The History of Science Fiction, by Adam Roberts (Palgrave, £15.99)
According to Margaret Atwood, science fiction is a pulp genre about "intelligent squids in space". Which is strange because, as Adam Roberts says, her best three novels are part of the SF genre. Oryx and Crake (2003) is "an unembarrassed entry into a dazzlingly realised dystopian imaginary world", he writes. As a professor of 19th-century literature as well as a prolific science fiction writer, Roberts is eminently qualified to write a history of the genre. This impressive tome is ambitious in its scope, tracing SF's origins back to the fantastic voyages of the ancient Greek novel - the original Vernean voyages extraordinaires. He identifies four types of SF narrative: voyages through space; time travel; techno fiction; and accounts of Utopia. In all of these, SF "embodies a genuine and radical Will to Otherness, a fascination with the outer reaches of imaginative possibility". One particularly striking claim is that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for his science fictional speculations, namely that the universe contained innumerable worlds. Science fiction, it seems, has its first martyr.
PD Smith
When Computers Were Human, by David Alan Grier (Princeton, £11.95)
When GB Shaw wanted a character who personified the challenges faced by young women, he made her a mathematician. In Mrs Warren's Profession (1894), Vivian Warren is a human computer. A graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, she prepares "calculations for engineers, electricians, insurance companies, and so on". In the days before even science fiction had imagined desktop PCs, scientific computers were the people who produced the calculations for research. Although not all were women, in Shaw's day many were indeed graduates of the new women's colleges. During the second world war, a "kilogirl" was a thousand hours of computation. An 18th-century computer said the work required "persevering industry and attention, which are not ... the qualifications a mathematician is most anxious to be thought to possess". Grier charts the contribution of computers from the 17th century until the arrival of the electronic computer in the cold war. Inspired by a conversation in which his grandmother revealed she had studied calculus at university in the 1920s, his meticulously researched history rescues these forgotten heroes of science from undeserved obscurity.
PDS
Diary of an On-Call Girl: True Stories from the Front Line, by WPC EE Bloggs (Monday Books, £7.99)
In Diary of an On-Call Girl, "WPC EE Bloggs" documents her daily dealings with sarky sarges, missing panda cars and wayward MOPS (members of the public). Think Belle de Jour meets The Bill. Monday Books specialises in straight-talking first-hand dispatches from the frontlines of various professions: other books, for example, deal with the daily lives of teachers, rugby players and nightclub managers. The imagined audience for this one seems to be schoolgirls who want to be the new Juliet Bravo and existing police officers who want to see their profession reflected in print. In effect, the book is one long raised eyebrow towards the mundane madness that police officers confront in their jobs. And for WPC Bloggs, the real criminal is a system that sanity seems to have left behind in its obsession with due process, competitive detections and red tape. While the ridiculing of anti-racist procedures may grate in the wake of the Menezes shooting, and the book's tone may quickly prove tiring, the lampooning of the waste and inanity of the audit culture will ring only too true for many in the public sector.
Jo Littler
White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, by Dominic Sandbrook (Abacus, £12.99)
This is the second in Dominic Sandbrook's history of postwar Britain. The first, Never Had it So Good, covered the period from 1956 to 1963, from Suez to the Beatles. White Heat deals with 1964-1970 and is framed by the rise and fall of Harold Wilson's government. The book is epic in scale - weighing in at just short of 1,000 pages - yet at the same time it is unusually crisp and accessible. This, together with the inevitable white male Oxbridge don credentials (why is mass-market British history publishing still so very anachronistic in this respect?), all adds up to a popular bestseller. And White Heat is indeed a pleasure to read: Sandbrook is a born storyteller with a sharp eye for a telling anecdote, whether about drunken politicians fighting or suburban attitudes to sex. Divided into thematic chapters, it saunters through the key scenes of the period, from easy living to Op Art to the World Cup. The 60s is the time when Britain was supposed to be truly swinging, yet Sandbrook argues that it was marked by more conservatism and conformity than we like to remember.
JL
The Dead Beat: The Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, by Marilyn Johnson (Souvenir Press, £9.99)
It's a peculiar moment when an eccentric occupation in which you've quietly, regularly participated is not only noticed, but appreciated. Marilyn Johnson wrote obituaries and knows not only the unwritten rules but how to subvert them (keep a cracker of a fact to sustain the ultimate "lifeboat" paragraph listing the deceased's survivors). She's also a fan of the form, especially the American folk art that is the Ordinary Joe or egalitarian eulogy - oral history in print, the short but complex annals of those not otherwise due a formal memorial in prose. Although she's conflicted about the extension of the vernacular style into the New York Times's 9/11 Portraits of Grief, vignettes of the victims from which all orneriness had been chamfered. She reads Ecclesiastes, attends dead beat conventions and is starstruck interviewing senior ranks from papers in London, "the obituaries capital", including that nice chap from the Guardian who tells the story of the death of a literary titan whose obit wasn't lying ready-prepared in the morgue. She's so awed and he so cool that there must be obituarist action figures available soon. With pen.
Vera Rule