(12) PATRICK TILLEY –

THE AMTRAK WARS (1983-1990)

Patrick Tilley was best known for his Amtrak Wars series of (six) books, although both he and the Amtrak Wars are less well known these days – sadly because it’s pure post-apocalyptic pulp fun.

There was just something about the 1970s and 1980s for apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic SF fiction. The Amtrak Wars is the third of my holy trinity of post-apocalyptic SF after Judge Dredd and Mad Max, albeit with nowhere near the same profile of Dredd or Max.

The Amtrak Wars series is closer in premise to Judge Dredd, not least in its setting in the former United States rather than Australia. Ironically, the books were apparently optioned by an Australian production company which might have brought them closer to Mad Max but nothing came of it.

The nature of the apocalypse – a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union characteristic of 1970s and 1980s post-apocalyptic fiction – is either now shrouded in myth or is a closely guarded secret of the Amtrak Federation’s ruling elite, the First Family.

Speaking of the Amtrak Federation, they are somewhat like the Justice Department and Judges of Dredd’s Mega-City One, except if transplanted to Texas and the neighboring states as well as far more antagonistic. So, you know, not unlike Texas City as opposed to Mega-City One in Judge Dredd.

The Amtrak Federation originated from the elite who survived the nuclear war in an underground bunker in Texas – although the overwhelming majority of the Federation is not elite but the grunts of a highly militarized, totalitarian police state. The Amtrak Federation adapts its name from the American railway system, except for the subterranean network between its bunker-cities but even more so the heavily armed ‘wagon-trains’ they use to wage war against the other American survivors, the Mutes. So very much like the mutated residents of the Cursed Earth in Judge Dredd.

As their name indicates, the Mutes are the descendants of those who survived the war but    are mostly mutated by radiation, with some exceptional individuals. More interestingly, they have adopted “a warrior ethos and tribal society” ironically like that of the native Americans but with twentieth century urban ghetto patois – not least in their religion, with the matriarchal Great Spirit figure Motown.

Much like the native Americans with the former United States, the Mutes would have no chance against “the Federation’s vastly superior technology and weapons”, except that this time the Mutes have a ghost dance on their side – actual magic as well as the Talisman Prophecy of ultimate victory.

It gets way more complicated and intricate than that, including yet another major faction mysteriously on the Atlantic coast of the former United States. It gets particularly complicated for the protagonist born and raised as a loyal Amtrak Federation citizen who learns that almost everything he (and we as readers) start off knowing is not what it seems. And while the Mutes may have literal magic on their side, the Federation’s First Family plans to at least go out swinging – co-opting not only Mute magic but the Talisman Prophecy itself for their own side.

Apparently more books were planned for the series but never completed. However, the series does come to something of a satisfactory conclusion, albeit open-ended.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Covers of the Pan paperback editions – the editions I own

(11) JULIAN MAY –

SAGA OF THE PLIOCENE EXILE (1981-1984)

From Julian May in the 1980s to Sarah Maas in the 2010s and 2020s – such is the fate, and some might argue the fall, of fairy fiction.

Or not, since the SF alien ‘fairies’ of Julian May are very different from the fantasy fairies of Sarah Maas.

Julian May was best known for her Saga of the Pliocene Exile series of (four) books, sadly eclipsed by fantasy fairy fiction like that of Maas these days – sadly, that is, as the former is a wild ride combining human-alien galactic space opera (for which May wrote other books), psi abilities, and prehistoric time travel to the titular geological epoch. O yes – and a few hot fairies thrown in, as the titular Pliocene exiles find the prehistoric epoch to be more populated than expected, by an alien race (or more precisely races) that resemble Celtic mythology and fairy folklore.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover of the hardcover edition of Peirce’s short story collection “With a Bang and Other Forbidden Delights” – the edition I own. Yes, I have no idea what’s going on in that cover art either

(10) HAYFORD PEIRCE –

“ICEBACK INVASION” (1979)

Hayford Pierce earns this entry on the back (heh) of the ironic near-future SF satire of his 1979 story (for Omni magazine) “Iceback Invasion”. In it, sparring Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, are each groaning on the point of total collapse and being eclipsed by the rising Chinese-Japanese co-prosperity sphere and European Union. The leaders of the Soviet Union conceive a last-ditch plan to bring down the United States (reasoning “what, short of nuclear war, can they actually do to us?”), using illegal Russian immigration – the titular ‘iceback’ invasion – to subvert American elections and politics, but which backfires spectacularly.

When including it in his 2005 short story collection With a Bang and Other Forbidden Delights, Peirce opined that it had not dated well, projected as it was from the United States of the 1970’s (and not least failing to anticipate the fall of the Soviet Union on its own). However, he may have misjudged that, as much of it was to prove surprisingly resonant even forty years later – particularly the scenes in the American cabinet, where President Martinez bemoans “the end of the Republic as we know it” (prompting Secretary of State Richard XYZ to exclaim that reparations to Africa are being paid on time). President Martinez’s exclamation is due to the state of readiness – or lack thereof – for the armed forces, despite the budget of a trillion dollars and Defence Secretary Mildred Haggleman proudly announcing it to be an “exceptionally well-equalized army”, although his concern is for “the potential dangers of a military coup”.

Pierce was probably accurate in his 2005 assessment when he opined “there’s enough black humor in here to keep it amusing two decades later, along with enough bare-knuckles satire to offend just about everyone”.

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover of James Tiptree Jr story anthology Her Smoke Rose Up Forever including the title story and “The Screwfly Solution”, by Tachyon Publications in 2004, paperback edition – the edition I own

(9) JAMES TIPTREE JR –

“THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION”

James Tiptree Jr was actually the pen name for Alice Bradley Sheldon, one of my favorite writers of science fiction stories, with her own distinctive voice.

She also had some of the most evocative and lyrical titles for her short stories – “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (although technically she borrowed her title from John Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci) and “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” are two of my favorite titles as well as stories.

However, the title of my favorite Tiptree story is not so lyrical – with its prosaic title of “The Screwfly Solution” – but is as evocative and haunting as any of her more lyrically titled stories. Its subject is also not so lyrical, that recurring SF trope of alien invasion. As I have said elsewhere, SF is still all Morlocks and Martians to me, with the latter evidenced by my soft spot for alien invasion stories. Of course, in the most realistic alien invasion stories, spacefaring aliens would have such technological advantages over us that they would wipe the floor with us, metaphorically speaking – to such extent that we may not even perceive the invasion, as in this story.

The title references the sterile insect technique, a technique of eradicating the population of screwflies by the release of sterilized males that compete with fertile males to reduce the population – a reference made clearer by one of its characters, Alan, a scientist working on parasite eradication. However, in this story, we’re the screwflies, but with a much more violent distortion of human sexuality – as an epidemic of murderous male violence against women starts to spread across the globe. Some scientists suspect a biological cause, but their voices are not heard amidst political inaction, or worse, elaborate misogynistic rationalizations for the violence. One such rationalization is a new religious movement that is spreading along with the murders – the Sons of Adam, who believe that all women are evil and that removing them will return the world to paradise, when angels shall return to earth.Alan realizes that the epidemic causes male sexual impulses to instead become violent homicidal impulses and he too is infected. His wife Anne flees to the Canadian wilderness where, in the end, pursued by an entire society bent on femicide, she sees one of the ‘angels’ that will inherit the Earth.

There is also an annual James Tiptree Jr Award for works of fantasy or science fiction in a similar vein to her stories.

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover of the Pan Science Fiction paperback edition – the edition I own

(8) ROBERT SHECKLEY –

OPTIONS (1975)

One of science fiction’s most unsung qualities, particularly to those not familiar with the genre, is the extent to which it can be a profoundly comic or satirical medium, often subversively so – which is ironic given that comic science fiction is perhaps the most accessible to readers outside the genre.

Robert Sheckley was primarily a humorist of science fiction, typically writing absurdist and satirical comedies with a thin veneer of a science fictional premise or setting. Sheckley’s “numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical”.

Sheckley shone through his playful short stories. My personal favorites are his absurdist satires of human mores, typically through the lens of alien observers or human societies on other planets. One such is “Pilgrimage to Earth”, in which humanity’s home planet, exhausted of its material resources to offer its former space colonies, resorts to space tourism for more intangible commodities – “Earth specializes in impracticalities such as madness, beauty, war, intoxication, purity, horror and the like, and people come from light-years away to sample these wares”. Wares such as romantic love – as a vendor exclaims, other planets have tried it and found it too expensive or unsettling, but Earth specializes in the impractical and makes it pay.

However, it is in Sheckley’s longer fiction that we find more extended satires or absurdist comedies from science fiction premise – which brings us to my favorite Sheckley novella, the absurdist and anarchic Options, in which Sheckley plays with story itself. It starts off in a reasonably linear narrative, in a comedic play on an classic pulp science fiction premise – ostensibly about the marooned protagonist Tom Mishkin’s attempt to get a spare part for his spaceship stored in a cache on an alien planet. To protect him, he is assigned a Special Purpose Environmental Response or SPER robot.

Unfortunately, the robot is programmed for another planet. However, that premise becomes an increasingly loose framing device as the non-linear narrative descends into a mass of diversions, non sequiturs and musings – “a deliberate cosmic shambles, an explosion or disintegration of story logic, a comedy of cliches and crossed lines, and a joke on the very act of story-telling”.

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Recurring cover art for the book (or in a similar style), which seems to originate from the Gollanz SF Masterworks edition

(7) RICHARD MATHESON –

I AM LEGEND (1954)

Richard Matheson was legend.

A legend of fantasy, science fiction and horror – writing novels, short stories and scripts or screenplays.

I’m tempted to give this entry to his most famous work to Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, arguably the most iconic Twilight Zone episode, but really in the end there can only be one – his 1954 novel I am Legend.

Forget the Will Smith film or any other cinematic adaptation, all of which vary in their faithfulness to the novel and its lone survivor protagonist Robert Neville – which were a major influence and precursor to the zombie apocalypse. Except of course in I am Legend, it was a vampire apocalypse. Robert Neville is apparently the lone survivor (at least in Los Angeles) of a pandemic, in which the victims resemble classical vampires. At night, swarms of them surround his house. During the day, he stakes them and forages supplies.

And the novel’s central twist is in his titular legendary status. Spoiler warning from 1954 – his cozy vampire-killing post-apocalyptic routine is disrupted when he finds an apparently uninfected woman, Ruth. He takes her in, but is surprised to learn that she is actually infected. What’s more, she is one of a population of infected that have slowly recovered, rebuilding human society and developing medication to overcome the worst symptoms of infection (such as those of the feral vampires that swarm his house). Indeed, she is an agent sent to apprehend him. And as that new society apprehends him (for execution), he learns the irony underlying the title – to the new society, he is the monster stalking and slaying them. They view him as he previously viewed the feral vampires, a remnant of old humanity now a monstrous legend to the new humanity.

Again – but really, do yourself a favor and help yourself to his other works, particularly his short stories – which offer cracking good reads that lodge themselves in your mind afterwards. Indeed, I could (and should) do a Richard Matheson Top 10

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

The classic cover art by one of my favorite fantasy & SF artists, Michael Whelan – it’s only part of his full art, which I believe some books featured as a wraparound cover (fair use)

(6) RAY BRADBURY –
THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950)

When I think of Mars, I still dream of the Mars of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (with one or two other fictional exceptions).

The Mars of Ray Bradbury is not a scientific Mars – a cold, dead planet – but a mythic Mars, an eternal planet of dreams.  Of course, Ray Bradbury identified himself not as a writer of science fiction, but as a writer of fantasy, particularly by reference to The Martian Chronicles – “Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see? That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time – because it’s a Greek myth and myths have staying power.”

The Martian Chronicles are stories of the human and markedly American colonization of Mars in a manner analogous to the frontier, with the native Martians akin to the native Americans (a parallel that would also be played for laughs in Futurama).

Indeed, my very favorite Martian Chronicles stories involved the native Martians – those dark-skinned, golden-eyed Martians, those telepathic and empathic shape-shifting Martians. In “Ylla”, the titular frustrated Martian wife has telepathic dreams of the incoming astronauts of humanity’s first expedition to Mars. Her jealous husband denies her dreams, but senses her inchoate romantic feelings towards the interlopers and shoots them under pretext of hunting.

By the time of humanity’s third similarly doomed expedition to Mars in “The Third Expedition” or “Mars is Heaven”, the Martians have become more hostile than Ylla’s telepathic tryst, perhaps in a telepathic premonition of their own doom at the hands of humanity. The expedition finds an exact replica of a town from Earth, populated by their lost, loved ones – who lure them into the houses and then bury them the following day, shifting between their human and Martian forms. The Martians’ doom had come in any event, as the fourth expedition finds the Martians all dead from chicken pox.

And yet the Martians have their ghost dance on Mars. In “The Night Meeting”, a human colonist encounters a Martian, with both of them seeming to inhabit their own parallel worlds of Mars. Each is translucent to the other and has the appearance of a ghost – the colonist sees only ruins where the Martian sees a thriving Martian city, and the Martian sees only an ocean where the colonist sees his settlement. In “The Martian”, a sole surviving Martian empathically takes the shape of a colonist couple’s dead son, but is tragically torn apart by contact with more human colonists, exhausted from helplessly shifting shapes to all their hopes and dreams of lost loved ones. And in “Dark They Were and Golden Eyed”, human colonists are transformed into Martians.

Ultimately, the human colonists have their own ghost dance, as Mars is decolonized by nuclear war on Earth. In “There Will Come Soft Rains”, an automated house on Earth continues to perform its daily duties, even while the family’s silhouettes are permanently burned into the side of the house. And in “Million Years Picnic”, the father of a family that has fled the war to Mars shows them the Martians, their own reflections in a canal.

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover of the Warhammer Space Marine video game released in 2011 (fair use)

(4) WARHAMMER 40K (1987 – PRESENT)

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned.
Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.
There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Warhammer 40,000 – usually known as Warhammer 40K – is the closest SF equivalent to Dungeons and Dragons, in terms of a game encapsulating its genre. It doesn’t have quite the same breadth of encyclopedic treatment of genre themes and tropes as Dungeons and Dragons, given that it is confined to its space opera setting. But what a setting!

“Warhammer 40,000 is your Standard Sci Fi Setting injected with a cocktail of every drug known to man and genuine lunar dust, stuck in a blender with Alien, Mechwarrior, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, and teeny, tiny sprinkles of Judge Dredd and 2000AD, embellished with spikes and prayer scrolls, bathed in blood and turned up to Eleventy Zillion (and then set on fire). Twice. With 8ft chainsaws.”

Although I’m surprised that quotation doesn’t reference Dune along with Star Wars – as well as Nemesis from 2000 AD, with that storyline’s Termight Empire led by the supremely xenophobic Torquemada. Not to mention the obvious influences of H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien – but they’re obvious influences on almost everything in fantasy or SF. Also apparently Paradise Lost according to the game’s creator.

Warhammer 40K drew heavily on its publisher’s previous fantasy game Warhammer – hence the name – but has long since diverted from and totally eclipsed its fantasy predecessor. Whereas the fantasy game had a smattering of optional SF elements – primarily advanced technological weaponry as artefacts or relics left behind by a long-gone race of spacefarers – the SF game went further in the opposite direction, space opera fantasy in the style of Star Wars or SF with substantial fantasy elements.

“It adapts a number of tropes from fantasy fiction, such as magic, supernatural beings, daemonic possession, and fantasy races such as orcs and elves; ‘psykers’ fill the role of wizards in the setting”.

Its setting and plot is far too complex for a single entry – indeed, it could easily be its own top ten (or several top ten lists, given the volume of game material) – but stands out for the grim darkness of its tagline, which has evolved into a meme, as has much else in the game.

As its title indicates, it is about 40,000 years or so in the future. Humanity has a galactic empire (yay!) but that empire sucks (boo!), although the galaxy beyond that empire sucks even more – factions and forces against which the Imperium of Man is desperately trying to hold the line, against overwhelming odds in the long run.

That’s pretty much it. Oh sure – there’s the basic plot summary from Wikipedia:

“The setting of Warhammer 40,000 is violent and pessimistic. It depicts a future where human scientific and social progress have ceased, and human civilisation is in a state of total war with hostile alien races and occult forces. It is a setting where the supernatural exists, is powerful, and is usually untrustworthy if not outright malevolent. There are effectively no benevolent gods or spirits in the cosmos, only daemons and evil gods, and the cults dedicated to them are proliferating. In the long run, the Imperium of Man cannot hope to defeat its enemies, so the heroes of the Imperium are not fighting for a brighter future but raging against the dying of the light.”

Or the evocative summation from TV Tropes – “the most basic summation of the game’s plot is that our galaxy has been twisted into an unfathomable horror where an eternal, impossibly vast conflict occurs between several absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal, and (in at least one case) omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology, and creative piece of nastiness imaginable cranked to an outlandish extreme… and even it has a Hell”

Perhaps the most interesting aspects of the game are its factions – foremost among the Imperium of Man as the default human protagonist faction. As previously mentioned, it sucks – an absurdly dysfunctional, paranoid, fascist theocratic state under the God-Emperor of Mankind, who now resembles some bizarre combination of mummified Egyptian pharaoh and Aztec god sustained by thousands of daily sacrifices.

The imperial cult holds sway throughout the empire – enforced by “a futuristic Inquisition” that ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even the slightest taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, even going as far as destroying entire planets, just to be sure.

Science and technology have stagnated – “partly because they are treated with fear, ignorance and magical superstition” and partly because of “the Adeptus Mechanicus, the secretive, deranged machine cult that maintains the Imperium’s technological base. The latter have a point though, as technology is a portal for daemonic corruption – and The Warp, a corrupted parallel dimension connected to the material universe that provides the Imperium’s lifeblood as its only means of faster-than-light Travel, is incredibly dangerous.”

And then you have the forces of the Imperium holding the line – “the Space Marines (capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Knight Templar Super Soldiers) and the Sisters of Battle (equally fanatical, pyromaniacal battle nuns) serve as the Imperium’s special forces, while the Imperial Guard, its at least trillions-strong regular army, takes disregard for human life to new and interesting extremes”.

For all its obvious dystopian dysfunction, the game publishers have to keep reminding fans that the Imperium’s “fascist totalitarianism is bad” – partly because they tend to be the point of view faction in game material, partly because they are indeed often awesome and cool in humanity’s last stand desperately holding the line, and partly because all other major factions are as bad, if not far worse.

You have the Aeldari or space elves, the Tyranids who consume everything else into themselves, the Necrons seeking to wipe out all organic life, the Orks modelled on fantasy orcs – and looming hungrily behind them all, the daemonic forces of Chaos.

Not bad for a game that primarily consists of miniatures or models, albeit with rulebooks – hence the special mention here.

Like many others, I don’t play the game – which seems to involve substantial expenditure of time and money in the ever-proliferating miniatures that are the basic components of gameplay – but enjoy the lore, of which there is an incredible volume beyond the game, not least in published tie-in books and comics.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT GOD-EMPEROR TIER?)

Rulebook cover art

(3) PARANOIA (1984 – PRESENT)

Commie mutant traitor!

“The Computer is your friend. The Computer wants you to be happy. Happiness is mandatory. Failure to be happy is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Are you happy, citizen? Have a nice daycycle”

Welcome to Alpha Complex in the SF role-playing game of Paranoia – “a world designed by Kafka, Stalin, Orwell, Huxley, Sartre, the Marx Brothers and that crazy old man at the airport bar at 2 am”. A dystopian fusion to the point where everything would be monstrously overwhelming but for its own dysfunctionality and the game’s absurdist dark humor.

It’s also a post-apocalyptic dystopia – although what apocalypse (if any?) forced the last survivors (or are they?) of humanity into the last underground or domed city (or is it?) run by the supercomputer known simply as the Computer or Friend Computer is now mysterious, as no one is sure what happened any more, if anyone ever did. Not even the Computer, when it tried to figure out what went wrong – “unfortunately, the Computer’s databases had been corrupted, and after finding some old Cold War propaganda, it concluded that the Communists did it”.

And now, the Computer is the equivalent of a barely functional paranoid schizophrenic – that probably would have wiped out Alpha Complex but for its inefficiency, its ability to simultaneously pursue wildly inconsistent goals at odds with each other, and its genuine but abstract benevolence towards Alpha Complex (or whatever remains of either that benevolence or Alpha Complex).

It may be teetering on complete breakdown (or outright psychosis) after decades of subversion or reprogramming by conflicting groups, but the Computer still rules Alpha Complex – “its dystopian society organized in a hierarchy of “security clearances based on the electromagnetic spectrum (specifically Isaac Newton’s version), from lowly Infrared worker drones, through Red grunts and Yellow managers, all the way up the rainbow to the Violet and Ultraviolet elite”, the High Programmers.

This society is supported by “swarms of robots” – which if anything, tend to be crazier and more dangerous to humans than the Computer – as well as “spies, omnipresent surveillance, and a bureaucracy so huge and convoluted no one’s quite sure who’s in charge of what any more”.

“Problems in Alpha Complex are solved by teams of Troubleshooters, whose job is to find trouble and shoot it”. (Stay alert. Trust nobody! Keep your laser handy!).

Those problems including traitors – where virtually everything is treason, and even the knowledge of what is or isn’t treason is usually above your security clearance – as well as Communists or other secret societies, and mutants. Or a combination of all of these – the trifecta of “commie mutant traitor”, which is what players yell as they shoot each other in the back. Indeed, I’m known to be fond of using that phrase in real life.

Of course, “thanks to years of clone breeding” (everyone is a clone in Alpha Complex), “overexposure to radiation, and other snafus”, everyone is a mutant. Everyone is also a member of one or more secret societies, mostly plotting to overthrow the order of Alpha Complex. Ironically, the secret societies were started by the Computer, as an outlet to the natural human impulse to conspire together, but as usual in Alpha Complex, got out of control.

(You seem a little too informed of matters above your security clearance, citizen – please report for termination! Have a nice daycycle!)

The players “are (usually) Red-level Troubleshooters working for Friend Computer, grudgingly assigned useless, backfiring equipment and weapons, and dispatched on (often impossible) Suicide Missions, all while navigating the endless deathtrap which is Alpha Complex, keeping their mutant powers a secret, advancing the cause of their secret society, and trying to earn promotion to higher color grades”. Not to mention in-fighting among players – if you’re not shooting each other in the back, it’s because you’re shooting each other in the face.

You’ll go through a few clones, if not all of them, by the end, if you make it to the end – which is the truly dangerous part, the mission de-briefing, when you accuse each of treason. If you’re lucky, your fabricated accusations of treason might just overlap with their genuine treason.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)