Government spy Tyne, undertaking an espionage mission, makes a discovery that seems to threaten the stability of the Rosk/Earth pacts, but can he get the information into the right hands? Whose hands are the right hands, anyway? The Rosks negotiate land around the equator on Earth, and then even a space for themselves on the moon they claim to be a race of refugees, but there may be terrorists within their midst.

But, in either case, the fear of ‘What if?’ was electric within those books., and are well worth reading now – not only for an insight into the 1950s, but for how they continue to reflect on life now. How could novelists make sense of those strange times? Writers such as Arthur C Clarke turned their eyes to the far future, while others such as John Wyndham explored contemporary society.

Anxiety over the powers scientists had unleashed after the dropping the atomic bomb at the end of World War II obsessed many novelists, but so did a sense of despondency at poverty and suffering within a community that was still living with rationing until 1954. In 2007 it was the turn of Ridley Scott, who then went on to make The Martian, so perhaps these claims should always be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly when we look back over the history of SF writing over the years and find that it is a genre that is as much defined by current events than by any singular vision of the future.įor that reason, British science fiction in the 1950s was incredible stuff.

It seems that every few years somebody announces science fiction is dead.

The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle