All My Futures Remembered

I must have been about twelve^[1]. In front of me stood a wall of books, all the same size, racked so that their covers were facing me – no spines, just covers. And what covers! These were Panther Science Fiction novels, of the early 70s, and Panther's house artist was the great Chris Foss.

Back in those days, my parents would seek out the rainiest, most miserable corners of Britain for our annual vacation. That year, they had chosen a static caravan park in Fairbourne, a small holiday resort on the Snowdonian coast, across the river from the slightly larger metropolis of Barmouth (current population ~2,100); this after several years where we had spent our annual vacation on Yorkshire's east coast. Fairbourne was very much more of the same. Apart from the caravan, which was an innovation we never repeated.

The caravan park had a single shop, which sold everything – groceries, newspapers, cigarettes, shampoo, Calor gas for the caravans – all the basic stuff, anyhow. But, somehow, I remember it as having what still feels like the best science fiction section ever; that wall, stretching from floor to ceiling, packed with the promise of the far future.

I spent a long time poring over them (Dad would take a daily constitutional to buy cigarettes; I'd scamper after him in the hope of another sight of those covers). The books I particularly recall include the whole of E. E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series. And a lot of Asimov. There were also some of the blue, textured, Corgi SF Collectors Library volumes (Corgi probably had a better set of writers – Arthur C Clarke, Brian Aldiss, various books that would now be considered classics – but they didn't have Chris Foss).

At some point, we were allowed to buy a book each. By that time, I had memorised the entire plot of the Lensman saga by reading the blurbs on the back. Nevertheless, I bought Smith's Triplanetary; my brother chose The Early Asimov, Volume 1. Back in the caravan, sheltered from the endless Welsh rain, I learned of the eternal war between the races of Arisia and Eddore, of the destruction of Earth's first civilisations, and of the plan by Arisian scientists to develop over time the ultimate weapon of the forces of good, the Lensmen^[2]. And that was the start of my love affair with the future, one that continues to this day.

In the early days, my pocket money went on the covers. Chris Foss was renowned for not really having read the books he illustrated^[3] – he admitted to it in his collection, Hardware^[4]; he also pointed out, probably correctly, that the covers sold the books. Hardware's interior title page contains a photograph of a shelf of books with Chris' covers. It pretty much coincides with my early book collection: the rest of the Lensman series, James Blish, Perry Rhodan (the first ten, anyhow), more Asimov, A. E. Van Vogt, Ben Bova's set of Novella collections.

Quite a few of those, I'll admit, were unreadable (especially the Perry Rhodan, although I remember Perry Rhodan 4 as being pretty good), even for an undiscerning twelve-year-old. The best thing they had going for them was their cover artist. But it was possible to supplement one's reading diet with genuine quality: the local library had plenty of excellent science fiction – Dick, Delaney, Silverberg, Herbert, Sheckley, Pohl (and his collaborators) – identified, in amongst the general fare (for there was no science fiction section, as such), by the bright yellow Gollancz covers, shining like beacons from the packed shelves. That habit – buying promiscuously, then learning to sort the good from the bad by actually reading the things – never left me.

A year or so after Fairbourne, I found myself in a bookshop in York with money in my pocket and time to kill. I spent my lunch money on three paperbacks – The Forever War, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Clans of the Alphane Moon – and went hungry. That day, I got lucky: two of those books are now considered masterpieces, and the third is at least interesting. I tell the full story elsewhere; the short version is that my sense of discernment began to improve. I started paying attention to awards, to authors, to the names on the spines as well as the covers.

All of which is a very roundabout way of describing the start of my journey. I've been meaning to write about these books for years. A few summers ago I spent a couple of very relaxing weeks, on a beach in Cape Cod, reading, firstly, Jo Walton's excellent set of essays about SF classics (or mostly classics, the rest being just stuff she liked, which still counts, I think): What Makes This Book So Great?. Then I read Adam Roberts' equally good volumes of reviews, Sibilant Fricative and Rave and Let Die. Much of the material in those books came from the respective authors' blogs. The immediate instinct, reading them on the Internet, is to pile into the comments page, perhaps add something I thought was missed, maybe disagree with something else or just slap the author on the back and say well done. But these are real paper books and it doesn't exactly work like that (OK, I could just write fan mail, but who does that nowadays?).

And I found I liked this genre – a review, not of something new but of a book perhaps long cherished and recently revisited, hopefully with the perspective of hard-won wisdom and in the context of hindsight. These are rereadings, not capsule reviews or buyer's guides; they are as long as they need to be, and that is intentional.

So I thought I'd join in. My original intention was to just go through the Gollancz SF (and Fantasy) Masterworks imprints, in order. But there's a wider world out there – that would be to exclude too much recent stuff and also be rather too much in thrall to the question of whether Gollancz has managed to secure the publishing rights in order to declare a book a classic. So the plan, such as it is: go through the Masterworks series, using them as the main road, but also take detours to new books, recent books, and books which should be on the main road but aren't. The Masterworks list is a useful spine, not holy writ. Three of the SF Masterworks to start (the series begins, happily, with The Forever War, that same book I bought those many years ago in York) and two other more recent books. I intend to add a couple more a month; it'll encourage me to read (although, to be honest, James Blish did his best to stop me).

And, along with the reviews and reminiscences about the books, you'll find some material on the cover art as well. Because I still appreciate the covers, even though grown-up me has learned to look slightly beyond them when buying a book. I expect disagreement – these are books people care about – but I assume close reading on both sides.

All of which leaves the question of why now – why, after years of meaning to do this, I'm finally doing it.

The honest answer is my job. I spend my days building systems that hunt for patterns suggesting fraud or money laundering or worse. Increasingly, those systems involve AI – not the chrome-plated robots of Chris Foss's covers, but something stranger and in some ways more unsettling: pattern-matching engines that can, occasionally, seem to think. I find myself having conversations about the future as a professional obligation. What will these systems be capable of in two years? Five? Ten?

Churchill once described the Balkans as a "net exporter of history" – a place that generated more consequential events than it could reasonably contain. My mind has become, I think, a net exporter of extrapolation. The habit of thinking about futures – some magical, some terrifying, most somewhere awkwardly in between – has become constant. And I've realised that science fiction trained me for this. Not to predict, exactly, but to hold multiple futures simultaneously, to take seriously both the utopian and the catastrophic without collapsing into either.

So I'm going back to the sources. Not for nostalgia, though there'll be plenty of that. But because these books – the ones I bought for their covers and the ones I found by accident and the ones I've discovered since – taught me how to think about what comes next. It seems only fair to acknowledge the debt.

And yes, I still appreciate the covers.