RADICAL science fiction and fantasy flourished in the 1980s, a decade of economic insecurity, aggressive foreign policies and cant about “the enemy within.”

It was a period when Michael Moorcock’s Mother London drew on mythic and supernatural elements to reimagine the capital’s working-class history and reassert the values of collectivism and mutual aid, while Iain Banks’s The Bridge was a multifaceted, prophetic broadside against the self-serving philosophies of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.

In his SF collection Slow Birds, Ian Watson mapped the insecurities of the era through tales of ecological disaster, psychological control and impending nuclear annihilation. And there were powerful and idiosyncratic novels from dissident perspectives by Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus), M John Harrison (the Viriconium books) and Iain Sinclair (Downriver).