NZCA Lines‘ top 5 science fiction novels

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Solaris was adapted twice for film, first by Andrei Tarkovsky in the 1970s and then more recently by Stephen Soderbergh. It’s the story of a scientist who, whilst studying the qualities of a strange sentient ‘planet’, is haunted by what appears to be his wife, back from the dead and impossibly located on a space station far from Earth.

The story is about our tendency to only understand ourselves and the universe in an empirical scientific way, qualifying intelligence as cognitive rather than emotional. The sentient planet Solaris communicates with the scientists by creating apparitions drawn from the deepest, darkest recesses of their psyche, driving them to the point of madness.

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

It doesn’t have to be the future to be science fiction. Alasdair Gray is a genius, no two ways about it, and Lanark is referred to by some as his Ulyssess. Well, I’ve never read Ulyssess, but a quick glance inside the cover revealed some very small type and indecipherable sentences from which I immediately recoiled.

Lanark, meanwhile, is at least fairly accessible. Starting in Glasgow sometime around the 1960s, it’s loosely autobiographical, charting the life of a talented yet arrogant painter (which greatly appealed to me, as I was reading whilst at Edinburgh College of Art). However it’s completely non-chronological, and alternates between this ‘reality’ and a dark reflection of our real world, full of allegorical characters, dangerous chemical spillages and wastelands in which time itself becomes distorted and unrecognisable. To boot, Gray’s beautiful pen and ink illustrations mark the start of each section. I can’t recommend this highly enough.

The Drowned World by JG Ballard

The Drowned World is Ballard’s second novel, and my favourite that I’ve read of his. Set in the not too far distant future, a change in the Sun’s behaviour has led to a global rise in temperature, to the extent where most of the planet is flooded. What remains of the human race lives in Antarctica, where temperatures are still habitable. However, there are small contingents out in the tropical lagoons above what were once our major cities.

The novel is set ‘in’ London, where scavengers dive for treasure in the submerged metropolis. Ballard got kinky with Crash later in his career, but his earlier work contains beautiful imagery, here conjuring dreamlike images of mangroves nestling among the tops of skyscrapers. You can almost feel the heat of the omnipresent sun, looming ominously above all the proceedings, its ancient heartbeat luring the protagonists back into the primordial ooze.

NB: It turns out there is a beautiful looking game called Submerged which appears very much inspired by The Drowned World.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Like Solaris, this is another book that was masterfully translated to film by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Set sometime around the present day, Roadside Picnic supposed a world where aliens have landed on earth, briefly, leaving before contact was made. All that remains are six ‘zones’, the areas in which landings occurred, each populated by seemingly supernatural objects and invisible dangers.

Scavengers dubbed ‘stalkers’ illegally enter these areas, collecting artefacts to be sold on the outside. This technology is so far beyond our understanding that we have absolutely no idea how it works, and the book’s title comes from the idea of a roadside picnic in the woods; stopping on a whim, humans leave behind all kinds of useless detritus that would be incomprehensible to the local wildlife. The point is this: that we were of no significance to the visitors, merely a stopping point on their interstellar journey – a routine garbage dump.

The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin

We so frequently come across the idea of a dystopia in science fiction that it’s refreshing to come across a novel presenting a borderline utopia, or at least an attempt at one. In what is clearly an allegory for the capitalist United States and a hypothetical alternative, Le Guin presents two civilisations: the materialistic planet Urras and its moon Anarres, inhabited by an anarchist offshoot society.

The book follows a physicist from the anarchist moon as he travels between the two civilisations, along the way highlighting the hidden power structures behind his own ‘non-authoritarian’ homeland, and the shock of entering into a capitalist society. Both societies are at fault, and The Dispossessed is a captivating study of what alternatives to our current social paradigm may be possible.