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 40) Salman Rushdie, East, West, 1994 Nine stories, three of Indians in India, three that exhibit aspects of Rushdie's own peculiar way with Western fictional forms, and three of Indians living in England. Those middle three are notable for their imaginative diversity but they don't sit well with the rest: we have a bizarre (and somewhat unreadable) abstraction on Hamlet, a scenario where fictional characters are infiltrating the real world at an auction of Dorothy's slippers from The Wizard of Oz, and a courtship with Queen Isabella in the fevered mind of Christopher Columbus (a story which, somehow, has Bruce Chatwin written all over it). The remaining six more straightforward stories show how Rushdie makes the act of spinning very engaging tales of ordinary Indians and their families look easy, including the very original 'Chekov and Zulu', something which could qualify as a piece of very Indian and very erudite Star Trek fan fiction. Tags: 2008 books, emigrés, fiction, india
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 39) Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960 One of the ten SF Masterworks hardcovers, and the first widely available hardcover edition for, well, decades. This was Miller's only published novel (if one discounts his incomplete Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman), and is the cornerstone of his reputation for looking at Christian themes while placing them in a science fictional context. Leibowitz was an ordinary electrician in the military prior to the world's first nuclear war, after which, repentant, he went on to found a minor religious order. Then came the 'Simplification' of humanity, and six hundred years hence an indecipherable artifact is found which was undoubtedly his, and over the following thousand years man learns once again to develop nuclear weapons. The generally bad temper to Miller's Catholic humour is what gives A Canticle for Leibowitz its kick: he is at turns comic, often sad but always prodigiously grim and rich. Some superbly cantankerous abbots and monks (most of whom are killed off without a shred of dignity) seem to prove their human fallability on a daily basis while at the same time debate higher morality on a grand scale with (perhaps too much) eloquence. The final moral dilemma for Abbot Zerchi is direct, painful and graphically drawn, making Miller's exploration – or was it a defence? – of a self-perpetuating Christianity all the more ambivalent. Part of Miller's whole point seems to be that humanity's beliefs – whether one considers them rational or irrational – will over centuries become exaggerated to the point of having a hold over us that's often far out of proportion to their elementary simplicity; on the one hand he seems to poke fun at this state of affairs in the wider world though on the other hand he appears to stand by some of the more ornately embellished beliefs of the Catholic Church. And where this discord applies to the story's last third it becomes an uncomfortably big question mark that hangs over everything – just how useful, or useless, is Christianity? – a question mark with a hook that one detects Miller can't seem to wriggle off all that easily (at least on the page, and he sits the reader squarely on that fence too, allowing you to jump either way). An angry and ironic book, and there are even iconoclastic aspects that make it as relevant today as ever. Tags: 2008 books, science fiction, sf masterworks
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 36) J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962 Ballard has disowned his first novel The Wind From Nowhere, so most people's Ballard collections now have to start here. It's a typical Ballardian cataclysm: an overactive sun has produced a melting of the polar ice caps with a submerged Earth undergoing a new Triassic era, and London is now a steamy, coral-encrusted jungle populated by giant iguanas. Robert Kerans is an expedition biologist, enraptured by the disturbing dreams that people share at this latitude, and he chooses to stay when his expedition departs. He then encounters the manic Strangman and his seductive African entourage, who are all similarly caught up by the end of the world but in a far more sinister and symbolic way. The Drowned World openly references the influence on Ballard of Paul Delvaux, who seems to provide a creative counterpart to Ballard's own destructive imagery, and once you 'get' the character of Strangman, a man with a real heart of darkness and the only properly developed character, Ballard's intention becomes clear and the rest falls into place. It's a somewhat stilted read now but memorable for the visual ideas it leaves you with, and given the biblical nature of this apocalypse it's also refreshingly free of much religious referencing at all. Tags: 2008 books, science fiction, sf masterworks
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 34) Walter M. Miller Jr., Dark Benediction, 1980 A short story collection that migrated to Gollancz's SF Masterworks series from their SF Collectors' Editions, where its original title was The Best of Walter M. Miller Jr. Miller's preoccupation with religious themes is not that much in evidence, though it does crop up in memorable imagery such as a crucifixion on Mars and a monk's retreat for people infected with an alien biology. Miller had a knack of making the reader think as much about the context and background to his stories as the stories themselves, which somehow makes them all the more whole and self-contained. Best ones: the far-future mini-space opera 'The Big Hunger', the hard-hitting 'Vengeance for Nikolai', and my favourite 'The Will', about a young terminally ill boy who uses science fiction to cure himself. All these put Miller's 1955 Hugo winning novelette 'The Darfsteller' at least partially in the shade, though that particular story is a good example of how to sustain a reader's interest by making a small idea go a very long way. Tags: 2008 books, science fiction, sf masterworks
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