Our Child of the Stars

Space can be a frightening place. It is the great unknown and as such it inspires fear in us. Films from Alien to 2001: A Space Odyssey and novels such as Dan Simmons’s Hyperion have captured our fear that the darkness of space holds things that are terrifying as they are beyond our ability to understand them.

We are used to being frightened of space, which is why it was so refreshing to read a science fiction novel with a different take. Stephen Cox’s Our Child of the Stars has at its core a fundamental optimism about space. The book follows Molly and Gene Myers, a childless couple in 1960s America who adopt and raise the only survivor from a crashed alien spaceship. They name him Cory and try to keep him a secret from the government. Thus the central premise of this book is that love, not horror, can come from the great unknown.

Throughout the book, the central threat to the Myers’s family is not strange creatures from outer space but other humans who work for the government and want to exploit Cory. In this novel, it is people who are familiar to us that are frightening and dangerous, not the unknown of space or people who look different to us.

This tallies with my experience of the world, which is one reason that I related to this book. Many human characters are dangerous and can cause pain to the Molly, where the alien character, Cory, provides her with love and completes her family. I can relate to this in a world where the greatest dangers come from authoritarian strongmen or raving populists - who are generally heterosexual men like myself - who tell us to be frightened of refugees, migrants or members of ethnic minorities - who are different. It's easy to be frightened of the unknown but the real threats may wear a familiar face.

Our Child of the Stars 1960s setting is connected to this. In the 60s many people, like Molly and Gene, realised that they had more in common with people who were different to them (both in America and overseas) than they did with their leaders who bombed villages in Vietnam and sent young people off to be killed in the war.

The 60s was a time of great change when old values were questioned and there were existential threats to the human race. This reminds me of the time we live in now, however, the 60s also had a current of optimism about people's ability to overcome these problems. This optimism is summed up in the novel by the way that Gene talks about people living in the moon in a UN run city of all nations that has no violence and weapons, one year before Neil Armstrong first ventures there. Today we are faced with threats on a similar scale, but we seem more pessimistic about our abilities to face them and could do with a dose of Gene’s optimism.

Reading a book that has tinged with hope for a better tomorrow, that people like Molly and Gene fought for in their activism, was a welcome change from cynicism. The book is also about being a parent, which is a statement of optimism about the future. People need a belief that tomorrow can be better and children offer this. When Molly loses a pregnancy early on in the novel her belief in the future is lost as well and through finding Cory she is able to find it again.

There is a lot to praise about the novel, it is well written and Cox has distinctive prose style that draws you into the head of the characters who feel like a family from our world, despite one of them having tentacles. Yeah, their family is a little strange, but isn't every family? The Myers are a relatable family, despite their difference, and we need to relate to families that are different to ours if we have any chance of saving our world.

What I liked the most about this book is that it sums up the best in humanity. It is a book about flawed, complex people who can do good things. This is what the science fiction genre needs right now. At WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, I attended talks from both Cyberpunk and Weird Fiction writers who said that they were tired of stories in these genres about people broken down and crushed by society. They wanted stories about resistance and hope. In dark times we can't afford to be pessimistic, which is why it was great to read a book that shows that humanity can transcend petty hatred and selfishness to care for people who are different. 

We need radical hope in a dangerous and threatening world. We don't need fear of the unknown. We need to be reminded that what comes out of the darkness can offer hope, love and healing as Cory does for Molly. We need positive messages right now and Our Child of the Stars does this. If you need some positive science fiction in your life to make you feel less hopeless about the fate of humanity then go read this book.

The Fifth Season

N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season has one of the strongest opening lines of any book I have ever read. It begins with the fantastically doom-laden:

“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.”

The rest of the novel lives up to the promise of this opening with a powerful story of people struggling to survive in a hostile world.

The reader feels the sadness that is the core of the story. At the start of the book, both the protagonist’s internals world and the actual Earth itself are broken, perhaps beyond repair. This makes the reader highly invested in the characters as we learn how they have suffered in this dangerous and volatile world.

In the first chapter, we get a gut-wrenching description of a mother's grief as she discovers the body of her young son, murdered by her husband. In the early stages of the novel we meet a woman forced to have sex against her will by a hierarchical organisation that controls her. We also meet a small girl taken from her family because she is different, who is then hurt by the person she thought would protect her.

Oppression and the many forms it comes in is a theme of the novel. In this world those with the ability to move the Earth, the Orogenes, are hated and feared by those who can't, the Stills. In a world where the Earth beneath your feet is a constant danger, having a connection with it is a dangerous thing. This is a world that is hostile to the Orogenes. It is because her son is an Orogenes that he has been killed in the opening chapter. It because she is an Orogenes that the child is taken from her home and given a harsh lesson in discipline. Throughout the novel we feel how much the Orogenes are hated and what they have to do to survive.

Science fiction describes the world we live in better than it describes the future or fantastical alternative realities. What does The Fifth Season, a portrait of a turbulent and oppressive world, says about our world? It shows what the social dynamics of our world would be like in a world where the environment was more hostile. It shows how we will turn on the weak and minorities in times when resources are scarce. It does not show our future in a world of environmental disaster, it shows our present social structures imposed onto a world of environmental disaster.

Although the world of The Fifth Season is alien to us, with its constant earthquakes, creatures made of stone and giant obelisks floating in the sky, deep down we know that this is our world. We know that when we are pushed as far as the people of the Stillness have been pushed, we would turn on each other as the Stills have turned on the Orogenes. Our world’s divisions are along lines of race and gender, these will be the faults along which we will tear the human race apart if we irreversibly break our Earth.

The Fifth Season has a complex narrative that is set over a long period of time and has several staggering revelations along the way. I won't spoil them now, because you should certainly read this book. The events of The Fifth Season take in the whole world of the Stillness (or at least a significant part of it) and show how it came to be the way it is - not just in terms of the natural disaster that have befallen this world, but also the root of its social structures and systems of oppression. This is fully-realised world, in terms of social science as well as natural science.

Jemisin has clearly done a lot of research into the geology and physics of her world (as well as its social structures). Despite it being a book about people who can move the Earth with their mind, it is hard to categorise this book as clearly fantasy. The degree to which the physics are worked out show a level of scientific research that goes beyond a lot of science fiction novels. The Orogenes are more believable than the hyperdrives or aliens in a lot of science fiction. Ultimately, this book is a bit of both genres, which is something we also see in the writing of Ada Palmer, whose novels touches on issues of divinity as well as social science.

Whether it is a sci-fi or a fantasy novel doesn't matter, what matters is that it tells a powerful story about a broken world and people struggling to live on it. It also tells a story about human nature. About how we turn on each other and hate each other when under pressure.

A book about humanity plagued by earthfire and hatred has a lot to say about how we hate each other in our world.

Use of Weapons: Reading something new for the last time

Five years ago my favourite writer, Iain M. Banks, passed away. With his passing the world seemed a little duller, a little less fantastic. At the time, I wrote an obituary, which stated that there was only one Iain M Banks book that I hadn’t yet read. I was saving this book, as once I had read it there would be new more new words from Banks left for me to read.

Five years later, I decided to sit down and read this novel, as it seemed like a fitting way to mark the passing of five years since his death. The book was Use of Weapons, the third novel in Banks's ‘Culture’ series, which is a loose collection of novels that can be read in any order. So, for the last time, I read something of his for the first time. 

Banks had a amazing imagination for science fiction. It comes to life in the small details of his writing as well as the big sci-fi concepts. Every one of his novels has unusual aliens, incredible locations or bizzare space ships. Use of Weapons is a fine example of his rich and complex vision, with the novel taking place across several different worlds, ships and space habitats, all of which are rendered vividly.

Banks also wrote literary fiction under the name Iain Banks, and his science fiction has some literary experimentation to it. Use of Weapons has an unusual structure as there are two narratives, one of which moves forwards in time and the other backwards. I found this to be confusing at first, but after a few chapters I got use the two narratives spinning forwards and backwards form their crossover point at the start of the novel.

Thus, the climax of the novel is also the beginning. The reader gets the conclusion and inception of a series of events in two hard-hitting final chapters that are very powerful. Banks is more experimental in his prose than a lot of science fiction writers, but he also had a wicked sense of humour that comes through in the dialogue of this novel. The seriousness of the literary experimentation is well-balanced against this humour.

Another interesting feature of the novel is how the focus change as it goes along. Use of Weapons starts out being very plot-focused. Culture agent Diziet Sma is taken away from an important diplomatic summit to find an old operative of hers, Cheradenine Zakalwe, who might be the only person who can stop a war that threatens to engulf an entire star cluster. As the novel develops, the focus shifts from this race against time to stop a conflict, into a study of Zakalwe’s character and how his traumatic youth made him the person who he is. The fate of cluster is left ambiguous at the end and the final chapters focus on Zakalwe’s life.

There are gut-wrenching revelations at the end of the book. I won't spoil them here, but the ending of Use of Weapons is a prime example of two techniques of which Banks was a master. The ‘act three twist’ that redefines what you have just read, and grotesque body horror, vividly described for maximum impact. These two work best together, as they do in Banks's debut literary novel. The Wasp Factory, and in Use of Weapons the final few chapters manage to combine body horror and a twist to leave the reader reeling. The ending of Use of Weapons could be one of Banks’s most gruesome scenes, and that’s really saying something.

All of Banks's novels are political to a greater or lesser extend. The Culture novels, for example, focus on a far-future utopia where machines facilitate a society for humans that has no laws, property, inequality, scarcity, crime, prejudice or want. Even death has been conquered in the Culture, leaving people free to pursue, art, culture, extreme sports and headism in all its forms. The Culture's only flaw is its need to meddle with other societies to improve them, ie make them more similar to the Culture.

Banks was one of the most interesting writers of utopias and leads the reader to question the assumptions we would make about whether the Culture is a perfect society. Use of Weapons looks at the rights and wrongs of the Culture interfering in wars, or situations that might become wars. The novel asks whether the Culture has the right to meddle in such a way, even when it has the best of intentions? Banks offers no firm conclusions to these questions, as do all great literary writers, but he does leave you asking lots of questions.

Use of Weapons was published in 1990, but the debates at the heart of the book are as relevant today as they were then. Wars are raging in Syria and Yemen, and people in the West need to ask themselves: if we are responsible for these conflicts and what are our moral obligations to the people caught in the middle of them?

Banks packs a lot of complex political ideas into an accessible novel that has spectacular action scenes as well as interesting debates. Reading his novels has helped to shape my politics. I read my first Iain M Banks novel, just out of university and still naive about the world. Banks’s passion for a better future and his love for humanity come through in stories that embrace the complexities of our world.

Banks's writing shows that despite the fact that we often fail, we can be better than we are. His stories tell us that in the future we can move past the problems of today and live fuller, happier lives. I’m glad that I have had his novels in my life, even if now there will be no more new stories for me.

What can Will Save the Galaxy For Food teach us about a future without jobs?

It is a well-known fact that science fiction novels say more about the time in which they are written than about what is likely to happen in the future. Science fiction is full of predictions that didn’t come true (Space 1999, anyone?) but, more importantly, how we view the future gives us insight into the present.

With that in mind, I recently read Will Save the Galaxy For Food by Yahtzee Croshaw, a post-modern take on the sci-fi trope of the hero starpilot. In the future, space travel led to a Golden Age of starpiloting, where daredevil adventurers found fame and glory in perilous deep space. Then Quantum Tunneling is invented and overnight no one needs starpilots anyone. The pilots themselves are thrown on the scrapheap and have to grovel for a meagre income selling guided tours of the sites of their past glory.

As I read the book, I realised that it spoke to a key anxiety of our world, namely that technology will make us all obsolete. Last year the Bank of England said that as many as 15 million British jobs could be lost to machine and online shopping has already caused 62,000 job losses in the retail sector. Due to rising automation in the workplace, we could all end up like the pilots in Croshaw’s novel.

If we are facing a jobless world, then there are policies we can adopt to prevent billions of people having to beg to survive, as the pilots do in WSTGFF. One such example is Universal Basic Income, and it is good that these policies are being explored in places such as Finland. What is striking about WSTGFF is not the poverty of the starpilots without an income, but the complete lack of dignity of their post-Quantum Tunneling existence.

The nameless starpilot protagonist is desperate to hold on to his pride, even as it becomes harder to make a living. He is against all attempts to commodify and sanitise the Golden Age of starpiloting, even if this might make him money. Some of the starpilots start businesses and try to move on, but many cling to the identity that their job gave them. Being a starpilot is more than a source of income - it is who you are.

This really rang true for me. We all base our identity on our source of employment. When someone asks me “what do you do?”, I don’t say: “I scour science fiction novels for political insights to post on the internet to make myself feel clever”, I say “I work in marketing”. Both are equally true.

If we lose our employment, we lose a crucial part of our identity. If we all lose our employment then a national crisis of identity will occur. Increasing advancement in robotics and companies eager to cut as many jobs as possible in order to drive up their profits don’t care about this. We need UBI to save us all from starving, but we need a change in the way we define ourselves slipping into depression.

If all our jobs disappear, we might find ourselves like the starpilots in WSTGFF, clinging to nostalgia for a time when our lives meant something, instead of seizing the opportunities of all our new free time. We might think that we were better off in a time when everyone had to toil away for an enormous chunk of their lives to provide an income that (for many people today) doesn’t cover the basic costs of living.

If there was no work, would we be consumed by nostalgia for a time where there was work? Increasing numbers of women are equal breadwinners to men, but now many men are wondering how a man can define himself when he’s not the sole provider for a family. This has led to nostalgia for a time when a man’s identity was simpler. This nostalgia completely fails to engage with the patriarchal oppression that women faced in the past and threatens to recreate it.

Without work, are we risking a similar crisis in identity? A similar nostalgia for a time when one could define oneself through work? A nostalgia that - similar to what is happening with many men - could be taken advantage of by those who have a dangerous agenda?

In WSTGFF, the pilot eventually learns to move on with his life and lets go of his nostalgia for a Golden Age that never really existed. It’s a good lesson, and it shows we can move on and recreate our lives. Our world is not as neat as a book and rarely provides a satisfactory ending that wraps everything up. There is no beneficent author figure resolving things in our world for the best. That’s why we need to heed the warnings of fiction.

To tackle the problems of growing automation and job losses, we need to think not only about how we will eat when there are jobs, but also how we will define ourselves. Our identities need to become more varied, more complex and less tied to what we do for a living. When people are more than what they do, it won’t matter what they do or if they do nothing.

Too Like The Lighting

As I chatted to fellow sci-fi fans at Worldcon 75, dashing between panel events and signings, there was one book on everyone's lips. You could hear its name whispered with quiet reverence in the halls of the Helsinki Messukeskus Expo and Convention Centre. It was mentioned by fans, authors and publishers as a great work of the genre. Those who had read it, found it hard to describe but were full of praise.

The novel I’m referring too was Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning, which won The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the Worldcon 75 Hugo Awards. It has been a huge hit with sci-fi readers and has catapulted debut author Palmer to fame amongst sci-fi fandom. It was the talk of Worldcon, and I had to read it.

Upon reading Too Like The Lightning, the first thing I noticed was that is not a hugely accessible book. This is not a negative point, if you this is the type of book that you enjoy. One of my least favourite features of a sci-fi novel is clunky info-dumping, describing exactly how a star ship or society functions. Making a novel accessible can come at a cost.

One of my favourite novels is Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, which drops the reader straight into a far future universe and expects them to find their own way. Too Like The Lightning is not dissimilar. The book throws a lot at its readers and expects them to keep pace. This is a book that respects the reader's intelligence.

The narrator, Mycroft Canner, does explain a few features of life in Palmer's twenty-fifth century Earth, such as example how their society idealises our own eighteenth century. It does help, reading this book, if you have a basic knowledge of Voltaire, De Sade, and other luminaries of the eighteenth century. Their ideas are central to Palmer's world and the story she is telling.

Where many sci-fi novels delight in the particulars of particle physics or cosmology, this novel is hard-social-science fiction. Having a basic grasp of the principles being discussed will help the reader. I have always been more interested in the societies and politics of sci-fi worlds, as opposed to their gadgets or weapons, and so I really enjoyed this aspect of the novel.

The world that Palmer has created seems complex and strange to us, but after spending a few hours there it becomes as believable as our world. The rich details that Palmer has used to develop this world and the philosophy behind it - drawing on her own expertise as a professor of history at the University of Chicago specialising in early modern Europe and the Renaissance, make it an entirely plausible future where we don't have nation states, genders or wars.

Palmer's world is not perfect. This society is not utopian or dystopian. They have solved some of the problems of our world and created some new problems of their own. Like any society in our world, some of its aspects we could learn from and others we would find frightening. This world is as detailed, complex, flawed and beautiful as our own.

The plot of Too Like The Lightning is engaging and interesting. I will avoid saying too much about it here, as I think you'll enjoy the book more coming to it with little prior knowledge of the plot, as I did. The opening chapter is especially strong, grabbing the reader's attention and immersing them in the story while the strangeness of this world unfolds around them.

There are a lot of interesting meanders along the way, although I felt the plot did lose some focus in the final third. It's worth noting that this novel is the first in a series, and it doesn't have a definite conclusion. The final chapter of Too Like The Lightning is a work of brilliance, transforming much of what has just been experienced in the mind of the reader. It left me wanting to start the sequel, Seven Surrenders, as soon as possible.

The characters are very strong. There are many of the them and each has their own life and a sense that they are an independent person with their own fears and desires, not just pieces being moved about in a story. Some of the standout characters are the narrator, Mycroft, who is an excellent guide to Palmer's world. Carlisle Foster stands in for the reader as someone new to the events of the plot and asks the questions that we want answers too. The Alphas, the seven leaders of this future, are all really interesting characters whose personalities reflect the diverse societies that created them. The Alphas’ court politics is both fascinating to read about and is as believable as any history of the nobility of the eighteenth century.

Too Like The Lightning is a really interesting book, filled with the imagination that makes science fiction such a fun genre to read. Palmer's world is a great place to spend a few hours and her characters are likeable companions while you're there.

If the description above has intrigued you, then go read it. I strongly recommend it - but, be warned, this book is not for everyone. Those who like this type of interesting and imaginative social science fiction will love this book.

Top five sci-fi political books

Science fiction is an ideal genre for exploring politics. Sci-fi novels ask “what if?” questions about humanity and the future and these are perfect for exploring political issues. Our world is messy and difficult to understand, despite our attempts to use politics to understand it. It can be much easier to comprehend a political argument when the entire world can be reconfigured for that purpose. For these reasons, there is a rich history of sci-fi novels tackling political issues and below are five of my favourite.

But, before we get started, if you are interested in seeing me talk about some political non-fiction then watch this video from Claire Rousseau’s YouTube channel where I choose my favourite political non-fiction books:

Right, now onto the sci-fi novels:

Look To Windward by Iain M Banks (2000)

Iain M Banks’s ‘Culture’ novels had to appear on this list and it was difficult to choose one. Look To Windward is one of my favourite of the nine novels that Banks wrote in his utopian Culture universe. These are sci-fi stories that show what humanity is capable of, and that we can rise up from the hatred and greed that stains our world.

Set after the Idiran-Culture war that was the focus of Banks’s first culture novel, Look To Windward is a profound meditation on the effects of war. Banks’s work (both sci-fi as Iain M Banks and literary as Iain Banks) is always overtly political and asks a lot of interesting questions. What makes this book (and the other Culture novels) so effective is the political debates are summed well by characters voicing different views that never come across as lecturing the reader.

The Uplift War by David Brin (1987)

Politics has rarely been done on such a galactic scale as in David Brin’s Uplift novels. These are not so much novels about exploring politics in our world through the prism of science fiction, but novels about how politics might work in the future. After humanity makes contact with alien civilizations we discover the fact that we evolved without the guidance of another race is abhorrent to most other civilizations in the galaxy, who were raised to sentience through a process called Uplift.

The novel takes place on Garth, a human colony that is invaded by an alien species who hate humans because of our origins. What follows is not just a military conflict over Garth, but a political one as humans use diplomacy, espionage, subterfuge and guerrilla warfare to hold onto Garth. Brin’s novels explores how politics would work between different species and all the complexities that entails.

Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh (1981)

If space exploration was a commercial venture than war between Earth and the stars would be motivated by profit. Such a war is the background to Cherryh’s seminal sci-fi novel set on a station that is 12 light years from Earth, which rebels against the wealthy Earth Company that has a monopoly on space colonization.

Many great science fiction TV shows and films owe a huge debt to Earth Company, not least Babylon 5, another show that deals with diplomacy in space. The politics of this novel are much more corporate than the others on this list, but it is still a hugely engaging sci-fi novel.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)

Ursula K. Le Guin is well known as a great writer of political science fiction. Her Hainish Cycle books ask many daring “what if?” questions about humanity. Le Guin is an expert in describing the different routes humanity could have taken, which makes the point that so many of the exploitative power relationships of our world did not come about because they are natural but because we chose to go down this road. If unequal power relationships are not natural then we choose to perpetuate them, and if we choose to perpetuate them then we can choose to stop them.

The plot of the Dispossessed touches on many political themes from when it was written (published in 1974), such as the rivalry between a capitalist patriarchal state and an authoritarian communism. It also looks at anarchist societies as an alternative to the authoritarian communism practiced by the USSR. Le Guin is a great writer and her gift with language brings these debates to life. This novel is a must read for sci-fi fans and those interested in politics.

The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig (2014)

There are many science fiction stories that explore the power dynamics of our world through a fictional one. The Fire Sermon is a great book about how those with power use it oppress those without. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where every woman gives birth to twins, one strong Alpha and a weaker Omega, the novel follows Cass, an Omega, trying to find her way in a world ruled by brutal Alphas. The sci-fi analogy of a society divided between weak and strong is a great way to explore the power dynamics of racism, sexism and homophobia.

The Fire Sermon is also a powerfully written book. Cass and her twin Zach, who becomes powerful in Alpha society, are well realised characters that sum up the power dynamic of the book. Author Francesca Haig is also an academic who studies Holocaust poetry and she has brought her knowledge of the darkest aspects of power dynamics to this incredibly engrossing sci-fi novel. 

Those are my choices. Let me know what political sci-fi novels you enjoyed in the comments below.

Books image created by Kirrus and used under creative commons.

Fear the future

What do we think about when we think about the future? I don't mean the future as in tomorrow or next week, or even next year. I mean, what do we think about when we imagine the future as science fiction writers might imagine it – the future in 50, 100 or 500 years’ time. Although based on everything that happened last year, 2020 seems like the far future.

When we think about the future, we mostly think that it will be awful; at least, that is what our science fiction is saying. You can tell a lot about a society from the science fiction it produces, as it shows how we think about the future. Judging by some of our recent output, we seem to think that civilization will collapse and we will be living in a wasteland like Mad Max: Fury Road or an extremely hostile urban environment like the Girl With All The Gifts.

Visions of destruction are more common than utopias. The works of authors such as Iain M. Banks or Hannu Rajaniemi show there is a lot of scope for telling stories in utopias. We seem to have stopped believing in utopias, probably around the time Iain M. Banks died in 2013. Our visions of the future are more Battlestar Galactica than Star Trek.

There is a lot of uncertainty about the future right now, and a lot of fear. That is understandable. With rogue states testing nuclear missiles, horrendous wars and the rise of aggressive nationalism, the world and the future looks pretty scary. This is reflected in our popular culture.

However, this is not the only time in our history that we have been frightened of the future. In the 1960s there was a lot of fear about the immediate future – in 1963, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, many believed the human race could end in a nuclear firestorm at any moment. As well as this, Western society was deeply divided along racial and political lines and violence was common.

There was also a sense of optimism about the future. It was around this time that Star Trek first appeared on TV. Star Trek had a radical vision of a future without racial tensions, where Americans, Russians, Japanese, aliens and even Scots could go boldly forth together.

Around the same time, Dune was published, and although it did not strike the same optimistic tone as Star Trek, it did show that the future will be vibrant, strange and filled with a terrifying beauty beyond anything we could imagine. Crucially it said that we would survive the Butlerian Jihad and reach the stars.

So if we were frightened in the past, then why are we so grim now? The vision of a future in The Expanse, riven with conflict, seems more likely to come true than the harmony of Star Trek or the discordant beauty of Dune. The key difference is that in the 1960s we were wealthy. The economy was growing and people were getting wealthier, new products and technologies were appearing in ordinary peoples’ homes. The future was arriving through home television sets and commercial flights, and people could imagine this continuing until we all lived on the moon, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The reason why we fear the future now is not because we have tangible external threats from North Korea or ISIS, or even homegrown extremists, but because we have an internal crisis in our society that appears unresolvable and is more fundamental than a war or terrorism. A crisis with capitalism itself.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” Fredric Jameson said and he was not wrong. We know that capitalism has been in crisis since the 2008 crash. The economies of the West are sluggish and weak. Wages have stagnated for nearly a decade and the cost of living is rising. A house that is not objectively awful is out of reach for most people. We are working hard and earning less. No one feels wealthy or confident about the future.

The main problem is that we don't have an alternative for capitalism, or even for this kind of ‘anything goes’ capitalism – or at least, not one that commands widespread support. Look at the collapse of moderate, social democratic, left-wing parties across the West if you think otherwise. If we cannot imagine a solution to the problems in our society then we cannot imagine a future for our society.

If the futures we imagine are not post-apocalyptic wastelands, then they are oppressive dictatorships likes The Hunger Games or 1984, which is suddenly popular again. This is because we can believe that the capitalism will end in fascism. It has happened before. However, imagining that capitalism will end in fascism is one step closer to accepting that our future is fascism.

We need to start imagining solutions to our problems or will we sleepwalk into tyranny or the complete collapse of society. Science fiction is one place where we can imagine a world where we have outgrown capitalism, or at least a world where we have fixed the problems that are killing our ability to imagine a future that is not filled with suffering.

Science fiction plays an important role in society by showing us how we think about the future. Right now, it is showing us that we think that there is no future. We need a science fiction that imagines a better future - not necessary a utopia, but a way through this crisis.

Sci-fi can provide hope to the hopeless that there will be a better future, which is desperately needed right now. We may be frightened of the future, but it does not have to be this way. Sci-fi can show us something else if it tackles the problems that we find ourselves facing. It can show us that the stars are within our reach. All we have to do is reach out and touch them.

The politics of Iain M. Banks novels

On Wednesday the 3rd of April, best-selling Scottish author Iain M. Banks announced that he was dying of cancer and that his next novel, The Quarry, will be his last. In light of the news, many fans must be looking back over his oeuvre, considering what conclusions can be drawn while he is still alive.

Iain Banks was famously described as “two of Scotland's best authors” because he writes both science fiction and literary fiction (the former as Iain M. Banks). Despite the different genres, the same broad political and social themes come up in all his novels and a lot of common ground can be found.

Iain Banks is amongst the most popular writers of today who is clearly left wing. He is outspoken on subjects as varied as Scottish independence and Israel’s military intervention in Gaza. Politics infiltrate his novels to varying degrees, but it is ever-present in the themes, characters and settings he explores. One recurring theme is the idea that political opinions are a manifestation of peoples’ deepest values, such as in The Steep Approach to Garbadale. The difference between left and right wing people, according to main character Alban Wopuld, all comes “down to imagination. Conservative people don’t have very much so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them... empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left leaning.”

Allegory is often used to convey these ideas. 1986’s The Bridge presents a strange coma-world which symbolises the crumbling of Britain’s post-war consensus and the onset of Thatcherism. The part of the Iron Lady herself is filled uncompromisingly by a sadistic Field Marshall, who indulges his pigs with luxury accommodation on his captured train whilst enjoying such activities as forcing tethered prisoners to run to exhaustion in front of the slowly driven locomotive. But it is, perhaps, the puzzling allegory of his Culture series which pose the most interesting political questions.

These novels mainly explore the question of “how perfect is the Culture?” Is this anarchistic, socialist, post-scarcity collective really a utopia? It caters for every possible human need and removes the need for sickness, death, money, want and intolerance. No one works as society is administer but hyper intelligent computers known as Minds for the benefit of humanity. Who would not want to live in the Culture where literally anything is possible? The subtle question asked by most of the Culture novels is: “is the Culture so perfect that they feel the need to meddle in the affairs of the less perfect?” Banks’s reaction to real-world military interventions perhaps suggests an answer: on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he returned his torn-up passport to 10 Downing Street in protest (after abandoning his original idea of “crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns”).

Many of the early books provide simple comparisons between the Culture and other civilisations. In Consider Phlebas, the Culture is at war with the Idirans who seek to aggressively conquer other species because they believe themselves to be superior. In The Player of Games, the Culture encounters the Azad who have a suppressive hierarchical society, repressive gender politics and the material problems of scarcity. Compared to these societies, the Culture appears utopian and the reader feels that they are justified in intervening to improve the lot of their citizens. Similarly, in Excession the Culture face the Affront, who are so disgustingly violent towards every other living creature that the reader has sympathy for the Culture in declaring all-out war against such an insult to sentience.

However in later books, perhaps as a reaction to the cultural imperialism of neo-con foreign policy such as the Iraq war, the Culture's well-meaning interference has disastrous consequences. In Look To Windward, the Culture unbalances the fiercely cast-based Chelgrian society in an attempt to make it more egalitarian. This results in a bloody civil war for which many Chelgrians feel the Culture is responsible. The Culture's belief in their own perfection and how to better others ultimately leads to more death than the Idirans or the Affront could create deliberately.

Whereas the Culture novels show us how great the future could be, Banks’s non-Culture novels show us how awful the future could be. In Against A Dark Background, the Huhsz cult is allowed to hunt and kill people in order for their messiah to be born. In The Algebraist the future is divided between the overbearing Mercatoria and the sadistic Starveling Cult. In these nightmarish vision of the future, technology is turned against humanity to repress and cause suffering. Banks has scorn reserved for our own world too, from the cruelty of Thatcher’s Britain in The Bridge to money-grubbing US businesses in The Steep Approach to Garbadale.

In his Culture set novella The State of the Art, Banks turns his lenses directly to Earth as we know it. Set in the 1970s, it deals with the Culture's first contact with humans. The Culture citizens, with their perfect existence, are horrified by how cruel life on Earth is. However, one Culture citizen decides to stay on Earth, smitten by the concept of Christianity (reaching the opposite conclusion, co-incidentally, to The Crow Road’s Prentice McHoan, who eventually finds happiness by rejecting religion). Banks explores the idea of whether happiness is truly possible without experiencing suffering, and thus can anyone in Culture be happy? He poses the idea that the Culture's meddling in the affairs of others may just be a means to justify its own existence.

At its best, sci-fi tells us something about our own world – as Banks once said, “no-body who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.” The Culture is more than just an aspiration of what lefties believe that a future society could be like, free from binding social roles, repressive leadership hierarchies and scarcity of resources. It is also an allegory for how westerners feel enlightened compared to poorer nations, and our need to meddle in their affairs – much as the West has done over the course of Banks’s career. We want to live in the Culture as much as we realise that we would rather live under western liberal democracy than under most other governments on Earth. The Culture reminds of the need to be critical of ourselves to see what effect we have on other societies.

1984: A critique

George Orwell's 1984 has a good claim to be one of the most famous books of all time. It is certainly one of the most famous books about politics, and has given us terms such as Thought Police, Big Brother and Orwellian. 1984 is frequently referenced in political discourse, but I am curious as to how many people who quote the infamous line about ‘a boot stamping on a human face – forever’ have actually read the rest of the book. Until recently, I had not read 1984; I knew the story, set up and characters, and I have read many of Orwell's non-fiction books, but I had never actually read his seminal text. So I decided to read the often-referenced indictment of tyranny and oppression.

1984 lived up to the hype. As well as being a terrifying vision of the future of humanity, where individualism, free thought and emotions are crushed by a cruel one-party super-state, I found it to be brilliantly written. I also found the book to be strangely old-fashioned in its thinking. Not conservative or even suffering from having an outdated vision of the future, many of Orwell's ideas about constant surveillance, entertainment machines that monitor you, and a fearful population constantly policing each other have come true. The key difference is that it is Google and Facebook who are constantly watching us, not the government. It is not a political party that wants to crush any dissenting thought, but hundreds of angry middle aged men on Twitter sending abuse to any woman who dares to question patriarchy. 1984 brilliant predicts 21st century life, but behind the scrutiny is not a not a shadowy political elite but large companies and ordinary human beings.

Our political debate has moved on from 1984. On the surface, Orwell's novel is an argument against the power of the state and for individual freedom. Orwell lived through the rise of Fascism and Stalinism in the 1930s and saw the USSR stretch its influence across Europe after the Second World War. He joined a Trotskyist brigade in the Spanish Civil War and fought against Fascism, but was appalled at how Stalinism was crushing alternative political movements on the left. Orwell believed in democratic socialism and individual freedom, and was against the naked tyranny of Stalinism. He wrote 1984 as a left-wing criticism of Stalinism, and not as a blanket condemnation of Communism - which unthinking readers often assume that it is.

Today, the threat of a specifically Stalinist dictatorship conquering the world through its subversion of the worker's struggle for emancipation is a distant memory. However, individual freedom does not reign worldwide. We are still watched over by a unknown elite, but now it is the masters of big data, not big government. Our thoughts and actions are still policed, not by political officers but by each other. Stalinism is dead, but we are still as frightened and as alienated as we were during Orwell's lifetime.

From our contemporary point of view, 1984 reads like a vision of the future from the past. It seem as a strange as the view in 1975 that we would be living on the moon in 1999. As I was reading the book, I kept asking myself, who supports this system? Who passionately believes in it, in the way that men on Twitter defend patriarchy and capitalism? Does everyone only support it out of terror? The political system of 1984 is so mercilessly awful that I felt that someone needs to gain from it or feel more secure through its existence to create the social cohesion that holds the system together. There are a few inner-party people who gain from the system, but what does the majority of the population get from it? Neoliberal capitalism benefits mainly a tiny group of the ultra-rich and oppresses billions worldwide, however the power of the ultra-rich is built on a comfortable middle class, who are supportive of the system because of their fear and superiority over the poor. The middle class lose out under neoliberalism (how many middle class people can afford to buy a property in London any more?), but they support it because they benefit enough from it not to cause a fuss.

In 1984, everyone suffers but no one questions. I do not see a political system like this surviving today, not with our ability to self-organise through social networks. Look at the Arab Spring and how the cruel dictatorships were swept aside by popular resentment (unfortunately to be replaced by war, chaos and more dictatorships). A system like that shown in 1984 could have conceivably existed the 1940s, 1950s or 1960s, but not today. Social control still exists, but not in such as an aggressive and heavy-handed way.

Orwell was a member of a Trotskyist Party in the Spanish Civil War and a Marxist critique of class and capitalism runs through his writing. However, 1984 does not take into account the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony. The totalitarianism of 1984 is heavy-handed and unstable. Culture is used to protect the party's power; the character of Julia works writing novels for the Ministry of Truth, but these are also blunt instruments of state control. Today social control still exists, but without taking away our individual freedom. It exists through subtly convincing us all that an artificial economic system - which only really benefits the very rich - is natural, inevitable and in all our best interests. If Orwell was writing 1984 today, it would reflect a similarly bleak future, but it would also reflect how individual freedom is co-opted by cultural hegemony to suppress dissent against the economic and political elites. The nature of Marxist critiques of society have changed.

One of the most positive things that happened during the second half of the 20th century was the decline of totalitarianism and the expansion of democracy. The Berlin Wall fell and the dictatorships of Eastern Europe transitioned to democracy. China has liberalised, apartheid has ended in South Africa, and totalitarian in regimes in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Burma and many other countries have ended or are currently embracing democracy. The Arab Spring showed how the oppressed people of the world hunger for freedom and democracy. However, we are still not free. We are not free from class when social mobility is declining, we are not free from patriarchy when 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, we are not free from racism when Donald Trump can glide his way to the Republican nomination on a platform of Islamophobia and anti-Hispanic racism. Russia transitioned from a communist dictatorship to a capitalist one. The far right and neo-Nazi parties are growing in popularity across Europe and Fundamentalist Islam is spreading in the Middle East across Iraq and Syria. With the fall of Communism, it looked like freedom had won, but freedom is as much under threat today as it looked when Stalin might roll his tanks from Berlin to Lisbon.

Tyranny is still real, but it's face has changed since Orwell wrote 1984. It has become subtler and more appealing to our fears and insecurities. In the 1930s and 1940s, Stalinism and Fascism wanted aggressively to take away our rights and suppress our individualism; now, it is our rights and our individualism that is used to police us. There is no Big Brother, no Party, no Thought Police, but we are constantly watching each other and any deviation from the dominant ideology is swiftly punished - ask anyone who stands up for women's rights on Twitter. The ways in which a shadowy elite control society and politics for their own interest have become much subtler since 1984 was written, but they are still just as present. If you want a vision of the future, just imagine a voice whispering that this is natural and in our best interest into your ear, forever.

How not to write a famous character

Adaptations are in: from comics to classic literature, our films and TV screens are dominated by characters originally convinced for other mediums. The most successful of these focus on well-established characters from stories written decades ago that have been adapted several times before. Characters such as James Bond and Batman are being constantly reimagined and updated. Now these larger than life cultural icons dominate pop culture.

These cultural icons favoured by high-budget film and TV adaptations are the ones we have all grown up with and seen in many different forms. They include American characters, such as Superman from the golden age of comics, and icons of Britishness, such as Sherlock Holmes. Many have changed over and over again to suit each new age, like Dr Who. Batman and Bond have been camp, surreal and moody depending on how we want them to reflect how we see ourselves.

These characters are larger than life. In the recent film Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Clark Kent looks up a statue of Superman that is several stories high, an unsubtle way of saying that the idea Superman is bigger than any one person or story. The recent BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes featured Sherlock dealing with the consequences of his own fame: the character of Sherlock is surpassed in the public's mind by a mysterious, unknowable figure in a deerstalker hat who appears on the front page of newspapers. In the recent series of Dr Who, the Doctor is not so much a person but an idea woven through time and space itself.

Many fans, writers and viewers grew up with these characters, and as we did so, our understanding of them grew as well. Now that lifelong fans control the companies and broadcasters who own these characters, we have entered an introspective cultural age. Since the 2008 financial crash, western civilisation has been asking questions about what we stand for and what should we stand for? Nowhere is this more apparent than with writers adapting these larger-than-life cultural icons into new stories. Writers are exploring our culture-wide uncertainty about the future by using established cultural icons to ask questions about who we are. This is done by making films or TV series that ask the question who is James Bond or who is Sherlock Holmes?

The larger-than-life status of these characters means that stories which explore who they are often do not fit into works that are believable. Writers have to compress their complex history into a believable human being, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the recent Sherlock Holmes Christmas special that tried to reconcile the present day and the Victorian Sherlock into one story. It ended up being a nonsensical mishmash of two tangentially related plotlines. Sherlock cannot be both his modern self and his Victorian self, and this make sense in a story that takes place in a world which we can recognise as being our own.

The Sherlock Christmas special is not the only example where this approach has led writers astray. Writing a story that asks questions about a cultural icon can led to an excessive focus on character and not enough on story. Most people want Sherlock or the newest DC film to be an entertaining story, not existential musing on the nature of Batman. The story must stand alone and be believable to the audience.

Another example of when the story was not believable was the most recent James Bond film, Spectre. Since Daniel Craig took over as Bond in 2006, we have been treated to a darker and grittier take on the suavely-dressed, wise-cracking spy. These stories have probed the nature of who James Bond is – is he a psychopath, or can he connect with other human beings? How can someone recognise their humanity after killing so many people, and treating almost every woman he meets as subservient to his will?

In the most recent adventure, Bond uncovers an international criminal organisation which has been behind all of the awful things that have befallen him. This global criminal syndicate seems to exist only to test James Bond; it is as if he is the most important person in the world. This has come about through trying to reconcile the icon of James Bond, the criminal enterprise Spector from the classic James Bond adventures, and a story which focuses on Bond's humanity. In our introspective age, James Bond cannot fight a global criminal network as he did in the 1960s: instead, the global criminal network must ask questions about who is James Bond. The problem is, in our world international criminal organisations do not focus their activity on antagonising one person. This makes the story inherently unbelievable.

Man of Steel chose to focus on how alien Superman is, rather than how human Clark Kent is. By constantly putting across how unlike us Superman is, we can see the character as the great culture icon which he is. Superman clearly cannot be human, as no one person can wear so many faces and do so much over the years. This makes Superman difficult to relate to. Audiences are not interested in a protagonist they cannot understand and no one can understand what it is like to be a cultural icon like Superman. This makes Man of Steel quite a cold film, with a protagonist that viewers cannot relate to.

Sherlock focuses on the relationship between Holmes and Dr Watson as the source of most of its drama. This misses the whole point of Sherlock Holmes, solving mysteries. The character of Sherlock has always been seen through the eyes of Watson, as it is the only way he can be knowable to ordinary human beings. However, when writers focus on the internal conflict of who is Sherlock Holmes, or the interpersonal conflict between Holmes and Watson, they miss the extra-personal conflict of the mystery to be solved. Focusing on the character of Sherlock is fine, as long as a good story can be told as well.

In recent years, Dr Who has become very introspective around the nature of the Doctor; an entire plot arc focused on the need to prevent the Doctor from answering the question of what his name is. This focus on the Doctor as an icon has meant that within the world of Dr Who, the Doctor has grown as a character from someone who joyrides through time and space, to a titanic figure who has seemingly touched the life of everyone in that universe. So much has the Doctor grown in infamy, that several times he defeats the antagonist of an adventure simply by shouting "I am the Doctor" at the problem – The Forest of the Dead is a notable example of this.

I can see how knowledge of the Doctor would grow over time in the universe of Doctor Who, but the current obsession with the nature of the Doctor as an icon within his universe has meant that he has grown to become not only godlike but the greatest and only God of this universe. This prevents the Doctor being relatable as a character, makes the dramatic events less believable and the narrative suffers. Any writer dealing with one of these cultural icons needs to avoid these three mistakes.

This age of introspection has produced some good films and TV shows. Batman Begins is a strong example of how to take an established character, ask questions about them and tell a good story. The film was successful in explaining why a man who wanted to fight crime dressed up as a bat and wore a cape despite the obviously impracticalities. It made Batman believable. Focusing on the psychological effect that the death of his parents had on Bruce Wayne made him relatable. Also, turning Batman's trainer into a villain made for an interesting narrative.

There are other examples. Casino Royale is the best of the Bond films starring Daniel Craig. It shows the origin of Bond's bloodlust through the trauma from the death of his lover, Vesper. This is believable and relatable. The film also has a great story. In Sherlock, the adaptation of the Hound of the Baskervilles was their best episode as it had a solid mystery at its core, thus delivering a good story.

From this I can determine that the three important characteristics to bear in mind when writing a story with a well-established cultural icon is believability, relatability and narrative. Writers working with these larger-than-life characters should keep this in mind so that the stories they create are engaging for an audience who are not as interested in asking questions about who is Batman or Bond. Generally, audiences prefer well-written stories focusing on their favourite characters – after all, the quality of their stories was why we fell in love with these characters in the first place.

Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System

The London Natural History Museum is unusually crowded, even for a Saturday afternoon. Children charge in every direction towards the skeletons of dinosaurs or volcanic rocks. Parents fret and try to keep up, or at least not lose their children in the throngs of people. There are tourists with confused expressions, who stop in the middle of a corridor without warning. Teenagers are taking selfies with the statue of Charles Darwin and middle aged men are looking at butterflies with furrowed brows. This bustle of human activity is the most important thing in the universe right now.

I step out of the crowd and into the quiet space of the Natural History Museum’s latest exhibition, ‘Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System’. The inside of the exhibition is the opposite of the rest of the museum. It is a quiet place in which to regard large static pictures of the planets in our solar system, while contemplating humanity’s place in the universe. Soothing ambient music from Brian Eno plays throughout, an original commission for this exhibition.

The exhibition consists of thousands of photos of the solar system - taken by NASA, ESA, probes and rovers - assembled into large images of Earth’s neighbours by the artist Michael Benson. It begins with Earth and the moon, before moving out to Mars, Mercury and Venus, and then travels all the way to the most distant planets. Each picture appears to show a world that is stranger and more alien than the one before it.

As I walked around the quiet space filled with enormous images of distant worlds, I was reminded that the universe is cold, dangerous and indifferent to everything we care about. Mercury’s atmosphere is pushed away from the surface by solar light and trails behind the planet like a comet’s tale. Venus’s atmosphere is toxic, heavy and superheated; completely inhospitable to human life. Mars is a dry desert. The rest of the solar system is cold and airless. Confronted with the stark hostility of the universe, I forgot all about the hive of activity outside the exhibition. It all seemed so pointless and brief compared to the surface of other worlds that have remained unchanged for millions of years.

It was scary to realise how insignificant we are, but I was also able to see also that the universe has great beauty as well as dangerous environments. Saturn looks sublime with its perfect rings. The cobalt blue of Uranus looks tranquil against the perfectly black sky. The cracked icy surface of Europa (a moon of Jupiter) is beautiful as well as protecting the sea beneath, which is kept liquid by the pull of Jupiter's gravity despite the extreme cold of being so far from the sun. Even in the harshest of environments, nature still holds wonders. The grand vistas of the Martian desert are stunning to behold. The universe is beautiful as well as dangerous.

This beauty is timeless and eternal. It is entirely unaffected by anything humanity has done - aside from the odd discarded rover on Mars or probe flying out into deep space. We are so vanishingly small when compared to the rest of our solar system. There are cloud storms in Jupiter's atmosphere that are larger than our whole world. The impact of humanity cannot even be seen on pictures of Earth, a reminder that it is not the world we are trying to save but ourselves. We cannot fathom how small and insignificant we are next to the vastness of the universe.

The universe is very beautiful, but utterly indifferent to everything we care about. The ice on Europa will still be there after everything we have ever cared about has turned to dust. A billion years after we are all dead, Saturn’s rings will still be spinning, unaffected by our lives and everything we hold dear. I was left feeling very small and pointless.

I emerged from Otherworlds into the hall of mammals at the Natural History Museum. The shouts of the rest of humanity disturbed my Brian Eno-created calm, but the scene was a welcome reminder of the fact that we do matter. Life maybe fragile, small and brief when compared to the planets in the sky, but the vibrancy and diversity of life on Earth is stunning to behold and every bit as beautiful as the surface of dead worlds. Humanity and the petty things we care about are more unusual than anything that exists on any other world we know about, and might perhaps be unique in the entire universe. I felt that I had travelled to the edge of the solar system to be reminded of truth about the people all around me: we maybe be small but we are still important.

Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System is on at the London Natural History Museum until the 15th of May 2016.

Jessica Jones is a new approach to Marvel characters

Warning: This article will deal with the issue of domestic violence and thus has a trigger warning. It will also have some mild spoilers for the TV show Jessica Jones.

Angry, hard-drinking, gets into fights, has dysfunctional relationships, lives in a seedy apartment – these are the characteristics of the archetypical PI. You can usually add male to the list as well, which is one reason why the Netflix/Marvel show Jessica Jones is such a breath of fresh air. Here we have a familiar take on the New-York-based private eye, but this time the PI is a woman – and has super strength. However, what makes Jessica Jones (played by Krysten Ritter) enduring as a character is her personality: she is a savour, living in a dangerous and uncertain world, but she never gives up. Also, she had a habit of breaking doors.

Jessica Jones is part of the wider Marvel shared universe, but one of the strengths of the show is that you do not need to have seen any of the other films or TV shows to follow the plot. The story is entirely stand alone, and it also has a different visual style and narrative to the Marvel cinematic properties. Jessica Jones is a gritty, intimate, ground level view of life as a jobbing person-with-abnormal-abilities. It is nothing like the spectacle rich, epic action-scene-based films of Iron Man or Captain America. Jessica Jones digs deeper into its characters than the films, which is one advantage a thirteen-part TV show has over a two-hour film.

The conflict of the show hinges around Jessica's personal relationships and not big action set pieces. We sees Jessica arguing with her boss, who is going through a messy divorce (ably played by Carrie-Anne Moss). We find out about her childhood and her lifelong best friend Trish (Rachael Taylor), and their friendship is dramatised with all the complexities of relationships we are familiar with from our own lives. Jessica and Trish have a deep bond of friendship, but Jessica's volatile personality leads to frequent falling outs. The show also develops in detail Jessica's relationship with the antagonist, Kilgrave - played by David Tennant on very good and very creepy form.

Kilgrave is another person-with-abnormal-abilities (we need better terminology for these people, anything better than hero or enhanced), although Kilgrave's power is that anyone has to do whatever he tells them. Free will does not exist around Kilgrave. If he wants you to stab your best friend, there is nothing you can do about it. Kilgrave uses this ability to manipulate others and enrich himself. He especially likes to use it make beautiful young women his play thing. One of these women was Jessica and at the start of the show she is still recovering psychologically from the experience of being under Kilgrave's control.

The show uses a sci-fi concept, Kilgrave's mind control, to explore an important issue in our world, the power dynamics of abusive and controlling relationships. Kilgrave's abilities are clearly a metaphor for the power abusers’ hold over their victims/loved ones and for how hard it is to break free from the control of someone who is abusive. Approaching this subject through the prism of science fiction allows the show to explore the dynamics of an abusive relationship with a degree of fantasy that makes the narrative less emotionally traumatic and easier to engage with than a more straightforward approach to the subject.

There are lots of films and TV shows that deal with domestic abuse in a sensitive and nuanced way, and stories based in our world that take a frank look at the nature of abusive relationships. Unfortunately, these films and TV shows do not find a huge audience, because of the depressing nature of their content. Tyrannosaur, directed by Paddy Considine, is one such example. Tyrannosaur is a brilliant film but sadly was not seen by many people because most audiences are not interested in social realist dramas set on a Glasgow council estate. The perception of science fiction as more light-hearted and entertaining allows these difficult to digest insights to slip under the radar and into the minds of the viewer.

Jessica Jones is a very good example of serious issues being smuggled into an accessible show with mass audience appeal. Jessica Jones explores the psychological toll that domestic violence has on its victims. Kilgrave appears as a shadow stalking Jessica, disturbing her sleep, distressing her, and appearing to physically assault her despite not being present. At first, the viewer is uncertain if this is a manifestation of Kilgrave’s powers, but later we find that it is psychological damage left by his hold over Jessica.

I like science fiction which tackles serious issues as much as I like escapist sci-fi, which distracts us from this world and appeals to our imagination. The Marvel shared universe has both, in Jessica Jones and Guardians of the Galaxy. Jessica Jones uses the concepts of the sci-fi genre to reflect our own world back at us in a way that we can easily comprehend. This makes it easier to understand how painful it is when an abuser holds power over their victim, and it also shows how difficult it is to escape from an abusive relationship. The use of a sci-fi concept as a key component of this relationship does not cheapen or belittle the psychological suffering of the victims, it merely makes it easier to understand how Kilgrave controls his victims.

David Tennant plays the role of Kilgrave very well. His usual, charming, likeable persona works well when playing a serial abuser. Often people who abuse others are outwardly charming and likeable. They hide the pain they inflict and force their victims to hide it as well. The character of Kilgrave was also abused himself during his childhood, by his parents’ researching his mind control abilities. This does not excuse his actions, but it does highlight an issue that abusers are often previous victims of abuse. Their own history of abuse colours their relationships with others. Pain and love are intertwined in Kilgrave's mind.

Kilgrave also does not see what is wrong about what he does. He sees himself as the real victim, and believes that Jessica genuinely loves him despite the way he has treated her. He blames his victims for his own actions, believes he acts in their best interest and tries to give up violence but always relapses. Kilgrave is entitled and believes he deserves the love and affection of Jessica, despite causing her so much pain. These are among the characteristics of abusive partners and the show explores how these traits appear in abusers who do not have a supernatural control over their victims. Jessica's best friend Trish has been abused by her mother, who believes she acted in her daughter's best interest, has a strong sense of entitlement and appears outwardly charming. Through the science fiction drama of the struggle to free New York City from the terror which Kilgrave inflicts, the show explores the nuances of abusive relationships.

Personally, I find this variety of science fiction more interesting than the escapist kind, although both suit different movies. It is also possible for science fiction to be escapist and to tackle serious issues, such as Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. Jessica Jones is an example of a complex issue in our world explored through the prism of sci-fi concepts. I hope that the show is doing some good, that it illuminated some people to the nature of abuse or made[*therefore also present tense: makes] them questions their own assumptions. This is the power of science fiction to be a social good and shows that Marvel can come up with interesting new takes on their well-established characters.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Warning: this review contains quite a lot of major spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Make sure you have seen it before reading this as it’s dead good.

Surely it is not news to anyone that there is a new Star Wars film out. There must be bacteria on Saturn that are aware of this. For the second time in my lifetime, a new Star Wars trilogy has exploded into the cinema with more hype than I thought was possible.

Clearly as a culture, we love Star Wars. Or at least the middle class geeky, mainly male, cultural group I move in loves Star Wars. Not even Harry Potter can so completely unite my Twitter and Facebook timelines in squeals of fannish delight. This new Star Wars film has reached near omnipresent status. It is everywhere and everyone is talking about it.

Star Wars has captured the cultural zeitgeist for a number of reasons, but mainly because this time the fans dared to hope that it would be good. Three sub-par, at best, prequels from George Lucas could not dampen our enthusiasm for more Star Wars. Fans are practically salivating with anticipation for another trip to a galaxy far, far away.

The fans have every reason to be excited; J.J. Abrams is a good director and has made two very entertaining Star Trek movies. His rambunctious take on Star Trek strikes me as an expensive means of auditioning to helm the new Star Wars trilogy. I cannot think of a director who would be better for the role. The trailers showed a lot of promise; the force is strong with this one.

There is one very difficult line Abrams had to walk, one that could make or break his take on Star Wars: how much do you rely on the recognisable characters and motifs from the original Star Wars and how much do you make this a film in its own right? Nostalgia verses originality. Clearly the film needs some of both, but getting the right balance is not easy.

Watching Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, I must admit that it was great to have the classic Star Wars iconography back, something that had been missing from the prequel trilogy. It was wonderful to see a film with tie fighters, stormtroopers, star destroyers, X-wings and the Millennium Falcon. However, The Force Awakens did not rely too heavily on classic Star Wars characters. I appreciated seeing Lela, C-3PO and R2-D2 again but I am glad their appearances were brief to allow new characters to assert themselves.

Said new characters were excellent. We had BB-8, the cute new robot rolling around, which looked convincing because it was a physical character that did not rely on computer effects. The new protagonist, Rey (Daisy Ridley), is engaging and sympathetic, from the beginning we are rooting for her to succeed. There is also Finn, a stormtrooper who does not want to be a stormtrooper anymore, played by John Boyega, who delivers the performance of the film, bringing energy and humour to the part. There is also Adam Driver playing new visor-wearing villain Kylo Ren, who is everything a blockbuster antagonist should be, creepy, evil, charismatic and a little bit frightening.

Despite having a mainly fresh cast, The Force Awakens is filled with nods to Lucas’ original trilogy. From when Finn accidently activates the holo-chess set onboard the Millennium Falcon, to Rey living inside a wrecked AT-AT. There are a lot of these cameos of familiar motifs in the film, and it sometimes feels like a roll call of scenes we knew and loved from episodes IV–VI, but it satisfies the audience’s thrust for nostalgia.

There were a lot of nods to past films, but The Force Awakens is a story in its own right. The new characters have lives and adventures of their own and are not crowded out by classic Star Wars characters. Han Solo is the only returning character to play a major role and Harrison Ford does so with the grace and dignity of an elder statesman. This is in contrast to Lucas’ prequel trilogy, which relied too much on classic Star Wars characters - Obi-Wan, R2-D2, Yoda - and did not develop its own characters enough.

The other major flaw of the prequel trilogy was that it focused too much on the internal politics of the Jedi. The Old Republic’s priesthood/Gestapo were not as interesting as Lucas seemed to think they were and each prequel episode always came down to a lightsaber fight in the end. There was an absence of epic space battles or feats of dangerous piloting, which should be the meat and potatoes of any Star Wars films. The prequel trilogy lacked anything as exciting as the battle of Yavin at the end of episode IV.

This issue was addressed in The Force Awakens as Abrams brought the epic. There were huge battles aplenty. The escape from Jakku was a breathtaking scene, with the Millennium Falcon flying loop-the-loops and then racing through the husk of a crashed star destroyer, chased by tie fighters. My heart was in my throat the whole time. As it was during the attack on Takodana when rebel X-wings fly to rescue the heroes and Finn tries to use a lightsaber for the first time. The greatest achievement of the film is its climax, when the rebels attack the new uber-Death Star. It combines daring feats of flying, an intense ground assault and a good versus evil lightsaber showdown. In a phrase: perfect Star Wars.

This amazing sequence was ends with the tragic death of Han at the hands of his own son, Kylo Ren. It was a scene of genuine emotion. So many Star Wars deaths seem hollow, when the audiences does not care about the character, but Han has a special place in any fan’s heart and it was gutwrenching to see him go. Both Harrison Ford and Adam Driver played this scene superbly; it is the jewel in the crown of this film.

The Force Awakens ends with a setup for the next film and a lot of the questions this film raises are left unanswered. I am very excited for episode VIII in March 2017 and I hope it delivers on the promise of this one. J.J. Abrams did an excellent job, taking on one of the toughest directing gigs in Hollywood. He managed to walk the line between the originality this film needed to be a story in its own right and the nostalgia it needed to keep the fans happy. The weight of expectation was enormous and Abrams rose to the challenge ably.

Episode VII has lots of adventure, visual spectacle and epic space battles. This is what Star Wars is all about. This film has the energy and enthusiasm for the classic trilogy that the prequel trilogy was missing. I left The Force Awakens about as excited about Star Wars as I was when I was ten years old. I am now itching with anticipation for more Star Wars films in the future. My faith in the franchise has been restored.

The Man In The High Castle

Orange is the New Black, Master of None and Jessica Jones: all of this year's must-watch TV has been on Netflix. The only TV shows that I followed on broadcast TV this year were Dr Who and Peep Show, i.e. established shows that built a fan base in the days before streaming TV services. Even these two, I watched on BBC iPlayer and All 4.

Amazon are keen for a slice of this rapidly-growing pie and have several high-profile original shows to compete with Netflix. Recently, they released the first of these shows that I was inclined to watch, a high-budget adaption of Philip K. Dick's novel, The Man In The High Castle. This book was a seminal part of my education in science fiction literature when I was teenager and has been close to me since. It is an interesting project for Amazon to put so much money behind, as Dick is not the most accessible of writers and this is not the most accessible of his books.

On paper, the pitch for this TV series is solid gold. A string of popular movies began life as Dick novels, including Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. The premise of this novel is compelling: what would early 1960s America be like if Japan and Germany had won World War 2? However, Dick's writing is esoteric, and is more focused on the characters’ internal conflicts than on the wider drama of life in a totalitarian society.

This Amazon adaptation has preserved many of my favourite aspects of the book, especially the focus on how Japanese and American culture interact in the occupied Pacific coast states. The book and TV show explore in fascinating detail how the Japanese see American history and American popular culture. It also explores how the Americans act under occupation: who desires to fight back, who desires to escape, who desires to keep their head down and who becomes enthralled by the culture of the occupiers.

The TV adaptation dropped some of the book’s more ethereal scenes. For example, the reliance of the Japanese Trade Minister, Nobusuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), on the guidance of the I Ching is explored in much more detail in the book. Tagomi’s extended thoughts on the wisdom and divine nature of the I Ching are interesting in literature but would be slow paced on television. There is still enough of these details to get an understanding of Tagomi’s character and of the world he inhabits, but a stronger narrative has been built across this world by the TV show’s writers.

One notable addition to the TV show is a great villain in Obergruppenführer John Smith, the head of the SS in the Nazi-controlled Eastern States. Rufus Sewell plays the part of Obergruppenführer Smith with relish, enjoying being a vision of terror but also bringing humanity to the character. The longer format of a ten-part TV show gives the writers a greater opportunity to explore the characters from the book more detail. Luke Kleintank does morally conflicted very well in the role of Joe Blake (Joe Cinnadella in the novel), a Nazi spy who falls in love with Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), a new recruit to the resistance movement which he is supposed to be infiltrating. The TV show has a clunky love triangle between Joe, Juliana and her current boyfriend Frank Frink (Rupert Evans) which adds little to the plot. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is exceptional as trade minister Tagomi, trying to avert the looming conflict between the Japanese and Nazi empires.

The most interesting aspects of the TV show were those that explored how American society could be co-opted by Nazi occupation. It is striking to see American flags and buildings adorned with Swastikas with the same pride as the starts and stripes. This embrace of Nazism by America is best expressed in the character of Obergruppenführer Smith, and the conservative, authoritarian small-town patriarch looks shockingly at home in an SS uniform. It is entirely plausible that apple pie, baseball and bunting could be combined with TV addresses from the Führer on Victory in America Day.

The TV show's vision of a world which combines the culture of the 3rd Reich and 1960s America is convincing, but does not stand up to more detailed scrutiny. Most likely the two would morph into a third, different culture that was not so consciously American. For example jazz music is used effectively in the TV show to evoke the feel of the early 1960s in the mind of the viewer, but no Nazi-based society would have allowed jazz music to become popular. Their music world have been Wagnger or Beethoven, but having the Ring Cycle playing over the start of an episode does not evoke the period that the show is set in. I can understand the show's producers need to take short cuts to establish the period, but it does not lead to a convincing vision of a world where the Axis Powers won the Second World War.

Overall, the Amazon adaptation of The Man In The High Castle was well made and really entertaining. I was hooked from the first episode, sucked into the show’s world and wanting to find out what happened to its characters. This adaptation is sufficiently faithful to the book to keep me satisfied as a fan, and it added enough to make the story work in a different medium. I am glad that Amazon stuck to Dick’s book, with all its inaccessibility, as much as possible instead of taking the basic premise and making a more accessible story.

Dr Who Series 9

Warning: This article contains spoilers for series 9 of Dr Who. I want you to read this article, so if you have not seen series 9, watch the show and then come back and read this article.

I find it hard to be objective about Dr Who. My love for the show began in 1993 when the BBC rebroadcasted Planet of the Daleks as part of the 30th anniversary of the show's first broadcast. I was 8 at the time and the show captured my imagination. Through VHS and episodes taped off UK Gold, the adventures of an eccentric man in a time traveling phone box became an integral part of my childhood and the foundation of my love of science fiction.

A lot of criticism has been leveled at the tone of the show, the believability of the stories, the reliance on CGI and head writer Steven Moffat, and I do not want to go into that debate here. Here I want to talk about how entertaining and well-made series 9 of the show, - which finished on Saturday the 5th of December - was.

Overall I thought this series was better than the one before it. I enjoyed a lot of episodes from series 8, especially The Caretaker, but this series had several distinct improvements. Primarily more two part stories, which allowed for meatier and better-developed narratives. Writing Dr Who must be a difficult task, each new episodes requires a whole new sci-fi world to be introduced, along with characters, and a story executed in three-quarters of an hour. It is not a writing job I envy. Due to these constraints, there have been unconvincing, cop-out, endings. Kill the Moon from series 8 is a good example of this. Series 9's longer stories were convincing, at no point did I feel cheated by a writer or that a plot needed more development.

The series opened with an overwritten introduction, typical of Moffat’s style. Moffat clearly has talent as a writer - Blink is near perfection – however, his ability to dwell too much on the infamy of the Doctor while writing confusing non- sequiturs that do not advance the plot is style over substance. It was an interesting motif but added nothing to the story. Moffat shows off too much in his writing. He needs to practice the art of writing stories without flair, which follow a linear progression. Then he can be play at being a sci-fi James Joyce. The opening of series 9 was typical Moffat excess.

After that, the story of The Magician's Apprentice kicked in and I forgot my misgivings. It was great to have Missy back and Michelle Gomez is exceptional in the role, definitely the stand out performance from the series. The Daleks were used effectively and not simply rolled out as a suitable end of series villain to add some dramatic weight the sake of it - I am looking at you, Russell T. Davies. From that point on, the standard of writing was high.

Series 9 boasted a great cast at the top of their form. The writers have caught on to how well Capaldi can act and given him more nuanced scenes and longer speeches where he can really show off how good he is in the role. Capaldi ably rises to these challenges and easily proves that he is the best actor to play the Doctor since the show was brought back in 2005.

Maisie Williams was an excellent addition to the cast and stole the show in four well-written episodes. I certainly hope her character can return at some point, as there is plenty of unexplored potential there. Clara is a good companion, she has a character in her own right, and Jenna Louise Coleman plays her well. Despite being a good character, Clara lacks the magnetism of some of past companions, Amy or Donna for example.

Some stand out episodes from this year were Under the Lake and Before the Flood, which had the creepy build up and satisfactory pay off of a strong horror story. Also The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion showed how sci-fi in general, and Dr Who in particular, can be used effectively to hold up a mirror up to the human condition. Here was a well-developed story, based on moral complexity and relatable characters on both sides of a conflict. When Dr Who makes you doubt whether you are rooting for the human, then it is doing its job properly. Heaven Sent reminded us of the great Moffat of the past, the one who wrote Blink and Silence in the Library, someone who can twist a story round on itself and keep you guessing until the last second.

One criticism of this year was that too many end of episode cliffhangers hinged on suggesting that either the Doctor or Clara were dead. This has been done so many times that it has lost its intrigue. Such is the overuse of this trick that it detracted from Clara’s eventual real death. Aside from the overly bombastic opening to The Magician’s Apprentice, I was also underwhelmed by Mark Gatiss' offering this series. Found footage has been done to death and this brought nothing new to the field - although Sleep No More did have a genuinely disgusting villain.

The ending of the series was solid, it did not loom over the rest of the series like Doomsday did in series 2 and did not feel like a bizarre and unnecessary coda like The Wedding of River Song at the end of series 6. The long anticipated return of the Time Lords was handled well by Moffat and Clara's goodbye was probably the best companion departure yet. It was good to have an emotional ending to her time with the Doctor, without her having to suffer greatly. It also addressed the question of what can give your life meaning after the Doctor has gone from it?

I generally feel positive about this series. Dr Who as a whole is not without its flaws. The momentum that the David Tennant and early Matt Smith series had is gone from the show. This is not necessary anyone's fault, nothing can stay that fresh and zeitgeisty for long. However, my enthusiasm for Dr Who is less than it once was. I have not re-watched a complete series since series 5.

I will always have a soft spot for Dr Who, and it is very pleasing to see Capaldi doing well in the role. The improvements over the last series show that this show can still deliver surprisingly good episodes, the Zygon adventure was a case in point. Capaldi appears to be just hitting his stride, whereas Smith and Tennant were already starting to feel a bit tired two series in. I can only hope that this year's Christmas special and series 10 maintain the quality.

Trapped In The Bargain Basement

How do you follow up a successful crime novel? With sequels, of course. The crime genre naturally lends itself to a series of novels, as there will always be more crimes to solve. This is especially true of detective novels, where new cases are constantly arising. As a reader it is great to find a detective novel that you like, as further adventures are very likely to come into print.

Last year I read and enjoyed The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf by debut author Nick Bryan, and I was similar entertained by the sequel published earlier this year, Rush Jobs, so I was very pleased to discover that a third volume, Trapped In The Bargain Basement, would be coming out in October.

Like its two predecessor ‘Hobson and Choi’ adventures, Trapped In The Bargain Basement is a gritty detective drama with a dash of Bryan's sarcastic humour on top. Bryan is not afraid of tackling serious issues - the previous Hobson and Choi adventure looked at the effect of gentrification of Peckham – and book tackles the problem of London's homeless.

Rising homelessness is a serious problem in London, and Bryan approaches the issues with intelligence and sensitivity. Trapped In The Bargain Basement acknowledges that homelessness does not just mean street sleepers, and that the term also covers those in temporary or insecure accommodation, something which is frequently overlooked in the homelessness debate. In this novel, Hobson and Choi encounter a group of people squatting in the basement car park of an up-market shopping centre – people without secure homes of their own who live in accommodation not fit for human habitation, which is often the reality of homelessness. These people are frequently the victims of abuse or people who have been evicted from private rented accommodation. With the soaring cost of renting in London, this is becoming a growing problem.

The main homeless character in the book is Camille, a French runaway who is hinted at having a history of abuse from a family member and whose job as a cinema usher will not cover renting in London. This is subtle way to explore the realities of homelessness for many people through the medium of a comedy/crime novel.

People like Camille are the unseen side of homelessness. They are hidden away in temporary accommodation or accommodation unfit for human habitation. These are the people we are oblivious to as we go about our lives, but they are frequently the victims of exploitation and crime, as this book explores.

Camille works in the cinema at the trendy East London shopping centre of the EastVillage, which is run by the exploitive manager Allan Ballart. Seasoned detective John Hobson and his teenage work-experience placement Angelina Choi are brought in to investigate a series of muggings that have taken place in the EastVillage. They quickly discover Camille and the community of homeless people living beneath the shopping centre, but when Hobson and Choi start asking too many questions about who really benefits from the crimes taking place, Camille is framed for murder and Hobson and Choi need to discover the real culprit.

The plot of Hobson and Choi's investigation takes twists and turns which keep the novel interesting, and the characters are written in a humorous and compelling way. The reader gets a sense of their lives outside the case which are developed enough to seem realistic. Hobson is having an awkward affair with the receptionist of his building and has newly acquired a dog that he is uncertain how to look after. Choi is taking her first steps in dating, as well as wondering whether she wants to continue with Hobson after her work experience ends. However, as interesting as the plot is, it does lack tension. There is not a great sense of peril for the main characters. The reader grows attached to Camille and we do not want to see her go to prison, but our main focus is on the detectives, who are not in a great deal of danger.

Bryan uses comedy to relieve what could be a very depressing story, whilst the darkly sarcastic nature of Bryan's humour matches the tone of the plot. The frequency of the jokes means that this is a story which does not take itself too seriously, and this makes it easier for the reader to digest the serious points made about homelessness, abuse, exploitation and murder. Trapped In The Bargain Basement is a dark story, but the sarcastic humour keeps it from being unbearably bleak.

The Hobson and Choi books are grounded in the realities of life for most Londoners. As well as the story of the case we get a lot of insights into Hobson’s and Choi's lives outside work. Choi lives on social media, Hobson is suspicious of it. Hobson eats at Subway, whereas Choi prefers a trendy pop-up pizza place in Brixton. The scenes from outside work for both characters are realistic and familiar to reader from our own lives, which is what brings the characters to life. One of the best scenes in the novel is Choi's date with returning Hobson and Choi character Will. Bryan portrays the early stages of a teenage romance without sensation and with his trademark witty sense of humour. We all remember what those early awkward dates were like and recreating these sensations with these characters gives them a life beyond that of the iconic roles of detective and assistant.

Trapped In The Bargain Basement is a very entertaining read and it lives up to the promise of the previous Hobson and Choi adventures. This is my favourite outing for the comedically mismatched pair of detectives, because it has a compelling story, tackles important issues in an intelligent way and has a sense of humour based on everyday life that brings the characters to life. I am glad that the Hobson and Choi series, which started so well, continues to produce great books. I am looking forward to their fourth adventure, Blood Will Stream, next year.

Cosmonauts at the London Science Museum

When Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon in 1969, it was broadcast around the world. For someone of my generation, it is hard to imagine a time when space breakthroughs were on the front cover of newspapers. Today, space exploration is confined to the science section of most news websites. Is that because we are not pushing back boundaries in the same way that we were in the 60s, or are people less interested in the exploits of private space companies when the benefits of their breakthroughs will not help all of humanity? Maybe we have all become cynical about space exploration because dreams of living on the moon by the end of the last century did not come true, or maybe we have simply stopped believing that the future can be different from today.

Despite America being the first to land a human on the moon, the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by Russian space breakthroughs. The first satellite in space, first animal in space, first man in space, first woman in space and first group in space were all Russian. Now a new exhibition at the London Science Museum called ‘Cosmonauts’ looks at the history of the Soviet space program and its accomplishments.

The exhibition tells the detailed story of the Russian exploration of space, through objects from the period, models, videos, photographs, audio and written accounts. The exhibition reveals the background to the Soviet space program that many people will not know in detail. For example, I did not know that Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, worked in a textile-factory before going into space.

The exhibition is arranged roughly chronologically from the early inspiration that Russian science fiction writers had on the space program, through to the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and then Yuri Gagarin's first trip into space in 1961. The exhibits tell the story in a powerful and emotional way, bringing in the personal stories of the people involved. ‘Cosmonauts’ also shows how the USSR's achievements in space inspired the ordinary Russian people.

As the exhibition develops, we are shown how fiercely Russia competed with America during the Cold War space race. Driven by early successes, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put pressure on the space program for more and more firsts. The USSR's achievements were supposed to keep them one step ahead of the USA, which they were until NASA landed the first person on the moon.

‘Cosmonauts’ does not shy away from the fact that Cold War hostility drove Russia's expanse into space. The exhibition shows how military technology, mainly rocketry, was adapted for the Soviet space program and how America was alarmed by Russia's progress. Successfully putting satellites into orbit confirmed to the Americans that the Soviets had rockets capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the USA. These advancements in space travel where not "in peace for all mankind", as Armstrong claimed when he stepped down into the moon.

‘Cosmonauts’ also walks the fine line of acknowledging the political repression in the USSR at the time, whilst not being too hostile to the Soviet government. This is primarily an exhibition about scientific and technological accomplishments, and not political history. ‘Cosmonauts’ is not a critique of Communism but a look at the scientific history of the 1950s and 1960s space program.

I am interested in both science and political history, and so I found ‘Cosmonauts’ fascinating. Beyond the history, I found it interesting because of my interest in modernism. Like a lot of the modernist period, the space race was a time when it seemed like the future was happening right now. People were not always optimistic about the future – the chance of the world being annihilated in a nuclear war seemed high – but people knew that the future would be radically different from the present. It is this dream, more than anything else, that we have lost. It is telling that ‘Cosmonauts’ ends at the end of the 1960s, when the modernist age was also ending.

I found that ‘Cosmonauts’ was accessible to people without much technical knowledge of space travel or rocketry. Despite reading The Martian recently, I cannot tell my Apollos from my Soyuzs. The technical information in ‘Cosmonauts’ was pitched at the right level: not too much to be confusing, but detailed enough so that I learned without feeling talked down to.

As a side note, I would certainly recommend picking up the audio guide for this exhibition. Partly because it is narrated by Helen Sharman, the first British person in space, but also because it gives the listener information about the exhibits without the need to crowd around the display signs, which will be busy on a weekend.

I would recommend ‘Cosmonauts’ at the London Science Museum to anyone interested in the early years of space travel. Even if you know nothing about – or are not particularly interested in – Soviet Russia, this is a fascinating exploration of a (mainly) peaceful competition that once captivated the entire world. Hopefully it can inspire us to look upwards once again. The exhibition closes with the words of of Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever".

The Martian

Andy Weir's novel of one man's struggle to survive on Mars has become a sci-fi sensation. The book was published to little fanfare but has become a viral success, ending up being Goodread's top sci-fi novel of 2014. The book is tense, well-plotted and uses the scientific detail to enhance the story of protagonist Mark Watney's struggle to survive. It has won over sci-fi reader after sci-fi reader, spread through peer-to-peer recommendations, and become a best seller. Inevitably, a big budget Hollywood adaptation has followed; the question is – can it live up to the book's success?

The short answer is that it does. The Martian is a superb film, entertaining from its witty first scene to the more thoughtful final few moments. Although it is two and a half hours in long, the Martian flies by and I was hooked for all of it. Watney's struggle for survival in the barren, airless deserts of Mars is tense and his fellow astronauts’ plan to rescue him is filled with edge-of-the-seat tension.

Ridley Scott is on excellent form behind the camera. His direction keeps the pace up and the film never drags, a real accomplishment for a film that is quite long and has a large cast of characters. Scott also uses special effects well, the action is intimate and focused on the characters. There are several dazzling scenes that doubtless employed an army of CG artists but no scene feels like hollow spectacle. The action drives forwards the plot and keeps the audience focused on Watney's precarious circumstances.

Scott's film is a very faithful adaptation of Andy Weir's novel. Dialogue, and at times whole scenes, are lifted directly from the book. The plot is identical to the novel: astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is the botanist on the third manned mission to Mars. During a freak sandstorm, Watney is lost and his colleagues are forced to abandoned the planet and leave him for dead. When he awakes and realises what has happened, he sets about finding out how he can survive on Mars until the next manned mission arrives in four years’ time. The problem is that he only has one year's worth of food and the airless, waterless surface Mars is a dangerous place to spend any amount of time. Meanwhile, NASA have found out that Watney is still alive and try to rescue him.

The film takes the novel's most tense scenes and expertly transposes them into nail-biting moments of cinema. The scenes when Watney's Martian habitat collapses and when he finally escapes from Mars make for tense and exciting cinema – the latter scene is one of the best I have seen this year.

All of the novel's large cast of characters are faithfully realised on screen in a series of great performances. Matt Damon excels as the ever upbeat Watney, a character he is perfectly cast for. Chiwetel Ejiofor is great as Vincent Kapoor, NASA’s Director of Mars Operations, the man in charge of saving Watney. So also Jessica Chastain, who plays Commander Lewis, Mark Watney's tormented superior officer. Other great performances are delivered by a stellar cast including Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Mackenzie Davis, Donald Glover, Kristen Wiig and Kate Mara, but a special mention must go to Benedict Wong who delivers the performance of the film as the hard pressed NASA's Jep Propulsion Lab director Bruce Ng. The only actor who disappoints is Sean Bean, whose enthusiastic performance appears to have been edited within an inch of its existence.

Fans of the novel will be glad to hear that the science of how Watney grows enough food to survive on Mars and the technology behind NASA's rescue plans are not diluted for the film. They feature heavily and are ably crafted into the story so that the audience never feels talked down to or confused, whilst the novel's level of detail is preserved. The Martian shows how a hard sci-fi story can be as entertaining as any action blockbuster, when handled by a competent director with a good cast.

My only criticism of The Martian is that it is perhaps too faithful to the book. Bringing a book with so many scenes and characters to the big screen means individual moments or characters rarely get a chance to shine. The film is long and although the tension remains high, some events are rushed through. It was great to see a film that was so faithful to a book that I love, but I would have preferred a greater degree of adapting the story to the medium of cinema.

The isolation and loneliness, which the novel conveys so well, are not developed in the movie. This could have been achieved with a greater focus on Matt Damon and less on the other characters. A movie which followed his video logs would have been less tense, but would have allowed for a greater character study and would have more effectively drawn out the drama of his struggle to survive in a hostile environment. The climax and denouement scenes are substantially different to the book to show what a more Mark-Watney-focused film would have been like. It would have been interesting to see this movie.

The road which the film could have taken does not detract from how entertaining and enjoyable The Martian is. It is an excellent adaptation that translates the strengths of the book to the screen and adds good performances and tense directing. I would certainly recommend seeing it to any fan of the book or of sci-fi cinema.

Science fantasy books

Readers often think of science fiction and fantasy as two separate but related genres. They both rely on creating unusual worlds and telling stories that explore them. Sci-fi and fantasy overlap - there are common tropes, archetypes, stories, etc - but most readers divide novels into one genre or the other. However the line between sci-fi and fantasy is blurry and there are some stories that cross over from one genre to the other. These are science fiction fantasy books.

China Miéville is an author whose work exists in this blurred territory. He has written urban fantasy novels like King Rat and science fiction like Embassytown, but some of his books, like The Scar, use both sci-fi and fantasy concepts. The Scar has magic (thaumaturgy in this universe) and vampires as characters, but there are also spaceships and aliens in the novel. Miéville’s writing borrows from the iconography of both genres, and he fits into neither.

In order to find out what exists between the two genres, we should look at the difference between them. The commonly accepted distinction is that science fiction should have some scientific explanation for the imaginative concepts that the author has invented for the story. For example, the novel the Andy Weir's novel The Martian is based on what is scientifically possible now and what might be possible in the future, where as there is no scientific explanation of the origin of the Discworld. These stories are easy to classify as one genre or the other.

Dr Who is a good example of a TV show that is both sci-fi and fantasy. Although a lot of Dr Who is based upon what we know about science, there are a lot of Dr Who stories that do not stand up to scientific analysis. Time travel is probably not possible; neither can a child crying on Christmas Day defeat a homicidal snowman. The Daleks and the Cybermen make sense when looked at from a scientific point of view, as they are imagined along the lines of possible developments in cybernetics, but when Amy wishes the Doctor back from the dead it is not scientific and neither are the means by which the Weeping Angels turn to stone when looked at. These devices can be used to tell emotionally engaging stories, but they do not stand up to scientific scrutiny, so Dr Who sits in the space between sci-fi and fantasy as it has elements of both.

A book can be in both genres not just by borrowing from both: a writer can approach non-scientific concepts in scientific way. For example, the time machine, from HG Wells’s novel, is a realistic (as was considered possible at the time) scientific explanation of what the future will be like told through a non-scientific means, i.e. time travel. Wells's vision of the future and the people in it makes sense but the science of the machine does not.

Rather than sitting across both genres, a story can move from one to the other. Anne McCaffrey's ‘Dragon Flight’ novels start off as fantasy but then become science fiction as the technology and science behind the setting is revealed. From the characters’ point of view it makes sense for them to explain their circumstances - mainly the existence of dragons - as magic based upon what they know, but their understanding changes as the story progresses across several novels.

The characters' perception of what is magic and what is science is key to the stories that sit on the blurred line between the sci-fi and fantasy genres. In some stories, the explanation is deliberately vague, which makes it harder to tell whether it is scientific or not because according to Clarke’s third law ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.

In many of the stories the power of technology is shielded in mysticism. In Frank Herbert's novel Dune, the line between science and magic is blurred because of social factors. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood and the Kwisatz Haderach are mystical and they have strange abilities, such as seeing through time and having ancestral memories, all of which is unscientific. The protagonist Paul's experience of the world of Dune is more like that of a fantasy novel (understanding strange things as magic) because that is how he sees the world. Paul does not seek scientific explanations to the strange things that he encounters, as we would, because of the different society he was raised in. The reader cannot judge if these concepts are scientific or magic because there is no reason for the characters to ask this question. The reader has to put this novel on the blurred line between sci-fi and fantasy because of how the characters see their world.

Characters see the world of Dune differently to our world because it is set in the far future and society has changed a lot in the intermediate millennia. Star Wars is another similar example where mysticism shields concepts such as the Force from scientific analysis and the characters do not question this. The technology behind the Death Star is based on projections from our science, but the Jedi and the Force is more difficult to explain. Like Dune, the characters do not question the unexplained nature of the Force, so the viewer can never know for sure. Star Wars is set ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ and Dune is our distant future, so it makes sense that society’s views on what should be questioned and investigated are different.

There is no hard and fast rule about which genre stories fall into and which ones are in between genres. The further the story is removed from our world, the more difficult it is to classify story concepts as magic or science. The Martian is clearly science fiction, but the science behind a lot of the book is not fully explained. There is no scientific explanation as to how they transported something the size of the rovers to Mars so the reader must just accept this for the story to work, much as they must accept magic in a fantasy story. Whilst there is no scientific explanation to the origin of the Discworld, the ways in which magic works in Terry Pratchett’s novels follows set rules like science does and is investigated in a scientific way at Unseen University. Even these books which appear easy to classify as one genre or the other have elements of both.

Across all of literature, the lines between genres are blurring to tell interesting stories, not just sci-fi and fantasy. As the distinction between genres becomes more vague, it will get harder to classify stories into one genre or the other.

Tintin, modernist science fiction and the moon

The Moon is a powerful symbol in science fiction. It constantly looks down on us, reminding us that the universe is larger than this world. It is the only other body in the solar system that people have visited, and it represents the first step in getting off this world and exploring space. Lots of sci-fi works set in the near future have the moon as the first place colonised by humans, and in many visions of the future the moon is a stopping off point for the rest of the system. Alastair Reynold's Blue Remembered Earth is the most recent example of a book I have read which uses the moon in this way.

There was a time, within living memory, when it looked like our world and science fiction were converging and the limits of human exploration were being pushed back. These were the hay days of the US/USSR space race, which led to the first humans landing on the moon in 1969. This race to the moon has inspired many sci-fi stories set on the moon or around the moon – the Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A Heinlein or Eon by Greg Bear, for example – but there is one sci-fi story which instantly jumps to my mind when thinking about the moon landing and that is the Tintin adventures Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. Belgian comic writer Herge first published these comics in Tintin Magazine in 1950, 11 years before Kennedy announced that America would go to the moon in 1961 and 19 before the first landing in 1969.

The Tintin stories are rooted in the modernist age and highlight some of the social and technological changes that modernism was exploring. New technological breakthroughs from colour TV to nuclear power are the focus of Tintin stories, and it is Professor Calculus's nuclear powered rocket which takes Tintin and his friends to the moon. The Tintin comics also focus on political changes, such as the Cold War, which shows concern about direction of events in the modern age. The space race was an important part of the modernist age and by looking at the way we viewed the moon, we can tell a lot about that time. This is especially well summed by looking at Tintin.

One feature of modernism was a sense of optimism about the future and a belief that we could build a better world – this was especially present in modernist architecture. For many people, the space race represented this hope for a future where new frontiers would be opened, and we would live in space or on the moon. The moon landing is the most striking image of an expanding future, as it pushed back the boundaries of where humans had been. Many people thought that within a few years from 1969 we would be living on the moon. Today this sense of optimism has faded, and we are frightened by the future. We have also stopped visiting the moon.

This sense of optimism about the future was fueled by a belief that technology would continue to develop at the rapid pace which it had during the 40s, 50s and 60s. In Tintin, this is represented by Calculus’s nuclear rocket, which makes space travel much easier than it was in real life. In Tintin, a single nuclear-powered ship could make the journey to the moon, return to Earth and be reused. If this had been how technology developed, then space travel would be much easier and we would now have colonies in space.

The nuclear rocket in Tintin is as much a science fiction concept as the Enterprise or a Culture GSV. Nuclear power has not become compact enough or efficient enough safely to power a mission to the moon, certainly not with the ease that is shown in Tintin. In reality, to visit the moon we needed several vehicles, connected together, most of which were destroyed in the process of being used. It is nearly 50 years since the moon landing and we still travel to space the same way, i.e. the majority of our crafts are thrown away. This makes space travel very costly and not something that can be undertaken easily.

Technology has advanced since the moon landings (most mobile phones are more powerful than the computers which the moon missions used), but the huge technological advancements of the modernist age – mass manufacturing, electronics, flight, space travel, nuclear power – did not make space travel as easy as it is shown in Tintin. Today there is a feeling amongst many people that we are going backwards and we have lost hope in the future. We got rid of Concorde, we do not go to the moon anymore, and we are worried about the effects of humans on this planet rather than getting off it. The future is a scary place and we do not want to live there. Tintin is modernist as it shows that the future can be a better than the present, in the future we will be able to go to the moon.

The Moon represents some of the goals of modernism because it is about being optimistic about the future and reaching for more than we have now. However, Modernism was also about questioning the narrative of endless progress. The rockets that took us to the moon were not just symbols of hope but also of terror, as they carried the bombs that could destroy the world. New technological breakthroughs during the Second World War made international travel and space travel easier and possible respectively, but it also made devastation on a huge scale possible. During the war, many people had seen the destruction that new technology could create and were frightened that the prospect of a war between the two global superpowers, the USA and the USSR, would be even worse.

The expansion of conflict into new theatres, especially space-based ones, is a key theme of science fiction. In Tintin, the new conflict of the Cold War is represented by the Bordurian attempt to sabotage the rocket and later by Colonel Jorgen, a Bordurian agent, who stows away on the rocket and attempts to maroon Tintin on the moon. Borduria is an Eastern European Communist state that stands in for the entire Eastern block in many Tintin adventures. The conflict with Colonel Jorgen in Explorers on the Moon shows that for Tintin space is as dangerous as much as it is an opportunity. It also shows how the conflicts of the modern world are expanding to new theatres as the boundaries of humanity are pushed back.

The Tintin adventures, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, are a glorious piece of modernist science fiction, filled with optimism and fear about the future. In the world of Tintin, new adventures such as travelling to the moon are possible, but also new conflicts are expanding in dangerous ways. The Moon remains as far away to us as it was in 1950; the brief age of space exploration is over, and for now humanity is very much stuck on Earth. At the same time, we have lost the modernist desire to build a better world. Maybe hope that the future will be better than the present will return some day and humanity will turn its head upwards and be excited once again about walking on the moon.