Science fiction has seen many audacious heroes who use their wit and guile to overthrow dictatorships, bring the truth to light, and save the world. While this kind of wish fulfilment has its place, so too do stories in which protagonists know only too well that they cannot change the status quo.

Maureen F. McHugh made her name with a story of this type, with her 1992 debut novel China Mountain Zhang. In 2001's Nekropolis, McHugh built a story around another outsider protagonist, this time living in a bleak vision of near-future Morocco.

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A soulful sequel to The Soul of the Robot (1974)

In episode 119, I took a look at The Soul of the Robot from 1974, the best-known novel by the little-known British SF author Barrington J. Bayley. As I continue to explore Bayley's strange, anarchic works, it is time to address his only sequel. Published in 1985, just before Bayley went on a long hiatus, The Rod of Light continues the adventures of the bronze-black robot Jasperodus, the only one of his kind to be blessed - or cursed - with a soul.

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A clash of the deep past and the near future

Featured in episode 107, Pat Murphy's 1986 novel The Falling Woman was one of my favourite reads of 2024. This episode covers her debut novel, The Shadow Hunter, originally published in 1982. While fairly obscure, it is every bit as good as The Falling Woman, and arguably deserves to be seen as a classic of the early 1980s.

In this story of clashing worlds, a time machine is used to drag a young Neanderthal boy hundreds of thousands of years into his future. His arrival into a ecologically and spiritually degraded world is used by Murphy to explore the costs and perils of technological, cultural, and commercial progress. By colonising the moon and the asteroid belt, and building vast gleaming cities, how does humankind impoverish itself?

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