Nightwalk – Bob Shaw, 1967 ★½

Crossing the Genre Streams

Science fiction stories fall into two broad camps: fantastic adventures and conceptual thinkpieces. What happens when someone brings them together by writing a captured-spy escape adventure that incorporates abstract theories about human vision and infinity?

Give Bob Shaw credit for never taking the easy way. Nightwalk may not be engaging or convincing, but the author’s ambition to blend the categories of rugged adventure and quantum physics is something to behold.

Never mind its jerky pace, strained narrative, thin setting, and dull characters; you do go on a ride.

Who Goes Here? – Bob Shaw, 1977 ★★★★

Dying for Shrimp Sauce in the 24th Century

Science fiction and comedy are not genres I associate with each other unless it’s Douglas Adams or another Robot Chicken Star Wars parody. Give it up for someone who did it earlier, and did it well.

His name was Bob Shaw.

Imagine a future where young men are sent off to distant planets to fight man-eating trees in the cause of selling shrimp sauce, signing away their life so that they (and the law) can forget a past crime via a patented process called an engram erasure.