert Silverberg novel is set in the year 1999. A mysterious visitor, apparently a time traveler from the year 2999, arrives in Rome and brings chaos with him. This is the beginning of an unusual kind of time travel story, in which the contemporary characters try to make sense of this enigmatic figure and what his hints about his own time imply about the future of humankind.

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This is an exploration of four short novels by a neglected female writer of SF who sought to subvert the genre from within.

One happy development in recent years is the growing awareness of the contribution of women writers to the development of classic science fiction. Today, writers like Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, and Andre Norton are fairly well known in genre circles. Readers and explorers of past decades continue to rediscover women writers, and to- hopefully - bring their work to greater prominence. Today's focus is on one such writer - Margaret St. Clair.

The Ace Doubles line was a long-running and now highly collectible fixture of western, crime, and SF publishing from 1952 to 1978. Published in the unusual dos-a-dos format, they bound together two novels, generally by two different authors. Of the eight novels that St. Clair published, half saw print in this special format - one of them joined with an early book by Philip K. Dick.

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Each month, I take a look back at the games I've played recently - be they new or old - and share my quick thoughts. In this instalment, I cover new releases Hard West II and Cursed to Golf, as well as Metro: Last Light (2013) and There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (2020).

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Would you believe it, it's the 75th episode! Thank you to everyone who has listened to this odd, bitesize, sort-of-podcast and its highly inconsistent subject matter. 

Barry Malzberg's breakthrough science fiction novel Beyond Apollo (1972) was the first ever winner of the prestigious Campbell award. Not everyone liked the book's experimental approach, though.  Expect sex, madness, and a completely unreliable narrator in this brief tour of one of the most controversial SF books of the 1970s.

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Originally serialised in Analog magazine in 1975, Lifeboat is a collaborative SF novel by Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson. Can the humans and aliens trapped together in a cramped interstellar escape module find a way to survive? And did Harrison and Dickson deliver an engaging story?

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Inflation is rising rapidly, plunging working people into poverty. A huge strike wave spreads from one sector to another. A major economy has pulled out of Europe, adding to the economic chaos, and a new disease spreads around the continent. The British government neglects these crises, and instead pursues a culture war.

This bleak description fits the UK in the summer of 2022, but it is also the backdrop to John Brunner’s 1973 novel The Stone That Never Came Down. This episode takes a look at this prescient novel of a declining, crisis-stricken UK.

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This latest instalment of my monthly series on the games I’ve played has four entries. It kicks off with Strange Brigade and Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, two very different games which are united by their unmistakable Britishness, sense of humour, and love of alliteration. Next up I have a few words about the fairly obscure action RPG Of Orcs and Men, made across the Channel in France. If you’ve enjoyed the fantasy stealth games in the Styx series, then you may enjoy the game that first introduced that gregarious goblin.

Finally for July, I revisited an indie masterpiece which has just been given a free and impressive overhaul. Tactics classic Into the Breach has been picked up by Netflix, who are making it available to their subscribers. To celebrate, Subset Games have upgraded all versions of the game to the even more excellent Advanced Edition. This gratis update adds a ton of new features, and makes one of the best indie games ever somehow even more perfect.

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Normal human lives are in short supply in The Time Dweller. Originally published in 1969, this collection is one of the earliest efforts to gather together some of Michael Moorcock’s shorter stories. Of the nine entries in this volume, seven were originally published in New Worlds, one of the leading British SF magazines. It might not have been too difficult to get them published, because at the time the editor was one... Michael Moorcock.

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Today, developers Bungie are known for the blockbuster Halo series and more recently, for the Destiny games. And while the studio changed first-person shooters forever, first on the Mac and then on consoles, none of their later successes would have been possible without their earlier work in a different genre altogether. It was the success of pioneering real-time tactics game Myth: The Fallen Lords which, in part, prompted Microsoft to purchase Bungie and to help propel Halo to industry-shaking success in 2001.

Myth was ahead of its time. Its 3D environments were some of the first in the genre and Bungie’s work helped to forge a new style of gameplay. They cut away the base building, resource management, and large unit counts that defined Command & Conquer (1995) and Total Annihilation (1997). Myth isn’t a strategy title at all - but part of the first wave of real-time tactics games. It does more than make players think; it makes them feel. Thanks a unique union of writing and gameplay, each of Myth’s missions inspires feelings of desperation, terror, relief and - hopefully - triumph. 25 years later, it’s the emotional impact of Myth which makes it special to this day.

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