Review: ‘Motel Architecture’ by J. G. Ballard

‘Motel Architecture’ is not one of the best-known short stories of the British author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), but it’s one of his most prescient. And this is an author who anticipated everything from Ronald Reagan becoming US President (in the late 1960s) to videocalls and virtual socialising via a TV/computer screen (see his ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ for the latter).

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Review: ‘The Electric Ant’ by Philip K. Dick

‘The Electric Ant’ is a short story by the American writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82), written in 1968 and published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October the following year. The story is about an ‘electric ant’ or robot which has always thought it was human; when it discovers the truth, it sets about trying to alter the reality around it.

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Review: ‘Through a Window’ by H. G. Wells

The influence of H. G. Wells (1866-1946) on science fiction goes without saying. Brian Aldiss, in Trillion Year Spree, call him the Shakespeare of science fiction, acknowledging his role in raising the emerging genre to an art form. The tales of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are familiar to millions of people, even those who have never read Wells’s books, thanks to notable film adaptations.

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Review: ‘The Treasure in the Forest’ by H. G. Wells

‘The Treasure in the Forest’ is a short story by the British science-fiction author H. G. Wells (1866-1946). It was first published on 23 August 1894 in the Pall Mall Budget before being included (as the final story) in his 1895 collection The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents.

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Review: ‘The Moth’ by H. G. Wells

‘The Moth’ is a short story by the British author H. G. Wells (1866-1946), published in his 1895 collection The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents. The tale might be regarded as a variation on the ‘ambiguous ghost story’ in that we as readers cannot be sure whether the moth in the story is the ghost of the protagonist’s old rival come back to haunt him, or a hallucination which exists only in his overworked brain.

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Review: ‘The Commuter’ by Philip K. Dick

‘The Commuter’ is an early short story by Philip K. Dick (1928-82), which appeared in the science-fiction magazine Amazing in 1953. The short story is perhaps best categorised and analysed as an alternative history story, so it qualifies as ‘fantasy’ in the broad sense of the definition.

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Review: ‘Burning Chrome’ by William Gibson

‘Burning Chrome’ is a 1982 short story by the author William Gibson, who is widely considered the father of cyberpunk. The story was first published in the science-fiction magazine Omni before being collected in Gibson’s first short-story collection, which is also called Burning Chrome.

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Review: ‘The Valley of Spiders’ by H. G. Wells

‘The Valley of Spiders’ is a short story by the British science-fiction pioneer, H. G. Wells (1866-1946). First published in the Strand magazine in 1903, the story is actually closer to Gothic horror or adventure tale than to science fiction, and shows Wells’s versatility and range.

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Review: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

Of all the authors whose works most follow Kafka, Ferenc Karinthy is unlikely to be a name to leap to most readers’ lips. He remains virtually unknown in English-speaking countries. And yet his 1970 novel Metropole is a quintessential Kafkaesque piece which also, at times, manages to take Kafka’s ideas in new directions, recalibrating the central premise of Kafka’s work in startling and sometimes amusingly satirical ways.

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Review: ‘At the End of the Ninth Year’ by Ray Bradbury

‘At the End of the Ninth Year’ is a short story by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). Unlike some of the other tales collected in his 1996 collection Quicker Than the Eye, it is not a fantasy story – there is no supernatural element – but nor it is out-and-out science fiction.

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