Think of what they'll do to you. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through. He or she is like a person who has put on full battle armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap. For Science and Science Fiction updates follow us on Twitter and 'Like' us on Facebook , and don't forget our daily 15 second blasts of science on Instagram.
Science Fiction Sci-Fi Books. These are some of the greatest quotes that science fiction, or at least written science fiction, has ever given us: I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. I fear the lack of them. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. Just get people to stop reading. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily. It's the being old now that's getting to me. Little wonder that it won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards.
As an alternative choice for this spot on the list we can present Le Guin's other work as an alternative read if you want another choice. Ursula Le Guin is, deservedly, one of the most highly acclaimed writers in science fiction. Set on a planet known as Winter, it describes a society in which people are gender neutral and only take on sexual characteristics once a month at a time known as kemmer.
At this time an individual might take on the characteristics of either sex, so the novel works as a thought experiment about what it would be like to have no male and no female. The result is one of the most challenging and the most inspiring books in science fiction. A fantastic Hugo-winning space opera that merges the narrative element of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with a futuristic space opera set in the distant future.
The whole series not just the first book is based on the assumption that man's conquering the stars is inevitable and the complexities and troubles this brings. The sequence consists of two pairs of novels. The first pairing, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, introduces a group of six travellers who set out on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs on Hyperion, a pilgrimage that is a certain death sentence.
For these pilgrims are seeking out the Shrike, a god like creature that legend says will kill all but one pilgrim, granting the one survivor a wish. During the journey the travellers, like Chaucer's pilgrims before them, each tell a story, and through the stories we find out what drove them to this desperate journey.
The second pair of novels, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, is set nearly years later and concerns a soldier, Raul Endymion who is unfairly condemned to death and rescued to perform a serious of hazardous tasks. The most important of these is to protect Aenea, a time traveller from the past who represents a threat to the all-powerful Church.
These are dark novels, exploring the suffering of the human soul -- both physical, emotional, and spiritual. Don't go reading this if you are looking for a light, happy go lucky read. Star Wars this is not, so don't think about this book if you want something happy.
The entire sequence depicts one grand hall of suffering, from the decrepit, dying world that's on the verge of collapse, to the tortured pilgrims who've given up all hope and are gambling their lives on a pipe dream shot of hope, to the "messiah of hope" the pilgrims are seeking, which is in fact in itself a missionary of pain and suffering with less empathy than one of the Greek gods. It's brilliant and I hazard to say the best damn space opera science fiction out there.
The titles, and the appearance of a character called John Keat, show that this sequence is heavily influenced by the poetry of John Keats, and it is indeed a gloriously poetic work.
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But it is also filled with stark and striking science fictional imagery. This is an ambitious, powerful and successful sequence that shows just how much science fiction can achieve when it sets its mind to it. Hyperion, even in , still stands as the gold standard of how to do complex space opera right. And not just space opera, but deep space opera that explores real human themes. Hyperion is a deeply human tale about flawed humans. But it's also a tale the covers the broad spectrum too -- romance, action, space battles, AI gone amok, time travel, and much more.
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The first two books are best, but the sequel duology -- which covers events many many years after the fallout from the first two books -- also explores some interesting science fiction concepts too. Look, just read the damn books -- they are the best of the best. If you want to know the most influential science fiction novel of the last thirty-odd years, look no further than William Gibson's Neuromancer.
The novel didn't invent cyberpunk; two films that came out a couple of years earlier, Tron and Blade Runner, had already introduced some of the themes of cyberpunk. And the term itself was invented by Gardner Dozois talking about a novel by Bruce Bethke. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that without Neuromancer, there would have been no cyberpunk. Neuromancer wasn't the first science fiction novel set among the low life and street people of the near future, but Gibson inhabited the Sprawl with utter conviction, inventing a street slang that caught on in the real world.
In this underground, Case is a washed-up hacker whose been treated with drugs to stop him accessing the Matrix ever again, while Molly is a street samurai who offers case a cure in exchange for his services. Through a violent world of double-dealing corporations and government cover-ups, Case and Molly risk their lives in the bright and threatening landscape of cyberspace, following a trail that eventually leads them to Wintermute, a powerful AI at a time when machine intelligence is banned.
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A heady mixture of computer know-how and grimy film noir action, Neuromanceris like no novel before it, a totally original and absolutely gripping take on the near future. Neuromancer was the first novel ever to win the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. It also set the tone for cyberpunk and made Gibson one of the most acclaimed of modern writers. Neuromancer didn't just catch the zeitgeist, it created it, giving us terms like "cyberspace" and "ICE", and being instrumental in the way the World Wide Web developed. In a balkanised Los Angeles, where everything is privatised and the economy is breaking down, a new computer virus appears that affects the users as much as their computers.
A key part of this future is the Metaverse, Stephenson's futuristic version of the Internet where people "log on" via virtual goggles. Everything is conducted through the Metaverse, from business to dating. Stephenson not only presents us with a very realistic look at what could be, but there are some subtle social observations about the way things are different and the same. Stephenson frames the modern social constructs intruding into this cyberworld; ones' social wealth is judged by the look of the avatar they use to interact with the Metaverse, with the wealthy being able to afford custom while the "poor" use off the shelf.
This book has it all, from hacker heroes who wield Samurai sword destruction by night in the Metaverse and deliver pizza by day for the Mob, governments and police controlled by private corporations, and a conspiracy that might the world needs some saving from. Joe Haldeman has said: This is an out and out brilliant novel that does things no science fiction novel had attempted before, and very few have attempted since.
It took the sf field by storm, and it has had a greater effect on more writers than just about any other book. The innocent man condemned to a lingering death is Gully Foyle, the sole survivor of an attack upon his ship, but when another ship passes by he is ignored. When he does manage to return to Earth he is anxious for revenge, and having unearthed a fortune he gets his chance. This is a much darker novel than most of the far future space operas being written at the time.
It's a violent story and Gully Foyle is no hero. But the rich and poetic language, the word play and the sheer fun of Bester's writing, the vivid colourful future, the breathtaking escapades, all keep us glued to the story and cheering him on. Thirty years before William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, Alfred Bester was inventing many of the tropes of cyberpunk. The result is an unputdownable novel that demands to be read over and over again. Delany claims that this is considered by many to be the greatest single sf novel, while Robert Silverberg insists it is on everybody's top ten list.
It's an unforgettable tale that just gets better every time you read it. And it's a gripping, very human, very disturbing tale about the extent men will go to for revenge, and the ultimate futility of the event. Read this one if you have not because you can't call yourself well read in the genre if you've missed it. And you might just be surprised how good the read is and how well aged it still is even in Dick was one of the most idiosyncratic and successful writers in science fiction. Okay, he's probably better known these days for all the films that have been based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau and heaven knows how many others.
Certainly there have been many more films based on Dick's fiction than any other sf writer. But forget the films, even the great ones, like Blade Runner, can't begin to match the compelling weirdness of the novels. Dick used to explore the same ideas in novel after novel. Reality was undermined, usually as a result of drugs; there was a truth under the illusion of the world, but it wasn't always good to learn that truth; things we trust turn out to be unreliable. And yet, the novels were far from samey, indeed the narrow range of obsessions resulted in an incredibly wide range of fiction.
What's more, Dick wrote with a mordant wit that made his work consistently among the funniest of all science fiction. Because he was so prolific, and because he hit the target so frequently, it is very difficult to choose just one book as a representative of his work. In the end we chose The Man in the High Castle, which in some ways seems a very untypical book because there is none of the pyrotechnic weirdness that often turns up in his fiction.
Indeed, the novel seems like a fairly conventional alternate history in which the Axis Powers won the Second World War. As a result, in the s of the novel, America is divided in three; Germany rules the East Coast, Japan controls the West Coast, while a narrow independent buffer state exists between the two. But in the end it is far from conventional. The story is full of fakes and deceptions; several major characters are travelling under false identities, some of the characters are dealing in fake American "antiquities", and Mr Tagoma, the Japanese bureaucrat who becomes central to the plot, attacks a German agent with a fake Colt revolver.
All of this leads us to doubt and question what is going on; and then we come to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel written with the aid of the I Ching, which describes a world in which America did not lose the war; though the world described is not the same as the one we recognise. He followed this with two novels that both displayed an awareness of and interest in science fiction, so it was no surprise when he added the middle initial and produced a straightforward science fiction novel. What was surprising was that it was a full-blooded space opera, full of battles and last minute escapes and epic explosions.
What caught everybody's attention, however, was that the novel introduced a vast, interstellar, left-wing utopia, The Culture. The Culture was an immediate hit, and over the next 30 years he produced nine more novels and a bare handful of short stories about the Culture, which grew into one of the most popular and interesting of all science fiction series. Typically, he would look at this post-scarcity universe obliquely while concentrating on the edges, where the Culture rubbed up against other space-faring societies, and the Culture's most disreputable organisation, Special Circumstances, operated.
Occasionally we would be shown what it is like in a society without money, because everything is freely available, a society in which people could be whatever they wanted, changing sex freely and even, in one instance, taking on the appearance of a bush. It's a world of dangerous sports and comfortable living, but mostly we saw it only from the outside, through the eyes of those who did its dirty work. Zakalwe is a mercenary, a bloody and effective soldier, who has worked for Special Circumstances on a number of occasions before, but now is called on for one last mission.
In the odd-numbered chapters we follow this final mission; but in the even-numbered chapters we go backwards in time through his earlier missions and back towards the secret of his childhood. The final revelation about Zakalwe's true identity is brutal and breathtaking. The unique structure of the novel is what makes this an especially powerful story. And it is told with a combination of cruel, unflinching violence and sparkling wit that is typical of Banks, and helps to explain his extraordinary popularity.
The Culture is one of the great inventions of science fiction, a communistic utopia that actually works. It is also a universe absolutely stuffed with amazing inventions, including the ships that are characters in their own right and have typically witty names in Use of Weapons, for instance, we meet "Very Little Gravitas Indeed" and "Size Isn't Everything". All of the Culture novels are worth reading, and Use of Weapons is easily the most rewarding of them.
Some will recommend Player of Games as the 'best' intro to Bank's Culture novels as it's an exciting, action packed read that takes place a very personal level between characters. Consider Phlebas is another good intro, and as Culture goes, is Bank's classic "Space Opera' entry into the series. Asimov was, with Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, one of that triumvirate of star science fiction writers who first came to prominence in the late s and continued to dominate the field for another 30 years. His magnum opus was this wide-ranging tale inspired by Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
We begin with a great galactic empire that has spread peace and civilisation far and wide across space. But Hari Selden has developed the science of psychohistory which combines sociology, history and mathematics as a reliable way of foreseeing the future, and thanks to psychohistory Selden predicts that the empire is due to collapse into a dark age that will last thousand years.
But if the light of civilisation can be preserved, there is a chance that this dark age will last only one thousand years, and so he establishes a Foundation at the extreme end of the galaxy from which a new empire might grow. For a while things go as Selden had foreseen: But then something is thrown into the mix that Selden could not have anticipated: And the Mule has heard rumours of a Second Foundation at the other end of the galaxy, and he's out to find it and destroy it. But what is this Second Foundation, and where is it hiding? Epic in scope, ambitious and readable, the Foundation Trilogy deservedly won the Hugo Award for the best ever series, the only time that award was ever presented.
It is science fiction on a huge canvas, the very definition of sense of wonder. Foundation is one seminal ' Hard Science Fiction ' novels -- a form of science fiction that aims at making the science as realistic as possible. It's science fiction that puts a lot of emphasis on the 'science' part of the word, rather than relying on the sciencey magical hand waving of science fantasy to describe the science.
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In the course of all this belated expansion to the original conception, Asimov also managed to tie in his Robot stories to create, rather unconvincingly, a future history that united all of his major science fiction. The series introduced the Three Laws of Robotics, one of the best-known formulations in the whole of science fiction, which has had an influence on every single robot story written since, and which has also had an effect on the actual development of robotics.
The early stories all challenged the three laws in some way, with either a robot apparently disobeying one of the laws or a human agency attempting to subvert them, but the laws themselves always won out in the end. As the series went on, the focus changed from the three laws to the question of the increasing humanity of the robots, so that one of the later stories, "The Bicentennial Man", which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelette, actually concerns a robot that becomes human.
In the early s, Arthur C. Clarke was approached by the film maker, Stanley Kramer, to ask if he would be interested in writing a film. Clarke recalled a short story he had written some time earlier called "The Sentinel", in which a strange, alien object is uncovered beneath the surface of the moon, and thought this might make a good starting point for a film. And thus , A Space Odyssey, one of the best and most famous of all science fiction films, was born. The novel, which was written at the same time as the film, differs in occasional minor details from the film, but essentially the two tell the same story.
The story is, surely, too well known to need repeating here. The black monolith whose appearance abruptly converts primitive man into a tool-using creature; the identical object unearthed on the moon that sends a signal towards Jupiter; the two spacemen contending with a computer gone rogue; the psychedelic journey through the star gate that ends in what appears to be a Belle Epoque palace, and the final mysterious appearance of the star child. As in so much of Clarke's fiction, it's about humankind coming to the brink of a new evolutionary leap.
In a sense the story is cold and intellectual, Clarke never was a writer of strong emotions, but if you love science fiction that appeals to the mind then this is the story for you. He wrote three sequels to Both aesthetically and intellectually, , A Space Odyssey is one of the most influential films of all time, certainly it's effect upon all subsequent science fiction is incalculable.
And let's not forget the movie by Stanely Kubrick was just as influential to film and general pop culture and generations of science fiction pop culture as the very book it was based on. Clarke has been voted one of the all-time best science fiction writers, and he left plenty of work that deserves that title. Childhood's End , which received a Retro Hugo Award, was Clarke's own favourite among his novels, and it's easy to see why.
Aliens known as Overlords arrive suddenly over the earth and bring an end to war. For fifty years there is peace and prosperity, but it is finally revealed that the real purpose of the Overlords is to prepare humanity for the next step in their evolution, a merger with a cosmic mind. But one person leaves Diaspar and discovers another community, Lys, an oasis where people have rejected the technology of Diaspar. By bringing the two communities together, a new future in space is opened up.
Campbell Memorial Awards, is a story of alien contact without the aliens. An asteroid is spotted heading towards Earth, but when it is investigated it proves to be an uninhabited spaceship. The story tells of the exploration of the craft, and the deductions that can be made about the aliens without the aliens ever appearing. The titles of these three novels Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars illustrate the way the planet is transformed over the course of this long work, from desert to the first stirrings of life to open water. It's a magnificent conception, carried out with great attention to scientific plausibility as well as psychological insight.
The story begins with the arrival of the first hundred colonists, and from there chronicles their struggles to survive in an inhospitable environment, their arguments about the ethics of terraforming the planet and the best way of doing it, and their first tentative attempts to turn the world into a place where people can live openly. Meanwhile, as resources become limited on Earth, transnational corporations come to dominate the planet and while a brief Martian rebellion flares, it is soon put down. But as terraforming proceeds over the succeeding years, so discontent about the authoritarian control from Earth grows, and another rebellion starts to brew.
Coincidentally, a catastrophic environmental collapse on Earth paves the way for Martian independence, but with the additional problem of refugees from Earth. With Mars now a planet where people can live openly on the surface, attention starts to turn towards populating the rest of the solar system. A fourth volume, The Martians, is a collection of stories and other related pieces that link to the trilogy.
It's a glorious and fascinating vision of the different ways that humanity might find to live among our different planets. The new scientific knowledge about Mars that we began to acquire during the s, and the scientific literacy of the Mars Trilogy, also inspired a number of other books about Mars. Wells, Stanley Weinbaum and others. From the First World War onwards, as communist rule was established in Russia and fascism spread from Italy to Germany to Spain, writers started to explore the notion of dystopia. They were, invariably, states in which conformity was enforced, and in which individuality had no place.
These dystopias were generally from authors not usually associated with genre, and were often though not always the only genre work that they produced. And yet they are works that have lasted, work that have become recognised as classics not just of science fiction, but of world literature. The one that stands out for us is Brave New World, in part because it is more ambiguous about the world it portrays so that we end up having to think that bit more about the world presented to us.
Written among the disturbances of the Great Depression, Brave New World proposes that stability is the ultimate need of civilisation, and the World State of the novel is peaceful, all needs are met, and everyone is happy. Yet it is a world in which children are not born but decanted, and everyone is assigned at birth to a place within society that permanently limits what they can do or where they can live.
But thanks to the drug, soma, there is no dissent, no unhappiness. Into this perfectly ordered society is introduced John the Savage, who was born in a reservation outside the reach of the state and thus has none of the conditioning of every other citizen. Ironically, the hero finds utopia too boring. He is rescued from death by the Princess Zee, who flies him to safety. The novel ends with the ominous prophecy that the superior race will invade the upper earth - "the Darwinian proposition", as Bulwer-Lytton called it. John Sutherland Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.
One of a flurry of novels written by Burgess when he was under the mistaken belief that he had only a short time to live. Set in a dystopian socialist welfare state of the future, the novel fantasises a world without religion. Alex is a "droog" - a juvenile delinquent who lives for sex, violence and subcult high fashion. The narrative takes the form of a memoir, in Alex's distinctive gang-slang.
The state "programmes" Alex into virtue; later deprogrammed, he discovers what good and evil really are. The novel, internationally popularised by Stanley Kubrick's film into what Burgess called "Clockwork Marmalade", is Burgess's tribute to his cradle Catholicism and, as a writer, to James Joyce. JS Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. In one of the first split-screen narratives, Burgess juxtaposes three key 20th-century themes: Trotsky's visit to New York is presented as a Broadway musical; a mournful Freud looks back on his life as he prepares to flee the Nazis; and in the year , as a rogue asteroid barrels towards the Earth, humanity argues over who will survive and what kind of society they will take to the stars.
JJ Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. John Carter, a Confederate veteran turned gold prospector, is hiding from Indians in an Arizona cave when he is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to the locals as Barsoom. There, surrounded by four-armed, green-skinned warriors, ferocious white apes, eight-legged horse-substitutes, legged "dogs", and so on, he falls in love with Princess Dejah Thoris, who might almost be human if she didn't lay eggs.
She is, naturally, both beautiful and extremely scantily clad Burroughs's first novel, published in serial form, is the purest pulp, and its lack of pretension is its greatest charm. Disjointed, hallucinatory cut-ups form a collage of, as Burroughs explained of the title, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork".
A junkie's picaresque adventures in both the real world and the fantastical "Interzone", this is satire using the most savage of distorting mirrors: Only Cronenberg could have filmed it in , and even he recreated Burroughs's biography rather than his interior world. Butler's fourth novel throws African American Dana Franklin back in time to the early s, where she is pitched into the reality of slavery and the individual struggle to survive its horrors.
Butler single-handedly brought to the SF genre the concerns of gender politics, racial conflict and slavery. Several of her novels are groundbreaking, but none is more compelling or shocking than Kindred. A brilliant work on many levels, it ingeniously uses the device of time travel to explore the iniquity of slavery through Dana's modern sensibilities.
The wittiest of Victorian dystopias by the period's arch anti-Victorian. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand as, for a while, did the chronic misfit Butler. Assisted by a native, Chowbok, he makes a perilous journey across a mountain range to Erewhon say it backwards , an upside-down world in which crime is "cured" and illness "punished", where universities are institutions of "Unreason" and technology is banned. The state religion is worship of the goddess Ydgrun ie "Mrs Grundy" - bourgeois morality.
Does it sound familiar? Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there. He ends up keeping his promise, witnessing the French revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath from the perspective of the Italian treetops. Drafted soon after Calvino's break with communism over the invasion of Hungary, the novel can be read as a fable about intellectual commitments. At the same time, it's a perfectly turned fantasy, densely imagined but lightly written in a style modelled on Voltaire and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Chris Tayler Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Campbell has long been one of the masters of psychological horror, proving again and again that what's in our heads is far scarier than any monster lurking in the shadows. In this novel, the domineering old spinster Queenie dies - a relief to those around her.
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Her niece Alison inherits the house, but soon starts to suspect that the old woman is taking over her eight-year-old daughter Rowan. A paranoid, disturbing masterpiece. The intellectuals' favourite children's story began as an improvised tale told by an Oxford mathematics don to a colleague's daughters; later readers have found absurdism, political satire and linguistic philosophy in a work that, years on, remains fertile and fresh, crisp yet mysterious, and endlessly open to intepretation.
Alice, while reading in a meadow, sees a white rabbit rush by, feverishly consulting a watch. She follows him down a hole Freudian analysis, as elsewhere in the story, is all too easy , where she grows and shrinks in size and encounters creatures mythological, extinct and invented. Morbid jokes and gleeful subversion abound. The trippier sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, like its predecessor, illustrated by John Tenniel. More donnish in tone, this fantasy follows Alice into a mirror world in which everything is reversed.
Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams. The year is - and other times. Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg. She has two large and wonderful wings.
In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures. The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet. Carmen Callil Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.
The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. Chabon's Pulitzer prize-winning picaresque charts the rise of two young cartoonists, Klayman and Kavalier. It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies.
XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Clarke's third novel fuses science and mysticism in an optimistic treatise describing the transcendence of humankind from petty, warring beings to the guardians of utopia, and beyond. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light. Humanity ultimately transcends the physical and joins a cosmic overmind, so ushering in the childhood's end of the title EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.
Chesterton's "nightmare", as he subtitled it, combines Edwardian delicacy with wonderfully melodramatic tub-thumping - beautiful sunsets and Armageddon - to create an Earth as strange as any far-distant planet. Secret policemen infiltrate an anarchist cabal bent on destruction, whose members are known only by the days of the week; but behind each one's disguise, they discover only another policeman. At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium.
Chesterton's distorting mirror combines spinetingling terror with round farce to give a fascinating perspective on Edwardian fears of and flirtations with anarchism, nihilism and a world without god. Clarke's first novel is a vast, hugely satisfying alternative history, a decade in the writing, about the revival of magic - which had fallen into dusty, theoretical scholarship - in the early 19th century.
Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural. The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years.
It's both a love story and a war story, and a deeply felt essay, ahead of its time, about how all living things are mutually dependant. This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction. Coupland began Girlfriend in a Coma in "probably the darkest period of my life", and it shows. Listening to the Smiths - whose single gave the book its title - can't have helped.
This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness. When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell. Wondering what the future holds? It's wrinkles, disillusionment and the big sleep.
It's not often you get to read a book vertically as well as horizontally, but there is much that is uncommon about House of Leaves. It's ostensibly a horror story, but the multiple narrations and typographical tricks - including one chapter that cuts down through the middle of the book - make it as much a comment on metatextuality as a novel. That said, the creepiness stays with you, especially the house that keeps stealthily remodelling itself: