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Philip K Dick’s name gained notoriety with a string of Hollywood films, but none of them have done justice to the dark and paranoid worlds created in his books. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner in 1982) is Dick at his best, combining so many of his favourite themes—post-nuclear war, religion, identity, technology and dis-utopia. It is set in the near future, on an Earth that has suffered a nuclear war but at a high cost. This Earth is dying, everywhere is surrounded by “kibble” (rotting bomb debris), all the animals have died from radiation, people wear lead-lined underwear and anyone successful has emigrated to Mars or beyond. In this world is Dekker, a bounty hunter who is hunting down “replicants” (more artificial copies of humans then robots) who have illegally returned to Earth. Using the structure of a Private Investigator thriller, Dick asks an unsettling question: how do you cope in a world where you can’t tell the real humans from the copies? Many of Dick’s novels have good premises but the plot often doesn’t follow it through, leaving the reader disappointed. With Do Androids… there is no disappointment, the plot lives up to all of the promise of its premise. It has a dark, twisting plot with a truly unsettling ending. The characters here are dark too; the people are worn down by their dying world, they are not the bright and glamorous people of so many science fiction films. When reading this novel, don’t think of the film Blade Runner, they have so little in common. If you’ve never read any of Philip K Dick’s novels then this is an excellent entry into his dark and dis-utopian world; if you’ve encountered him before then this novel is where so many of his most unsettling themes come together.

Alien invasion is a staple of science fiction and has featured far too many novels and films, but in The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham turns that classic theme into a frighteningly original story that is still disturbing now. The Midwich Cuckoos begins with Richard Gayford (the novel’s narrator) and his wife Janet returning from an evening in London, celebrating his birthday, to the English village of Midwich, where they have recently moved. Midwich is the stereotype of the quiet, sleepy 1950s English country village where nothing unusual ever happens. Except this day Richard and Janet find they cannot enter Midwich, all roads are blocked. So they set off, on foot, across the fields, only for both of them to collapse, unconscious, in their tracks. The army, who are trying to keep everyone out because Midwich is incommunicado, rescues them. Everyone in the village is unconscious, as if they collapsed were they stood, the same happening to anyone trying to enter the village. An invisible force is surrounding the village. This lasts for twenty-two hours and then everyone wakes up as if nothing has happened. Soon it becomes apparent that every woman able to bear children is pregnant—some without the benefit of sexual intercourse. Also, together, the women give birth to beautiful but strange babies, all with blonde hair and golden eyes… There are no bug-eyed aliens or reptilian creatures fighting humans here, instead there are strange children who look and behave like humans but are not. As they grow up, the children begin to show nonhuman-like behaviour, slowly stretching their power over the villagers. As an alien invasion this is an original and disturbing approach, to have humans as hosts for the aliens and trick them into raising and protecting these “cuckoos” in their midst. Also, this is an implied alien invasion; no one names it as such. Wyndham’s novel is a slow burn, slowly and piece by piece giving the reader information, slowly revealing the nature of the children. Yet the characters here are all too real, displaying that all too human trait when faced with the extraordinary of simply accepting it as ordinary. He also taps into one of our fundamental fears, that our children are not our own but have been substituted by changelings. I first read this novel as a teenager and it frightened me; coming back to it as an adult I find it just as disturbing but for different reasons. This invasion almost mimics the way a virus attacks a body. It is such a simple but very original premise. The Midwich Cuckoos is set in 1950s England, when it was written, and so reflects the attitudes and prejudices of the time, children born out of wedlock are a source of shame and class rules everyone’s relationships. This only adds to the atmosphere and feel of this novel, the setting so real that it makes the extraordinary events that slowly unfold seem real as well—only adding to the horror. John Wyndham should be held up there as one of the greats of science fiction, though he seems to have slipped down in people’s memory. If you are new to Wyndham’s works this is an excellent entry into his dark universe. If you read this novel many years ago, give it a new look—it has lost none of its impact and is also now strangely relevant.

Though this is a classic dystopian novel, the world it portrays is still strikingly original, even though it was first published in 1932. There is an oppressive, totalitarian regime ruling the world, here they are ruling it by creating a hedonistic society where everyone’s sexual and pleasurable desires are fulfilled. This is also the ultimate classist society, here people are genetically engineered for the class they will live out their lives in. Even now this is still a very original dystopia. Huxley created a world that is shockingly class riddled, people are born via huge vitro factories where foetuses are manipulated to be one of five rigid classes. The alphas are at the top, the most intelligent and the tallest, and the epsilons are at the bottom being the basic manual labourers with the lowest IQ and shortest stature. No one questions this society because everyone is kept “happy” with legally available mind-altering drugs and the requirement to be sexually promiscuous, even the simplest signs of monogamy are frowned on. This novel isn’t about the downfall of this society, as many lesser dystopian novels are, but how a few characters fall foul of it and what happens to them. Huxley vividly creates his world, leading the reader through many of the different institutions that are the pillars of this society; the novel opens with a vivid description of a vitro factory. Unfortunately his characters are not as striking or as well drawn as these institutions. This is a very male-dominated world and some of them feel interchangeable. There are only two real female characters, one is the object of everyone’s desire, all the male characters want to sleep with her, and the other is a sad and old woman, her body allowed to age naturally and therefore she is now “ugly”. The style of this novel is very detached and unemotional, so often scenes are described in a cold and dispassionate tone. The most intimate the novel gets is when Lenina is confronted by a woman who has aged normally and she is repulsed by her and when John, the savage, sits by his mother’s bed as she dies in a drug-induced coma. These are also the most memorable scenes of the novel, where Huxley gets under the skin of his characters. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel does not reach this same level of intimacy. I have found this is the style of other novels from the same time, but I still found it distracting, so unemotional, so detached from its characters. There are some language and scenes here that could make a modern reader uncomfortable but this is still a very interesting and original dystopian novel, especially remembering it was first published in 1932. Find it here on Amazon Drew

It is the future and all humans live underground, each person having their own room, which they never leave. All their needs – food, drink, hygiene, medication and even sleep – are provided for them automatically from machinery within the room’s walls and ceiling. They communicate with other people without leaving their rooms, via a metal disk on which the other people’s faces are projected. They have a book that contains all required knowledge, which is being constantly updated. This world is all run, for these humans, by the mysterious Machine. This disturbing dystopian novella was published in 1909 and was written by EM Forster, more famous for the novels A Room with a View and Howard’s End than his science fiction writing. This is a strange but still fascinating read. It is written very much in the style of the Edwardian novel, as all of Forster’s fiction were, with a distanced narrative. The central character is a middle-aged woman, not a dashing male hero or strong-willed young heroine so common in later science fiction, and she doesn’t rebel against her world but embraces it, she almost worships the Machine. Neither does Forster explain how this world came into being; he just describes how it is. An early dystopian story that bucked the trends that would later be present in so much of later literature. This was a fascinating read and so surprising coming from the pen of EM Forster. The only downside was that the title gives away far too much of the plot. This was the only piece of science fiction that Forster wrote, but it is so startling and original that I wonder what else he would have written if he’d tried his hand at it again. Find it here on Amazon