In planet sci-fi | Book Shelf

Whether it's the typically utopian predictions of a technologically advanced society or social and lighthearted explorations of its meaning and effects on us, science fiction authors have written it all. From the days of Brave New World, to a more recent and literary fiction like Never Let Me Go, science fiction attracts a large readership. WAVE introduces you to some must reads in this genre. Take your pick:

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005

Short-listed for the Booker Prize, Never Let Me Go is a melancholic story set in a fictional dystopian England where human beings are cloned to provide organs for transplants. The central character's life is introduced as a seemingly average one, but Ishiguro continues the story generously utilising his craft at subtlety, and revealing the truth through obscure suggestions.

The narrative follows Kathy and her two friends Tommy and Ruth, who are students at a boarding school for clones and lead deceptively typical teenage lives – an attachment to their cliques, an admiration for sport and art and a preoccupation with sex. But the novel, divided into three sections, continues into their youth where they leave the boarding school and live in cottages that are closer to the 'normal' world. It spans into their adulthood where they become what they have been created and brought up for–to become either donors, or 'carers'.

Never Let Me Go is essentially social. Ishiguro explores, instead of technology, the issue of hierarchy between the 'normals' and the clones–and the resulting unethical social fragmentation. Interlacing a complex romance between Kathy and Tommy, and a direct, almost innocent narrative, that dips into a tragic tale of helplessness Ishiguro leaves the reader, until the very end, to pick up the trail of hints he leaves behind to piece together Kathy's reality, which is at once both intriguing and disturbing.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams, 1980

The second book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of five books, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, will make for a good laugh with its cleverly silly humor. It follows a hilarious turn of events when Arthur Dent and his friends are attacked by Vogons and Arthur hangs their spaceship by asking it to prepare a cup of tea. They are saved by the dead grandfather of Zaphod, the President of the Universe. With his friend, Arthur travels back in time and finds that the human race descended from documentary directors and hygiene technicians rather than the good old apes.

The Giver, Lois Lowry, 1993

Set in the future, The Giver explores a world that in its endeavor to become a utopia has dulled into a monotonous society with no depth or emotion. The story follows Jonas, a boy who is chosen to be 'Reciever of Memory', to keep memories of the past in case they are required for future reference. As the story proceeds, Jonas begins to see the hollowness in his world, where the children are born to designated birthmothers and where people pop pills to suppress any inkling of love or emotional attachment through his telepathic experience of feelings that have been long eliminated from his world.

The Reality Dysfunction, Peter F Hamilton, 1998

The first book in the Night's Dawn trilogy, The Reality Dysfunction is a classical sci-fi novel about a futuristic world in AD 2600, when most of the planets in the Universe have been colonised, and a diverse cultural society exists, bolstered by superiorly developed genetic engineering and a technological utopia. This golden age of industrial growth that thrives on entire star systems, is shaken when a criminal in a primitive planet is faced with a threatening entity called the reality dysfunction that has worried the human race since the beginning of time.