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🎁🎅🎄MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR!☃️❄️🦌
🎁🎅🎄MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR!☃️❄️🦌
The literary genre of Science Fiction has contributed massively not only to the written word, but also to popular culture including music, film, television and video-gaming. It can be argued that literary science fiction has helped humankind better understand the universe and creation, and how to approach some of mankind’s existential problems in the fields of medicine, space travel, ecological threat and others. From the earliest masters of the form such as Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), to the 19th century greats including Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and into the 20th Century with pace-setters John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Country House Library boasts a universe of choice and has selected just a small sample from our stellar Science Fiction collection:-
Jules Verne was a French novelist (1828 -1905) who achieved great popularity with a long series of books combining adventure with popular science fiction. Among his most successful Voyage to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days, have all been made into films and TV series on several occasions. Had Verne been alive today, he would have certainly competed with J. K. Rowling on the writer’s rich list! This 1891 publication of his lesser known 1865 novel De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes, follows the fictional exploits of the Baltimore Gun Club as the members endeavour to literally shoot the gun clubs’ president and two fellow travellers to the Moon.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
George Orwell, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903 – 1950), wrote his two most successful novels, both political satires, close to his untimely death from tuberculosis, aged 47. Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1950) brought inevitable comparisons with the 19th century political satirist Jonathan Swift. Hard to exaggerate the massive influence Nineteen Eighty Four has exerted, not just in science fiction, but also popular culture including music, journalism, and real-life politics and law-making. Some of Orwell’s fictions such as ‘newspeak, ‘doublethink, the ‘thought police’, and ‘Big Brother’ have resonated through the modern age and passed into common language.
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1902 – 69) used various combinations of his names in different phases of his career. Before WW2 he was active as John Beynon but became known as John Wyndham with his best known, post-war, science fiction beginning with The Day of the Triffids (1951). His plots tended to focus on the difficulty of preserving English ‘decency’ in hostile conditions, which found favour with the British public at the time, over and above the more colourful American science fiction, which still seemed alien. This mixed collection from publishers Penguin, is the ideal way to add colour and depth to any vintage science fiction collection.
"It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil."
This 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess (1917 – 93), marking a new development in the Joycean tradition of ‘stream of conciousness’, with inventive word-play and rhyming slang, reached cult status following the film version by Stanley Kubrick in 1972, and is considered to be one of the most influential dystopian novels ever written. The story follows the 15 year old gang leader Alex and his friends (the ‘droogs’) as they wreak extreme violence in a near-future cityscape. While the book was initially banned for its obscene language by some educational establishments in the US, the British literary world were generally favourable with Kingsley Amis acclaiming the novel as “cheerful horror” and Roald Dahl “a terrifying and marvellous book”.
By the time Aldous Huxley’s (1894 – 1963) most famous work Brave New World was published in 1932, the writer had already established his reputation with journalism, drama criticism and several volumes of poetry. His collections of short stories such as Limbo also helped to launch his reputation as a witty and satirical commentator on contemporary events. With Brave New World, Huxley turned his attention to the threat of world domination by scientific totalitarianism, and this 1944 novel Time Must Have a Stop is firmly of that ilk. Country House Library is proud to offer this first edition.
“Life is wasted on the living.”
Although Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001) is best remembered for his comedy sci-fi multi-million selling novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he was also an accomplished actor, dramatist and satirist, penning four stories (13 episodes) for the BBC’s Doctor Who and wrote, and appeared in, episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In this 1981 publication of the sequel to ‘Hitchhiker’s’, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox leave the planet Magrathea on the Vogon ship The Heart of Gold. Understandably, Arthur gets frustrated that the ship is unable to produce a decent cup of tea.
The book-lovers at Country House Library love a short story, so this 1964, first edition anthology from publishers Faber, edited by the veritable doyen of British science fiction, Brian Aldiss, was a natural selection for this list of recommended sci-fi reads. Including short stories from such masters of the form as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, this is a wonderful choice for lovers of the sci-fi genre, the classic short story, and vintage literature.
Unusually for a writer of science fiction, Northern Ireland’s James White (1928 - 99) abhorred violence of any sort, and medical and other emergencies were often the source of the dramatic tension in his novels. His ‘Sector General’ series of 12 books is regarded as defining the genre of medical science fiction, and for introducing an unforgettable cast of aliens. This 1970 publication (titled The Escape Orbit in the US), short-listed for the genre’s Nebula Award, chronicles the efforts of human prisoners of war to survive after being dumped on a hostile planet without tools or weapons.
Michael Moorcock (b.1939) is one of the most prominent of the ‘New Wave’ SF writers from the 1960’s, part of whose aim was to invest the genre with literary merit. From 1964 to 1971, as editor of the respected British SF magazine New Worlds, he’s been credited with the development of ‘cyberpunk’. In 2008, The Times newspaper listed Moorcock as one of the Top 50 writers since 1945. This 1969 novel tells the story of a man fleeing the disintegrating society on Earth, in a stolen spaceship packed with his nearest and dearest in a state of suspended animation. What could possibly go wrong?
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not... Both are equally terrifying – Arthur C. Clarke
One of the towering figures of Science Fiction, Sir Arthur C(harles) Clarke CBE FRAS (1917 – 2008) co-wrote the screenplay for one of the most influential films of all time 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This 1980 publication of Clarke’s first ever full-length novel, first published in 1951, was written before man had ventured into space. A critic writing at the time described the novel as "first-level science fiction for the intelligent and literate reader.” Clarke is the giant star in any vintage sci-fi collection.
More than any other literary genre, Science Fiction has shaped how we the human race sees ourselves as a part of the universe. As a serious book-lover, it would be a near impossibility not to have read at least some of the great Sci-Fi classic authors, or not to have been touched by their influence in 21st century culture. We hope you’ll enjoy orbiting Country House Library’s Science Fiction section and making a successful touch-down on books of your choice.
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