Jon Salway

Shipwreck by Charles Logan makes The Martian look like a first draft. It won the Gollancz SF Award and was published in 1975.  My copy is from '77 and I think I must have bought it then. It has haunted my imagination ever since. I don't know why it isn't better known. Possibly because it is such a downbeat story. It's about courage and loneliness and the human needs for connection more than anything else. But it's not all introspection as you'd imagine from my description. The detail of how the protagonist struggles to survive on a genuinely alien planet gives it solid old school hard science fiction foundations. You believe every word. But it takes you on a journey that both you and the protagonist can see coming and the ending is so simply and movingly done. In a review Edmund Cooper called it 'haunting' and it is. One curiosity, the author Charles Logan, never wrote anything else (at least he never tried to get anything else published) and he carried on his career as a mental health nurse after the book was published. I feel that if he'd had only a couple more novels of this caliber out in print, he would be a well known and celebrated author to be found in all of the reviews of sci fi literature. Read it if you can find it.

Bloody marvellous. That's all you need to know.