Or this about the prospect of women in space:

Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction…

Published in 1973, Rendezvous With Rama is undoubtedly one of Clarke's better books. It opens with a meteorite hitting the north of Italy, totally annihilating Venice and the surrounding countryside. In the wake of the disaster, the united people of Earth start up an organisation with the pithy name of Space Guard. Their mission: to protect the earth from wayward asteroids and meteorites. Commander Norton and the crew of the Endeavour are out on a mission when an object is detected heading towards the inner solar system. With no one else out in their part of space, it's up to Norton to intercept and destroy the object. But then it turns out to be a huge, slowly rotating cylinder - an alien space craft kilometers long. The next logical step is go inside and explore.

Rendezvous With Rama is an adventure in the grand tradition and Clarke's detail is staggering. The interior of Rama, the name given to the alien visitor, is vividly realised and, despite the occasional lapse into boys own adventure, remains tightly focused on the task at hand. Clarke's background in physics and chemistry (he's an old boy of Kings College, London) is put to impressive use. It's as if Clarke uses the old tailor's maxim: never mind the quality, feel the width. The author manages to create an entirely convincing alien ecosystem with unique numerical and architectural features thrown in for good measure. You do indeed forget the quality - it's the wide-screen adventure that engulfs the reader.

Reading Clarke is a guilty pleasure. It's not the greatest book ever written - in parts it's a perfect example of just what is wrong with so much so-called "classic sci-fi" - but when you put the book down you feel as though you've been somewhere. And that in itself is no small achievement.

By the late 1960s the utopian idealism that typified so much science fiction had become untenable in the face of the escalating cold war and the emergent 'counter-culture'. Ballard, along with authors like Christopher Priest and Michael Moorecock in the UK and Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny in the US, had created what was called 'The New Wave' of sci-fi. Clarke and Asimov's starships were in flames: the genre returned to an Earth overwhelmed by the arms race, overpopulation and pollution - the touchstones of the counterculture. The New Wave also proposed what was then a radical stance: everyday life is science fiction, not some speculative future.

Ballard's Crash is probably the best examples of the New Wave; the desire to invest fiction with some of the radical departures that other art forms had achieved. But as a consequence some of its pre-occupations have dated: S&M is now the stuff of mainstream Hollywood. The positing of everyday life as the arena for sci-fi is now a standard genre device and the approaching apocalypse in the form of the family car has been consigned to the same bargain bin as Ralph Nader's Unsafe At Any Speed. The recent movie version of Crash is no better proof that, despite the radicalism of the book in the early 1970s, certain aspects have not survived the test of time. On the other hand, it's Crash's very radicality that marks it out as one of the true classics of 20th century fiction, not just as science fiction.

The literary proscenium is immediately demolished by Ballard's main character: James G. Ballard. Writing in the first person Ballard, character and author, takes centre stage as the novel's main protagonist. Driving home from his job as the director of an ad shoot, Ballard narrowly survives a car accident. Convalescing in a hospital near Heathrow Airport, Ballard meets Vaughn, his guide into a nether-world of perverse auto-eroticism. Vaughn is obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and plans the ultimate orgasmic/death scenario - a car crash where both will die. In the meantime, Ballard is introduced to a society populated with the survivors of car accidents who recognise the implicit sexual charge of the near death experience. The faster and the more violent the accident, the bigger the thrill. A gash on a leg caused by the incision of metal into flesh is nothing more than an alternative point of entry for the sexually liberated.

Ballard's novel is also one to be read with a box of Panadol Forte to hand - it has a headache inducing intensity that has been rarely matched. The author cleverly combines pornography, violence and the fetishisation of car culture to create a portrait of an entirely convincing alternative reality. His prose is lean to the point of banality, but so charged with sexual/violent frisson that, once read, is almost impossible to forget. There is nothing like it in subsequent sci-fi - indeed, in fiction at large. The closest thing this reviewer has ever read that compares to the overwhelming intensity of Crash is Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. A book to be approached with caution.

During the late 1970s and the 1980s science fiction had to deal with two major problems.

The first was that the radical re-evaluation of modernism that brought about the New Wave had created a no-win situation for sci-fi. It was stuck in a rut. With the aesthetics of post-modernism in the ascendancy and culture at large starting to take on the appearance of science fiction, the normal genre mechanics of print science fiction, (space craft, f-t-l travel, genetics, a cashless society, etc) began to look incredibly tired.

The second problem was Star Wars. George Lucas's 1977 film firmly placed science fiction at the centre of Hollywood's money making machine. Publishing, which is after all another money making enterprise, followed suit. Bookshelves were groaning under the weight of endless, multi-volume series that rehashed sub-Arthurian legend for a decent profit.