The Aleutian Trilogy

Right from her debut as an adult novelist with Divine Endurance (she has an equally long and successful career as a children's writer), Gwyneth Jones has been a writer to watch. Her plots are complex and politically charged, you need to have your brain in gear when you're reading her work, yet her writing is vivid and engaging. Though Divine Endurance is probably her most popular work, it is the Aleutian Trilogy, White Queen (winner of the James Tiptree Award), North Wind and Phoenix Cafe that is her most arresting. It is an alien invasion story, but what is most interesting is not the invasion itself but what happens afterwards. When Earth is colonised by the Aleutians, we are presented with all the problems associated with that. There are linguistic differences which make it difficult for coloniser and colonised to understand each other; there are problems with the fact that the Aleutians have a sort of immortality; and above all there is the new sense of inferiority that leads many humans to have themselves surgically altered so they look more like the aliens. Why it's on the list: Colonialism has been a theme of science fiction at least since the work of H.G. Wells, but no-one has spelled out exactly what it means to be colonised the way that Gwyneth Jones does here.