Join me, on a voyage of discovery. You don’t need a sailing ship or a spaceship. Just a willingness to sit down and have a good read.

I’ll be talking about my favourite books in sci-fi and I hope to inspire you to discover new worlds.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the world of science fiction. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because of the time I was born dash three years before the first st manned moon landing. Maybe it’s because even after the landings ended spaceflight continued. I can remember Apollo and Soyuz capsules joining up so that American and Russian astronauts could meet up in orbit.

My first memories of science fiction came from TV series. Star Trek in its original form, Blake 7. Douglas Adams’ hilarious Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, on TV and radio, vied for my attention with recreations of classic tales like HG Wells’ War Of The Worlds. And before long I discovered films like 2001 A Space Odyssey, a film journey into the near future.

In those days I rarely thought about science fiction in book form.  But once I did, I pushed myself to read more. And the result has been a voyage of imaginative discovery.

Classics like Dune by Frank Herbert had passed me by, at least in their original written form. But when I finished the first Dune book, I found myself hooked on that world. Frank Herbert is just one of dozens of fantastic writers in the science fiction genre I’ve discovered.

And I’ve come to realise that the best writers in this genre come from across the globe. For too long the success of American writers like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, hid the fact. Or maybe my white, British upbringing blinded me to it. (In fairness to us white blokes, finding any books about Africa written by Africans has until recently been like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack).

Now, the success of Chinese writer Cixin Liu, whose Three Body Problem books have been turned into a Netflix series, has shone a small light on stories little known outside the author’s homeland. I’ve been blown away by sci-fi stories from Tade Thompson, a London born writer whose Nigerian roots give them a distinctive flavour.  So much so that I seek out his short stories on those of other African sci-fi authors. Their perspective on the world, it’s politics and it’s unpredictable future is very different from that of traditional English an American sci-fi writers.

Having said that, I have found the modern works by the likes of Americans Becky Chambers, Pierce Brown and Adrian Tchaikovsky among others, a refreshing update on the fictional Science fiction universe.