During Robert Silverberg's well-known peak period from 1967 to 1976, he put his own spin on various familiar SF tropes, from psychic powers to robots. One that he returned to frequently was time travel, and Hawksbill Station is an important example. In this short novel, expanded from a successful novella, time displacement is redeployed as a punishment. For anti-government rebels condemned to live in the Cambrian period, life is a hard, constant struggle to stay sane in a time period hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved.

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20 years ago, Alfonso Cuaron's film Children of Men was released to some acclaim. Today, its depiction of a decaying, paranoid UK is often described as chillingly prescient. Less discussed is the central concept - of a sterile world, a world without children being born. The film was loosely based on P.D. James' 1992 novel, which itself has been described as "derivative" of Greybeard - a 1964 novel by British SF legend Brian Aldiss.

This episode takes a close look at Greybeard, which was written as means for Aldiss to process a difficult time in his personal life and which is a powerfully effective entry in the tradition of the British catastrophe novel.

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This episode returns to the work of Michael Moorcock, and to one of his many trilogies - the playful, baroque books that make up The Dancers at the End of Time. Strongly influenced by the writing and art of the 1890s, these are tales of superpowered, decadent immortals living at the end of everything.

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