Brian Aldiss – Blood and Porridge

June 9, 2023June 14, 2023

Remembering Iain Banks

Ten years ago today, on June 9^th, 2013, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks passed away at the age of 59, struck down by a gall-bladder cancer that’d only been diagnosed two months earlier. Here’s a slightly updated version of the tribute to him I wrote at the time.

Iain Banks became a big thing for me, and for many people like me, when he found success, fame and a certain notoriety with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. This was because he seemed to tick a lot of important boxes.

Like me and the crowd I hung out with, he came from a Scottish background, so we were familiar with many of the places he wrote about. Like us, his politics were left-of-centre, with a leaning towards the cause of Scottish independence because independence seemed the best way to avoid being saddled with right-wing Tory governments whom few people in Scotland ever voted for. And like us, he was obviously into literature, but he was also into some strange, off-beat writers whom stuffy literary critics would dismiss as being too ‘genre’ for serious consideration – Mervyn Peake, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, and so on.

You could argue that Alasdair Gray had blazed the same trail a few years earlier with his 1980 novel Lanark, but there was one important difference. Gray had been a young man in the 1950s. Banks, like us, was clearly of the 1980s. Like it or not – and we did not – Banks and us, his readers, were Maggie Thatcher’s children.

The Wasp Factory made an immediate stir with its blackly funny plot about Frank Cauldhame, a maimed delinquent living in a remote part of Scotland, who amuses himself with the shamanistic killings of insects, seagulls, rabbits and young children. In quick succession Banks followed it with Walking on Glass (1985), which showed the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946-59); The Bridge (1986), a paean to both the Forth Rail Bridge and Gray’s Lanark, with a healthy dose of the J.G. Ballard short story Concentration City (1957) mixed in; and in 1987 Consider Phlebas, the first of many epic outer-space novels about an interstellar anarcho-utopian society called the Culture. The Culture novels were attributed to Iain M. Banks, a move by his publisher to help fans of ‘serious’ mainstream fiction and fans of science fiction identify what was what in his output. At the time, the speculative fiction magazine Interzone remarked that it was delighted to see Banks at last ‘come out of the closet’ as a sci-fi writer.

In August 1987 Banks was scheduled to appear on a discussion panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Around the same time I’d agreed to edit the latest edition of a small literary magazine called Alma Mater, published by some fellow-students at the University of Aberdeen’s English Literature Department. Dr Isobel Murray, who’d been my tutor at Aberdeen for the past year, was chairing the Book Festival panel and I used my connection with her to persuade Banks’s agent to let me interview him after the panel, for Alma Mater. I later offered Dr Murray a grovelling apology for brazenly using her name as my calling card.

© Abacus Books

The panel, which I attended, produced a few sparks. In addition to Banks and Murray, it featured the Glaswegian writer Frederic Lindsay, whose 1983 novel Brond had recently been made into a TV series, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring a very young John Hannah. (By a sad coincidence, Lindsay also died in 2013, just ten days before Banks did.) And it was rounded off by another Glaswegian, Ronald Frame, author of the just-published novel Sandmouth People. If it’s unfair to say that the tweedy Frame was a young fogey at the time, he certainly gave the impression of being one. When somebody in the audience asked the authors about their views on self-censorship, he said pompously: “I would never include anything I might regret in five years’ time.”

Banks immediately spluttered, “But those are the best bits!”

Afterwards I met up with Banks and a few of his friends and conducted the interview in a pub in Edinburgh’s Rose Street – either the Kenilworth or the Auld Hundred, if I remember correctly – with Banks speaking into the mic of the clunky tape recorder I’d bought with me, transferring his voice onto a crackly cassette tape that, like almost everything else I possess, now resides inside a cardboard box somewhere in my Dad’s attic.

I asked him about the hostile reception that The Wasp Factory had received in some quarters. (The Irish Times had described it as ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’.) Banks had been surprised by this. He’d expected some flak from animal rights groups, but not from the critics. He’d learned that one reviewer who’d blasted the book as ‘the literary equivalent of a video nasty’ also worked in the Conservative Party office in London, which pleased him no end. Offending that guy had been an honour.

I also asked him about his fondness for peppering his novels with references to the popular culture of the time. In The Bridge, for example, just before the car accident that sets the surreal plot in motion, the hero slots a copy of the Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) into his car stereo. Wouldn’t that make the books look rather dated a few years later? “Yeah,” he agreed, “it’ll date them. But what the hell?” He believed that characters living in a particular time and particular place would be influenced by the current popular culture, so he didn’t see why he should shirk from mentioning the music, books, films and TV programmes of the moment.

I quoted Brian Aldiss at him – Aldiss had famously said that all good science fiction hovers at the edge of being something different from science fiction. Banks agreed with that, sort of, but he also disagreed. Enthusiastically, he told me how Consider Phlebas came with all the trimmings of the traditional Isaac Asimov / Robert Heinlein ‘space opera’: giant spaceships, laser cannons, inter-planetary battles.

© Little, Brown

Did he, I asked finally, worry about being pigeon-holed, with one half of the world viewing him as a ‘Scottish’ author and the other half viewing him as a ‘sci-fi’ one? Not at all, he said. He was quite at ease with being regarded as Scottish. And being seen as a sci-fi author didn’t bother him either, since science fiction was an ‘old love’ for him.

From Rose Street, we moved to Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar in Candlemaker Row, just behind the statue of the famous Edinburgh terrier who’d spent 14 years in the adjacent graveyard guarding the grave of his dead master. Poor wee Bobby, I remember musing, wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d been a character in The Wasp Factory. By then a good number of pints had been drunk and the conversation had descended somewhat from the lofty heights of literary discussion. I recall talking to Banks about Arthur Montford, the lugubrious Scottish TV football commentator famous for his eccentrically patterned sports jackets and for his catchphrases that included “What a stramash!” and (uttered all too often) “Disaster for Scotland!” At some point too we discussed the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula Prince of Darkness, which had featured the Scottish actor (from Shotts in North Lanarkshire) Andrew Keir.

The next issue of Alma Mater, containing my interview with Iain Banks, was published later that year. A series of cock-ups by the typesetter meant that it looked pretty ropey, though thankfully the pages featuring Banks were okay. The following year, I heard that Banks would be making an appearance at Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop in West Crosscauseway (now long vanished) and I went along to give him a copy of the magazine. To my surprise, he remembered me and enthused about the mini-pub crawl we’d done that day: “That was a good afternoon!”

After that I read several more Banks novels: Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993). The Crow Road, his stab at writing a sprawling family saga, is the book that everyone talks about, although I have to say that it’s not one of my favourites. Sure, it has one of the best opening lines in modern literature (“It was the day my grandmother exploded”), but as with most other sprawling sagas about eccentric families, I find it too contrived for its own good.

© Little, Brown

On the other hand, I think Espedair Street, which is about a hapless rock musician who’s found fame, fortune and much unhappiness and is now trying to live anonymously in a rough part of Glasgow, is marvellous. I also think it’s the warmest and most relatable Iain Banks book that I’ve read. Among my all-time favourite novels about rock ‘n’ roll, it’s up there with Harlan Ellison’s Spider Kiss (1961) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008).

And I like Complicity, which welds a serial-killer plot onto Banks’ intense distaste for the corruption and inequalities of the recently-ended Thatcher era. Much of it is set in Edinburgh, where scuzzy journalist-hero Cameron Colley boozes in a series of pubs ranging from the upmarket Café Royal on West Register Street to the desperate, late-opening Casbah in the Cowgate. By then I’d lived in Edinburgh and I knew Colley’s haunts well. I’d even had an experience similar to one he has in the Café Royal, when he stands in front of the bar’s gantry (which doesn’t contain a mirror although it looks as though it does), can’t see his reflection and in a drunken panic believes himself to be a vampire.

After Complicity, however, I stopped reading Iain Banks, probably because by then there were just too many young Scottish writers competing for my attention: Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Robertson. Banks’s success in the 1980s, of course, had helped pave the way for all these slightly younger Turks. It wasn’t until after his death that I read more of his stuff: the collection State of the Art (1991), whose stories lean towards science fiction, so the name ‘Iain Banks’ on the cover contains that all-important initial-letter ‘M’ to warn readers of serious mainstream literature to keep clear; The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007); Stonemouth (2012); The Quarry, published posthumously in 2013; and Banks’s one book of non-fiction, Raw Spirit (2003), which details his experiences while he works on the rather enviable assignment of visiting, and sampling the products of, as many of Scotland’s whisky distilleries as he can.

Among these later novels, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, another sprawling family saga, perhaps sticks most in my mind. That’s largely because of the following quote, wherein the narrator muses on the connection between being right-wing and not having an imagination, and which could be the manifesto for Banks’s own politics: “We got talking about how some people were selfish and some weren’t, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination. Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them. They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever. Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are. It’s all to do with imagination, empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning.”

Meanwhile, I found Raw Spirit so informative that, as I read it, I tried to record what it said about the distilleries Banks visited, the whiskies he drank, and his opinions on their flavours, in a series of mind-maps.

Banks was so prolific that, looking at his bibliography, I see there are still nearly 20 books of his that I haven’t read yet. That includes the entire series of Culture novels. So, I still have much catching up to do with the great man’s oeuvre.

February 25, 2021

The big Gray man

From pinterest.co.uk

Today, January 25^th, 2021, has been designated ‘Gray Day’ on Scottish social media in honour of the celebrated Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray, who died in December 2019. As my way of marking the occasion, here’s a reposting of a blog entry I wrote shortly after the great man’s death.

Much has been written about Alasdair Gray, the Scottish novelist, poet, playwright, artist, illustrator, academic and polemicist who passed away on December 29^th, 2019. I doubt if my own reflections on Gray will offer any new insights on the man or his works. But he was a huge influence on me, so I’m going to give my tuppence-worth anyway.

In 1980s Scotland, to a youth like myself, in love with books and writing, Gray seemed a titanic cultural presence. Actually, ‘titanic’ is an ironic adjective to use to describe Gray as physically he was anything but. Bearded and often dishevelled, Gray resembled an eccentric scientist from the supporting cast of a 1950s sci-fi ‘B’ movie. He once memorably described himself as ‘a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian’.

He was also a presence that seemed to suddenly loom out of nowhere. The moment when Gray became famous was in 1981 when his first novel Lanark was published. I remember being in high school that year when my English teacher Iain Jenkins urged me to get hold of a copy and read it. I still hadn’t read Lanark by 1983 when I started college in Aberdeen, but I remember joining the campus Creative Writing Society and hearing its members enthuse about it. These included a young Kenny Farquharson (now a columnist with the Scottish edition of the Times) explaining to someone the novel’s admirably weird structure, whereby it consisted of four ‘books’ but with Book Three coming first, then Books One and Two and finally Book Four. And an equally young Ali Smith recalling meeting Gray and speaking fondly of how eccentric he was.

In fact, I didn’t read Lanark until the following summer when I’d secured a three-month job as a night-porter in a hotel high up in the Swiss Alps. In the early hours of the morning, after I’d done my rounds and finished my chores and all the guests had gone to bed, I’d sit behind the reception desk and read. It took me about a week of those nightshifts to get through Lanark. I lapped up its tale of Duncan Thaw, the young, doomed protagonist of what was basically a 1950s Glaswegian version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which constituted Books One and Two; and I similarly lapped up its alternating tale of the title character (mysteriously linked to Thaw) in the grimly fabulist city of Unthank, which constituted Books Three and Four. A quote by sci-fi author Brian Aldiss on the cover neatly described Unthank as ‘a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch’.

© Canongate

That same summer I read The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka (1983) and the fantastical half of Lanark struck me as reminiscent of the great Bohemian writer. Gray himself acknowledged that Kafka’s The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) had inspired him: “The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night.”

The result was an astonishing book that combines gritty autobiographical realism with fanciful magical realism. Fanciful and magical in a sombre, Scottish sense, obviously.

With hindsight, Lanark was the most important book in Scottish literature since Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trilogy (1932-34). By an odd coincidence I read A Scots Quair four years later when I was working – again – as a night-porter in a hotel in the Swiss Alps. So my encounters with the greatest two works of 20^th century Scottish literature are indelibly linked in my mind with nightshifts in hotels decorated with Alpine horns and antique ski equipment and surrounded by soaring, jagged mountains.

Lanark also appeared at a significant time. Three years before its publication, the referendum on establishing a devolved Scottish parliament had ended in an undemocratic farce. Two years before it, Margaret Thatcher had started her reign as British prime minister. During this reign, Scotland would be governed unsympathetically, like a colonial property, a testing ground, an afterthought. So Lanark was important in that it helped give Scotland a cultural identity at a time when politically it was allowed no identity at all.

Whilst telling me about Lanark, Iain Jenkins mentioned ruefully that he didn’t think Gray would ever produce anything as spectacular again. Not only did it seem a once-in-a-lifetime achievement but it’d taken up half of a lifetime, for Gray had been beavering away at it since the 1950s. He once mused of the undertaking: “Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live… but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer.”

© Canongate

However, two books he produced afterwards, 1982, Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), are excellent works in their own rights even if they didn’t create the buzz that Lanark did.

Janine takes place inside the head of a lonely middle-aged man while he reflects on a life of emotional, professional and political disappointments, and masturbates, and finally attempts suicide whilst staying in a hotel room in a Scottish country town that’s either Selkirk or my hometown, Peebles. (Yes, Peebles’ two claims to literary fame are that John Buchan once practised law there and the guy in 1982, Janine might have had a wank there.) The protagonist’s musings include some elaborate sadomasochistic fantasies, which put many people off, including Anthony Burgess, who’d thought highly of Lanark but was less enthusiastic about Janine. However, it seems to me a bold meditation on Scotland in general and on the strained, often hopeless relationship between traditional, Presbyterian-conditioned Scottish males and the opposite sex in particular.

Poor Things, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow, initially seems very different from Janine but in fact it tackles similar themes. The narrator, Archibald McCandless, relates how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature. McCandless soon falls in love with her. There follows a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy, but near the end things are turned on their heads because Bella takes over as storyteller. She denounces McCandless’s version of events as a witless fantasy and portrays herself not as Frankenstein-type creation but a normal woman, albeit one ahead of her time in her views about feminism and social justice. Again, the book is a rebuke of male attitudes towards women, especially insecure Scottish ones that are partly possessive and partly, madly over-romanticised.

© Canongate

Gray’s other post-Lanark novels are entertaining, if less ambitious, and they’re never about what you expect them to be about. The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) looks like it’s going to be a comic tale of a Scottish lad-o’-pairts on his way up and then on his way down in London, but it turns into a caustic commentary on the loveless nature of Scottish Calvinism. Something Leather (1990), which is really a series of connected short stories and again features much sadomasochism, isn’t so much about kinkiness as about Gray’s disgust at the politicians and officials who oversaw Glasgow being European City of Culture 1990, something he regarded as a huge, missed opportunity. A History Maker (1994), a science-fiction novel described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘Sir Walter Scott meets Rollerball’, isn’t an absurdist sci-fi romp at all but a pessimistic account of how humanity can never achieve peaceful harmony with nature. And Old Men in Love (2007) promises to be a geriatric version of 1982, Janine, but is really an oddity whose ingredients include, among other things, ancient Athens, Fra Lippo Lippi and the Agapemonites.

Gray was also a prolific short-story writer. He produced three collections of them, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall and True (1993) and The Ends of out Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories and had several more stories published in Lean Tales (1985), alongside contributions from James Kelman and Agnes Owens. I find the quality of his short fiction variable, with some items a bit too anecdotal or oblique for my tastes. But many are excellent and Ten Tales Tall and True is one of my favourite short-story collections ever.

The fact that Gray was also an artist meant that his books, with their handsome covers and finely detailed illustrations, made decorous additions to anyone’s bookcases. The illustration by Gray I like best is probably the one he provided for his story The Star in Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

© Canongate

He also liked to make mischief with the conventions of how books are organised, with their back-cover blurbs, review quotes, prefaces, dedications, footnotes, appendices and so on. For example, he wasn’t averse to adorning his books with negative reviews (Victoria Glendinning describing Something Leather as ‘a confection of self-indulgent tripe’) or imaginary ones (an organ called Private Nose applauding Poor Things for its ‘gallery of believably grotesque foreigners – Scottish, Russian, American and French.’)

As an artist, Gray was good enough to be made Glasgow’s official artist-recorder in the late 1970s and to enjoy a retrospective exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 2014-15. His artwork included a number of murals on the walls of Glasgow and it’s a tragedy that some have been lost over the years. Among those that survive, perhaps the most famous is at Hillhead Underground Station. It contains the memorable and salient verse: “Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing / To earn what we need to keep going / Prevent what you once felt when wee / Hopeful and free.” Also worth seeing is the mural he painted, Michelangelo-style, on the ceiling of the Òran Mór restaurant, bar and music venue on Glasgow’s Byres Road. It looks gorgeous in the photos I’ve seen of it, although regrettably when I went there with my brother a few years ago to attend a Bob Mould gig, I was already well-refreshed with several pints of beer… and forgot to look upwards.

I never got to meet the great man, though I’m pretty sure I saw him one night in the late 1980s in Edinburgh’s Hebrides Bar, talking with huge animation to a group of friends and admirers. I was, however, too shy to go over and introduce myself.

One writer in whose company I did end up during the late 1980s, though, was Iain Banks, whom I got to interview for a student publication and who then invited me on an afternoon pub crawl across central Edinburgh. Banks was delighted when I told him that his recently published novel The Bridge (1986) reminded me a wee bit of Lanark. “I think Lanark’s the best thing published in Scotland in years!” he gushed. Come to think of it, it was probably the favourable comparison to Gray that prompted Banks to take me on a session.

From austinkleon.com

July 12, 2020July 22, 2020

Detours into dystopia

© Polaris Productions / Hawk Films / Warner Bros.

The world is in a dystopian condition at the moment. It’s being ravaged by a deadly virus that’s especially rampant in countries run by authoritarian, anti-science, right-wing clowns like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro (and not forgetting the UK’s own right-wing pipsqueak Boris Johnson). Meanwhile, propelled by manmade climate change, temperatures continue their remorseless rise. Much of Australia was in flames at the start of this year while the recent record-breaking heat in the Arctic Circle indicates that ecological catastrophe could be bearing down on us rather sooner than we’d expected.

I feel glad that I’m a big fan of dystopian fiction. I’ve read so many books set in dystopian futures over the decades that now, when I actually find myself living in the dystopia of 2020, I don’t feel in the least bit surprised. None of this came as a nasty shock for me.

I’ve also been thinking about dystopian fiction recently because I’m currently halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994), which as its title suggests takes place in an authoritarian society where memory itself is policed. Gradually, everyday items like flowers, perfume and photographs are deleted physically, from people’s everyday existences, and mentally, from their memories. As the world loses its precious details and becomes drabber and greyer, the body enforcing these deletions, the Memory Police of the title, becomes ever-more oppressive. I don’t know if Ogawa will manage to keep this premise interesting for the novel’s full 274 pages, but so far I’ve been impressed.

I’ve thought about it too because of the death last month of French author Jean Raspail, known for his apocalyptic novel The Camp of the Saints (1973). I haven’t read Camp and don’t intend to, because from all accounts it’s the nightmare fantasy of an ultra-right-wing, ultra-Catholic, ultra-privileged white French male and is a bucket of racist slime. Let me quote from its synopsis on Wikipedia. Camp depicts France being swamped by a tidal wave of immigrants from India, who have names like ‘the turd eater’, have ‘monstrously deformed’ children, indulge in public fornication, are ‘filthy’ and ‘brutish’ and ‘flout laws, do not produce and murder French citizens’. They’re aided and abetted in their takeover of France by lefty aid workers, journalists, politicians, ‘charities, rock stars and major churches’. Needless to say, the book is much admired by the likes of Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen. I only hope that, before he croaked, Raspail took a look at the rankings of the world’s strongest economies. Because he would find that India, source of his racistly sub-human bogeymen in Camp, is now in fifth place, which is two places above his precious France. Maybe one day an Indian author will write a reply to Camp, in which an affluent India is invaded by hordes of starving, third-world Frenchmen.

Anyway, all this has set me thinking. If I had to name my favourite dystopian novels, what would they be?

© Penguin Books

I’d better start by defining my terms. By dystopian fiction I mean a story set in a society that’s gone seriously off the rails, either because of hellish political oppression of some sort, or because of a natural or man-made cataclysm that’s turned life into a scramble for survival. It has to be set at least a little way into the future, not in the present. And there’s the issue of location. The horribleness described in a proper dystopian story, for me, has to be widespread, if not global. Therefore, books like William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954) or J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (1975), where the societal breakdown takes place respectively on an island and in a tower block, don’t qualify because they’re too localised in scale.

I will also disqualify novels where the setting for the story is pretty grim, but that’s all the dystopian element is – a setting, a backdrop against which the plot takes place. We gets glimpses of bad stuff in the background, but we’re more interested in the narrative and in the psychology of the characters. So for that reason I will exclude William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). In a proper dystopian story, the world is in an awful state and that state has to be at the forefront, so vivid that it becomes an important character itself in the story, if not the most important character.

And I will leave out novels where, yes, present-day society has met its nemesis and collapsed, presumably bloodily and destructively, but where the narratives take place so far in the future that they feel like fantasy or fairy stories. The settings are so distant and fantastical that there’s little or no link with our own world, and the reader isn’t disturbed by the thought of what happened to civilisation between now and then. So that means H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962) are both out.

I’ve seen lists of dystopian novels that include ones set in alternative universes, like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). But I’m excluding them too because, for me, a properly effective dystopian novel has to take place in a universe that’s recognisably our own one. The thought, “This could happen to me or to my children, grandchildren or descendants” has to be prominent in the reader’s mind.

Finally, I’ve left out Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) because, although it’s set in a future New York that’s largely underwater thanks to global warming, and although it impressed me with its scale and ambition, I found it a bit too hopeful to qualify. To hit the required nerve, dystopian fiction has to be depressing and pessimistic. There’s no room on my list for nice dystopian fiction. Sorry, Kim.

© Vintage Books

Right. I’ve just disqualified nine or ten commonly cited classics of dystopian fiction. Is there anything left to go on my list? Well, actually, there is. I’d have liked to present an alliteration-friendly number of titles, such as a ‘top ten’ or a ‘dystopian dozen’ or a ‘first fifteen’, but I’ve ended up with sixteen. These are:

Greybeard (1964) by Brian Aldiss.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood.

Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood.

The Drowned World by (1962) J.G. Ballard.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.

A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess.

The Death of Grass (1956) by John Christopher.

Make Room! Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison.

Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley.

Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing

The Iron Heel (1907) by Jack London.

I am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson.

The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy.

1984 (1949) by George Orwell.

Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) by Christopher Priest.

Day of the Triffids by (1951) John Wyndham.

A few books that are regarded as classics of dystopian writing aren’t on the list because, simply, I haven’t read them yet. They include P.D. James’s Children of Men (1992), about a near-future world where mass sterility means that no children are being born and society is destabilising as the population ages. A similarly-themed book is on the list, though, Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard, which takes the scenario further and imagines a future England where nobody is under 50, nature is quickly wiping out traces of human civilisation and the oldsters are finding it increasingly hard to distinguish reality from senility-induced fantasy. Actually, the sci-fi writer Adam Roberts, who wrote the introduction to my copy of Greybeard, reckons it’s a better novel than the more acclaimed Children of Men.

Some of my inclusions are predictable – Orwell, Huxley, Burgess, McCarthy. Meanwhile, Margaret Atwood is the only person on the list with two entries, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, so Madge is officially the Queen of Dystopian Literature as far as I’m concerned. I was tempted to include a couple of J.G. Ballard’s other works like The Drought (1964) and The Crystal World (1966), but I opted for The Drowned World because it’s the first and most famous of his surreal, psychological and hallucinogenic novels set during or after a global catastrophe. And irrespective of their individual merits, The Drought and The Crystal World do feel like variations on a Ballardian theme. Whereas with Atwood, the nastily patriarchal and reactionary society envisioned in The Handmaid’s Tale and the ecological disaster zone described in Oryx and Crake are two very different creations.

Many people would argue that Richard Matheson’s I am Legend is actually a horror novel, a vampire one, but the apocalyptic plague Matheson describes is given a scientific rationale; so it could happen, just about. It was also a massive influence on George A. Romero’s zombie movies, which in turn gave rise to the zombie-apocalypse trope that’s now a major sub-genre of dystopian fiction, TV and cinema.

Nowadays it’s fashionable to knock Day of the Triffids because of the middle-class cosiness of its characters. Their personalities manage to remain decent, upstanding and Radio 4-ish even after 99% of the population have been blinded and giant, mobile, flesh-eating plants have invaded the streets. And even some of Wyndham’s admirers might argue that The Chrysalids (1955) and The Kraken Wakes (1953), both of which feature dystopias of their own, are better books. But I think Day of the Triffids deserves its place in the list because of its impact on popular culture. The word ‘triffid’ has entered the English language. I’ve heard it used to describe everything from a noxious-looking weed growing in somebody’s garden to the state of Helena Bonham Carter’s hair.

On the other hand, I’ve picked John Christopher’s The Death of Grass and Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island because they offer an antidote to Wyndham’s cosiness. Both books have characters who start out as respectable middle-class English types whose personalities undergo a breakdown as violent and frightening as the disasters – a plague that destroys cereal crops in Death, a refugee crisis caused by a limited nuclear war in Fugue – rocking the societies around them.

One novel I feel really deserves its place on the list is Harry Harrison’s disturbing meditation on the dangers of human overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room! It just annoys me when people compare Make Room with its 1973 film version, Soylent Green, and pontificate that the book isn’t as good because it doesn’t have the film’s two big gimmicks. These are a euthanasia clinic, to which the character Sol (Edward G. Robinson in the film) goes when he decides that he can’t handle any more of the world’s ghastliness, and the film’s twist ending when it’s revealed that the mysterious foodstuff Soylent Green, a major component of the future human diet, is… people! (You have to shout it in Charlton Heston’s voice.)

However, as Harrison pointed out, and unbeknownst to the filmmakers, euthanasia clinics and suicide machines are a bit of a cliché in science fiction. (Not so long ago, I read Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, published back in 1895, and it had something called a ‘government lethal chamber’ in it.) And Harrison had researched Make Room meticulously to make its apocalypse seem as realistic as possible, so he knew that the idea of humanity relying on industrialised cannibalism to survive wasn’t feasible. Human beings don’t fatten up quickly and require a lot of feeding and looking after, so as a form of livestock to meet the world’s dietary needs, they’re economically a bad idea. And as this study shows, they’re not even that rich in calories.

On the other hand, one novel that nearly didn’t make my list was Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor because it feels rather dated now. The problem is that the feral kids and gangs of violent youths that populate the novel seem a bit, well, hippy-ish. Sorry, Doris, but when I try to imagine a Mad Max-style dystopia I don’t normally see crowds of hippies running at me with chainsaws. Of course, Memoirs was written in the early 1970s when memories of the Summer of Love, Woodstock, flower power, etc., were still fresh. It’s a pity Lessing didn’t write it a couple of years later, after the much more dystopia-friendly punk rockers had appeared. Still, I like the novel for its psychological depth, with the narrator escaping from the claustrophobic confines of her apartment by concentrating on a wall until she’s able to ‘pass through’ it into an imaginary realm. And considering that dystopian novels are frequently dominated by male characters, it’s good to see one where female characters are at the forefront.

Incidentally, my brother, who works in the building industry, once told me that while he was attending a health-and-safety seminar about the dangers of asbestos, the speaker mentioned Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. He said that in 1953, as a publicity gimmick, the publisher Ballantine produced 200 numbered and signed copies of Fahrenheit 451 that were bound in asbestos. The joke was that in a future society where are books had to be burned, these 200 copies of the novel couldn’t be burned. Obviously, at the time, people were unaware of the links between asbestos and lung cancer.

Now that sounds like a truly dystopian book – one that tells a story about a totalitarian future society whilst having the power to induce a dystopian-style breakdown inside the reader’s body.

This is an updated version of an entry that first appeared on this blog in July 2014.