the walls of their City, Dex crosses paths with Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot on a quest to find “what humans need.” Humankind, after all, is no longer reliant on robotic labor: Two centuries before, robots developed consciousness and left their factories for the forest (Chambers 6). The journey that follows is not only a meeting of human and synthetic minds, but a “rewilding” of human purpose for Dex, which drives them toward the text’s central invocation: to “find the strength to do both” (Chambers 10).

Chambers’s rich descriptions of comfortable objects—hot food, crisp sheets, a calming cup of tea—reinforce the novella’s frequent categorization as a “cozy” text (Harris 2025). Yet this emphasis on comfort adds to the eremitic rigor of the book by illustrating Dex’s devotion to Allalae, the God of Small Comforts, and is embedded in Dex’s function as “three parts therapist, one part confessor, and two parts bartender” (Ladd 2021). Criticism has inadequately considered the text’s urgency around negotiating human purpose as part of Dex’s monastic role. Instead, it attempts to historicize the text’s discussion of the relationship between technologized human comfort and the harsh realities of the wilderness within an industrial context that can feel anachronistic to monastic work (Arianne 2025). Yet by staging a conversation between a robot and a human with a vested interest in committed purpose, Chambers offers fruitful speculations on the relationship between function and purpose.

The companions’ dialogue revises human flourishing as a rewilding process, led by a commitment to fluidities between technology and nature. This rewilding is reconstitutive, suggesting reconciliations between humans, our technology, and the natural world through messy, sometimes injurious balance. Critically, this process is modelled through programmed and nonhuman actors, whose nonhuman priorities are also centered. In this discussion I will first consider Dex’s “rewilding” as an ecosystemic process resulting from engagement with the external world, rather than monastic contemplation. Mosscap’s role in this rewilding will then be considered as a model of neither a nostalgic and impractical virtue ethics nor a rationalist optimization but a more ecosystemic, and perhaps more plausible, way of being. 

In Ways of Being (2022), James Bridle describes intelligence—broadly defined here as the ability of a creature to take in information, process it, and apply it to behaviors or perceptions—as one of many “ways of being”: “it is an interface to [the material world]; it makes the world manifest” (Bridle 52). He furthermore suggests that “all intelligence is ecological,” only knowable from some sort of inter- or intra-action (Bridle 57). Bridle asks:

What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean—to us and for us—to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earth which our technology has sundered, and sundered us from? (Bridle 11)

Bridle’s discussion of these alternative ways of being, from mycelia to moss, emphasizes the possible misapplication of anthropocentric characteristics in our relationship to technology. It is worthwhile to integrate ecological methods into analyses of literary portrayals of alternative ways of being, not least because the collision between extrapolative futures and the somewhat less optimistic present can help us decipher how we might respond to what is coming before it gets here. After all, SF has its characteristic prescience; consider the depiction of rocket-propelled space travel in Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World (1657). A Psalm for the Wild-Built exists in dialogue with a longer tradition of “rewilding” through admission of technology into ecologies in SF. 

The positioning of technology as a route to rewilding is not specific to solarpunk, nor did it originate with the genre. Solarpunk is almost hallucinogenic in its optimism, although it has in some cases started to become more realistic. There is an infectious quality, and perhaps an unsettling idealism, in a genre that allows the reader to imagine a world in which we need not place our bets on coal or plutonium but instead on the clean comfort of sunlight. Yet similar, less idealized technological mediators and models can be found in the ecosystemically-minded generation ship of Kim Stanley Robinson’s famously pessimistic Aurora (2015), or even in the tenuously symbiotic relationship between Le Guin’s technologized Cities and Archives of Wakwaha in Always Coming Home (1985). Mosscap’s modeling of an alternative way of being is characteristic of these ecological thinkers, especially in the robot’s emphasis on decay, disposal, and disassembly. Yet A Psalm for the Wild-Built does represent the central impulse of solarpunk, which Konstantinou describes as a more imperative “ought” rather than a “could be.” This reflects an increased attention to SF’s particular responsibility in its interlocutory relationship with tech, as described by Yeliz Figen Döker and Zoya Yasmine in the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence last year. Mosscap dramatises a rewilded disposition toward nature for Dex and for the reader, but it also emphasizes the importance of this rewilding for future productive and responsible engagements between people, our tech, and the natural world. By reading these texts together, we can consider what we might learn from our own technologies, in developing our own ways of being in our ecosystem.

Dex’s travel is initially reminiscent of an offline millennial van-lifer setting off in a vintage campervan to find the coastal eddies of Point Reyes, but their quest for meaning immediately implicates the external world, not just the internal, through its environmental implications around balance and fluidity:

Oh, there were plenty of bugs–butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. (Chambers 6)

Dex’s emphasis on “ancestors” identifies their dissatisfaction as a historical issue, with adaptation to the orderly structure of the City, itself a “healthy place, a thriving place” accompanied by the disappearance of singing in its resident creatures (Chambers 6). A straightforward reading of these “happy little synanthropes” suggests a subtly sinister dimension to the City, in spite of the apparent health of its ecosystem. Yet the tension of this moment lies in the siloing “border walls”—reminiscent of Le Guin’s Wall of Anarres in The Dispossessed—upon whose conservationist function the continued function of the City and the “chaotic fields” are predicated. 

This tension is underscored by Dex’s choice of the term “synanthropes,” which emphasizes the balance between closeness and otherness: While the butterflies, spiders, and beetles are neighbors, they are not kin. The echoing call of this chirping, singing wilderness foregrounds the contrasting eerie silence of the City’s bugs. The emphasis on song in this moment evokes an oral tradition in the natural world and in doing so rewilds personal and historical expression from human actors into the broader ecosystem. The text, and ecological thinkers like Bridle, do not suggest that through this rewilding humans are discovered to be fundamentally less complex than we believe, but that our environment is capable of greater complexity than we anticipate.

The development Dex undergoes in the “chaotic fields” and the dense forest beyond is initially unsatisfying; the text ends on a wobble. Dex is unable to resolve the felt necessity of their calling with the sinking feeling that their work is unsatisfying, and ultimately decides to put aside their work in order to continue accompanying Mosscap on its quest. Readings of Dex’s surprising nonanswer to the question of human purpose have varied from an optimistic nihilism in the face of purposelessness to an alternative resolution to the works/faith line. Yet the text’s refusal is its resolution; after a harrowing journey through the wilderness, a sudden revelation of very human purpose would undercut Dex’s reassimilation into the often incomprehensible ecosystem they are now a part of. Much of the text emphasizes the distinction between healthy environments that are navigable by humans (as in the City with its “happy little synanthropes”) and the total wilderness: “[a cave] was craggy and dark, uncomfortably angled. A stagnant smell emanated from nowhere in particular… A fragile rib cage of something extremely dead lay without ceremony on the floor, a few tufts of limp fur scattered around, unwanted by whatever had crunched the bones clean” (Chambers 117). 

This emphasis on discomfort in Dex’s wilderness, which is “uncomfortably angled” and “without ceremony,” unsettles the almost excessive emphasis on comfort, ritual, and definition that pervades the novella. The text suggests that it is important, even in a utopian future where we have become reconciled to our environment, for there to be an unsettling “nowhere in particular” in which bad smells, “fragile rib cage[s]” of dead creatures, and things that “crunch bones clean” live without human structure or observation. This nonanswer becomes an ecological resolution: that it is not in nature for us to find clear and defined purpose, and that the desperate human desire for this definition is anomalous, rather than the norm. As Gautam Bhatia’s Strange Horizons review of the novel observed, the text is ateleological as part of its ecological commitments. For Dex to remain uncertain about their purpose, yet to continue onward, enacts the text’s central invocation to “find the strength to do both.” Dex is still a participant in an ecosystem, but their role shifts: from purpose-built to wild-built, from ends to means. 

This shift in Dex’s identity is catalyzed by an assertion made by Mosscap. Embedded in a love for, and wonder at, the environment more broadly, and a joy at their participation in it, Mosscap’s assessment of Dex’s dilemma returns Dex to the ecosystem without reducing their complexity. Mosscap says:

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it… You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do. (Chambers, pp. 138-9)

Mosscap’s argument locates both Dex and itself squarely alongside the rest of their ecosystem, and, more subtly, it asserts Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” Mosscap’s assertion that Dex is only an animal is not a denial of the particularities of humanity so much as it is an invitation for humans to recognize their existing participation in a larger system. Dex’s failure to reach a clear definition of purpose¹ constitutes a rewilding, facilitated by Mosscap’s intervention as an equally authoritative interlocutor within the same ecosystem. By asserting that “it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it,” Mosscap reframes Dex’s purposelessness into a subtle call to action—or, perhaps, a call to attention: to “marvel.” The claim that marveling is a necessary ecological function recalls Bridle’s framing of the purpose of intelligence as one ecological interface amongst many. In an echo of early American naturalist thinkers,² Chambers asserts that to marvel is a necessary part of human flourishing, a mandatory part of responsible human participation in our environment. To be a responsible ecological citizen, Dex must recognize that as an animal, they have “no purpose.” Dex’s shift across the course of the text is a reversion from a purpose-led synanthrope to a more expressive, attentive partaker in their ecosystem, following in Mosscap’s footsteps.

The success of Dex’s realization depends on Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” By putting substantial definitional power in the hands of a robot, Chambers confirms that the “wild-built” robots of the text are not only members of, but advocates for, the natural world.

Much of Mosscap’s ecological authority rests on its status as a “construct.” The monastic scholar whose reflective introduction contextualizes the novella asserts that robots were originally made as “constructs that could build other constructs” (Chambers 1). The term “construct” evokes a synthetic, potentially artificial quality, particularly when it comes to questions of reproduction or species continuance, maintaining in its periphery the possibility of deconstruction or even spontaneous collapse. Chambers emphasizes the anomalous, fragile, and potentially transitional nature of constructs: “we struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around” (Chambers 110). Mosscap and its robot kin could theoretically live forever if they maintained themselves indefinitely, but robots in the novella refuse the potentially empowering permanence and adaptability of immortality. Instead, robots in A Psalm for the Wild-Built reproduce by scavenging the functional parts of their deceased kin. Once no more robots function, the species will come to an end, having run the natural course of its component parts. 

Constructs must be reconstructed, recycled, and repurposed. By developing these new and yet more conventionally natural forms of reproduction, the robots imagine an effective way of participating in an ecosystem which is inspired by the time-limitedness and inevitable decomposition of its other members. Mosscap asserts that by remaining immortal, rather than recycling, the robots would be “behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sought to understand” (Chambers 94). These recycling practices position the robots as not just responsible actors within their ecosystem, but also as its historians, echoing Donna Haraway’s assertion that “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (Haraway 103). 

Robotic history in A Psalm for the Wild-Built is not transmitted through oral storytelling, nor through formal robot history texts, but through the passing-on of “remnants.” Describing remnants, Mosscap says: “I have a remnant of chairs, but I have never sat in one” (Chambers 56). Remnants lie between instinct and memory, and are transmitted through robotic component parts. In a human analogy, Chambers’s remnants are almost epigenetic. The function of remnants, to borrow a metaphor appropriate to Dex’s monastic calling, resembles the inborn architecture of the soul in Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle: structural, with all the local nuances of a city, and, likewise, traversable and signposted. Remnants carry trauma from the Factory Age, and guide the development of a robot culture despite the dispersion and solitude of Chambers’s robots, who spend most of their time alone in nature. The book itself also mimics this dynamic memory, as the natural world intervenes on the page with the inclusion of naturalistic fleurons of maple leaves at the beginning of every chapter. This symbolic infiltration of the processed paper of the book by its material precursor enacts what Connor Louiselle calls the “positive reinforcement of solarpunk” through aesthetic reminders of the natural world (Louiselle, Almanac for the Anthropocene). 

Mosscap models this alternative way of being in an ecosystem for Dex by maintaining its inherent remnants alongside the embedded newness of its capacity for wonder and curiosity. This emphasis on both present being and cultural memory reframes construction as a creative, generative activity rather than an industrial one. Compare the craftsmanship of Mosscap’s with the manufacturing origin of its original central compartment, which is stamped with “643-143, Property of Wescon Textiles, Inc,” a name whose numerics evokes any number of dehumanizing historical precedents (Chambers 93). In contrast, Mosscap’s insistence on the ecosystemic embeddedness of robots models a creative, reconstitutive way of being in the world. Rather than being constructed, the “wild-built” robots are described as “composed,” like music, with the regular rhythm of consciousness accompanied by a melodic emergent cultural memory (Chambers 93). Like the crickets Dex leaves the city for, Mosscap’s existence sings. 

Resisting the temptation towards anthropomorphizing, Chambers’s depiction of Mosscap remains resolutely nonhuman.³ Mosscap insists on being called “it,” while emphasizing the dignity of an object operating outside of recognizably human behavioral norms: “We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its… We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value” (Chambers 69). Mosscap’s is not a call for objectification, for treating humans in the same way we currently treat objects. Rather, it’s a call to recognize different ways of being in an ecosystem by nonhuman actors, a recognition that does not detract from participation already realized by human ones. Dex’s rewilding results from a recognition that humans are made up of separable and often fluid component parts, built without purpose or calling, embedded in an ecosystem of which we are not always fully cognizant but must always try to be mindful. We must continue anyway, and we must continue to marvel.

From the vantage point of 2026, this novella already feels, in some ways, like a relic, with its optimism about the potential of technology to do more than steal our data, hallucinate our work for us, and provide positive reinforcement where gentle criticism from a human might do a better job. Russell and Norvig’s seminal text on the development of deep learning gestures at the Bayesian networks they anticipated in advanced AI models. The suggestion that machines will operate on Bayesian decision-making principles neither suggests any encouraging similarity to the unpredictable texture of human decision-making nor offers an alternative model for true robot consciousness. It certainly does not do much to reassure the reader of much opportunity for kinship with our future robot neighbors. 

Yet, as Bridle observes, “We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us” (Bridle 18). SF imagines alternative ways for us to coexist with these tools, and in turn posits alternative ways in which we may ourselves be better “technology.” To recognize our own constructedness in a way that extends beyond the social world into the natural one is to challenge our specialness within the ecosystem, and to perhaps have a shot at a more collaborative relationship with our environment. We clearly have remnants of cricket song. Perhaps the recognition that it is our duty as a species to listen to it might tug the reader to the wilderness, where we could unpack our constructs from a satchel and watch them flourish.

Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either. (Chambers 135)

Footnotes

1.  Perhaps best framed in religious terms, in conversation with Frank Herbert’s Litany against Fear or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed tenets.
2.  Consider Thoreau’s essay “Walking.”
3.  Much can be said about the reassurance found in treating machines that appear to think like people, and about the lengths we will go to in order to make these objects familiar to us. Consider the Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer, the CM-5, which had to use extra computational power in order to maintain the flashing red lights that made it appear to be “thinking” (Thiel, 1994).

Works cited and consulted:

Arianne. “A Psalm for the Wild Built: Analysis & Reflections,” Letters from Ari, Substack, 21 June, 2025. 

Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, Vintage Books, 1997.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Function, 2022.

Haraway, Donna. ‘4. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’, Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

Harris, James. ‘A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT and A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY by Becky Chambers’, Classics of Science Fiction, 18 November 2025.

Hendlin, Yogi Hale. ‘Compost modernity!’, Aeon, 10 February 2026.

Ladd, Christina ‘A Psalm for the Wild-Built Review: Find the Strength to Do Both’, Geeklyinc, 14 July 2021.

Konstantinou, Lee. ‘Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction’, Slate, 15 Jan 2019.

Magnasson, Andri Snær. Love Star, 2002; translated 2012 by Victoria Cribb

Russell, Stuart and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, 1995.

Scott, Spencer. ‘Solarpunk: Refuturing our Imagination for an Ecological Transformation’, One Earth, October 5 2025.

Thiel, Tamiko, “Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2: Design Legacy,” 1994 (Digitized).

Wagner, Phoebe and Brontë Christopher Wieland (eds.), Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures, West Virginia University Press, 2022.

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien's most popular work blended the pioneering techniques of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), which combined identifying cultural systems within given societies, with their own youthful interests in princesses, knights, and dragons. Their use of aesthetics as decoration informed the actions of their characters in a way reminiscent of a case study. Authors working within fantasy still justify using antiquated anthropological techniques through the prestige of Lewis and Tolkien, who were both academics in related fields while such techniques went without criticism. Even their immediate inheritors moved beyond their methods: Diana Wynne Jones prodded gentle holes in the edifice of her mentor, Tolkien; Pratchett, though a reverent adherent, turned fantasy tropes into jokes. But the temptation to reduce fantasy to a genre within which a world can be built through climate, language, religion, and government remains strong, and nurtured in a genre designed to entertain its audience by alienating it.

Likewise, princesses, knights, and dragons persist as familiar touchstone in a genre formed at a time when the public’s relationship to monarchy and mythology was upended by industrialization, colonialism, and democracy, and fantasy’s subsequent use as a tool for nostalgia or deconstruction depends on the user. Tolkien and Lewis grew up with adventure stories about goblins kidnapping princesses which, though aimed at children, were pared down versions of the avant-garde art of the era. Popular artists from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, for example, drew from myths and legends to create a body of dreamy, pseudo-medieval imagery. And The Lord of the Rings (1955) itself began as a pared-down version of Wagner’s Des Nibelung, or Ring Cycle (1876). In Wagner’s magnum opus a gnome steals gold from the Rhine to form a magical ring that helps him conquer the nation of dwarves. When he is separated from the ring, he curses it to inflict unending suffering until it is returned to him. The Hobbit (1937) began as a bedtime story for Tolkien’s son, Christopher, with a plot similar to the third opera in Wagner’s series, Siegfried, except for one important distinction: The hero is not the wyrm slayer but a dithering little pacifist.

While Tolkien and Lewis were both educated in the final throes of the British Empirical directive for the social sciences, designed to generate managerial reports of colonial outposts, their generation were already in the process of deconstructing their labor by the time World War One ended. Thus, the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis are a blend of techniques that define their characters by their individual temperaments as well as the physical attributes associated with their kin and race. Criticism has fallen on Tolkien’s depiction of the dwarves as a clear Semitic caricature, the orcs with highly racialized features, and the very existence of a whole group known only as “Easterlings,” but the story’s heroes are also racialized. Hobbit society has no need for shoes; dwarves mine because they are short. Elves are creatures in between mortality and divinity. While Lewis did not implement the same fantasy race system as Tolkien because Narnia had no intellectual debt to Norse mythology and the levels of the Yggdrasil, his books were populated by a more dreamlike world of symbolic magic and British Catholicism.

In the anthropological school that itself was emerging during the time at which Lewis and Tolkien both wrote, structural functionalism was building flexibility into the study of people by describing cultural formations as taking a utilitarian role. Durkheim called these identifiable features in a cultural landscape a “social fact … capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint.” They are a synthesis of factors that are part of everyday life, and therefore have coercive power. As an example, Durkheim studied suicide and found that sufferers lapsed into a few related categories of thinking that made life feel unviable. These seemed paradoxical on the surface, such as suicide taking place during periods of strong economic growth as well as with collapse, but the underlying causes were as related to a person’s environment as their ability to address their circumstances. The noteworthy feature was the cultural significance of suicide: Durkheim noted that, in upper-middle-class Parisian circles of 1897, there were fewer Catholic suicides than Protestant ones. He attributed this less to direct intervention from a spiritual leader than to how religion created a worldview that rendered suicide inaccessible.

Franz Boaz, a founding father of the discipline, wrote in 1920:

It is also beginning to attract the attention of students who are no longer satisfied with the systemic enumeration of standardized beliefs and customs of a tribe, but who begin to be interested in the question of the way in which the individual reacts to his whole social environment, and to the differences of opinion and of mode of action that occur in primitive society and which are the causes of far-reaching changes. [2]

This new model inspired generations to explore new methods of practicing the social sciences. By comparing Tolkien’s and Lewis’s output to their inspiration, the unique concepts underpinning their worldbuilding becomes clearest. As students of culture and its development, they were concerned with farming techniques and handicrafts more than Wagner or the great bards of chivalric literature. Lewis and Tolkien developed a preoccupation with the invisible social institutions behind the stylish pseudomedievalism of their childhood, drawn from Durkheim’s arguments that there was a function to the form of collective organization. This presupposition challenged the social Darwinist assumption from which fabulists like Wagner drew. While Tolkien and Lewis were both deeply committed to their religious beliefs, folding in Christian morality to their stories remained true to their belief that ideas change rather than die. The idea of a society’s values adapting rather than going extinct was a contemporary concept that contradicted Wagner’s central thesis of the death of the Gods. As Durkheim wrote:

If … the categories [time, space, class, etc.] are, as we believe they are, essentially collective representations, before all else, they should show the mental states of the group; they should depend upon the way in which this is founded and organized, upon its morphology, upon its religious, moral and economic institutions, etc. [3]

Durkheim’s argument was that the concept of time as an immutable force was not materially different from time as a rational consciousness that could be argued with. Conceptualising a force within a given framework manifests a shape in which it operates, and that model shapes subsequent thought. The belief was that these logic models would produce repeatable results in the fields of agriculture, medicine, and astronomy. Durkheim’s model made sense for the irrational logic-models that served as a cultural fabric in many nineteenth-century societies (and still today); and so did Lewis’s and Tolkien’s, despite their condescending authorial voices.

The colonial bones of anthropological methods in fantastical fiction have been softened or contradicted in the years since Tolkien and Lewis. Many authors foster a cozy sense of nostalgia in fictional cultures. Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler offered their readers respite from plot-driven conflict through the creature comfort of meals and sleep, even in alien contexts. Others exploit the glory of artisanal craft or extravagance: R. F. Kuang’s Babel (2022), for example, was an experiment in confronting the voyeuristic colonial gaze of fantasy through an imaginary Oxford where the very act of translation served as the means to extract power.

But fantasy remains preoccupied with imagining worlds in which the dynamics between the dominant lifeform that populates the narrative—whether that story is told by humans, talking mice, elves, or dragons—and their environment create new perspectives for the audience to explore. There is a voyeuristic exoticism in fantasy, with a range of dehumanization throughout the genre: Audiences revel in the sight of mice using acorns as hats and sewing needles as spears, or of demons wielding the jawbone of an imaginary beast on an imaginary continent.

In the twenty-first century, there have been many questions raised about the foundational beliefs in both fantasy and anthropology, and whether each could survive adapting to a pluralistic lens. Both have, but in different ways. For its part, fantasy’s inherent voyeurism still stems from curiosity in the human experience and celebration of our collective creativity, but there remains the leftovers of a structural functionalism lens that believes all culture is nothing but language, religion, and material needs.

The persistence of this simple, sugary belief that fantasy readers could build worlds from a handful of institutional structures comes more from the prevalence of the tabletop game industry than Tolkien or Lewis. Extracted from an earlier form of wartime strategy games, Dungeons and Dragons (1974-) and subsequent copycats combine storytelling elements with games of chance. The work of building a system that allows a player to craft a purely self-indulgent power fantasy, and then face challenges in a group storytelling environment, is an impressive act of labor. Subsequent manuals have continued the work of adjusting the mechanics of the game. Copycat companies and game creators often spring from house rules that worked well for the creator and their friend group. New concepts, mechanics, and avenues of gameplay lore have all grown a flourishing industry of fantasy genre media without a traditional narrative structure. Video games, too, draw from the mechanics of analog tabletop war strategy games and the half-forgotten aesthetic inheritance of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It’s no surprise that innovation alone can’t erase the charge that fantasy’s role is to draw from history: The sheer scale of work poured into speculative fantasy scenarios exceeds the labors of the many generations who have contributed to it. But a consequence of this work has been to calcify elements of the genre that were never meant to be as standardized as they are, such as racializing the heroes.

For example, in tabletop gaming the elements of a character hinge most on the player’s improv skills, and next on the stats written down on their chart. These numbers usually relate to skill subclasses that have evolved their own associations free of the framer’s intentions. Players are given parameters of what is possible by the hard numbers, and these can be levelled up in gameplay. In origin, the very structure of these pre-determined racialized statistics harkens back to an antiquated view of race that was contemporary to Lewis and Tolkien. These “race” elements have come not always to connect with human ethnicity, however, but to inhere in an exaggeration of biological features that aligns more closely with Lewis’s animistic fairy-tale cosmology. This began with the inclusion of Dimensions, Space, and Time as new frontiers for fantasy to explore, in the contexts of which sentience could be attributed to practically anything. This was played as a joke in Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884) with a square trying to understand the concept of a third dimension, but can include the Barsoom books and the Planeswalking in Magic: The Gathering (1993). As a creative playground, this movement freed creators from maintaining any fidelity to terrestrial biology.

In today’s fantasy markets, then, “races” now feature any combination of physical traits: blue skin, wings, antennae, fur. Some are cats. Artists and writers are free to design any type of creature with any amount of connection to the human experience. They can be humanoid, mutually intelligible, or neither. A special game that creators like to play is to stretch how far a character can be situated outside our sphere of understanding, and this diverse kingdom of sapient, agentic “races” plays a complicated role in the “play” of fantasy. Features like horns and fangs act, ultimately, as decoration: Attributing supernatural abilities to them stirs the imagination, and yet fantasy is still full of bog-standard human characters with no extraordinary flair. This creates a visual lexicon outside Pre-Raphaelite imagery that constructs meaning for these physical traits and then playfully deconstructs them. Cat-people can be silly, playful companions, mysterious wild cards, or apex predators. Elves can retain their regal splendor for comedy or for horror.

This construction and de-construction of character types within the “character-build” paradigm hasn’t sparked much reflection on the implications of sapient races with their own customs and language. Most fantasy properties simply choose to treat each group as a modern-day nation, with thorny diplomatic issues and internal tensions between tradition and modernity which the protagonists have the chance to observe. Danjon Meshi (2014-2022) by Ryoko Kui plays with this inconsistency by creating a cast who are willing to kill, eat, or befriend monsters depending on the situation. With homages to medieval alchemical texts and the cooks who served as the first biologists in real-world history, Danjon Meshi shows the cast carefully recording, dissecting, cooking, and eating creatures like mandrakes and kelpie. As a modern participant in the fantasy genre, Kui has clearly heard the criticism and rebuttals for fantasy racism: Danjon Meshi includes discussions about what it means for characters to demean others for their bodies, or for the past politics of former rulers. There are certainly nations for halflings and elves; but what sets the manga apart from similar properties is that there is also a secondary cast ripped straight from an Edo-period fantasy, whose characters walk confidently into the DnD-inspired world of elves, orcs, and halflings. The dichotomy between a cast drawing from typical Japanese fantasy tropes and another informed by English ones opens a light-hearted interrogation of the key concepts of fantasy.

The underpinned tropes of fantasy are not deconstructed in Danjon Meshi—it’s still set in a pseudo-medieval Europe—but the inclusion of pseudo-warring states characters with appropriate attire opens the sandbox to include more toys to play with. This attitude towards play, and the manner in which it is increasing the availability of tropes and images, has also been the response of video game and tabletop companies for years. Companies have offered character art with darker skin and a wider variety of facial features, regardless of fantasy-race: In summer of 2024, for example, Dungeons and Dragons made Mexican orcs part of their campaign.

This creation within fantasy gaming of fantasy creatures with non-white features has become a standard. The real-world impact has been that more people feel invited to create characters with tusks, horns, or scales. Yet the question of what this means, geopolitically, inside each world is normally floated as a joke among fans. No one thinks there’s an easy answer to the question of what it means for there to be a Mexico, if there are Mexican orcs. It’s just a game, after all—and at least the approach separates the genre from the Tolkien-esque overconfidence which creates a culture from the bare mechanics of food, shelter, and community, instead allowing the genre’s participants to be honest about borrowing from real life.

Moreover, it helps emphasise that the hubris of creating the terms that would necessitate a culture of the author’s own imagination is based in itself on a fallacy. Paul Rabinow, in his article on “Fieldwork and Friendship in Morocco,” wrote:

Culture in all of its manifestations is overdetermined. It does not present itself naturally or with one voice. Every cultural fact can be interpreted in many ways, both by the anthropologist and his subjects. […] It should be clear that the view of the “primitive” as a creature living by rigid rules, in total harmony with his environment, and essentially not cursed with a glimmer of self-consciousness, is a set of complex cultural projections. There is no “primitive.” There are other men, living other lives. [1]

Perhaps instead there can be a re-negotiation of how these creatures originate, rather than using antiquated formulas of race and ethnicity. The folkloric origins of fantasy blended the spirits of the dead with the spirits of nature and a far stranger reflection of divinity. Perhaps that’s not the right vibe for a game, but fantasy has other aspects where these tropes can mature and change. For both readers and creators, fantasy can serve, as it always has, as a sandbox for fearless exploration.

Endnotes

[1] See Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. University of California Press, 1977, pp. 142-162. [return]

[2] See The Methods of Ethnology, pp. 311-321 from American Anthropologist 22(4), Oct.-Dec. 1920. [return]

[3] See Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse: le système totémique en Australie, Alcan Press, 1912. [return]

But I am increasingly convinced that this urge—regardless of the answers one reaches at the end of the process—is itself a poisoned chalice, and the act of ever-tightening categorisation is one that haunts and harms the genre and all who sail in it.

Before I get into that, I will admit that there are some perfectly practical reasons why one might want to find a definition of SF that one could declare to be final and complete—maybe when writing about the history of the genre, for which defining the texts to include/exclude is a critical part of the exercise, or when creating a new award, when eligibility must be considered. But, even with these two examples, there’s already a crack showing: The definition is in both cases contextual, and what works for one may not suit the purposes of the other.

I would also argue that these are not actually definitions of SF at all, but instead thresholds. They ask: is a given work SF enough? There’s a sense of a minimum viability to meet, rather than an ideal to embody.

To choose an example from my own experience, we might discuss Private Rites by Julia Armfield. This was on the 2025 Clarke Award shortlist, and I think quite rightly so. It’s a great novel, and, moreover, entirely science fictional enough for the Clarke. Collectively, the jury certainly seemed to think so. And yet, I in … at least moderate seriousness … was willing to engage in an argument on Bluesky that while it is climate fiction, I’m not sure it’s science fiction (or not fully, or not only). In my view, any SFness the book holds exists at the very least alongside its litficness. This gives rise to at least two implications: SFness isn’t a binary status that can be characterised by yes/no; and it exists in interaction with both other genres (here, litfic) and subgenres (climate fiction).

So there are circumstances in which there is a genuine purpose for a definition, a need to hash this all out in a way that suits; but they are particular, with specific contexts that drive their definitional needs.

Does this account for the majority of the discussions in fandom, however? Does it heck. Those are simply for love of the game. In these contexts, and if we leave aside the specific offshoots of histories and awards, I think there are two approximate camps of definitions that I see come up colloquially.

The first I’ll call an ideological definition. These involve a more abstract idea of what genre is, or indeed “should be” (when we crack out the “should,” it’s all already going sideways, lads). This is where we find “all literature that does/contains x belongs in genre y,” for sometimes wildly generalising values of x. This is the argument of theoretical categorisation.

The second form is what I think of as the functional definition, what a person might practically seek out as being within their chosen genre. Here, people seek out what they wish actually to read and hold candidates in conversation with a mental map of the megatext which they use to navigate and describe the fiction they want to consume and discuss.

In my experience, for a lot of people, there is a distinct dissonance between these two definitions.

To take an example: in 2023 and 2024, the Booker Prize was awarded to books which I saw widely categorised as science fictional. Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023) is set in a near-future dystopian vision of Ireland and Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2023) has astronauts witness a moon landing attempt that has not happened in reality. Many in SF fandom were thus drawn to say: The Booker Prize has been won by a science fictional novel. How many of those same fans picked those books up (or would consider doing so)? How many might consider them for a Hugo Award? For books that won a major literary prize, they were not so widely a part of the conversation within the genre fandom space. Where it occurred at all, discussion tended far more to the negative: it highlighted in Orbital the lack of action, the lingering focus on character conversation, the limited scope, the stylised language; and in Prophet Song the extended use of metaphor or the unoriginality of the premise when held in comparison to the existing corpus of dystopian novels. And to whether they were good SFF. Or, accepting that they were SFF, that they were not written sufficiently from within the SFF tent, or sufficiently in conversation with the existing works within the genre.

This disjoint is where the functional and the ideological versions of generic definition clash for many. Having read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and Orbital, I would consider both to be good books. They certainly met my functional definition of SFF enough to read them. But both books heavily employ the tools more commonly associated with literary fiction (most obviously those allowing a greater focus on interiority and character experience as a lens on the matter of the story, rather than those that develop an interest in the world, or the functionality and mechanisms of the science fictional conceits presented), as well as or instead of or alongside the ideas of SFF. They’re SFF enough to win points in an argument, but not SFF enough to actually be welcomed into the genre tent. Or, to summarise accusations levelled by many at Kazuo Ishiguro (whether Le Guin accusing him of “despising” fantasy, or Gautam Bhatia suspecting him of “trying to reinvent the six decades of the robot novel in Klara and the Sun while clearly having read nothing of what came before”), they are novels that use the ideas of SFF but are by authors who are not coming from within the genre; and so they cannot possibly do it right, or understand it properly. They are, in some way, insufficient in their SFFness, neither sufficiently pure for the ideological definition, nor sufficiently familiar for the functional.

This dissonance leaves us with definitions that, at best, feel incomplete, and at worst as though the driving purpose behind the definitional activity is that of delimitation—it doesn’t matter what people do or don’t read, but the arguments are about what is, or is not, allowed in the tent. And both inclusion and exclusion can be as troublesome as each other. Saying “x isn’t proper SFF because it doesn’t fit my narrow definition” is an obvious issue, but “I am choosing to believe x is SFF rather than approach how it differs from current reality on the terms laid out within the work” is a problem endemic to genre fandom, and one that limits our openness to new and different things. Establishing SFF as a literature of the unreal, but one in which reality is set to a fixed viewpoint, is just as problematic a position as opting aggressively to keep things out of the party. Moreover, it limits our ability to flex our definitions as reality and our understandings of it change over time.

*

I’ve come over a thousand words and still not offered you my own attempt at a definition. Instead, I’ve alluded vaguely to those employed by others, rather against the spirit of the thousands of essays that begin with a quote from the dictionary. In part, that’s because I don’t have one that I am truly happy with, or which I coherently use in daily life. The best I can approach it, at least recently, is that SFF does not exist as a singular entity—here I echo Paul Kincaid in his collection Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction (2025)—but instead a thing that can be discussed descriptively—and here I echo Samuel Delany—at a given moment; but that, if we do so, the object under the lens proves a shifting target, something more usefully described by its relevance to the literary now, and within the current context as reflected in that literature. And so, SF is an umbrella term that unites across time, subgenres, and geographies some very disparate modes and affects, via a readership that is not necessarily shared exactly, but contiguous, and via aesthetic preferences, tendencies, and motifs that are adopted and reflected in different ways within the subgenres that form this web of connections.

On subgenres: these are sufficiently finite as concepts that we can probably define them enough to reach consensus. But they also come and go, ebb and flow in popularity, and give way to something new over time. Paranormal romance came and then drifted out of notability, and yet sits quite near to the modern darling that is romantasy. Dark academia is presently on the rise, but with connections to magical school stories and increasingly to romantasy, and also to campus novels outside of the umbrella. The changing relationships between the subgenres, their shifting vitality, seems to me more interesting than any definitional identity. SF today might be an agglomeration of subgenres that in ten years will have no relevance at all, displaced instead by new modes we haven’t dreamt up yet.

So mono-definition may be doomed to failure. As a specific example, we might look at the “literature of the future” approach to defining SF. For me, this doesn’t work at all, not least because the future being evoked in the literature is all too often one as viewed from approximately the 1950s. The focus is on specific technologies and aesthetics, per this “the future if” meme: flying cars and glass skyscrapers, an expansionist view of space that is relatively uncritical of the colonialist underpinnings it perpetuates, and even assumptions about future geopolitics that imagine a single world government (see, for example, Star Trek right up into the 90s at the very least). The projected view of the world created by this particular vision of the future—tied up in the concerns specific to those years, not least of which the Cold War—no longer represents a reflection of the anxieties of now. The future, after all, is a moving target. Even in terms of dates, many of the futures of the Golden Age SF books have been and gone, and their responses on page and screen to the future as they perceived it holds little in common with the future as perceived from this moment, or even ten years ago. The anxieties, the aesthetics, the present being projected into that future are all so different … what commonalities can we draw? Can the characteristics of a given future even be used functionally for whether a given person will want to read the book? However much I might enjoy When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift for its haruspicial approach to divining the future, for how it peers into the entrails of the now and interprets them, futurology has little bearing on how I feel about the work of Arthur C. Clarke. Time moves on.

A truism: Whatever window into the future a work offers, it does instead reflect the anxieties of the time in which it is written. The future, the unknown that marches incessantly towards us, cannot be a unifying factor across the ages because its characterisation is, necessarily, disparate. To read Cold War anxiety futures is a wholly different experience, arriving at wildly disparate ends, from climate fiction anxiety futures. What do they truly have in common at all?

Climate fiction, in fact, epitomises this problem. Is climate fiction inherently speculative in nature? Is it inherently SFnal? It may have been definitively so ten, twenty years ago, but perhaps the march of time into the daily fact of anthropogenic climate change has rendered it simply “reality,” and thus easy fodder for any novel (like Private Rites) concerned with the current fate of humanity? Climate change feels real and present enough that it has thoroughly crept into all types of literature, and so cannot, to my mind, now be used as a marker for SF on its own. It’s a part of current material reality; what about that is inherently science fictional? There are recent novels that use climate fiction as a theme or central problem but explore it using the tools of other genres entirely, which centre their climate anxiety on the present day and on experiences that are not speculative at all. To continue with Private Rites, for instance: While the novel’s unending, drowning rain is absolutely a climate-fiction problem affecting the protagonists, the tools employed to face it are focused around the psychological impacts of that rain on the characters, and draw heavily from horror as well as modes of realism (as highlighted in Abigail Nussbaum’s review here). Or, if we look at Eva Meijer’s Sea Now (2025, translated by Anne Thompson Melo), while the rising sea is the central catastrophe that propels the plot, there’s very little examination of it as a scientific phenomenon. Again, its impact on the characters is primarily limited to the psychological and experiential, drilling down into relationships rather than the world being crafted: The world in which it is set is functionally indistinguishable from the present, save for that disaster. At best, then, climate fiction as a marker of speculativity is ambiguous and at worst entirely irrelevant, and has been rendered so by the shift of the lens of the “now.”

One characteristic of the now we presently inhabit to that which SF once belonged involves who is interested in it. As Ursula Le Guin put it in her preface to Dreams Must Explain Themselves (2018), once upon a time “critics and academics generally refused to consider fantasy or science fiction as literature at all.” As we have seen, today by contrast works of SF can win one of the most prestigious literary awards. SF is also extremely big business, from cinema to video games. The mainstreaming of particularly those non-literary examples of SF, and the proliferation of larger online communities devoted to them, has I think intensified the way in which definition of SF is not about the works at all, but instead a desire to delimit a community whose shape has changed drastically in the last decade or so.

SF multimedia has enormously popularised SFnal ideas and aesthetics, and a burgeoning fanbase breeds a widening pool of definitional categories—but also a bigger argument. There are more people than ever who form part of the community interested in SF ideas and aesthetics, and—as ever happens with this sort of popularisation—a pushback to this new influx from some who have been inside the tent all along. This in turn only increases the desire to delimit, to prescribe the boundaries of what is inside—and out.

In the time I have been an SF fan, it has felt decreasingly possible for things to be fuzzy, to be fluid and mutable, to be multiple, even as works that are exactly all of those and more are published, only often with less marketing push and community impact than that enjoyed by their more generically classifiable cousins. Indeed, to my mind, some of the best work that exists—and has existed long into the history of the genre—occupies those fuzzy spaces between. Works have always existed that combine those ideas and aesthetics of SF with the tools, structures, or tropes of another genre entirely. We need only to look at the 2025 Hugo Best Novel, The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, to see the fantastical sitting alongside the solving of a crime. To go back to the Booker, can a work not be both literary fiction and science fiction simultaneously? I don’t see why not. And yet, when making arguments about categorisation, much seems to be flattened, and the decision is portrayed as distinctly binary. This, of course, comes back to that urge towards delimitation. It’s ours, not theirs. It belongs to us, not to whichever group we perceive as being outside, other, as having more prestige or not enough, who care about the wrong things. Delimitation like this only works if one assumes a work cannot belong to many things at once, or be beholden to none.

We need a more expansive approach to any attempt at definition today. If, though, we see SF as a process—as a grammar of ideas and themes, as a set of motifs, however you want to classify it—the genre can and plainly does sit alongside other genres which operate on different axes, both on a work-by-work basis and in a more macro view of shifting subgeneric traditions. This attempt at a definition—insufficient as all such things are, useful to me only by virtue of being mine—posits SF not as a clearly taxonomised, singular thing, but as a series of questions we keep asking both ourselves and the texts we read. Today it might be “what does the future look like?”, but tomorrow it might be “what even is magic?”, or “what does it mean to be human?”. These are questions that don’t necessarily have fixed or correct answers, but the asking of them forms a community of subgenres, readers, and modes of interest—one that overspills any boundaries we might wish to impose and mingles with the wider sea of literature.

*

What is SF? Idk, vibes. That is the answer I yearn to give, if ever I am asked, and I think it is the truest one that underpins all attempts at more specific classification.

Realistically, vibes are my actual definition, at least in the day-to-day. I’d argue this matches most people’s functional definitions—they may select different books for their functional category of SF than I do, but I do strongly suspect we both get there by the same, predominantly intuitive path. This sense of formlessness, taken alongside the desire to ask questions of our texts, feels to me the best approach to tackle an ever-shifting now, the works we have, and the ones that will continuously add to the vast and varied body of SF. It is also best for the community that forms around them. Any definitional approach should be used to ensure we are appreciating the wider variety of all that is, rather than being bound by what was. And it is here I come at last to one of the other mainstays of genre definitions: “genre as a body of works in conversation with each other.” This one I don’t refute, or not precisely.

I think the approach exists in a snapshot, a photo whose ink immediately begins to fade, and which is rendered increasingly incomprehensible by the passage of time. There was, once, a point at which someone could be sufficiently familiar with a large enough proportion of the body of work that was, by consensus, science fiction that they could have some sort of overarching view of that genre and of its conversation with itself. That time has long, long passed. Books written now are multiple generations removed from the antecedents of yore, and while there may be inherited iterations of connection that stretch back and back through book after book, is that first distant relative truly relevant to the book now? Is it more relevant than that book’s conversation with the current time, with the TV shows the author grew up with, the mystery novels they loved, the art they saw last week in a gallery? What is it really about that great-great-great grandmother book that prioritises its vitality to the definition of a genre over all the other core inspirations that led to its creation?

As time goes on, each new text’s connections to the earliest iterations of a tradition become weaker and weaker. The now moves—does that mean that those books fall out of the genre as the conversation moves with it?

The yet more fundamental issue here is that the “genre in conversation with itself” definition requires that science fiction be bounded primarily by the past, and by what already exists. And even then, often only by a specific view of the past, within a specific literary geography. If works must be in conversation, there can never be anything from outside the tent, from completely new angles or with wholly new perspectives. Where, in this schema, do works from non-Anglophone traditions fit? Works in conversation with wholly different genre traditions? Who determines the “itself” with which a given genre-text is in conversation? The snake eats its own tail.

I would, at best, like to subordinate this approach to something rather more utilitarian, an approach that does not imply a requirement to delve into the backlists before one can fully appreciate what SF as a genre looks like, but allows one to exist in one’s current context and appreciate breadth instead.

How much of SF is, ultimately, in conversation with travel writing, with satire, with romance, with thriller, and with mystery? How many bear the legacy of a text like The Count of Monte Cristo?  We might return to that idea of a web of subgenres—connected, perhaps in something approaching conversation, jostling under and outside of a wider SFnal umbrella. These are conversations never strictly bounded within a single genre. By this logic, you follow a text’s threads and find the whole of literature. In many ways, I almost prefer that. Blow it wide open, refuse boundaries at all. SF is meaningless except in the specific and the personal. Does it quack like SF? Are the vibes right? Good enough.

Because more than anything, I want to crack open that idea of “us,” that boundary on the fandom, and on the things that are of interest to this community. SF is not corrupted by the imported ideas and motifs of other genres, nor is it diluted, cheapened or weakened. The greatest strength of a genre is surely that its tools are so vital, so interesting, and so beloved that they find their uses in many places and to many people. That is the future I want for SF, and the present I increasingly see: a wider and more open market, full of things that operate in ambiguous, complex spaces and enrich and are enriched by their differences in turn. The urge to define clinically is the antithesis of this, serving only to delimit the variety of approaches we can take to an amorphous, ever-changing thing.

What the anglophone world calls speculative fiction, the francophone world calls “littératures de l’imaginaire”—literatures of the imagination, or even literatures of the imaginary. I’m fond of the term: The anglophone world might do well to adopt it, since “speculative fiction” may never have been much more than a slightly distasteful placeholder for some better umbrella word which no one has ever managed to dream up. French readers of this “literature of the imaginary” typically need no introduction to the anglophone tradition: Many read fiction directly in English, and legions more benefit from abundant catalogues of translated fiction like those of publishers including Au Diable Vauvert and Le Bélial’. In fact, our anglospherical hegemony casts such a Morgul shadow over French speculative fiction that many French-speaking readers may have a better grasp of the history of the genre in English than they do of the history of speculative fiction in the francophone world.

In France, the collection of overlapping genres designated as littératures de l’imaginaire has enough of a readership to merit two well-attended annual festivals, Les Utopiales in Nantes and Les Imaginales in Épinal. So these genres have plenty of native practitioners, with the possible exception of horror and horror-adjacent work, which remains, alas, scarce. [1] But, while science fiction’s famed forefather Jules Verne was French, SF properly speaking remains largely a 1950s import in France. French-native forebears of SF prior to 1950 tend to appear as slightly oddball offshoots of other local genre traditions like the roman d’aventure (the traditional adventure novel with its world travelers and swashbucklers, a mutant example of which might be Verne’s work itself); utopian fiction and its cousin the dystopian satire (Albert Robida in the 1880s); or what I would call the “weird savant” novel, in which a strange, visionary “scientist” leads the reader from invention to invention (L’Ève future by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in 1886, for instance, and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus in 1914—but Verne’s Nemo himself is not far off in this department). [2] The space opera, for example, really only emerges in the 1950s. The vast frescos of whole societies that we associate with SF, the sociological or anthropological thrust that such scale suggests (as opposed to the isolated “savant” I just mentioned), find a place in later classics like Stefan Wul’s Oms en série (1957), which yielded the celebrated René Laloux/Roland Topor animated film Fantastic Planet (1973; if you haven’t seen it, do).

Of course, even in examples like Oms en série/Fantastic Planet, French SF has its own distinct flavor, notably by way of surrealism, whose influence pops up everywhere. The late SF stalwart Philippe Curval (1929-2023) happened to associate closely with the movement. His classics include Le Ressac de l’espace (1975, reissued by La Volte in 2022) and Cette chère humanité (1976, translated as Brave Old World by Steve Cox in 1981—this book is most certainly a social fresco of the kind I mentioned). But Curval wrote innovative fiction until the end. His colleague Serge Brussolo’s (1951-) hallucinatory narratives owe much to André Breton’s oneiric avant-garde movement. Brussolo wrote some 150 novels across his long career (not all of them speculative fiction), and Edward Gauvin’s 2016 translation of his 1992 Syndrome du scaphandrier, under the title Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, is the first to be translated. In addition to surrealistic dreams and dreamlike imagery, Brussolo’s work has an unsettling feel that rubs shoulders with the best weird fiction. [3] Yet both Brussolo and Curval, staples of French SF, are undertranslated and nearly unknown in the anglophone world despite Gauvin’s and Cox’s translations. In contrast, Antoine Volodine, a literary descendent of Beckett and magical realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez rather than of surrealism, has been abundantly translated into English by Jordan Stump and Jeffrey Zuckerman, among others; Volodine is among the few who have scraped their way to relative prominence in the anglophone world (not without reason in the case of this visionary writer).

These examples already demonstrate a few characteristics of the francophone tradition: how powerfully the historical avant-gardes, whose epicenter was Paris, inflect the genre. Early examples of speculative fiction, when they do not belong to popular fiction, overlap entirely with avant-garde production: Blaise Cendrars’s extraordinary voyage into interiority/exteriority, L’Eubage (1926), or Henri Michaux’s imaginary ethnography Voyage en Grande Garabagne (1936) are cases in point, to say nothing of the aforementioned Locus Solus. Volodine’s inscription into Beckett’s literary family tree speaks volumes about hyperliterary aspirations, and Céline Minard’s Plasmas (2021, published in a translation by Annabel L. Kim in 2024 by Deep Vellum) belongs to the same tendency: Like Volodine from the nineties onward, like Minard, Marie Darrieussecq, and others, science fiction with literary credentials often “disguises” its connection to genre fiction by appearing in non-genre editorial contexts. These disguised works tend to win more non-genre prizes and find translators more easily.

A part of speculative fiction in France has therefore always aspired to literary lettres de noblesse in a way that seemed long out of reach for writers in the anglosphere’s genre ghettos. La Volte, the publishing house responsible for my first novel, Le Premier Souper (2021), displays this tendency, publishing challenging works including translations of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing (Shikasta, 2016, translated by Paule Givarch), the elaborate metafictional and linguistic experiments of luvan (Agrapha, 2020), or of course the anarcho-Deleuzian, vitalist allegories of Alain Damasio (La Horde du Contrevent, 2004; Les Furtifs, 2019). While the early collection Anticipation from the publishing house Fleuve noir (1951) produced much “popular” fiction (much of it justly forgotten), France never had a pulp era. [4] In addition to explaining the higher literary aspirations of francophone SF, the absence of a pulp era may also suggest why French science fiction has always felt aligned with political commitment: In the anglophone pulp era, the “entertainment imperative” offers a convenient alibi to keep certain political issues at arm’s length (even when they are in fact present not far beneath the allegorical surface of those tales). French science fiction may have felt freer to wear its politics on its sleeve from an early date (and the avant-gardes were, of course, heavily involved in politics, whether of the futurist proto-fascist and nationalist variety, [5] or of the communist-surrealist variety).

For example, Catherine Dufour’s 2024 novel Les Champs de la lune, from Robert Laffont) has garnered an astonishing pile of (French) prizes in part because it seems to accomplish the desire for genuine political commitment while avoiding excessive didacticism, preferring literary subtlety to American science-fictional pyrotechnics. It is never shrill nor heavy-handed. And, contrary to the likes of Volodine or Minard, it does not compromise its genre identity in order to seem literary; this is as pure a science-fictional story as one might hope for, and fairly “hard” without feeling relentlessly technical. Les Champs de la lune avoids a key characteristic of SF space opera—if the moon still counts as a form of space opera setting—that have traditionally positioned it within the preoccupations of adolescence; namely, “action,” which is to say, violent confrontation. A reader on Amazon.fr complains that “the first 100 pages are dedicated to plants and their manner of development on the moon. The rest of the novel is just as uninteresting” (“Les 100 première pages sont dédiées aux plantes et leurs manières de se développer sur la lune. Le reste du roman n’est pas plus passionnant”). But the comment, like many one-star reviews, and besides being a substantial misrepresentation, misses the point: The narrator is a botanist and gardener who has dedicated her life to caring for living creatures on the surface of the moon (under a protective dome), while most of the colonists live in vast underground caverns. She is neither a warrior nor an adventurer, and those seeking “thrills” are unlikely to find them here. Dufour’s narrator takes a special interest in what the poet Theodore Roethke called “the small” (“I live to woo the fearful small,” he writes), and this includes the small among men and women; she looks after the least privileged members of the people living underground or wandering in the moon’s deserts. She cares even for the mad machines, whom she seems to pity.

Let us note that this avoidance of high-intensity conflict reflects a calculated choice on Dufour’s part, who is no stranger to action-packed narratives—her short stories, in collections like L’Arithmétique terrible de la misère (2020), can be satirical, sharp-witted in the extreme (often deploying huge amounts of slang and colloquialism, Dufour is wicked smart and speaks our language), and fast-moving. Les Champs de la lune departs from this earlier work in its contemplative, almost meditative quality. It is the journal of a soul whose activity removes her from spaces of sociability, who chooses to relate to a select few as she confronts the persistent problems of the surface—a growing crack in the dome structure, an invasive species that seems able to grow anywhere, and the terrible fièvre aspic, “asp fever,” a mysterious illness endemic among those living underground.

But the real subject of Les Champs de la lune is hegemony—not in the sense of simple domination of a class or group, but along the lines of Gramsci’s original concept, that of the “spontaneous consent” that props up dominant ideologies, and that leads the alienated to desire their own alienation (in the shape of the status quo that oppresses and exploits them, and that they willingly sustain). The tale suggests that, although “we don’t have to live this way,” we often choose to, without always being willing to accept that it is a choice, lying to ourselves and making sacrifices we should not make.

The ecological thrust of the novel, and its nearby setting, reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels, which have become increasingly climate-oriented in recent years. Yet in Les Champs de la lune, the earth’s fate hardly enters the discussion; the narrator seems to assume the reader knows its fate as well as anyone, suggesting that it has become definitively inhospitable. And this absence of preachiness or self-conscious political posturing remains one of the novel’s best features. It approaches the ecological question with matter-of-factness: The narrator is a gardener; accordingly, she wears her duties as a kind of pastoral role, even when she extends that role to mentoring young humans in her art. The novel rejects grand gestures, the commotion of rhetoric, and the alarmist language of crisis and cataclysm. The novel acknowledges urgency and crisis with a certain realist detachment. Strangely, this narrative, despite the revelation of grand stakes for the communities of the moon, feels like a chamber drama. This novel’s understated politics appear quite welcome to its readers.

A recent short story collection, Lanvil emmêlée, from the Martinican writer Michael Roch (2024), struggles both more stridently and more anxiously with politics than Dufour’s novel, and it tends to excel where it leaves political messaging to one side. Since 2022’s Tè Mawon, Roch has accumulated accolades and visited several American universities; his variety of (Caribbean) “Afrofuturism” appears quite unique in the francophone world (in other words, that world, unlike the anglosphere, has not benefited from any widespread science-fictional tradition emerging from Africa, the Caribbean, or indeed much of anywhere outside of continental France with the exception of one or two Québecois writers). Both the short stories of Lanvil emmêlée and the novel Tè Mawon take place in the city of Lanvil, a tentacular city that spans the Caribbean, interconnecting its former islands. In some of Lanvil emmêlée’s stories, the city’s structure seems to mirror its socio-economic inequality, since the wealthy overlords and powerful operators of anwo Lanvil (“upper Lanvil,” as it were) exploit the various shades of underclass that inhabit anba Lanvil (“lower Lanvil”). This urban arrangement echoes many works, such as Arcane: League of Legends (2021-2024); the structure represents a manifestation of the upstairs/downstairs trope. But, while Arcane takes an interest in characters from both sides of the railroad tracks, the oligarchs of Lanvil emmêlée tend by design to remain invisible, silent, deliberately undeveloped, as though Roch did not want to humanize these hideous agents of exploitation, or else wished to emphasize the horizontal archipelago of human variation rather than class hierarchies and stable social categories.

At times, the issues of class and race hierarchies do interfere with Roch’s storytelling. In the collection’s second tale, “Avaler la terre” (Swallowing Up the Earth), Clod lives in upper Lanvil, among the bourgeoisie, and has bought into the overt racism of that milieu: Born dark-skinned in the lower city, he has employed medicines that bleach his complexion and has hidden his working class origins in his desire to arrive (Clod replicates the very real colorism that exists in many parts of the Caribbean). He is a parvenu and a class defector. Yet the story traces his sudden conversion (or reversion) to a partisan of Lanvil’s proletariat. The conversion is so sudden and artificial that it fails to convince: We understand Clod’s alienation, but that it should be so easy for him to free himself of that alienation feels contrived and seems designed expressly for the purpose of conveying a political message (it is better to work on behalf of the downtrodden than for our evil overlords). The conversion back to the “Resistance” has no inner necessity from a character-building point of view. Clod, and perhaps the “Sénatris” of the final story in the collection, seem to be the sole characters of a privileged milieu drawn with any depth, and Clod inevitably resolves into another defender of Lanvil’s underclass.

The other tales, however, often shine very brightly. The astonishing “La Clandestine” features a set of militant “digital health” workers whose goal is the “protection of virtual identities.” Among these militants is Man Pitak, a fugitive digital shaman who has been known to help disenfranchised citizens of anba Lanvil “ascend,” or upload into a new virtual existence. The emancipatory thrust of the trope speaks for itself: Man Pitak works to help others evade the system’s class-based gatekeeping. But Roch’s stylistic virtuosity, not his politics, forms the extraordinary medium of this cyperpunk-soaked tale. On many occasions the reader senses that the distinction between the digital spaces in which Man Pitak operates and those of the city of Lanvil begin to weaken; disoriented, the reader finds herself in an elusive in-between: She experiences Man Pitak’s power to navigate between the city’s ever-present digital and nanotechnological “clouds” and physical space.

In fact, Roch’s narratives hardly operate without disorientation; he makes demands on his readers, who must yield to a whirlwind of unfamiliar or unconventional techniques that do not always favor transparency. Thus, his style blends creole (French and occasionally English creoles of the Caribbean) and elaborately wrought French; practically never signals direct discourse with the conventional dashes or quotation marks used in most French fiction; and drops capital letters to reflect direct discourse or inner monologue (or perhaps something like free indirect discourse). This mixture, this agar in which the urban bacteria teem, reflects the title of the book, Lanvil emmêlée—Lanvil entangled. In “Drive,” the character Joe muses on the word “kub” (a small apartment or confined living space) in the following terms:

Et kub, asere, c’est même pas kréyol. Quoi, on dit pas kub? Non, si c’est kub, mais la lettre au milieu, la voyelle, en kréyol, elle existe pas. loto-a, sé an vwati. Virus, sé viris-la. pa ni u. des locks naturelles, sé nati drèd-la, wé ! pa ni u.

Alors pourquoi kub? Poutji? asere, tout ça, sé an mouvman, c’est un emmêlement, les gens entrent dans Lanvil et puis ils sortent, les idées entrent, les images, et puis les mots changent et se fixent d’une autre manière, sur un autre mode, en fait, dans le sens où les moun vont. ils disent kub, on a dit kub, tout le monde dit kub maintenant. sé en mouvman. tjip ! kuuuuub. Une piaule, quoi. Un stuuuudio, une piaule, wé.

Sé kon sa qu’on tient. emmêlés. y a p’t-être pas besoin d’aller bien loin pour vivre, ¿ves? si tu peux vivre dans l’emmêlement des voix, des gens, des mots. si tu peux vivre avec le mouvman, la bascule, ni bon ni mauvais, asere, déplié-replié, toi-même et puis tous les autres en même temps. emmêlé, quoi. si tu peux vivre ça, ta place, elle est ici. ailleurs, c’est toujours l’illusion. (131)

And kub, asere, it’s not even kréyol. What, you don’t say kub? No, yeah it’s kub, but the letter in the middle, the vowel, in kréyol, it don’t exist. loto-a, it’s in the car. Virus, is viris-la. pa ni u. natural locks is nati drèd-la, wé ! pa ni u.

So why kub? Poutji? Asere, all this, it’s in mouvman, it’s tangled up, people come to Lanvil and then they leave, the ideas come, the images, and then the words change and are fixed in a different way, in another mode, in fact, whichever way the moun go, all those folks. they say kub, kub is said, everyone says kub now. it’s in mouvman. chip! kuuuuub. a pad, right? A stuuuudio, a pad, wé.

Dat a di way wi stay. Mixed up. You maybe don’t need to go so far to live, ¿ves? if you can live in the tangle of voices, people, words. if you can live with the mouvman, the seesaw, not good not bad, asere, plié-déplié, yourself and then all the others at the same time. tangled up, right? if you can live that, your place is here. elsewhere it’s always an illusion. (my translation) 

“Asere” is a Cuban slang term that means something like “pal”; “ves” is Spanish; “kub” is derived presumably from French (which it is not precisely); “piaule” is French slang; and French creole is peppered throughout this discussion of the high front rounded u, /y/, which doesn’t exist in creole. The end of the passage uses triangulated address; while the characters are engaged in dialogue with one another about the languages, the text also addresses the reader: “if you can live that, your place is here. elsewhere it’s always an illusion.” Living in the mixture of languages and multiple modes of speaking, writing, reading … is the reality with which Roch confronts his public, who must be willing to submit to the demands of an unfamiliar textual environment, not to say unfamiliar realities.

The passage also suggests where Roch most excels: in his poetic deployment of language. As the Arcane comparison demonstrates, many of Roch’s ideas come from elsewhere, especially from cyperpunk; his political ideas in particular remain fairly familiar. Yet what makes these narratives hum is not the politics, but things like the narrative blur between the virtual and the physical in Man Pitak’s tale, “La Clandestine” (another kind of “entanglement”) or Joe’s richly textured patter in “Drive”—in those places, in other words, where the reader risks losing her footing in a kind of delicious vertigo. If that vertigo means losing sight of the well-worn signposts of political value, it may seem a small price to pay.

Lanvil emmêlée ostensibly places the titular megalopolis at its heart. To the extent that it does so, it bears comparison to a number of books and series based explicitly around an urban center: Anouck Faure’s dark fantasy La Cité diaphane (2023) tells the tale of the city of Roche-Étoile; Julien Heylbroeck’s Lazaret 44 (2022) features a city built on the rotting carcass of a cosmic leviathan; Léo Henry and Jacques Mucchielli’s Yama Loka Terminus (2024) is based around the fictional Soviet-sounding city of Yirminadingrad; Christophe Siébert is responsible for a parallel series involving the city of Mertvecgorod (for instance, Feminicid [2021]). The Soviet stylings of Siébert’s and Henry/Mucchielli’s works, as well as some of their themes, recall Volodine’s Russian-inflected post-exotic Bardo in a way that distracts a bit from the evident quality of these works (Heylbroeck, for his part, displays his debt to China Miéville with an epigraph from Perdido Street Station [2000]). In any event, the narrative device of the megalopolis has evidently spread throughout French speculative fiction, with often excellent results.

Where Lanvil differs is in its disconnected flavor, which seems to include patches of rural territory, mushroom cultures tended by robots (“technosapiens”), more or less uninhabited zones of post-industrial ruin, luxury high-rises, slums, skyscrapers, skybridges, mines and construction zones, (sentient) factories … Its patchwork includes every landscape and every condition. Like the Caribbean on which it is modeled, Lanvil is an archipelago.

Anouck Faure finds her inspiration in another archipelago, that of the islands of the Pacific. Faure is a native of New Caledonia now based in France, where she works as an illustrator, particularly for genre fiction. In Aatea (2025) as in La Cité diaphane (2023), her talent as an engraver is on vivid display. Aatea’s archipelago is called La Nuée, an untranslatable term that comes from an old, poetic word for “cloud.” La Nuée is an ocean—suspended high in the atmosphere in a series of unpredictable, constantly shifting strata. The islands of the Nuée are living beings and produce “the filament,” a fiber that detaches from the island and forms a symbiotic bond with the islanders in infancy. Without the filament, direct contact with the islands or their many roots causes death, for the islands’ surfaces bear a deadly neurotoxin.

The island has developed a rigid caste system: The master navigators and the nobles rule over a vast servant class who are little better than slaves, some of whom lack the filament, many of whom are ritually castrated or sterilized. This social reality subtends the book’s entire plot, which features Aatea, a eunuch who happens to be the unfavored son of the queen of the young island of Enatak. As a navigator able to “onceive” (“oncevoir,” derived from the verb “percevoir,” to perceive) his aerial-ocean surroundings, Aatea spends much of his life at sea, on the treacherous suspended waters of La Nuée. His is yet another tale of emancipation from a grotesque system of inequality that sharply distinguishes the privileged few from the subaltern. The memory of colonial conquest in the Pacific lies under the surface of this novel, yet it reverses colonial reality: Whereas Continental Europeans’ colonial conquest eventually subjugated many islands of the Pacific and their Indigenous communities, in Aatea’s world, the islanders themselves, particularly the aristocracy and the privileged “master navigators,” are those who dominate others; they generally display an insufferable arrogance.

In a revealing passage, Aatea discusses his identity as an islander (though without the filament) with a nomad, Berub. Berub understands only the “might is right” ethos that has imposed itself on the nomads amidst the uncompromising waters of La Nuée. Berub says to Aatea:

-- Je peux t’apprendre à te defendre. Contre les humains et le reste. Reste avec nous, et je t’apprendrai. Tu es intelligent et coriace, tu obtiendrais vite une bonne place. Ici, tu ne serais pas condamné à rester esclave.

-- Ça ne m’intéresse pas, répond Aatea.

Sa hargne est retombée, il n’a pas le cœur d’argumenter, d’expliquer que les deux options, la domination ou la servilité, le révulsent autant l’une que l’autre. Seul demeure un vague dégoût au fond de sa gorge qui lui rend la solitude plus désirable encore. Ici comme sur les îles, il semble qu’il faille toujours un perdant. (178)

"I can teach you to defend yourself. Against humans and the rest. Stay with us, and I’ll teach you. You’re intelligent and tough, you would quickly earn a good position. Here, you would not be condemned to remain a slave.”

“I’m not interested,” answers Aatea. 

His spiteful feelings have dissipated; he doesn’t have the heart to argue, to explain that the two options, domination or servility, are both just as revolting to him. All that remains is a vague disgust in his throat that makes solitude still more desirable. Here as on the islands, it seems that there always has to be a loser.

In short, Aatea seeks a solitary escape from the dynamics of power and powerlessness that have forever constrained him. Berub and the nomads offer him no viable alternative to his previous enslavement, for Aatea does not want to survive at the expense of others as the nomads do. From Aatea’s perspective, the nomad’s dog-eat-dog worldview only replicates the unjust hierarchies of the islanders.

Aatea does not read like a political story. Told from the protagonist’s perspective alone, it concerns his journey; it resembles a Bildungsroman more than a novel of intrigue or social commentary. Political maneuvering, embodied by the repugnant noble astronomer Orua, remains mostly in the background and represents that which Aatea seeks to escape. We do not learn how the islanders’ iniquitous hierarchies dissolve; we are offered only a very modest and timidly drawn (anarchist/cooperative) alternative to the model of domination/servility that Aatea resists in the passage above. Faure’s novel offers no facile solutions to inequality and no political program clearly animates her narrative; her allegorical gestures do not map neatly onto existing social realities. Politics—the caste system of the islanders, the survival-ethos of the nomads—pushes the narrative forward but mostly does not lead to political conclusions, with the possible exception of subtly advocating for non-violence (Aatea is no warrior, but a peace-loving navigator, although unlike Catherine Dufour’s Champs de la lune, Aatea does contain a great deal of adventure).

These three very different narratives—Dufour’s, Roch’s, and Faure’s—all wrestle differently with the political dimensions of their narrative, and with the demands of form. Dufour’s politics are pessimistic with regards to the possibility of transformative collective action; her protagonist remains ultimately isolated (in a position of resignation or renunciation, perhaps—but ambiguously). Despite that pessimism, and her always understated approach, her politics seem clearly articulated in favor of a form of ecological stewardship. Faure prefers not to foreground political critique yet positions it at the core of her narrative; resistance to social hierarchy and systemic inequality forms the unambiguous moral backdrop against which an apparently individualistic tale takes shape. The contrast between the polity and the individual takes center stage in both these narratives. Only Roch pushes collective action to the fore: Ties to (usually dissident) communities define his characters, and isolated or solitary figures often suggest a form of irreparably damaged life, with few exceptions. Both Faure and Roch differently support belonging as a relative antidote to the all-consuming logic of domination, although belonging itself is never a simple and settled affair.

In the small but bustling world of French science fiction, political commitment is largely an expectation, at least among its producers (some of its consumers may care a great deal more about “entertainment”). In the broader world, calling fiction “political” often suggests criticism of that fiction, a sense that it is too preachy or moralistic. What I find interesting in the “politics” of these three books is that “preachiness” is not a function of political messaging, but one of aesthetic integrity. It is because Roch’s “Avaler la terre” does violence to logical character development that it appears “preachy,” not because of the message per se. It forces Clod’s story into a Procrustean bed, that of a political conversion which feels implausible regardless of how we feel about the political content at stake. We cannot believe in Clod’s redemption because the psychological groundwork for that redemption has not been adequately laid. In other words, being “preachy” is not in fact a political flaw at all, but an aesthetic one. This applies to the anglosphere as much as it does to French speculative fiction; arguably, it applies to all fiction. In Roch’s case, the problem with “Avaler la terre” might be the price of the aesthetic risks he takes; Lanvil emmêlée is doubtless the most formally inventive and innovative of the three books discussed here, and the closest in outlook and approach to the historical avant-gardes that have so heavily influenced French speculative fiction. To my mind, formal daring like that of Michael Roch has positioned francophone speculative fiction at the forefront of francophone literary experimentation in the twenty-first century.

Since teaching those French science fiction courses at Virginia Tech, I have not resolved the questions I have raised here, such as the problem of form and its relation to political commitment. I cannot presume to have torn back the veil of language and revealed the specificity of francophone speculative fiction—but I can, based on these strong recent examples, advocate for a more robust culture of translation in the anglosphere. Francophone speculative fiction is to be envied precisely because it resists linguistic and national barriers through a healthy ecosystem of imported literature. The same might be said of littératures de l’imaginaire in other countries outside the anglosphere. Translation is the only remedy to our near-sightedness, and the mission of translation is the same as that of speculative fiction: to take the human imagination as far as it can go.

Endnotes

[1] Mélanie Fazi writes fantastic tales of a pure sort, such as in Rêves de cendre (2023); Nicolas Liau has authored several macabre collections in a quirky, elaborate style that hovers between the comic and the gloomy. I would also include the dark fantasy La Cité diaphane by Anouck Faure (2023), which I’ve written about at length in “The Weird and the Fantastic: Genre in Theory, Genre as History,” an academic article in Modern Language Notes, vol. 140, no. 4, Sept. 2025, p. 870-889. This article is available as an open access publication. [return]

[2] I’m partly taking my cues here from the French scholar Simon Bréan, whose book La Science-Fiction en France (2012) argues that, before the 1950s, the French tradition has little “true” SF and indulges instead in what he calls the “novel of scientific imagination” (“le roman d’imagination scientifique”). One of the characteristics of this proto-SF is the isolated, circumscribed nature of the science-fictional phenomenon or the protagonist: Rather than implicating an entire society, the science-fictional element (called a novum by critic Darko Suvin) is very limited in scope, just as Nemo and his Nautilus have no impact on the broader society of the nineteenth century in Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. [return]

[3] Some early French works have a much zanier feel, like the bizarre and often funny Gaston de Pawlowski’s Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (Voyage to the Land of the Fourth Dimension [1912], whose “adaptation” into English should be forgotten in favor of a proper translation still to come. Pawlowski’s work also demonstrates the mystical and irrational component often present in the French tradition. “Hard” science fiction seems considerably rarer in France than in the anglosphere. [return]

[4] A few pre-1950s “popular” writers who deserve more ink include Gustave Le Rouge (1867-1938) and Maurice Renard (1875-1939). Renard wrote another “weird savant” tale called Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), while Le Rouge’s Martian duology (Le Prisonnier de la planète Mars in 1908 and La Guerre des vampires in 1909) anticipates several later SF tales and includes a cosmic horror component. [return]

[5] An early proto-SF film in France is the art deco-infused L’Inhumaine by Marcel L’Herbier (1924), which involved the likes of the couturier Paul Poiret and Fernand Léger, and whose politics are deeply objectionable, including a brown foreigner as the villain and a blond, blue-eyed protagonist. On the other hand, the anglosphere has always had the likes of Robert Heinlein. [return]

These questions are not so easily resolved in real politics. The history of political philosophies and forms can be interpreted, in part, as a history of opinions about the malleability of political change, how certain we can be about future stability or dynamism, and who has the agency to affect these futures. These are often strongly held opinions shading into the realm of faith. Perhaps that’s why SFF has only rarely addressed the question of political agency as a truly speculative one, rather than firmly level-setting at the worldbuilding stage. However, the genres have great untapped potential to explore questions about political inevitability and lack thereof.

These questions include where choice (if it exists) is located, how broadly distributed it is, what constrains it, and how (if at all) it’s possible to expand it. In a time when these subjects are so volatile in reality, surfacing them in speculative fiction is vital for helping people grasp their own agency. Is fascism avoidable? Why isn’t the arc bending consistently toward justice? Do my actions make a difference, or is that just something corporations say to distract from their own responsibilities? Scroll through social media and you may find all-too-certain answers to these kinds of complex questions. Speculative fiction provides opportunities for more nuanced responses.

 A History of Speculative Inevitability

Many of the formative texts of speculative fiction, the direct forebears of fantasy and science fiction as they exist as genres today, are descended from the chivalric romance and the epic poem.

In the evolution of fantasy specifically, the divine right of kings and the feudal system which surrounds it are thoroughly embedded in the ur-texts which serve as the genre’s earliest models, such as Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) and the Song of Roland (c. 1100). Early fantasy writers like William Morris (1834-1896) and James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) were among the first to begin deconstructing these concepts with a contemporary genre framework. For his part, J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)—one of the most influential models for the fantasy genre in the latter half of the twentieth century—did not use these ideas unquestioningly or uncritically, either. But he and other early fantasists also generally did not seriously explore alternatives. Indeed, the forms of political inevitability which appear in Tolkien, and which he passed along to English-language fantasy from epic and romance, are a reasonable gloss for the forms of political inevitability which have dominated genre conversation ever since.

These forms include, for example, literal divine blood as a source for the divine right of kings, an idea which goes back to the epic of Gilgamesh and appears in cultures from Egypt to Japan. Tolkien does complicate this somewhat: While the line of Luthien, Aragorn’s family, is prophesied never to fail, for instance, there are certainly centuries in which they do not hold the kingship; yet even in this case, the line does intersect with another common form of inevitability, the concept of prophecy as a shaping historical force. Prophecies in post-Tolkien fantasy may be true or they may be false, steered by or misinterpreted, lost, garbled, or literally carved in stone, but they are never simply irrelevant. Most obviously, the concept of the chosen one, as an initially humble but eventually messianic champion, can be directly related to prophecy, or to the driving forces of divine blood or divine fiat.

The most frequent genre model of inevitability leaves space for an inscrutable and rarely interventionist overlord/creator god in addition to less powerful but more accessible subordinate pantheons. This thread of gods driving the destiny of mortals runs from standard pseudo-medieval fantasies through more mindful history-inspired secondary worlds (e.g., Bujold’s Five Gods [2001-] series, Bear’s Eternal Sky books [2013-2015]), and then through more modern settings such as Butcher’s Dresden Files (2000-).

Early science fiction also descends from the chivalric romance via the traveler’s-tale and scientific romance—and diverges from this less than might be supposed. Similar threads inform such tropes as mathematically predictable societal developments, superhuman computer intelligences, and the evolutionary maturation of species from fallible physical forms into enlightened and powerful energy beings. In E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series (1934-1948), psychically powerful aliens form a Manichaean cosmological split. The noble Arisians ordain lineages of powerful chosen ones, whose battles against the evil Eddorians permit the growth of truly adult civilization. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1942-1993), the psychohistorian Hari Seldon has, though by no means a Marxist, determined the specific twists and turns of the inevitable trends of history, and chooses himself and a small set of other people to influence those twists and turns in the directions he prefers. Neither of these series is explicitly theist—both leave the question open—but the outlines of the same ideas about prophecy and choice which have dominated fantasy are clearly visible. The differences are that material beings, either human or alien, (usually) take the place of the gods in their capacity for agency. Also notable is the integration of the Victorian anthropological idea that civilizations and species have natural cycles and patterns of growth and maturation, in the same way that individual organisms do.

For a long time, this sort of idea has offered a relatively unexamined groundwork for speculative fiction. It is rare to find fantasy in which people discover that the divine right of kings holds true in their universe and then try to change that. Philip Pullman, for instance, doesn’t go into the political consequences of the loss of God—but seems to assume that divinity wasn’t load-bearing and the universes can kind of run themselves from now on. On the other hand, Anne Ursu’s late-2000s middle-grade trilogy, The Cronus Chronicles (2006-2009), involves humans discovering that Greek mythology is real, deposing the gods, and taking over; but it’s a rare exception, and even so we see little of the new order afterwards. Le Guin’s The Other Wind (2001) is extremely notable in this direction for featuring a human correction of a major metaphysical problem with the afterlife, which also happens to be a metaphysical problem the author set herself with the worldbuilding of the early Earthsea novels. In other words, in changing a stereotypically bad vaguely-Greek afterlife into a not-at-all-bad Daoist oneness with the universe, Le Guin’s characters are in some ways rebelling against the inevitability of the author herself. However, this metafictional level effectively camouflages how unusual these plot elements are for a work of fantasy. Science fiction, too, rarely grapples with the overturn of non-strawman sociological theory. For example, we lack stories in which the idea that civilizations have maturation cycles is given serious credence—as it is without quibble in Foundation or the Lensman series—and is then disproven or dramatically modified. This is despite the fact that this paradigmatic shift was central to much of twentieth-century political thinking.

The Mutual Interplay Between Speculative Worldbuilding and Real-World Movements

In the collection Octavia’s Brood (2015), Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown explicitly connect mundane political work with SFF. Imarisha writes:

Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds—so what better venue for organizers to explore their work than science fiction stories?

This is intuitively compelling: When activists work on changing the world, we begin from the posture that a better world than the received status quo is possible. In activist work as in fiction, however, there are questions about how and why change takes place, and various accounts of the limits on what is possible. Perhaps the limits on speculative fiction’s imagined societal transformations mirror some of these real, historical assumptions about constraints.

Marx and Engels offered an account of political inevitability that, whether affirmed or denied or parodied, continues to be a reference point for many. In its most plausible form, theirs is the idea that the seeds of societal transformation are present even in the most constricted circumstances, and that the capitalist system of extraction and profit is riddled with internal contradictions that will lead to its collapse. On the left, this approach has sometimes produced what Sasha Lilley calls a “couplet of ideas”—that “capitalism will collapse under its own weight or that worsening conditions automatically give rise to revolution.”^[2] This produces a determinist-voluntarist dyad, in which we can just wait for an inevitable revolution to happen or heroically summon fundamental social change through the bold actions of an intrepid few. Determinism can produce quietism, the idea that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice all on its own, without any need for humans to push it. In contrast, voluntarism enjoins the chosen to make history through force of will.

Voluntarism can also hybridize with determinism to create destructive accelerationism: If revolution will come from worsening conditions because people will hit the limit of what they’ll accept, let’s allow (or encourage) things to get worse quickly, so that we can move to the next stage of world history ASAP. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) is a classic example: a lunar revolution is ultimately inevitable (assuming you trust the computer calculations), but revolutionaries must first make life harder in order to reach a critical level of support, lest the natural timetable lead to even worse hardships.

Nonetheless, in SF, perhaps because of what Jo Walton and Ada Palmer identify as the “protagonist problem,”^[3] most depictions of social transformation are on the voluntarist side: Big changes are depicted from the point of view of universe-moving characters. Think of Corey’s The Expanse universe, in which—while there are millions of people involved in a struggle for livable lives in the Belt—James Holden is routinely the catalyzing agent for transformation.

We see similar narratives of historical transformation in religious beliefs such as millenarianism, as well as in non-religious accounts that posit an inevitable pattern in the rise and fall of civilization (think here of Edward Gibbon’s account of the fall of the Roman Empire [1776-1789], which Asimov used as an overall plan for the Foundation series). Science fictional narratives land strangely often on the ideas that some higher power—divine or market-driven—determines the course of history and that the way things are—technologically or socially—determines automatically what will come next. Mixed in with this determinist line, we often also end up with voluntarist lone heroes, chosen ones, or at best small ensembles shaping change.

One telling example shows how real-world politics can interact with narrative goals, with subtle and often-overlooked implications. Steven Brust’s Dragaera novels (1983-) take place in an elven-dominated fantasy world where political succession is overtly enforced by a magical artifact. Each of seventeen houses must rule in its turn, and each rules in ways unique to its prototypical personality characteristics. Sixteen houses out of seventeen rule via imperial lordship, but once every few thousand years, the house of the Teckla successfully instantiates a brief republic. In Teckla (1987), however, a group of Teckla revolutionaries get hold of the equivalent of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and attempt a revolution out of turn. Their efforts fail because they are at the bottom of the Cycle. Brust is often praised for building a world that metaphysically conflicts with his real-world communist political beliefs. Digging deeper into the ideas raised in Teckla, however, they appear entirely compatible with the orthodox communist belief that certain historical progressions are inevitable. The implication, in fact, is that, without the interference of the Cycle, Dragaera would follow the “natural” rules that make communism inevitable on Earth, and that if it weren’t for this constraint, a central planning paradise would inevitably replace empire. This is unusual in that, while speculative fiction is full of workarounds for the speed of light, few stories explicitly contrast principles of political inevitability across worlds or time periods. Physics is up for imaginative modification; political science is not. Given that political science is a rich field full of loud and detailed arguments about which scientific laws, if any, govern human interaction, this seems like a big sandbox in which more creators should play.

A major exception to this tendency of the genre toward tropes of inevitability is alternate universe and time travel stories. Stories in which the consequences of different choices can be literally visited provide powerful tools for considering what choices are possible, and what differences they may make. They can also highlight authorial and cultural assumptions about what can’t be changed, or about what changes are interesting. For example, there are many more books about the Confederacy winning the US Civil War than about what would have happened if the catastrophic plagues following European contact with Turtle Island had been substantially mitigated.

These subgenres are, though, perhaps particularly suited to exploring the relationship between individual and societal possibilities. Emet North’s In Universes (2025), for example, focuses on one person’s options for self-discovery, modifying the world around them dramatically in order to ask what kind of society might be necessary for them to overcome depression and embrace their queerness. Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain (1988) audaciously explores what would have happened had Harriet Tubman not been sick the night John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry, imagining a collective formation that produced a socialist, space-exploring Nova Africa on the North American continent. And Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) questions the power of isolated decision makers to achieve ambitious improvements, while still acknowledging and celebrating individual contributions to collective dreaming.

A few other recent works illustrate the untapped potential of speculative fiction to question inevitability. Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors (2023) depicts a world shaped by prophecy, but in which competing prophecies can cancel each other out or open space for new choices. M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone (2022) retains certain Marxist assumptions about inevitability and violent revolution, but vividly depicts the collective nature of change through its “oral history” structure. And Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (2016-2021) depicts “great men” trying to shape events that their science predicts as inevitable, and in doing so discovering the limits of both those predictions and their own protagonistic power.

Inviting and Encouraging New Directions for Speculative Agency

Broadly speaking, patterns of political exchange might be portrayed as inevitable, fully open, or contingent. Inevitability provides simple constraints that allow certain well loved types of story: the restoration of the rightful king, prophecy and psychohistory, the need for a chosen savior who also makes a conveniently bite-sized protagonist. Fully open possibilities can easily go unmarked and unexamined, and allow for highly agentic characters who can change the world dramatically with enough resources. Contingency—the least explored of these options—requires wrestling with more challenging complexities, but also opens the door to all sorts of intriguing social science inspirations. Different possibilities may be open at different points and with different likelihoods, and competing groups may seek to leverage “steam engine times”—when multiple people invent something in parallel because all the precursor requirements are in place.

This type of complexity is typical of modern social science, but much storytelling is shaped by the simpler and more dramatic claims of earlier theories. Ships plying the ether are clearly marked as steampunk, but the Victorian civilizational lifecycle and the Great Ladder of Being still find their way into chemically-rigorous vacuums. Narrative appeal is one reason for building around these patterns. Another is the unavoidable awareness of real-life complexity: We live in a world that is impossible to fully grasp as an individual, and in which the many factors influencing politics—and the existential problems influenced by politics—feel deeply and dangerously out of control. A world of greater and simpler inevitability can provide a welcome escape, and we will complain about that just as soon as we’re finished with our current stacks of comfort reading.

Escapist stories are an important source of fuel, and dealing with real-life complexities can leave scant spoons for fictional ones. At the same time, stories of non-inevitability can open our imaginations toward not only possible futures, but our abilities to shape them. In the face of fascism and climate change, it can feel burdensome to realize that we can have some impact—though only limited—on the world’s movement along the spectrum between catastrophe and eucatastrophe. Speculative fiction can, and should, do more to help us figure out not only how to exercise this uncertain agency, but how to bear it.

Endnotes

[1] L. M. Bujold, Hugo Acceptance Speech, Denvention, August 2008. [return]

[2] S. Lilley, S., D. McNally, E. Yuen, & J. Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. [return]

[3] A. Palmer & J. Walton, “The protagonist problem,” Uncanny Magazine, 40, 2021. [return]

I never managed to settle on something that felt meaningful to say for the remembrances published in Strange Horizons’s 2023 special issue on criticism, even though Maureen was an influence on my critical practice, a warm correspondent, and the first editor to commission any of my writing. Here, three years late, is an effort to remember and honor her in a way that feels obvious in retrospect: by following her thoughts in writing about reading. In tribute to Maureen’s project reading the weird, I’m going to work through her observation about the Dead Marshes as a wider conceptualization of the moment of weirding and the act of weird reading.

In another essay, one of many trying to sketch out her critical practice, Maureen described her approach to reading speculative fiction as an active search for the sublime, and argued that “surely the very notion of sf is to invite the willing suspension of disbelief.” In addition to this larger suspension of disbelief, I will add that the ideal reader of the weird has to embrace a kind of wilful suspension of foreknowledge or generic expectation. This affected tabula rasa perspective requires, in turn, a critical approach, a practice of weird reading [1] hyper-attuned to the weird poetics of a piece as it signals its own weirding and becomes weird fiction. In an ideal world, being a reader of weird fiction would mirror being a character in weird fiction, unexpectedly encountering the irreal where you expected only the prosaic. That way, the affect of the weird can creep up (or irrupt!), unsettling reality and/or storyworld. In actuality, genre publications and reading habits being what they are, this is an incredible rarity. It’s far more often the case that a reader, aware that they’re entering the realm of the weird, preemptively reads weirdly, critically engaging with the text in search of clues and ways that the narrative has left the realm of the real and entered irreal territory. This is, moreover, a replication of the metaphorical experience at the heart of the mode of the weird. Maureen borrows from Adam Roberts that sf “is a fundamentally metaphorical literature because it sets out to represent the world without reproducing it.” This essay will go on to contend that weird fiction, too, is a metaphorical literature—because it generates a representation of the world without reproducing it and then actively unsettles it, and in so doing metaphorizes its own critique/criticism.

To begin our examination of this critical practice of weird reading, let’s turn to two momentous collections of/on the weird that were published last year. The Weird: A Companion (edited by Carl H. Sederholm and Kristopher Woofter), a nonfiction collection of criticism, theory, and history, and The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1 (edited by Michael Kelly, publisher of Undertow Publications), a collection of weird tales selected as the year’s best by one of the genre’s preeminent editors. Both of these books are indispensable guides to the state of the weird in the twenty-first century. In their emphasis on the weird’s profusion around and beyond genre lines and lineages, their respective grapplings with both theory and application of the weird each provide incredibly fertile ground for the practice of reading as an active search for weirding.

Sederholm and Woofter set forth two objectives for The Weird: A Companion: First, to “demonstrate just how expansive the Weird has become as a mode,” [2] and second, to claim space for the weird “not only as an aesthetic tradition but also as a vibrant, expansive critical term” (emphasis theirs). Weird reading as a practice takes both of these into account. To think of the weird as a critical framework helps guide both the formation of the body of texts that we read as “weird fiction” and the way we read those texts. I’m particularly fond of Indigenous scholar Kali Simmons’s reference to the potential of weird fiction as “a suspicious critical method that seeks to unmake hegemonic realities,” and this is precisely how I would like to bring it to bear here.

Weirding, in this sense, is an active unsettling, expressed both in the reading and the affective poetics that trouble, unsettle, and actively weird its material. I’m mostly concerned with the former here, but the latter bears mentioning, particularly in light of the metaphorical nature (or, at least, metaphorical reading) of the mode. Indeed, I’m not sure you can separate the two. Weirding as a critical perspective is embedded in both, since it characterises the attempt to write/represent/comprehend the unwriteable/unrepresentable/uncomprehendable as a critical way of thinking along all three axes. Destabilizing/unsettling/defamiliarizing is a method of challenging the reader, author, character all to look at and think about things differently. The reading of weird fiction, then, inculcates a critical approach, a practice of weird reading that centers the search for, and experience of, that defamiliarization.

Much has been written about H. P. Lovecraft’s emphasis on the inability of language to convey the weird, and perhaps for this reason his work has become (unfortunately) a synecdoche for the weird at large; but we don’t have to look far afield to find others doing the same thing. As Emily Alder notes in her chapter for Sederholm and Woofter on William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), the book’s style “is integral to its uncomfortable qualities as a weird tale.” She quotes Greer Gilman’s point that the language of such books “is wielded as a defense against the unspeakable horrors it cannot represent, often ‘working by paradox, denying what it names. It finds estrangement in a throng of words.’” [3] Weird reading is the active search for this estrangement, just as weirding is the active creation of this affect in a text. Both are applications of Shklovsky’s ostranenie: defamiliarizing as an artistic technique to make the usual strange and to make perception/understanding slower and more difficult.

Think back to Maureen’s observation about the unsettling effort required of the hobbits and Gollum to try to understand the weirded nature of the Dead Marshes in their own moment of weird reading. Uri Margolin has pointed to the mirroring of writing/reading as inherent to the technique of defamiliarization, which leads to “both the slowing down and the increased difficulty (impeding) of the process of reading and comprehending and an awareness of the artistic procedures (devices) causing them.” Weird reading/weirding is particularly cognate, in this mirroring, with queer reading/queering: Both are practices of reading that find something within a text and simultaneously critical approaches to the thing being found. Indeed, Brian Johnson’s chapter in The Weird: A Companion, “From Qweird to Queered Weird and Back: Notes on Reading Lovecraft in the Closet,” notes the etymological similarity between “queer” and “weird” before suturing them into the jarring portmanteau of its title.

Weird fiction relies on this kind of liminal bleed—between writing and reading, between fields of knowledge and ontologies, and between the tools of the irreal and the unsettling—to weird something, to force it to be seen differently, to be understood outside of what was previously believed to be its nature. In the Companion itself, two of the axioms from Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s “Seven Weird Axioms” (a riff on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Culture: Seven Theses”) are key to this discussion: “The Time of the Weird is a Spiral” and “The Motor of the Weird is Crisis Energy.” That idea of Spiralling time partly shapes what Sederholm and Woofter refer to as the weird’s tendency “to frame knowledge-seeking and deciphering as always-already heading toward an impasse.” (Brian Johnson similarly notes the “always already” sense inherent to queer weird readings.) In weird fiction, crisis energy is produced within “a moment of indeterminacy poised on the edge of the knife’s blade between the rightness or wrongness of the world” during a “transition from the familiar into the strange”; it is this that “propels the spiral of the Weird.” [4]

Weird reading rests on these crucial moments of criticism and crisis—which both stem, ultimately, from the Greek krī́nein, “to separate, choose, decide, judge,” and which spiral throughout the weird reading of weird fiction. The shape/movement of this crisis/criticism means that weird fiction can embed these moments in line-level poetics and/or structure throughout a story. As with the weird within the storyworld, sometimes it’s an abrupt irruption, even within the first lines of the story; sometimes it’s incredibly subtle; sometimes it’s only legible within the arc of the entire work.

Chris Campbell’s story in Kelly’s anthology, “In the Palace of Science,” opens with the classic weird fiction tactic of a warning that spirals throughout the rest of the story: “If you’ve found this recording … a grave danger to humanity most assuredly survives with it.” Uchechukwu Nwaka’s “An Offering of Algae,” on the other hand, immediately announces itself as post-apocalyptic science fantasy, leaving the reader to piece together what’s particularly unsettling, particularly weird, about the setting. Rachael Jones’s “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus,” meanwhile, establishes a science fictional world and weirds the narrative only at its very end, reaching back to estrange what the reader encountered at the beginning. These moments are more abstract elsewhere: Nicholas Royle’s “British Wildlife” manages to estrange the quotidian with an overwhelming emphasis on menace and implication within the line level; Joe Koch’s “These Are His Memories” does so by blurring its narrative voice, the “you” of an embedded story and the “you” of the second person narration metafictionally reminded that “you, too, are made of paper”; telling both character and reader that the weird has “so many causes and effects, failures, losses, but lots of them good, the things you worked for and wanted, happy occasions. It’s never one thing. There is no straw. It creeps up on you.” Whether overt or subtle and diffuse, these moments of indeterminacy and unsettlement, these liminal spaces of critical thinking, are where weird fiction happens, where things are weirded.

Toni Morrison, in reference to the opening lines of Beloved (1987), pinpointed this moment as a “fully realized presence of the haunting,” which was “both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of hand” and acted to “keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.” The former, the effect upon and effort required by the reader, is what I’m focused on here, but I never want to lose track of the latter, which was the emphasis of “Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism,” to which the current essay might be thought of as a companion piece. Homi K. Bhabha built upon Morrison’s shocking crisis moment of the fully-realized haunting as a “moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion” in the “beyond” where “there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction.” Finding oneself suddenly in the beyond is exactly what weird reading does (or should do)—and the disorienting, disturbing depaysement of the weird means that dread and the numinous, both amorphous and ambient affects, are often more important for the weird than horror or disgust.

Charlotte Tierney’s story in the Kelly, “A Woman’s Place Is in the Haunted Home,” centers this weirding affect of reading. Its protagonist Lisa, a new mother, reads and constantly cites texts, both real and fictional, as part of her “critical analysis” of infant care. The story posits pregnancy and postpartum anxiety as weird hauntings: Lisa accrues many thousands of ghosts, each one created by a crisis moment of worry about her child’s safety. In an expression of the always-already of dread and the weirded spiral, “Lisa knew a haunted house was, customarily, already haunted prior to a ghost’s manifestation.” The story also twists and weirds its ghosts to emphasize its distance from horror; rather than the appearance one would expect based on prior fiction (“Unreal, uncanny, and unlikely”), they look real, “empty and sad, rather than horrifying.”

Thomas Ligotti, in his “‘In the Night, in the Dark’: A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction” (originally the foreword for his 1994 collection Noctuary and reprinted in Sederholm and Woofter), riffs on the oft-explained etymology of the weird as a form of fate to note that “[t]he entrapments presented in weird fiction may go so far as to be absolute, a full illustration of what was always in the works and only awaited discovery.” Or, to pull from Thomas Ha’s “Alabama Circus Punk,” collected in the Kelly and wherein a digital lifeform has been infected with a cybervirus which corrupts its language capabilities, leading to its realization that “nothing was safe or whole or solid, and none of it ever really was.”

But, in true weird spiral fashion, we must—before digging into that moment of the weird verb—begin with the weird as noun. As much as I want to avoid the genre-wrangling so endemic to writing about the weird, I find that it’s necessary to explore a little how the verbed weird creates the noun weird. Sederholm and Woofter’s introduction, indeed, begins their book with the declaration that “[a]nyone who writes about the Weird eventually must address the daunting prospect of definition.”

*

The film historian Jeanine Basinger, in her book on Anthony Mann (1979), wrote that noir is not a genre but a “virus” which “attacks healthy genres and makes them sick, dark, discouraged, and disillusioned.” This is how we should think of the weird as well. Noir sickens, the weird weirds; both are verbs, active critical perspectives brought to bear by writers but also readers (and critics, who are nothing if not readers who write). In the Kelly, Natalia Theodoridou’s “Nocturnal” weirds itself immediately by unmaking a familiar tableau: As a child, the second-person subject was put to bed by her mother; but she is then told stories by “your not-mother, your other-mother” who “looks just like your mother, except she’s taller and there is no love for you on her face.” Decades later, the dying mother tells her daughter, herself now a mother, that stories are “[v]accines to guard against the cruelties of the world.” But the critical crisis moment of deciding which of these mothers to trust powers the story, vaccine or no. This mirrors the real experience of reading to find out when the weird declares itself, to discover the moment when a piece shifts itself into weird fiction.

This active and expansive shift is an important aspect of Sederholm and Woofter’s conception of the weird, informed by Mieke Bal’s idea of “traveling concepts”—ideas that move across scholarly disciplines and, in the process, “change, develop, and hybridize.” This slipperiness and perpetual elision of boundaries typifies the act of weirding and the act of thinking about/reading the weird. In Bal’s words, “[w]hile groping to define, provisionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do.” The weird, Sederholm and Woofter are at pains to argue, weirds things, forces a perspectival and critical reappraisal by way of estrangement. Weird reading is what picks up on that action.

We can further complicate the weird as a traveling concept by emphasizing its apophatic nature. Part of what invites critical, close reading in weird fiction is the fact that the weird thrives in voids and productive ambiguity even more than in direct explication, leaving the reader to interpret and fill in what the text does not. The metaphor of the weird as a void and a traveling concept appears directly in Richard Gavin’s “Banquets of Embertide,” in which the population of a small Northern town in Canada gathers for an annual banquet, a liminal ceremony to usher in the change from autumn to winter. It culminates in an intruder at the door (“Something foul is knocking at the door to our world!”), a guest which reveals itself as “a great absence, a thing (or rather a no-thing) of darkness, a negation whose absolute stillness permeates all.” This intruder, revealed to be the very concept of the grave, “has no qualities whatsoever. It holds no odour of the soil from whence it came, nor any traces of its previous occupants. In fact, nothing about it is inherent.” This is an incredible co-incident/spiraled echo of Alison Sperling’s assertion, in her chapter in the Companion on “Weird Queer Ecologies,” that the weird is an “affective (and therefore subjective) atmosphere more than a particular quality that inheres.”

I’ve often been frustrated with the overdetermined emphasis on genre multiplicity in discussions of weird fiction. Emphasizing an affective, apophatic atmosphere, Gavin’s negation—whose absolute stillness permeates all—provides a much more convincing alternative. For their part, Sederholm and Woofter argue that the weird is not a genre but a mode. That is, “if genre is meant to suggest a set of texts with certain key categorical definitions, tropes, and conventions (however hybridizing or constantly shifting and in tension), a mode is meant to indicate a particular orientation toward the world, a methodology or strategy.” This orientation, to hammer the point, is a critical one, in two important senses: As a model applied to works of fiction ex post facto through weird reading; and in the sense that, within the works of fiction at hand, the weird lives in moments of crisis/critical indeterminacy for its own thematic material. To return to Maureen, for a weird reader, “various taxonomies of literature and marketing come into play, in an effort to define as precisely as possible what it is one is after … It is only later that the realisation dawns that taxonomies are not only more fragile than might be supposed, and thus liable to collapse, but that this is a good thing, and indeed a necessary thing.” Similarly, Cristina Rivera Garza has emphasized the power of interrogating in and between genres; not “hybridity or the melting pot, or with things that fuse together harmonically” but “friction and constant questioning” so that you can “consider the frictions that happen when you jump from one way of writing to another.”

In other words, for the purposes of weird reading in particular, it isn’t that weird fiction partakes of different genres, but that it thrives in the friction that builds when moving between them. (Or, more accurately for our present purposes, in the intrusion of the mode of the weird into the host genre of the story.) Most obviously or stereotypically, this friction can be found in the shift from the real to the irreal in these crisis/critical moments of weird reading—emphasizing the movement and agentic character of the weird.

*

In The Weird: A Companion, Timothy Jarvis and Helen Marshall’s excellent chapter on “M. John Harrison’s Radical Vision of the New Weird” teases out some of the implications of a critical approach that spirals forward-and-backward within both text and corpus. [5] Pointing to Harrison’s insistence that the weird is “not ‘Lovecraftian’” but “a way of writing about the real,” Jarvis and Marshall situate the weird as a revelatory critical method used “to crowbar open the world to get at some quality of reality.” Against the tendency that sets Lovecraft as “a fountainhead for the Weird, with various tributaries springing forth from his tradition of cosmic horror,” they suggest that perhaps “the Weird should be described, not as a river, with waters flowing downward from a source, but as an estuary where freshwater and ocean mix to form a rich, brackish murk hiding many reefs and islands? Such a way of thinking about literary history emphasizes transmutation over transmission.”

I would push this excellent idea even further: The spiral/brackish temporality of the weird also troubles the periodized approach to weird fiction as bifurcated between the so-called old (or “haute”) weird and the new. As opposed to a Lovecraft-descended canon—whose emphasis on historical weight has more of a Gothic tenor than a weird one—we might say that the brackish approach is weirding the weird, emphasizing a more formal, close-reading approach to how the weird reads critically across genres. The brackish weird actively subsumes irreal crisis/critical moments even in stories by writers with no familiarity or active engagement with weird fiction as a Lovecraftian canon (for example, Franz Kafka or Toni Morrison). This ecumenical approach to the weird definitely infests The Weird: A Companion: There’s an incredible hodgepodge of texts under scrutiny, from movies, novels, and TV shows to black metal, visual art, and, of course, what I would call the most apt form of the weird, the short story.

The Best Weird Fiction of the Year takes it for granted that weird fiction takes place in short stories. Michael Kelly’s previous series, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, with a series of guest editors, ran from 2014-2018; this new book is a sequel, or sibling, to those earlier selections (“Welcome, once again, to the weird” the back cover proclaims, in a nicely spiraled timeline). It contains publications from 2024. Michael Kelly’s introduction to the anthology, while brief, is illustrative. Kelly is firmly in the brackish camp, with an expansive approach to the critical weird that demonstrates its generic profusion. He is anthologizing around genre gaps, selecting fiction that is “speculative, and often (but not always) works to explore and subvert the laws of nature,” expressed as “unceasing distortion and buckling of ambient space and time”—what a depiction of crisis energy!—“where plot, theme, atmosphere and voice coalesce. Hence, the lens from which you view the world is askew and occluded.” What’s noteworthy here is not just the critical viewpoint spotlighted as the effect of the weird, but that the you in question is not specified between character and reader.

This conception of weird fiction emphasizes not lineage but approach, a weird critical reading protocol in Samuel Delany’s sense, where, stressing the impossibility of defining genres, he emphasizes instead that “[a] more fruitful way to characterize the distinction between genres is to view it as a set of distinctions between reading protocols, between ways of reading, between ways of responding to sentences, between ways of making various sentences and various texts make sense.” Weirding in this guise is as much a function of reading as authoring, a critical view that spills beyond the text into a way of reading the weirdness, disjunction, and unsettlement of the world. As Borges wrote about Kafka, both hugely important authors for the brackish weird:

Kafka’s idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. The word “precursor” is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

In other words, the conception of the past brackish pool of weird writings both constitutes its own reading and is, in turn, constructed by it.

Dan Sinykin, in a recent article on “Sociology and Allegory,” notes that a critical reading in the spirit of Pierre Bourdieu “recognizes in texts allegories for the literary field.” That is, “to be reductive—that a book is always about its own attempt to succeed.” The visual art critic Clement Greenberg situated this kind of self-reflection as the bedrock of modernism writ large: “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.” [6] And so, as I promised earlier, in turn, I’m going to argue, with tongue only mostly in cheek, that weird fiction is a metaphor for critically reading weird fiction.

More seriously, it’s a metaphor for thinking about the world weirdly, for a weird critical reading of the world in crisis. In the brackish, Delanyian sense, the search for weird knowledge, the quest to find the crisis moment of weirding, is the reading protocol that determines weird fiction, by metafictionally recapitulating the narrative’s moment of crisis/criticism. In this more sober sense, weird reading as a way of thinking critically about the world is literalized in several of Kelly’s selections. In Greg van Eekhout’s “Across the Street,” a man fleeing “a fair number of damp, drizzly Novembers in my soul”—and sharing Ishmael’s urge to step “into the street and methodically [knock] people’s hats off”—instead spends his lunch break walking past a string of corporate chains and franchises to cross the street in search of something weirder: mysterious footprints, a pet store featuring dragons, street signs with shifting alphabets, screaming churches and noises his brain had not evolved to process. He asks a passerby about portals elsewhere, and is told, “Everything’s a portal … It’s whatever you’ve always imagined is on the other side.” Pandemonium, unravelings, rebirth, apocalypticism: “These are only metaphors. Pale reflections of the beyond.” Of, in other words, Homi K. Bhabha’s “moment of transit”! Even more apt for our constant return to the spiraled time of the weird, the man comes across a street sign for “The World is a Sphere but Time is Linear Avenue.”

The protagonist of Seán Padraic Birnie’s “Black Water” also moves in metaphors and critical theories, haunted by his weird reading of the nature of reality. He “often felt as if he had not quite woken up: Some days it was twilight all day long. He had theories about that, but the trip was supposed to take him out of that frame of mind in which he developed theories. A theory, he knew, could get you in trouble.” In particular, it is his theory regarding the fictionality of the world—“That none of it’s real[,] not really [... which] haunts me.” The perspectivism of the weird is also expressed in the chronic pain and infestation or impregnation of the story’s male protagonist: He awakes in his captivity and sees through the “dim translucency” of his belly “eyes flitting through a flowing substance akin to smoke or black water.”

Black Water is also the title of a pair of Alberto Manguel anthologies that typify, without using the term, the brackish weird—collected stories where Manguel found “the impossible seeping into the possible, what Wallace Stevens calls ‘black water breaking into reality.’” Intertwined ghosts and metafiction do something similar elsewhere in Kelly’s anthology, too—in Zachariah Claypole White’s “Ghost Story.” A tightly coiled spiral told in the future tense (“In the ghost story, a boy will vanish”), it presents the meta-story of a ghost story about a missing boy, his single mother, judgmental townfolk, and a weird forest. The story is told, retold, and changed (somewhat) in the telling. Some things stay the same, including the fact that “The boy will not be found. Or at least not in a way which satisfies the ghost story.” The ghost story rendered as an agentic entity fulfills a similar role to Richard Gavin’s visiting absence: embodiments of the traveling concept of the weird. The story, then, is another metatextual expression of the critical power of the weird, a ghost story about a ghost story in which the ghost story is expressing certain expectations of ghost stories.

White’s story ends with the mother exerting her agency against the town. Staring into the forest, she will “call to its impossible clearings and black roots, beckoning them closer, toward the town that consumed her son.” This is an example of the unsettling numinous weird (or consonant weird, see note 5) as a crisis point that emerges at the end of a weird tale—and draws the reader into active engagement with productive ambiguity. Sohni Chakrabarti, in her Companion chapter on the weird as metaphor for Chicana feminist resistance, makes reference to the weird as “a kind of orientation or critical disruption” which “upsets and disrupts essentialist and dominant notions of identity, home, and belonging,” allowing writers to weird spectral female figures as—in the words of her subject, Mexican writer Gloria Anzaldúa—“the maternal, the germinal, the potential.”

Potential, here, should be understood as latent crisis, and as a way of understanding the weird as an affect. To spiral back to 1937, Clark Ashton Smith wrote in “Atmosphere in Weird Fiction” that his titular subject can be distinguished in the kinetic and the potential varieties—the former “comprising all the effects of overt surface imagery,” the latter the more important type for his (and our) purposes, as the one in which “all the implications, hints, undertones, shadows, nuances, and the verbal associations, and various effects of rhythm, onomatopoeia and phonetic pattern” plus the “ambiguity, the lack of precise definition, stimulate the reader's imagination and evoke shadowy meanings beyond the actual words.” It demands, in other words, active critical engagement on the part of the reader to read weirdly and parse the weirdness behind and in between the words. Back in 2024 and in the pages of Kelly’s anthology, the ambiguity in Kay Chronister’s Evensonian “Ruminants” invites unresolvable potential and untapped crisis. In the story, refugees trapped on an island are compelled to work as handlers for some kind of uncanny animal: “The ruminants are not cows but they are something like cows” which have “some wrongness in them that might somehow be transmitted to us if we were to consume them.” The characters are stuck critically, within the dread of krinein, of crisis and criticism, that is capable of being but not yet in existence within the spiraled time of the weird. This sense of crisis is generated by the text, particularly in its points of productive ambiguity, and left in inconclusiveness and perpetual crisis, in the place where critical thought happens.

*

Maureen Kincaid Speller, in writing about and reading the weird, suggested that, within the mode, “the pleasure derives from the ongoing uncertainty but also from the potentiality of the situation.” As usual, she was on to something. This is the form of the disrupted, crisis-riddled world we find ourselves in—and a critical weird reading of that potentiality helps us make metaphorical sense of our perpetual feelings of dis-ease. It’s fitting that Maureen left her reading project on The Weird unfinished, in a liminal, indeterminate state. After spending six months on it and covering about a third of the anthology, she left it for three years before returning in 2015 for one last entry on Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd” (1943). At the end of her discussion of this story about a mass of onlookers who cluster around car accidents, Maureen concluded that, regarding the question of the crowd’s mysterious origins, “[w]e never know. In fact, we never can know. That’s the beauty of the story. And yet, ever afterwards, you can never look at a street accident in quite the same way.” The best weird fiction leaves us with this uncertainty, this impossibility of knowing for sure. Immersed in the brackish pool of the weird, we can never look at reading in quite the same way.

Endnotes

[1] Eileen Joy has written about her practice of weird reading in an essay of the same name in Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism. I’d love to engage with that here and spell out some differences (and similarities) between her project of weird reading as a philosophical inquiry and my project of weird reading as a way of engaging with and finding weird fiction, but for the sake of not stretching this piece any longer than it already is, I’ll just say that’s an essay prompt for another day. [return]

[2] This proper noun capitalization occurs sometimes in writing about weird fiction, but I won't be replicating it here outside of direct quotes. [return]

[3] For simplicity’s sake, essays and stories outside of the two books under discussion will be hyperlinked; anything without a hyperlink will be found in either The Weird: A Companion or The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1. [return]

[4] Speaking of crises: The climate crisis is frequently used as the go-to metaphorical reading of weird fiction; to such a degree that I find it such well-worn territory that I think it will be interesting to elide it here, even with the understanding that it is perhaps the foremost crisis of the twenty-first century and underlies so many of our social crises. [return]

[5] I find “the New Weird” to be a useful name for the specific movement of post-New Wave, post-Viriconium (1971-1984) work that embedded the weird within fantasy novels and which reached a boiling point about two decades ago; “new weird fiction” as a generalized reference to modern weird tales much less so. A much more useful distinction, I think, would be between the consonant and dissonant weird as sub-types of the affect, the former emphasizing transcendence and an embrace of monstrosity. The consonant weird thrives within the post-Clive Barker “new weird,” scare quotes very intentional. [return]

[6] I keep threatening to write an essay arguing that weird fiction, particularly in its resurgent late twentieth/early twenty-first century version, is an amalgam of reading strategies pulling on modernism by way of speculative fiction’s New Wave—with unsettling affects pulled largely from horror. One of these days I’ll actually do it. [return]

Who are some of the singular and eccentric authors within English-language speculative literature? The ones who may (re)define or defy genre boundaries, the ones who frustrate and enthrall in equal measure, and how are we to consider their influence on other writers?

Commissioned by Strange Horizons, we gathered via videoconference and shared docs to identify some names and themes. The task is inherently difficult, since it may be oxymoronic: How to categorize and corral the misfits, renegades, those who are purportedly sui generis? What makes a writer idiosyncratic and hard to imitate while nevertheless being inspirational and influential? How do we even discern and trace, let alone measure, “influence”?

We decided that movies, music, and video games were beyond our scope, and that we would focus on the written word (primarily prose, though poetry may figure), from the drabble to the doorstop multivolume series, in English-language speculative literature, potentially including works translated into English.

We were seeking to identify a score or so authors who defy easy classification, whose unique style and/or creative philosophy have influenced other writers (and are recognized as such by other writers) in perhaps subtle and oblique but demonstrable ways—even if they did not establish a “school” or “distinct group of self-defined disciples.”

While we engage for the most part directly with the novels and short stories, we acknowledge the work of critics and reviewers who have also focused on “the odd and the rum,” and more broadly the long history of lit-crit debates about what constitutes “the unique” and “influence.” Please see the appendix for some of the critics and scholars whose insights have most inspired us. Brian Attebery’s “mitochondrial theory of fantasy literature and intertextuality” is an important guide. Above all, we strive to be, in Merve Emre’s words, “generous readers,” “the critic as friend.” We also agree with Molly Templeton when she says: “The criticism I love best is an act of curiosity. An investigation, an exploration. And an open door.”

What follows is not a transcript of a single event, but rather a synthesis of our running discussion over several months via Google Doc, email, and Zoom, jointly edited by all contributors. Our format is not direct one-to-one reportage, much less minute-taking.

The Conversation

Daniel Rabuzzi: Thank you all for joining the roundtable, and thanks to Strange Horizons for organizing it as part of the annual criticism issue. Let’s begin with an assertion by Paul Di Filippo that “some works of SF [are] so unique that they don’t really inspire any scions, homages or imitations.” In this category he included works such as The Stars My Destination (1956), Lord of Light (1967), and The Spear Cuts Through Water (2022). I think Di Filippo is right, and that we can nuance his take: Even the most seemingly unique works influence others, albeit often in obscure, round-about, unacknowledged ways. Your reactions?

Kristen Bell: I really like the quote from The Spear Cuts Through Water review, as well as that novel as an example. I’ve also been thinking about authors who are difficult to imitate because they have such a unique style, like Terry Pratchett or Patricia A. McKillip. They might inspire others but there’s just something about some authors, like Pratchett and McKillip, that’s so uniquely them that nothing will ever seem quite the same even if they were influences.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: Authors I think of as “an unheralded influence” would be Helen Oyeyemi and Lesley Nneka Arimah. African women writers are often left out of the canon even though they’re doing some incredible, formally daring work from the margins. Nnedi Okorafor is another pioneering writer in this regard. I want to emphasize in particular how fully Oyeyemi’s work defies easy categorization. Is it gothic? Fabulist? Magical realism? Oyeyemi’s work tends not to follow any rules of genre and always leaves me with more questions than answers. Oyeyemi seems to go where her curiosities lead her.

Drawing from fairy tales, folklore, and gothic traditions, Arimah and Oyeyemi embed the speculative within the domestic and psychological. The uncanny unsettles the familiar environments their narrators inhabit: Houses think, mirrors remember, and mothers breath life into dolls. Their influence is most visible in writers who deploy speculative elements sparingly but decisively, who use the uncanny to reveal the darkness already residing within reality.

Other international or diasporic writers I would add to the canon are Ben Okri and Marlon James. Neither writer fits comfortably within the dominant frames of speculative fiction yet both have profoundly reshaped how writers imagine the relationship between realism and the unreal, myth and history, violence and spirituality. You see echoes of Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) in writers who center Indigenous cosmologies and oral tradition within their storytelling and who resist genre expectations that demand explanation or easy categorization. Similarly, in Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) in particular, Marlon James uses lyricism and excess to take the apparatus of epic fantasy (quests, monsters, chosen figures, immersive worldbuilding etc.) and overloads it with fractured narration, timelines that resist linearity, and contradictory narrators. James’s work recalls Amos Tutuola, a foundational figure in African speculative fiction whose use of Yoruba folklore, myths, and oral traditions in The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) was groundbreaking. Tutuola blended fantasy, horror, and spiritual quests through a unique, fragmented prose style. Tutuola laid important groundwork for writers like James who resist easy categorization to emerge.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Oyeyemi’s White Is For Witching (2009) is one of the books that haunts me, that I return to. Nothing quite like it, and, at the same time, its impact is deepened when I recognize how successfully she negotiates with and moves beyond her precursors. Jennifer Croft says about Oyeyemi’s 2025 novel A New New Me that “Oyeyemi’s work is always partly inspired by other writers,” and she argues that A New New Me is most informed by “the great 20th-century satirists of the Czech Republic and Poland, like Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) and Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69).” Now, Gombrowicz and Hrabal are themselves acquired tastes— “writer’s writers”—so Croft’s comment makes me think of subterranean streams of influence across generations, languages, and cultures. In this case, Oyeyemi adds her unique twist: She acts not only as a quiet influencer but as a translator and transmogrifier of the subtle influencers who came before her. Oyeyemi exemplifies for me hidden traditions that are as important as the obvious lineages we label “Tolkienian” or “in the spirit of Robert E. Howard,” or “Lovecraftian,” or “after Jack Vance,” and so on.

Charles Payseur: Being more engaged with short fiction, I’m thinking of the stories of Vina Jie-Min Prasad, who has had a lot of striking short fiction and who I would call a rather unique voice in the field. But there are dozens of authors whose work I’ve come across over the last decade who manage a very unique style and voice and who are challenging, for me at least, to place in a direct flow of influence. Some of that might be simple cultural blinders: I’m largely monolingual and monocultural, having grown up and lived in the Midwest of the US my entire life, and lacking the same cultural touchstones and foundational texts that many who grew up elsewhere or who grew up reading and writing different languages might have. So the idea of “uniqueness” to some extent varies a bit from reader to reader. But I do think, since we’re talking largely of the English-language speculative fiction field, those who are coming in from the margins of that space are going to often have an element of “uniqueness” that can be partly explained by their particular inroads into the genre and how different those inroads can be globally.

Kristen Bell: “Unique” is a rather complicated word because I’m very aware of the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. But, as the rest of Octavia E. Butler’s quote says, “there are new suns,” and those are always fascinating to discover. At the same time, I’m aware that my new sun might seem like an ordinary sun to someone else, given we’ve all experienced different stories—and even for those we do have in common, we could have very different views on it due to other works we’ve read, which parts stand out to us, or myriad other personal reasons. (Which is also fascinating!)

The works that seem most unique to me tend to contain a combination of factors that make them different, memorable, and difficult to imitate. Here are a few examples.

• Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Satire, wordplay, and footnotes are not unique on their own, of course, but Terry Pratchett’s cleverness and wit certainly make his work unlike anything else I’ve read. When another work does remind me of his writing, it’s usually only on a surface level, and I probably mainly see a similarity because I don’t read enough humorous, satirical fantasy not to see a bit of a comparison on the rare occasions I pick one up.
• Laini Taylor. She excels at developing characters, her creativity and imagination shine, and she is excellent at building mysteries about the setting she’s created and slowly unraveling them: whether that’s the world beyond the portals in Daughter of Smoke and Bone (2011), the history of the Unseen City in Strange the Dreamer (2017), or the story behind the girl who wakes up one morning with a different eye and new memories—neither of which belong to her—in “Hatchling” (2009).
• Octavia E. Butler. Her work has great range, and though they may have some themes that overlap, each of her stories is different. I love how she often starts with something like our world as a jumping-off point, then makes it diverge from ours in a way that makes it feel like something else altogether. I find it especially fascinating that her Patternist and Xenogenesis books are different takes on humanity’s future development, with each series showing those changes over the course of multiple books.
• Jacqueline Carey. Settings based on an alternative version of history are not unusual, but Jacqueline Carey’s invented pantheon in the Kushiel’s Legacy series (2001-2011) and its message of “Love as thou wilt” is refreshing—and, of course, Phèdre nó Delaunay is an iconic heroine. I can’t say I’ve read any other books following a gods-touched masochistic courtesan/spy, but she also stands out as an exceptionally well-written character due to her rich voice that encapsulates her intelligence and desire for knowledge, deep compassion, and remarkable inner strength.
• Nnedi Okorafor (with a check plus to Yvette’s earlier comment). Death of the Author (2025) is unlike anything else I’ve read, alternating between the story of an author’s life and parts from her successful science fiction novel following robots in Nigeria in the distant future. It’s a fantastic ode to the power of stories.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Delving into “the power of stories,” I want to foreground the importance of prose style as a key vector in what I find unique or at least arresting in an author. (I recommend Matthew Oliver, Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy [2022], and wish we had much more of this sort of close reading and explication of the text.) What do you all think?

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: Style is much harder for me to define! Perhaps it is a writer’s signature, something so idiosyncratic to the writer that no one else could have written it? But I think that a writer’s signature is not just one thing: It’s voice, it’s sentence level, the kinds of worlds they build and beyond.

I think one useful way for me to think of it is to borrow from fashion: “Style is the unique way a person combines elements to create their own aesthetic.” So, in writing, how do you wear the sentences, how do you construct the world and guide the reader through it? I’m thinking of how Marlon James’s style embraces excesss with its long sentences, dense imagery, and sprawling casts. His prose often carries the rhythm of oral storytelling. In thinking about how an author guides the reader through their world, do they give us a single candle and expect us to find the way in the dark alone or do they switch on all the overhead lights and let us play in the world and explore at our leisure? I think Oyeyemi is an author who never lets you settle comfortably into the rooms she builds: The overhead light blinks in and out and when you finally change the lights, the room has shifted underneath your feet. Oyeyemi’s work creates uncanny realities, but the strangeness of the world is rooted in character. The worldbuilding is rooted in liminal spaces that you cannot comfortably settle in. We see the world through the eyes of characters who have a second sight, characters who see beyond the visible world and never fully fit into our world. I’m thinking of characters like Jess in The Icarus Girl (2005) who lives between cultures, between Englishness and Nigerianess, between Blackness and whiteness as a mixed raced child haunted by the spirit Tilly Tilly, who follows her to England from Nigeria. I’m thinking of the somewherehouse with two doors in The Opposite House (2007): one opening to London, the other to Lagos. Oyeyemi’s characters are never fully settled in the spaces they inhabit and this creates a warped, loopy world for the readers to navigate, an in-betweenness.

Charles Payseur: Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Alaya Dawn Johnson each have a categorically unique style, regardless of what particular genre or subgenre they are writing in. Yes, Moreno-Garcia has written Lovecraftian-style work, and more romance-influenced speculative fiction, but at the end of the day I’ll agree with Kristen that part of what it comes down to is if the particular combination of influences combine into something that is more rare and singular. Writers like Melissa Scott (cyberpunk science fiction) or Richard Bowes (contemporary fantasy/science fantasy) or Clive Barker (horror) all came out of traditions within SFF, but managed to do things that were very unique and in turn I think went on to influence other writers by showing just how some of those larger trends could be twisted, subverted, or complicated.

I think in short fiction over the last decade or two, we’ve seen authors like Sam J. Miller (contemporary fantasy/science fantasy), R. B. Lemberg (second-world fantasy), Sarah Pinsker (strange, liminal horror/science fantasy), C. L. Clark (2^nd world fantasy), and others all emerge as interesting and unique voices in the field with distinct styles. They have influenced, and will influence, many writers who have come after (even as each of those authors puts out their own work still). But their most important contributions might be more than just the authors they have inspired—it might be more about how they’ve shown what kinds of stories can not only be told, but can be popular and critically acclaimed.

Kristen Bell: I really like this point, having come across interviews where authors mentioned they didn’t realize they fit or that you could do this until reading something specific.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: The concept of permission resonates! I will have more to say on this.

Kristen Bell: Returning to the specifics of style, I’d like to draw attention to Laini Taylor’s glorious prose. She comes up with descriptions that feel simultaneously new and old: They’re unlike anything I’ve encountered before, yet they’re such a perfect fit that it’s like they’ve been there all along. One of my favorite examples of Taylor’s writing is from the story “Goblin Fruit” in Lips Touch: Three Times (2009) (interestingly, despite having such a memorable section, this is probably my least favorite of her individual works). This homage to Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” follows Kizzy, a teenage girl who grew up hearing about the time her grandmother saved her sister from goblins when they were young—and like her grandmother’s sister, this girl exudes the sort of palpable longing that goblins find irresistible. The author beautifully captures this wanting and Kizzy’s dreams of who she’d like to be through vividly specific imagery in the following passage:

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy’s blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn’t possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer’s small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.

Kizzy wanted.

Daniel Rabuzzi: I appreciate the close reading, so we can savor the text directly! For me, “uniqueness” stems in large measure from how effectively the author manages through their prose to make me feel estranged from my daily perceived reality, to make me willingly suspend my disbelief—to harken back to a core definition of what drives speculative literature.

I think Glen Cook’s gritty, first-person style opened doors for later authors to adopt similar voices. Likewise Hal Duncan with his fever dreams, Sonya Taaffe with her re-imagining of poetic forms, Cat Valente with her ornate, hothouse prose. I think Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont deserve a special shout-out for the sheer audacity of the Malazan project.

 Charles Payseur: In short fiction, I think the biggest impacts have been on editors and other gatekeepers, who have seen the reception of these trailblazing stories and had to rethink their own resistances to publishing stories that are outside of their comfort zones. And that really is where I see the true influence in the most unique and memorable authors like Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Clive Barker, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett, and more. It’s not that they don’t have their imitators (there are a ton of authors trying to write after these giants), but that their true impact is in the expanding of the field to be more diverse and inclusive. While the lines of influence in terms of subject, tone, and so on (that is, the elements of style in traditional writing education) are important, there’s something to be said about doing something new and breaking down gates as a result that I think lifts authors into what we think of as influential.

And uniqueness is something that changes over time, as well. We have seen a growing influence in speculative fiction, and fiction in general, of fanfiction, for instance. I feel like some of the growth in discourse around “cozy” speculative fiction has come in part from trends in fanfiction crossing over into the professional writing spaces. There’s something where there were stories that felt more unique before the trend really caught on, but perhaps became a bit less so over time because that’s the nature of trends (and also they weren’t perhaps all that unique if you were already familiar with those trends and tropes in fanfiction before they spilled over). So, whether we see works like Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (2022) as unique is perhaps dependent on whether we already had experience with stories like that in spaces outside of mainstream speculative fiction.

Daniel Rabuzzi: I like the term “mainstreaam speculative fiction” for what it implies about margins becoming cores, in a constant movement of types and genres. Reminds me of how Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint (1987) and Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s Sorcery and Cecelia (1988) launched the “fantasy of manners”/Regency romance and magic movement. They were arguably the forerunners to “romantasy,” real pioneers, unique at the time. Young readers today might not even be aware of this history, inundated as the market is with bestselling series by Maas, Yarros, and so on. But if younger readers can be excused for their lack of knowledge, experienced critics cannot be. As Le Guin put the case about the Harry Potter phenomenon: “How could so many reviewers and literary critics know so little about a major field of fiction, have so little background, so few standards of comparison, that they believed a book that was typical of a tradition, indeed quite conventional, even derivative, to be a unique achievement?”

Charles Payseur: Which I guess is all to say that for me the idea of uniqueness is going to be a bit different from person to person. But something that does seem important in that idea of uniqueness is how unique it remains over time.

Kristen Bell: I think I see what you mean, but I also think there’s more nuance to this. Uniqueness does change over time, and there are definitely trends that will emerge and then won’t seem unique anymore pretty quickly afterward. But I also wonder if there are things that we might not see as particularly unique today that would have remained unique if not for the fact that it did resonate with so many people who tried to do something similar and made something really popular. Is an individual work any less unique if it made people think, “Oh, this is interesting,” and started a trend?

Charles Payseur: At the heart of this discussion of ours is perhaps the recognition that uniqueness is something that we really only see over a longer period of time, as we experience what authors seem to fit better into trends and who stand out as more different not just from their peers but for those who come after. Baldree might be seen as one of the early “cozy SFF” adopters, but as the trend continues I’d be harder pressed to call that style truly unique.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Cy reminds us of the shifting winds of taste and reception. As long-time literary editor Gerald Howard recently wrote:

The life of literature and the lives of its creators are radically unpredictable and, frankly, fractal. As much as we would like to think that the republic of letters, as it used to be called, is a linear and orderly place where the best books are immediately recognized for their quality and achievement and therefore rise like cream to the top, the precise opposite is true. […] Literary reputations are never static and fixed, instead being subject to a ceaseless churn as tastes change and evolve.

I think, for instance, of Lin Carter emphasizing the long-term influence of Lord Dunsany (otherwise forgotten by the late 1960s), Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler pointing out the importance of African American authors neglected by the canon-makers, and the creation of The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society in 2000. More broadly, I recall that artists today considered canonical once languished in obscurity until later artists and/or scholars revived their posthumous fortunes: the Great J. S. Bach Revival of the 1820s, the same for Melville in the 1920s, and the recent surge of interest in Zora Neale Hurston. What would we even know of Kafka if not for Max Brod’s efforts on his behalf?

*

At this point, we all stretched our legs, had a cup of tea or coffee, and then returned to the discussion.

*

Daniel Rabuzzi: Let’s drill down on the nature of influence. One marker of indelible influence—even if made with invisible ink—is whether the author makes me re-read their precursors in a new light. Do I reconfigure my understanding of a given theme, tradition, or trope as a result of this author’s creativity? To give an iconic example, per Harold Bloom in his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, we read Marlowe today through the lens of Shakespeare. To give a spec fic example: I think this is equally true of N. K. Jemisin, after whom we should be re-interpreting entire swathes of epic fantasy and cosmic horror. Talk to us about how you see the innovators, the unique in spec fic influencing those who come after?

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: The Kenyan author and editor Shingai Njeri Kagunda has a practice of asking “what does this story give me permission to do?” when encountering a new work, and I’ve found it a useful framework in the way that I think about a particular work’s impact and influence on those who came after. With that in mind, I define influence as giving permission. It is that indescribable magic and alchemy, a kind of “eureka!” moment, when a work sets off a spark in another writer’s brain, when it gives others permission to play, to experiment, to be weird. It is when you read a piece of writing and immediately want to open up a blank page yourself and get to writing. Influence for me opens up something (perhaps a portal!) in another artist’s brain and it is in that opening where the magic happens. The works of Oyeyemi and Arimah have personally given me permission to play with genre, the uncanny and the weird.

I think short fiction and short story collections tend to be left out of conversations about influence in speculative ficiton in favor of bigger, sweeping secondary world epics. One standout science fiction collection in particular that is shaping Africanfuturism is Wole Talabi’s Convergence Problems (2024). Talabi’s science fiction anchors near- and far-future technology and science in Indigenous African knowledge systems. Stories such as “A Dream of Electric Mothers” and “Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core” merge speculative technologies with long-standing cultural practices around ancestry, spirit possession, and consultation. “A Dream of Electric Mothers” is set in an alternative futuristic Yorubaland where politicians make national decisions after consulting the “electric mother,” a network formed from the combined digitised minds of the ancestors. “Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core” takes the form of marginalia on a patent submission for a device that preserves the minds of the deceased, allowing loved ones to experience them as voices in their heads. Both these stories take the tradition in many African cultures of consulting the ancestors before making big life decisions and beliefs in spirit possession and merges them with technology. Talabi’s science fiction worldbuilding treats African belief systems as generative systems capable of producing their own futures. Talabi provides a model for speculative fiction that allows Indigenous epistemologies to shape a story’s ethical questions, narrative structures, and assumptions about progress itself.

Charles Payseur: I’m intrigued with how the idea of Influence intersects with individual authors. Because over time we can start to see what trends develop, and where they lead, and who gets to be seen as a pioneer of a particular trend, and who the disciples, and who are using those trends to jump off into new or contrary styles. Returning briefly to “cozy” SFF, it’s hard for me to see it as a trend wholly independent from grimdark.

Kristen Bell: I also think that these two are related and that it’s a cycle. Grimdark and morally gray characters started in response to stories with noble people who won the day, and now there’s a swing toward cozy, and then there are counter movements to that, and I suspect this will just keep going …

Charles Payseur: Right. “Cozy” SFF responds to the focus on the traumatic and bleak themes in a lot of media. As I see it originating more in fanfiction, I feel this response is more to media that isn’t novels or stories, but is instead television, movies, and video games, and the popular texts in those media that really like to focus on the grim, the gore, and the depressing and/or bleak. Creating alternate universe stories where characters can escape the horrors of their settings, and instead work or meet in a coffee shop or some such, is definitely influenced by grim trends in media, even though it becomes something new in relation to those (at the time) more dominant trends.

And of course “cozy” SFF has already spawned a number of counter movements from people wanting to get back the more grim elements, and who see “coziness” as lacking value in the genre. So I think that influence is more complicated than just influential authors inspiring writers to emulate or otherwise lean into a particular style.

Kristen Bell: Love this point, agree 100 percent.

Daniel Rabuzzi: So, influence as not only one-to-one but also as many-to-one, of ambient ideas, memes in the atmosphere.

Charles Payseur: Yes, there are many stories each year that are influenced by specific other stories or authors (looking at you, all the Omelas stories I’ve read over the last decade). But there are also trends that become self-sustaining, where certain styles are viewed as more marketable or valuable, which in turn influences the stories that get bought and published, and the stories that get taught in classes and workshops, and on and on. We can’t tell, after all, how influential any particular author or trend is if the majority of the works produced under said influence never make it into the hands of readers.

This is not as much an issue with short fiction, because the gatekeeping is less (direct submissions with no need for an agent and many non-profit or “non-professional” markets that still have a wide readership); but it’s still there. Influence is in some ways baked into the genre by things like comp titles (titles that authors compare their works to in order to pitch them to agents and publishers), which promise “it’s X meets Y by way of Z.” These are things that are looked for in the field, which means that influence is certainly something that people are consciously thinking about, at least in terms of marketability and sales (which might seem beside the point but again, if your comps are things that aren’t popular, then they’re less likely to seem like the safe bet that most agents and publishers want when looking for books to represent and/or publish). So not having popular influences isn’t rare only because people aren’t writing more unique works, but also because there are active barriers to getting works out there that are more unique, at least through the bigger presses. I feel like smaller-press works (thinking particularly of Tachyon and Neon Hemlock) often take bigger chances on works that do feel more like they come out of influences that aren’t as popular and so feel more striking and different.

Kristen Bell: Sometimes we pick up on influences without even realizing it. Many of an author’s influences will probably be from conversations, readings, and experiences that we readers aren’t privy to, and some probably aren’t even apparent to the writer. I’ve sometimes seen authors mention people saying "You were obviously influenced by author X" when they have never read author X in their life. There’s so much that’s connected and trickles down even if it doesn’t come directly from the same source.

This means you may not be able to tell what precisely influenced an author unless they themselves have said so. It may be possible to make some educated guesses based on works they’ve read, but two people can still have similar ideas independent of each other or be inspired to write two different works of fiction based on the same mythology (or from two different pieces drawing from the same myth, and so forth).

Daniel Rabuzzi: Reminds me of how many technologies—the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the light bulb—had multiple independent inventors, each working separately and unaware of one another, but influenced by the same underlying knowledge.

Kristen Bell: Indeed. I want to try to be very clear about whether or not I’m speculating based on work the author has mentioned experiencing before, or I can refer to a source where the author stated they are paying homage to something—trying to emulate a certain style, or just found something specifically formative when it came to writing, building worlds, or creating characters.

Two authors I’d like to highlight as unique writers and unheralded influences: Patricia A. McKillip and Storm Constantine. (This is tricky since there still needs to be some evidence of influence so they can’t be too unheralded or new!)

With Patricia A. McKillip, I knew I’d encountered something rare and special when I picked up my first book of hers, her short story collection Wonders of the Invisible World (2012). Her prose is elegant, conveying so much in few words, and there’s a subtle wit, wisdom, and sense of humor running through a lot of her work that feels unique to her, even if much of it may fall into familiar fantasy categories, such as fairy-tale-inspired, mythic types of stories.

Daniel Rabuzzi: I fell in love with McKillip’s prose from the first page of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which I read when it first came out in 1974! So yes, say on!

Kristen Bell: There’s just something timeless and magical about McKillip’s writing, with its dreamy quality. There’s a strangeness to some of her work that leaves me unsure of what exactly happened at times (her novel The Bards of Bone Plain [2010] and short story aptly titled “Weird” [2014] both come to mind), but I always feel like she knew exactly what she was doing even if parts feel a bit too slippery for me to grasp. Her work tends to feel classic to me: Even her works set in more modern settings than most, like Kingfisher (2016) and The Bards of Bone Plain, have an old, mythic quality that makes me forget that they are set in a world much closer to the one I know than many fantasy stories.

Although there may be echoes of her elsewhere, there’s something about McKillip’s prose and the way she pieces everything together that is unlike anything I’ve read before. If I’m in the mood to read something “like McKillip,” it’s probably best to stick to reading or rereading one of her many stories since nothing else is likely to match her prose style or the little touches that she adds closely enough to be satisfying.

The only book I can recall that felt like it could be a successor to her particular style is Amal El-Mohtar’s recent novella The River Has Roots (2025), mainly its earliest pages describing the river that runs with grammar. The lovely but spare prose style combined with magic that’s both mysterious and real—something a bit beyond my grasp but also something that seems true in a way I can’t quite put into words—had me thinking of McKillip’s work. (The author has expressed her admiration for McKillip’s writing, although I’m not certain if she considers her an inspiration for this book given that it’s not included among those I’ve seen her mention.)

Although McKillip is a World Fantasy Award–winning author who has been lauded by many other speculative fiction authors—including Peter S. Beagle, Charles de Lint, Ellen Kushner, and Marjorie Liu, to name a few—I still think she qualifies as an author who has not received her due. It seems to me that her name doesn’t come up nearly as much as it should, and I’ve seen others express similar sentiments. Aaron Heil’s review of Audrey Isabel Taylor’s Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building (2017) noted that he did not remember McKillip ever coming up during his speculative fiction studies, and that Taylor wrote this book because of the glaring lack of literary analysis focused on her work.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Such an important point—so many of the spec fic authors we love fail to garner the kinds of critical attention we feel they deserve. Here you highlight one critic who felt moved to write the book she felt needed writing, emphasising the role of criticism, and the need for The Long View. Reminds me of Goss’s study of Coleridge, Mew, and Townsend Warner (2008), and likewise Swanwick’s work on Hope Mirrlees (2009), James Branch Cabell (2007), and Greer Gilman (2021).

Kristen Bell: And then there’s Storm Constantine. Like McKillip, Constantine has not just a single book but a large body of work that eludes easy classification. Her eclectic collection of novels and short stories don’t tend to follow a particular structure or feel like they’re utilizing common tropes. Each of her works I’m familiar with stands out as something no one else could write. With her Wraeththu books (1987-2005), she imagined mutants who are both male and female in stories that are a bit fantasy and a bit science fiction, populated by characters who feel real in part because of how human they seem in spite of it all: They are so convinced they are superior to humanity yet subject to the same foibles. In Sign for the Sacred (2002), she examined the journeys of characters connected by their views on a charismatic prophet and showed how different individuals can perceive the same situations very differently—and left much open to interpretation so readers can similarly take away their own different ideas about it. Through Calenture (1994), a novel about the relationship between art and artist, she created a world unlike any other with characters encountering everything from a city of people who follow a script in their daily lives to a family living on a giant insect that they share a special connection with and worship as a god. And her short fiction encompasses a variety of fantastical and science fictional settings, using her lush prose and unconventional storytelling to examine themes like identity, self-discovery, gender, and obsession (especially romantic or religious).

Others have found her work to be a rarity as well, including Sarah Ash, Michael Moorcock, and N. K. Jemisin. When announcing that Constantine would soon have a guest post on her blog, Sarah Ash wrote about realizing through her work “that it was possible to write fantasy that was not Tolkien-influenced but instead something genuinely ‘rich and strange.’.” Michael Moorcock opens his introduction to Constantine’s short story collection The Oracle Lips from 1998 by calling her “an idiosyncratic voice, a unique vision.” Her Wraeththu books were part of the inspiration for N. K. Jemisin’s debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010)—this inspiration was one of the reasons I was so eager to read her debut when it first came out! The books also inspired a lot of fanfiction, some of which was selected for anthologies released through Constantine’s own publisher, Immanion Press.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Another example of why small and independent presses matter!

Kristen Bell: Though Immanion was originally created to keep Constantine’s own work in print, she championed other writers’ works as well, and the press expanded into publishing “unusual and intriguing fiction by other authors.” This included anthologies containing stories by various authors set in the world of Wraeththu, co-edited by Constantine and Wendy Darling, and several works by Tanith Lee, as Immanion is “committed to keeping her legacy alive.” After Constantine’s passing, Immanion released Pashterina’s Peacocks (2021), a tribute to her edited by Danielle Lainton and Louise Coquio that includes pieces by Lee, Moorcock, Warrington, Liz Williams, and many others.

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We took another break, to share recipes and to talk about upcoming books we were especially looking forward to reading.

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Daniel Rabuzzi: In closing, are there other authors you would add to our ever-growing list of the hard-to-classify and/or the quiet influencers?

Kristen Bell: There are a few books I can think of from the last couple years that aren’t necessarily ones I’d call hard to classify but do stand out to me as giving permission to do something different. The Scarlet Throne by Amy Leow (2024) is a book about a teenager that isn’t young adult and one that does not include a romantic relationship, during a time when fantasy romance is particularly prominent—especially for books with main characters in the same age range as this one. It’s also not a cozy story, and it does not feature found family or even just a strong friendship; but there are additional aspects related to worldbuilding and characterization that cement it as one of the more unique books I’ve read during the last couple years.

There’s also The Mountain Crown by Karin Lowachee. Part of what makes this feel a bit different is that Lowachee is an author who goes where the story takes her, making this feel like you’re going on a journey with the characters, and she also pulls from an eclectic set of inspirations like North American frontier literature and the Daoist philosophy of wu wei, and animals (especially her cat, who served as a model for possible dragon behaviors). In particular, the way her dragons communicate using sets of words that make sense to them but aren’t straightforward human language is unlike anything else I’ve encountered. It’s difficult to parse at first, but with repetition, meanings start to emerge even if the precise details remain a bit mysterious.

Charles Payseur: The Birdverse works by R. B. Lemberg remain one of the most singular and engrossing projects in speculative fiction to me. The collection Geometries of Belonging (2022) includes a lot of the earlier works that for me have shown what can be done with second-world fantasy, from the worldbuilding to the poetry to the inclusion of really complex takes on gender and sexuality and power and pleasure. While relatively recently published, I do feel the ripples that have spread from the impact of these works in the larger writing communities. The field is so much richer for the conversations that these stories moved forward and complicated. For me they remain both incredibly unique and deeply influential.

Nalo Hopkinson has also put out some fantastically original and provocative fiction, from her novels to her shorter works. Part of what makes her works so original for me might be that they were among my first introductions to Caribbean perspectives and folklore and culture, but she’s also not afraid to take on very serious topics without losing a sense of hope and future. Her depictions of LGBTQ+ relationships and communities has been fearless and really important to getting outside the mainstream visions of what those communities really look like—not just the young pretty white gays but messy and beautiful families that can form along the margins, seeking a better world.

Kristen Bell: I’d also cite The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills. What sets it apart is how deeply Mills dives into the protagonist’s relationship with her religion, and her mentor, after she makes a decision that leads to her being cast out of her sect after having served for twenty-six years, starting when she was a teenager. It’s not at all unusual for fictional characters to have to face the fact that everything they once believed is wrong, but most of those I’ve read are about younger people who don’t have to contend with the fact that they’ve spent a big chunk of their adult life dedicated to a cause they now realize is wrong. This one does show how her younger self came to be where she was, but it also shows her grappling with the consequences in a story about redemption, disillusionment, and deciding to walk a new path.

Another recent book I can see having an influence is Goddess of the River by Vaishnavi Patel (2024). There has been an influx of retellings and reimaginings that seek to give a voice to female characters often relegated to the background, but many of those have focused on stories with their roots in Europe, particularly Greek myths (like Circe by Madeline Miller [2018], Ariadne by Jennifer Saint [2021], A Thousand Ships [2019] by Natalie Haynes, Ithaca by Claire North [2022], Medea by Eilish Quin [2024], and too many others to list here). Of course, it’s not that there aren’t those based on stories from other parts of the world, or even others also based on Indian epics like this novel or Vaishnavi Patel’s previous one, Kaikeyi (2022); but they are fewer and further between when one primarily reads books published in the United States. Goddess of the River is a reimagining of the Mahabharata centering the goddess Ganga and the impact she had on its events, which Patel wrote after discovering the river goddess was often overlooked in studies and texts despite having an important role. It’s a novel that focuses on platonic relationships, primarily the one between Ganga and her son, and I appreciated how vividly Patel portrayed the eponymous character as an otherworldly divine being and a river who encompassed so much—and had to learn what it was like to go from larger than life to a smaller, single form when she spent some time as a mortal.

Charles Payseur: In general we do see a lot of “take a fairy tale and update it” stories: Every year there are dozens of stories that basically take a swing at some of those formative fables, folk tales, and so on. This year has had a number of Beauty and the Beast stories, and every year it seems to shift a bit so that one year it’s Little Mermaid stories and another year it’s the one with the brothers who get turned into swans and on and on. So writers have that background and indeed we see a lot of this in the short fiction landscape, too. It’s good to see this tradition expanding.

Nisi Shawl is another pioneering voice in speculative fiction. Their short works have for a long time really pushed the envelope and blended fantasy, horror, and science fiction in amazing ways. They have a voice that’s difficult to characterize but hits hard. Stories like “The Things I Miss the Most” (2018) and “Queen of Dirt” (2017) really hooked me when I came across them, and their novel Everfair (2016) does things with alternative history that I had never seen before.

Kristen Bell: And there’s Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang (2023). Originally self-published before its release through Del Rey, Blood Over Bright Haven is one of those novels that had a storyline that felt like one I’d read before in the beginning and then diverged from it in an interesting way. One of its main characters is the first woman to become a highmage, but it’s not a story about how she’s breaking the glass ceiling and paving the way for others like her. Instead, it exposes her obliviousness to intersectional problems when the male mages decide to amuse themselves by making the other main character, a refugee to their city who works as a janitor and knows nothing of magic, become her assistant. It’s a book about the worst aspects of humanity, and resistance to tearing down established structures, with a female protagonist who can be selfish in her ambitions but also courageous and smart. I felt that the way it explored the discovery of the secrets of their city’s magic and the fallout from it made it stand out as different—even given the predictability of its mystery and the novel’s complete lack of subtlety. It mixed tragedy with hope in a way that felt true to life, and it didn’t have easy answers or solutions.

Charles Payseur: And I’d be remiss without mentioning Sam J. Miller, whose stories are probably a big part of why I fell in love with and stayed so entrenched in short fiction. I learned so much about myself as a person and so much about what’s possible to do as a writer from his stories. He leans into angst and pain and trauma, but not to revel in it or glorify it. Rather, he finds the magic that comes from people pushing back against the crushing weight of intolerance and bigotry—the light that shines brighter for being fragile and delicate. That breaks at times, but still endures and is passed from person to person and heart to heart in an unbreakable and beautiful chain.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Bobbing my head in wonder and excitement: Thank you for adding more books to my already vertiginous TBR pile! Feeling the need to dive into the pile, I will summarize what I heard as some of our conversation’s main points. Whew, defining “unique” and “influence” is really difficult. Having said that, what shines through for me is the concept of “giving permission,” that is, of an author’s work illuminating a new path forward (or sideways or around in a circle), granting an emerging writer the freedom to explore beyond what “the canon” (however defined, and by whom) has allowed or even contemplated. Influence as emancipatory, a spirit of generosity, not strict adherence to a precursor’s style or themes or mode of worldbuilding; influence as “a ha,” not “how to.”

Another key take-away for me is the reminder that influence waxes and wanes over time. Today’s critical darling may be forgotten a generation hence, then re-discovered a century after that. What is perceived as unique at publication may or may not be viewed as longitudinally unique in years to come. Lastly, a publisher has to take a risk on an eccentric manuscript, often in defiance of what the market thinks it wants, highlighting the vital role of small and independent presses in providing a home for the singular and odd. With that, I am off to my book stacks, with gratitude for the lively conversation—thank you Kristen, Charles, and Yvette!

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Appendix. 

Works of criticism:

Attebery, Brian. “A Mitochondrial Theory of Literature: Fantasy and Intertextuality,” chap. 5 in his Fantasy: How It Works. Oxford University Press, 2022.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press, 1997 (orig. 1973).

Delany, Samuel. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2009 (orig. 1977).

Di Filippo, Paul. Review of The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, in Locus (August 27,2022).

Emre, Merve. “The Critic as Friend: The Challenge of Reading Generously.” The Yale Review (Summer, 2024).

Fenkl, Heinz Insu. “Introduction” to Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (eds. Theodora Goss & Delia Sherman). Small Beer Press, 2007.

Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2015; second ed.

Goss, Theodora. Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Aqueduct Press, 2008.

Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: On the Pleasures of Not Belonging,” in Interfictions 2 (eds. Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak). Small Beer Press, 2009.

Keegan, Ken. “Why Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories …,” preface to ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond The Spheres of Literary And Genre Fiction (eds. Rusty Morrison & Keegan). Omnidawn, 2006.

Kelly, James Patrick & John Kessel, “Slipstream, the Genre That Isn’t,” in Feeling Very Strange (eds. Kelly & Kessel). Tachyon, 2006.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Commodified Fantasy Takes No Risks,” foreword to her Tales from Earthsea. Harcourt Brace, 2001.

Maund, Kari. “Reading the Fantasy Series,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (eds. Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn). Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Mendlesohn, Farah & Edward James. A Short History of Fantasy. Middlesex University Press, 2009.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (with China Miéville’s intro and afterword by Jeff VanderMeer). MonkeyBrain Books, 2004.

Oliver, Matthew. Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy. McFarland, 2022.

Sangster, Matthew. An Introduction to Fantasy. Cambridge University Press, 2023. See esp. chap. 2 on the “value of iteration.”

Schwab, V.E. “Just Trust Me: In Praise Of Strange Books.” (NPR, Dec. 23, 2017).

So, Richard Jean & Andrew Piper, “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic (March 6, 2016).

Swanwick, Michael. “In the Tradition ... A Cruise Through the Hard Fantasy Archipelago in Search of the Lonely and the Rum … “ [the latter a term used by Tove Jansson], in his Moon Dogs (eds. Ann A. Broomhead & Timothy P. Szczesuil). NESFA Press, 2000.

Templeton, Molly. “(It’s Not) The Death of Criticism (Again).” Reactor (September 11, 2025).

Thomas, Ebony. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. NYU Press, 2019.

Thomas, Sheree Renée. Introduction to Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (ed. Thomas). Aspect/ Time Warner, 2004.

Walton, Jo. “The Weirdest Book in the World,” and “Something Rich and Strange: Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine,” in her What Makes This Book So Great: Re-reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Tor, 2014.

Williamson, Jamie. The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Wolfe, Gary K., with Amelia Beamer. “Twenty-First-Century Stories,” in his Evaporating Genres. Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

Selected authors discussed, with some of their representative works:

In talking before our discussion, and in sidebars throughout, we bandied about many possible authors to consider. Among legacy authors whose work we mulled were Mervyn Peake, William Hope Hodgson, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Angela Carter, Clark Ashton Smith, Silvina Ocampo, Austin Tappan Wright, Tanith Lee, Avram Davidson, Leonora Carrington, Ursula K. Le Guin, Amos Tutuola, and Octavia Butler. Among living writers: Mark Z. Danielewski, John Crowley, Greer Gilman, Kelly Link, M. John Harrison, Samuel Delany, C. L. Clark, Alan Garner, Clive Barker, Andrea Hairston, Susanna Clarke, Sofia Samatar, Sarah Pinsker, Tamsyn Muir, Jared Pechaček, Nghi Vo, P. Djèlí Clark, and Vajra Chandrasekera. We emphasize that any and all of these could just have easily made the list below! We settled on the following (in alphabetical order):

Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes.

Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Legacy.

Storm Constantine, Wraeththu.

Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction.

R. B. Lemberg, Geometries of Belonging

Amy Leow, The Scarlet Throne.

Karin Lowachee, The Mountain Crown.

Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Sam J. Miller, Boys, Beasts & Men.

Samantha Mills, The Wings Upon Her Back.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Love & Other Poisons.

Lesley Arimah Nneka,  What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.

Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author.

Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching.

Vaishnavi Patel, Goddess of the River.

Vina Jie-Min Prasad, “Pistol Grip.”

Terry Pratchett, Discworld novels.

Nisi Shawl, “The Things I Miss the Most,” “Queen of Dirt.”

Laini Taylor,, “Goblin Fruit.”

M. L. Wang, Blood Over Bright Haven.

Isis Asare: Thank you for participating in the Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025 panel. You’re amazing. In this session, there will be affirmations. Next, the panelists will do self introductions. Then, I will ask questions. Afterwards, I’ll look at the room and ask for audience questions. In response, so many hands will go up because we’re planting the seeds, and we’ll pick those fruits together.

Affirmations: One, we’re engaging in intersectional feminist content and conversation. If that is not your typical framework, you’re still welcome to stay. Take the opportunity to listen, engage, and learn. We are curious and actively affirm different opinions. We’re open-minded, we’re respectful, and we’re thoughtful about our impact and understand that impact is not the same as intent. I also want to do a short land acknowledgment: I live in Oakland, California, which is stolen Ohlone land. I like to ask the question: “What would it look like if we all paid into a Native American land trust, in much the same way we pay our taxes every year?” 

Now I’ll turn it over to introductions.

Annalee Newitz: Hi. I write science fiction, and I am also a science journalist, which means I write nonfiction too. My books are in both genres. My latest book is Automatic Noodle. It just came out a couple weeks ago. And my most recent nonfiction book is called Stories Are Weapons. It’s a history of psychological warfare in the United States. Most of my nonfiction tends to be focused on science and history. 

Charlie Jane Anders: Hi, I have a new novel called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it’s about a young trans woman who teaches her heartbroken lesbian mom how to be a witch as a way of kind of bringing her mom back to the world. I have a free weekly newsletter at buttondown.com/charliejane.

Ada Palmer: Hi, I write F&SF. I’m also a historian. I work on the history of censorship. I’m also disabled and a disability activist. I teach at the University of Chicago, which through the last four election cycles has had the highest undergraduate voting rate of any college or university in the country, which means I track the rapid turnover of feelings among the generation that is just starting to be politically active, watching their hope and despair cycle at lightning-fast undergrad speed. That has affected my teaching a lot. I’ve been considering ways we can use the classroom to generate hope, regardless of the topic, since I think one of the biggest things we need to be teaching right now is hope.

Andrea Hairston: Hi. I do theater and write poetry and novels–Archangels of Funk is one.

Isis Asare: This question is for all of you. Ursula K. Le Guin argued that “resistance and change often begins in art.” In the face of Project 2025, how can speculative storytellers empower readers to envision freer, more inclusive futures?

Ada: Ten years back when I came to University of Chicago, I asked a colleague in the Creative Writing Department, what percentage of your majors are writing genre fiction? And he said: All but two of them are writing dystopia. All but two in the entire Creative Writing major.

There has been a saturation of dystopian, grim, and post-apocalyptic literature since 2000, so the undergrads coming into my classroom have practically no experience imagining positive futures or futures worth living in. We need to broaden that variety of futures. Because what they’ve been getting gives them practically no models of the future other than The Hunger Games; everything else is as naive to them as The Jetsons. So one of the biggest things we can do as storytellers is describe a variety of possible futures, so it starts feeling to young people as if their actions matter and are choosing among many possible futures.

When Le Guin talks about genre writers as “the realists of a larger reality,” we surrender the power of that when we narrow our work to only depict one type of future. We have great power to restore alternate narratives, to re-broaden the range of imaginable futures.

Andrea: I write “hopepunk," right? I have for the last fifty years as I’m so much older than everyone on this panel. I do remember people telling stories that weren’t just The Hunger Games. 

I’m also a theatre/film professor. I made sure my students got all of the wonderful stories that I had experienced. We watched A Brother from Another Planet from the ’80s and they would go, “Oh my God!” And I’d say, here’s the list. They would just go and watch all of these “hopepunk” films. I taught a class called “The Magic If”, and the point was to get students to come up with alternatives to whatever. So you can have your dystopia, but it’s just one of many stories. 

Charlie Jane: One of the things I really try to do in Lessons in Magic and Disaster is celebrate all the stuff that they’re trying to tear down right now, like arts and the humanities and poetry and just being comfortable not knowing everything. Being comfortable with uncertainty, with things being complicated and confusing and messy and challenging. That’s the thing I keep coming back to my work: that people who want everything to have a simple answer. That’s the thing I keep kind of nibbling at in my fiction and I feel that’s very hopeful in a way—like celebrating like just being comfortable with things being complicated and confusing and poetic and not like prosaic.

I like messiness. I really, really, really like messiness. and I don’t enjoy when people want things to be simple.

Annalee: Yeah, I think that’s such an interesting point because one of the things that comes up a lot around dystopia is this idea that it’s this really simple answer to what’s coming next. I also write things that are accused of being hopepunk, and people will say, “Oh, well, but that’s not realistic.” What’s realistic, they say, is dystopia. 

But dystopia is no more realistic than utopia. It’s taking all of the most horrific possibilities and putting them together into one story in a way that would never actually unfold in real life. Because even when we live in a world that is ruled by authoritarian thugs, we still find moments of joy and freedom.

We still come together in this room and speak critically about the leadership of our country or about the leadership of our communities. So there’s never a perfect dystopia, just like there’s never a perfect utopia. I too love the messiness. I often say that my writing is “topian.”

(laughter)

The other thing I think that we can do in our writing is push back against this narrative that the way we reach truth is through fighting. There’s this real fetishization right now through things like the Jubilee channel on YouTube where they stage these absurd debates. Like a person who believes in women’s right to an abortion will argue with twenty people who disagree with them. And it becomes a game. Everything becomes a debate that we consume for entertainment, not to reach a new understanding of the issues.

It’s like the Monty Python sketch. Politics become “I’d like to have an argument, please.” Except it’s not an argument; it’s just a contradiction. I’m right, you’re wrong. That is not a way of reaching truth or consensus. That’s literally a way of sowing contradictions. It’s what leads to the idea that “debate” is a trans person having an argument with someone who believes that trans people shouldn’t exist. Again, that is not a political debate. That is just a contradiction.

And if we actually want to have productive debate and productive negotiation, I think we need to start telling stories about how we do that. How do we negotiate? How do we form communities instead of how do we divide them? How do we fight in ways that lead to resolution, rather than contradiction? 

And we need to tell stories about what it means to bring a community together and how pleasurable that can be. I think again we’re in a phase in the United States right now where the idea of community and consensus are being demonized and being portrayed as somehow brainwashing. If you want to reach consensus or be part of a community, you’re going to be infected by a mind virus and be mind-controlled. But the fact is that we all live in community and community is a source of joy and it’s a source of productivity and a source of, you know, it’s the place we go to begin rebuilding or to begin building if we want to create an alternate world. And so one of the things that I’ve always strived to do in my fiction is to show why communities are rich and interesting and how people resolve their issues in those communities, even if it means having a lot of boring meetings.

Because that’s where we start. We have a long boring meeting and we figure out what everybody wants and we negotiate about it, which is why my previous novel, The Terraformers, really does have a lot of boring meetings in it. And characters complain a little bit about that. I try to skip over the boring part for the reader, but the fact is that everybody is going to a lot of meetings.

Andrea: Realism is actually just what we’re willing to believe. It is not the unadulterated world. It’s the story we’re telling on the world. “Normal” is the secret weapon of empire. Empire Normal Stories make us think it is “realistic” that there are no Black people, no queer people, only white straight people in the world. Totally realistic, right? 

Empire Normal supposedly covers every story, a mass culture that contains everything. You’re part of the Empire Normal story or you’re not realistic. As an African American who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, I know we had a lot of fun; I know we had no Empire Normal power, and yet we changed the world, despite having “no power.”

Because, of course, we did have power. 

We knew we had power and we used the power they wanted to hide from us, and we changed things. We did not wait for someone to say, you have power now. And we did not all agree. We were a diverse community who had to have those long, boring meetings. To take action we had to be able to not just call each other out but also call each other in.

Paraphrasing Loretta J. Ross, who wrote Calling In, there are people you just won’t be able to call in. But consider the people you agree with 50 percent and instead of shredding each other, you could call each other in. But how to do that? In Calling In, Loretta generalizes from her experiences as a reproductive rights activist. Her point is we need to call people in and grow our community and be able to interact with one another. Those are the kinds of stories we need to tell. So I’m always writing about community.

Annalee: Yeah.

Andrea: Yeah.

Annalee: Archangels of Funk has an incredible community.

Charlie Jane: Oh, my god, yes.

Annalee: I think about it all the time. I want to live there. It’s very messy.

Andrea: It’s messy.

Annalee: But it works. You know, people come together.

Charlie Jane: Hell yeah.

Isis: I love all of this. Charlie Jane, you talked about operating in a way that’s not hierarchical, which aligns with human contradiction that Octavia Butler explores in Dawn. How do you create opportunities, create situations where people are moving non-hierarchically, but it’s also sustainable?

Charlie Jane: Well, I think one of the words that you just said that really jumped out at me was sustainable. I think making things sustainable is really hard, especially communities and especially, like when I think about communities and sustainability, I think about burnout.

I’ve been there, done that, seen it so many times. I’ve seen people who are burned out, who won’t admit they’re burned out, who won’t let go, who are holding on. And I don’t know, that’s been my whole experience, my entire life in queer communities and like any kind of activism. I feel like it’s hard. And I feel like people admitting that they can’t do something is really hard. I think that’s really important. I think not making it all about you,

I’ve been thinking about how to write about burnout a lot more, in fact, and about how I feel like the antidote to burnout is kind of not just going and going and going, but kind of stopping and being curious and paying attention and paying attention to other people and maybe other people actually have ideas that you could have been listening to this whole time instead of just being like, I know how I do this and I’m gonna keep doing it the way I’m doing it.

I feel like that, I feel like listening. I feel like it’s hard to write about listening actually. It’s hard to write about listening because a lot of what drives books is people telling, talking and doing and like acting and reacting, but listening is hard to write.

But I love–one of my favorite things as a writer is to write people who don’t fully see each other clearly at first and they’d learn to see each other clearly. And I think that’s kind of the small-scale version of what I’m talking about, which is at the community level, like more listening, more understanding. I don’t know, that was very rambling. I hope that made sense.

Isis: No, that was awesome.

Annalee: Yeah.

Andrea: Made me think of Momo–the major character’s superpower is that she can listen. That’s how she saves her world. She listens to all these different people and listening to them allows them to speak and her to grow and the world to change.

Annalee: Yeah, and one of the most powerful characters on Star Trek: TNG is Guinan, who is a good listener.

Andrea: Yes, yes, yes!

Annalee: That’s pretty cool.

Isis: I love that, listening as a superpower.

I have individual questions for each of you, and then we’ll go back to questions for all of you. Annalee, in your work Future of Another Timeline, you pit feminist time travelers, the Daughters of Harriet, which I love, against some misogynist “Comstockers.” Drawing from your novel’s vision of coordinated multi-era resistance, what specific strategies can feminist speculative fiction authors use to help readers recognize these threats?

Annalee: Yeah, a big part of Future of Another Timeline is the central fantasy is that feminists from different eras are time travelers, so they can meet each other in person. The idea is that they aren’t just hearing rumors about what feminists from another era were doing. They literally are in community with them.

And that’s a really powerful fantasy. The reason why I wanted to center that was because I do feel like one of the tragic things that happens in activist communities is that our history is taken from us and erased, or it’s malformed. It’s rewritten by other people who hate our history and lie about what’s happened or portray us as demons or as something terrible, whatever it is they’re gonna call us.

What I really wanted to emphasize about feminism in that book is that it is a cross-generational project. And also that it’s about community action. It’s about small actions taken by many people across time. It’s not just about great leaders.

There’s actually a scene in that book that has made a few readers somewhat grumpy, where the characters are dunking on Emma Goldman. Emma was a big egomaniac, and she got into a lot of public debates with other feminists and other anarchists like Lucy Parsons, who she hated. And from all accounts, she was kind of a toxic person. Sometimes she was doing exactly what you were talking about, Charlie, making everything about herself.

And so these characters say: We don’t like what Emma Goldman is doing. We want to be feminists who are inclusive and who bring people in and who don’t turn it into a story about us, but a story about everyone. And in my novel, sex workers and immigrants team up with academic feminists, which to me is the dream. You know, we should be in solidarity with people who are oftentimes marginalized and treated with great cruelty by the state.

That’s the goal, right? By bringing in people from across the timeline, we can remember clearly what our elders have done for us, and also hold that so that we can pass it on to the next generation. But we also share it with all the people around us now, who haven’t been seen or listened to.

One of the really tragic parts of the history of feminism is that it hasn’t been inclusive. White feminism has dominated, and prevented other voices from being heard. Luckily there are these incredible moments when that changes, and we start to see more intersectionality. But then we see backlash, like we are today. Right now we have this very dominant part of feminism which has become TERFy, and is all about excluding trans women from the movement. And once again Black women are being excluded from the movement, and lots of other people too, people who are deemed not acceptable feminists. So fuck that. That’s my advice: Fuck that.

(APPLAUSE)

Ada: If I can add briefly to the very important theme of collective action: I think we have a paucity of collective action narratives and tools for telling collective action narratives, and this has worsened substantially in the last three decades. Before the 1990s, a much larger percentage of bestseller books that became movies didn’t have one protagonist as the structure. It was always a slight majority, but now it’s an overwhelming majority. Think about how in the original Mission Impossible TV series it’s a team, and everybody on the team is coequal. But in the Hollywood more recent Mission Impossible movies, it’s Tom Cruise, and the plot waits for Tom Cruise and only Tom Cruise can make a difference. That is a protagonist structure.

Andrea: One man.

Annalee: It happens in nonfiction too. I’ll be writing about a scientific discovery, and of course science is always done by teams. Like, you never have the one, single person who discovers something. And I’ll say to my editor, well, there are six people in this story. And they say, well, can’t there be a main character in this story? And I’m like, this is journalism? It’s not a fictional story. I can’t create a main character unless I want to lie. So the struggle is real, all across our culture.

Ada: Yeah. We historians are constantly making main characters out of things, but it’s easy to tell the story via a main character. This is exacerbated, certainly in my students’ age group, by the fact that a lot of video games have a structure where only the player can make the plot advance. There are many kinds of videogames, including multiplayer ones, but in many only the PC can change things, whether it’s gentle storytelling or a first-person shooter, it’s the protagonist who moves through space; Link is the only customer at any store in the world. When those videogames are a substantial slice of the narrative people consume, it makes protagonist-focused narratives a bigger slice of how we see the world. I think that cultivate those moments when people discuss a politician asking X can rise to be the leader that we need? rather than asking how can we create the teamwork that actually achieves change? We have a glut of protagonist stories and a famine of collective action stories.

Andrea: In theater, it’s a little less so. I mean, there’s still Tom Cruise kind of stuff happening. But the practice of theater allows for multiple storylines because you have actors. They embody a character and then it’s easier for the audience to follow five different pivotal characters. You also see that in long-form television shows.

But Hollywood is stuck on one man saving the world. A student of mine put together a reel of film trailers featuring “ONE MAN does blah blah blah.” We told her to turn it off before the end. She had so much. There’s a Carol Churchill play, Top Girls, and she has women from different times at a dinner party. Each historical figure is important, a star. You need amazing performers to do each one. The audience experiences them interacting and struggling. Some are like Emma Goldman, big ego characters, but still doing the work together, calling each other out and in.

I don’t write anything but community books. Sometimes people ask: Where’s the (ONE BIG) protagonist and who’s the bad guy? I’m not talking about bad guys. I’m talking about a system, not one bad person/thing. I’m not saying, if we get rid of that bad person/thing then we’ll be fine. That’s one of those false narratives. We have to change the whole system and interact across differences and be non-hierarchical. That’s how we save ourselves. We need all the ants to aerate the soil on the earth. That’s a line in my current novel. We need the ants and they are under siege right now. 

Isis: And what I hear is we talk a lot about a fight, an action, but what I’m also hearing is that there’s a collective mind-set shift.

Andrea: Yes.

Isis: That is also really powerful as we think about envisioning and inviting this future. My next question is: Do you feel like there’s an urgency to write cautionary tales in our current political moment?

Andrea: An urgency.

Ada: It feels like we have too many cautionary tales and what we need are tales of success and progress and at least partial victory. Especially partial victory, since all real victories are partial victories.

Annalee: I agree. I like stories that are about winning a particular fight or having a success, but knowing that it’s contingent on continuing to work. You’re not necessarily continuing to fight, but you’re not going to be able to just rest on your laurels. It’s an ongoing process.

Andrea: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.” Sweet Honey in the Rock. Not the burnout thing, but just because we figured something out doesn’t mean it’s all over. We need ongoing vision. What could the world look like? How could we make a different world? Who do we need to call in so that we can realize our visions? How do we go about doing that? That’s to me visionary, not cautionary.

Charlie Jane: I feel like we’ve been drowning in cautionary tales. I feel like there have been so many cautionary tales, not just recently, but going back decades, about damaging our own natural habitat, about pollution and climate change, about like trusting too much to like big faceless systems that don’t have our best interests at heart, about like the dangers of putting too much power in the hands of the rich and the few, the plutocratic elite. You can see that it’s going back to the ’60s and ’70s. That has been a constant theme in science fiction, a constant theme in pop culture, a constant theme in a lot of the culture that I grew up just mainlining and absorbing. And, unfortunately, people did not watch that flood of cautionary tales. And then there’s that joke about, I created the torment nexus from the novel don’t create the torment nexus. I feel like people do not, for whatever reason, that strategy does not work.

What I always say in answer to questions about optimism or pessimism or hopeful futures or terrible futures is that these things are theories of human nature. They are theories about what human nature is like and whether humans are primarily a selfish species or a very hierarchical species or whether we’re capable of being more generous, more kind, more hopeful, more able to care for each other. And these are, there’s no one, you can’t like say human nature is X, Y, or Z. It’s like, it’s obviously complicated, which gets back to what I said before about messiness. But I do think that rather than cautionary tales, I want to see more stories that advance the theory of human nature that allows us to survive as a species.

Andrea: Survival of the friendliest.

Charlie Jane: For survival of the friendliest, yeah! And that is kind of what hopepunk is, but also just even if it’s not like, I feel like there’s the type of story that we’ve had a lot of, which I love, where it’s like, here’s how we fixed it, here’s how we got together and got our hands dirty and built a better world, here’s how we dealt with climate change, thirty years in the future, here’s how we managed to stop some of the worst problems. I love that kind of story, but I also love any story. And this, I wanted to say earlier, when we were talking about types of stories that are hopeful. I think romance is a very hopeful genre, especially romance where it’s not based around any kind of power dynamic that’s obnoxious or unexamined, romance where it’s about people loving each other and appreciating each other. Like just a really sweet romance is in a way of really, it’s a theory of human nature that shows that we’re loving creatures.

And I feel like anything that showcases human beings, and especially I have to say Cis white men: If I could read a story where I was on a panel a while ago, sorry, I’m rambling. I was on a panel a while ago where there was a dude on the panel who said, “I only write soft boys.” And I was like, “Oh, I love that.” And I feel like I want to see more soft boys. I want to see more cis white dudes who are just nice and friendly and kind and thoughtful. And I feel like the idea that if you are a cis white man, there is something inherent in your nature that forces you or drives you to be a total piece of garbage, is a theory of human nature. It’s a thing that pop culture ramps down our throat. And I feel like anything that presents an alternative to that is actually very powerfully subversive.

Isis: Thank you for that.

And you have [to present?] reframed romance for me.

Charlie Jane: Oh yeah.

(audience laughing)

Ada: And one characteristic of genre romance is that, in addition to finding love, there’s always a transformation in the woman’s life, where she realizes she didn’t like the life she had before, and makes a major change and ends up in a better place, a better job, a new home, changing her circumstances for the better. Which is such a vivid contrast with the genre we refer to as mainstream lit, which is inevitably about somebody being powerless in the giant grinding gears of modernity and with no power except to come to terms with their own despair.

Andrea: And being sliced up while that happens.

Ada: That’s what gets celebrated as realistic lit. Realistic is when we are powerless and can only come to terms with our despair. Whereas fiction where we have the power to actually change the world is fantasy, not realism, while romance, books about changing your personal circumstances for the better, that genre we’re not even going to count Romance in the New York Times bestseller tallies of books, because we never want admit how often it would be the top. Of course my students are despairing.

Isis: Yeah? Yeah. Thank you. 

EDITORIAL NOTE: THE Q&A PART OF THE PANEL BEGINS HERE

Isis: Okay, now is that time. I look at y’all, I look at your beautiful faces, are there any questions from the audience? Yay!

Audience comment: One thing I think that should be emphasized is the ability to suspend judgment, to say: I haven’t made up my mind yet, that there are arguments here and there, and I’m going to wait and seek actions that are solution driven, not just reaction.

Andrea: Charlie was talking about messy.

Charlie Jane: Mm-hmm, that goes with what I was saying earlier. Thank you.

Annalee: A focus more on suspending judgment and not leaping to conclusions and trying to essentially hear each other out, and be messy while we consider what is possible. And listen.

Andrea: Yeah, and listen.

Annalee: Yeah, this is one of the things that drew me to science as a journalist was that science properly understood, not necessarily the way it’s practiced all the time, is all about every truth being provisional. A truth is a hypothesis. It’s a theory. It’s what we agree on through consensus. And we have methods of reaching consensus. We have methods of establishing truth and evidence. And the way that that works well is that we are always willing to throw those out and say, oh, we’ve got new evidence. Now we have a new provisional truth. And I wish that we could have that in more of our discussions and debates.

Audience question: Is it possible to have a society for everyone, progressive and conservative both? Do we need the yin and the yang? 

Ada: What people mean by conservative varies a lot. There is one almost vanished meaning which is valuing the old techniques of doing things and not wanting to unexaminedly change them, valuing tradition and culture and looking at those and wanting to always double check: Is it actually the case that we want to replace this with the newfangled thing? Is the shaving cream in an environment-destroying spray can actually better than the old shaving brush and soap block? We pause to ask whether the old way is actually still better, that’s a kind of conservatism, one that helps and balances innovation as yin with yang. But when I was at Harvard, during my PhD, I was part of a large-scale project searching for patterns in conservative thought over deep history and broad time, from presocratic Greece, ancient Egypt, and early China through medieval to modern, to see, when there are political sides people identified as conservative, what patterns they shared? After looking at hundreds of examples, we concluded that a consistent pattern in conservative movements was the belief that there exists some portion of the population that is better capable of ruling than the rest, and that everyone will be better off if power is concentrated in the hands of that population, not distributed among all.

Sometimes this takes the form of hereditary aristocracy, or oligarchy. Sometimes it takes the form of meritocracy, an exam system to choose who will be the elite elect. But it is profoundly undemocratic, in that it believes that it is not good for power to be distributed among all people, that it is better for power to be concentrated in few hands. It was scary how consistent this was over time and space. That is what conservative has really meant, in hundreds of places over thousands of years. I don’t think there is space for that in the kind of community that we want.  

So, the conservatism of pausing to ask whether the traditional way has value, whether we shouldn’t throw away the brush and block rashly, that thread has value, but it’s rarely what conservatism really is. We’ve seen, for example, how quickly progressive-seeming Silicon Valley figures flipped to the far right because of their dedication to meritocracy. We need to remember that meritocracy is not democracy and is not compatible with democracy, even though it feels fair.

Charlie Jane: It’s seldom really about merit nowadays.

Ada: But even if it were, it would not be democracy.

Andrea: It’s realism, you know? It’s like what you’re willing to believe is that there is this individual who rose from nothing and can do everything—

Ada: And is the protagonist.

Andrea: And should go to Mars and, you know, live there by himself.

(laughing)

Charlie Jane: He really should.

Annalee: I love that.

(laughing)

Ada: Agreed, I just don’t wanna accidentally undermine the point that even if it were real meritocracy, it would still be incompatible with democracy.

Andrea: Right, exactly.

Ada: That these two systems are not the same and we often get lured into thinking that they can be.

Audience question: I’m an activist, and I have a book in my bag called Direct Action and Sabotage; what is the space for disruptive actions in all this, especially in the context and lens of positive futures, communities, inclusive, and complex communities?

Andrea: Well, I’ll take that because in theater—action is where we live. The idea that you are ready for change is essential. If I’m on stage and suddenly everything is falling apart, I have to be able and ready for change. You actually rehearse being ready for something coming out of nowhere. And that’s what it means to play. We all play at things, we rehearse: I’m off guard, and I don’t know what to do. So I think we should disrupt ourselves and ask, do I really need this?  Is this who I should be? Is this what I’m thinking? But if you mean some other kind of violent disruption, I have less sense of that as necessarily constructive. But in terms of improvisation, when I throw something like a wrench in the works, and then we have to figure it out now. That is excellent, because you have to think and be and act, and suddenly you come up with something you wouldn’t have come up with if there hadn’t been that disruption. Anybody else?

Annalee: Sure, I think, I would also emphasize that I don’t think violence is really a great idea ever. It actually just ends up creating more violence. So I’m not talking about that, but I do think that at least right now in the United States, we’re dealing with a lot of entrenched institutions that are failing and that are not actually living up to their own rules and not actually doing what they were built to do. I’m talking about our justice system, many of our federal agencies which have been deprived of money. And so when that’s happening with the system, when you cannot work within the system because the system is being starved or has been captured by meritocracy,

(laughter)

then I think direct action is really, really important. Political organizing, protesting, going on strike, refusing to do the labor of arresting people, refusing to allow people to be arrested. I think that that’s incredibly important. I think at this point, that’s what we have. And we need to be planning for how we’re going to do that. And I want to see it happen in a mutual aid framework, not in a us beating up the dude or shooting the guy who runs a health insurance company or whatever, which—listen, I think we all had that moment of, yeah, I wish we could kill all these bad guys, but it never, it doesn’t work.

Andrea: It doesn’t result.

Annalee: Yeah, that doesn’t fix the system. In fact, it entrenches the system. And so yeah, what we need is collective forms of response. And maybe that means starting a worker owned co-op. Maybe it means starting a collective. Maybe it means organizing, like I said, a strike. But I think we, within our communities, really need to be thinking seriously about how to do that.

And in all of my stories, people do end up having to take direct action because they don’t have a system that will listen to them. And there are ways of doing that, but they’re very, they’re collaborative, they’re about community care. And yeah, let’s not be afraid to think about that.

Charlie Jane: Yeah, I’ll just say really quickly that I think that when you were dealing with a form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, I think sabotage is a really valid tactic I think sabotage, ideally, that doesn’t cause physical harm to people, but puts sand in the gears. Like, just, yeah.

Andrea: A wrench in the system.

Charlie Jane: Put a wrench in the system.

Annalee: Yeah.

Ada: I would add to this a reminder, a statistic, and a simile.

When we differentiate between disruption and destruction, I think we can all agree that disruption is very valuable, but destruction is very risky. We live with much more robust institutions for non-violent solution of large-scale problems than past centuries had. We should be very slow to give up on those structures. They’ve succeeded at pulling back from authoritarianism in many other nations that have modeled their institutions on our own. But in America, we are still running the beta-release software of modern democracy with barely any patches. It makes sense that the hackers are getting at us more than at the more new-release democracies like Australia and Germany that are running more sophisticated software than we are. We are very hackable.

Charlie Jane: Windows 95.

Ada: The statistic is: if you look back over the last sixty years at countries that have had authoritarian swings and then you look at them ten years later, 75 percent of them end up more liberal than they were before the swing because resistance is really working and the tools we have for it are really effective. When you limit that to just the last decade, it’s 85 percent. Our tools are getting better.

Andrea: But the story is that we’re powerless. So there’s a disconnect between fact and narrative. This is the science thing that drives me wild. If you actually have the knowledge, then you have the hope. But since you don’t have the knowledge, which is what we should be sending out, telling stories with, you feel like there’s nothing to do. And so for me hope is an action. What Ada just said, I’ve lived it. That’s the nice thing about being old. I have lived through those shifts. So I keep saying, these (current) people are not going to last. I mean, it’s going to be over. And everyone looks at me like, what’s wrong with you? Can’t you see it’s over for us? But that’s a narrative. That’s their realism.

Ada: To briefly add the simile, I think that small-scale destructive actions, when rhetorical, can be very powerful. Like, burning the bra in the square as a feminist symbol was incredibly rhetorically persuasive. Communication is an ecosystem. Think of when you go on social media: There’s a mix of voices. They’re all talking about the same thing, but some are doing it with lots of profanity and cathartic anger, others with humor, others with ploddingly factual graphs. And sometimes you’re in the mood that you’re really resonating with the anger; sometimes you’re resonating with the humor; sometimes you’re in the mood for the article with graphs. Rhetorical acts of small-scale destruction like setting fire to something in a square, which does not injure anyone, but is incredibly vivid, can be very rhetorically powerful. I think that is a major place that destruction has within our ecosystem of resistance discourse, even while we still trust in our ability to use these the robust systems of peaceful transformation that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worked so hard to create.

Andrea: Yeah, that’s festival drama, right? When you burn your bra, when you do that, it’s powerful theater. There’s a group of women in West Africa—the Igbo people—and what they do is when men are doing stupidness, the women gather together and surround the house of the man whose goats say have been eating all the crops, and the women perform—they chant: Your dick is short, your feet are funky, etc. They won’t stop until the man agrees to get his goats out of the fields. It’s called women’s war. And society knows the rules of women’s war–it’s theater. When the British encountered this, they were confused because they thought war, violence, but it was rhetorical or theatrical violence, a performance: We’re mad at you and we are not going to get off your case until you change. So I think we need to do performative things that will get to people and make them change. The Igbo had perfected this thing and the British were, what? War? And it was known as war because it was effective, a battle for change. Guys would go, oh-oh the women are going to war, so we’re going to stop now. 

Annalee: It’s more effective than war because everybody is alive at the end. 

Andrea: Yes, everyone is alive at the end.

Isis: That was really our last question. Thank you so much. These questions are beautiful and bright. Do you have any pieces you want to read? Quotes from your work? 

Annalee: I’m going to read you just a tiny moment from Automatic Noodle, where four robots have created a community, a restaurant. One robot asks, “But aren’t we making up a community?” And the other robot says, “No, we aren’t making anything up. We are making a place for people who are already here.”

Charlie Jane: I have a quote I think about a lot from my novel, The City in the Middle of the Night: “Joining with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective dreaming/designing is the only way that we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community.”

Ada: Before my quote, I want to urge everybody to sign up for the Fix the News weekly newsletter digest of global good news: civil rights victories, disease eradications, endangered species restorations etc. Because bad news gets shared one hundred times more than good news, so it’s life-healing to read once a week about global victories. To give a micro-example: Last November there was a big breast cancer study, confirming that breast cancer survival rates over the last decade are up 40 percent. A huge part of that is better detection among younger women, mammograms early. Every single English language newspaper that covered this, covered it with a headline like: Cancer Rates Rising in Young Women! What’s Killing Them? They reported good news as the opposite. That’s the news ecosystem we live in, and Fix the News is the antidote. 

Andrea: Look up the Goldman Prize, given to ordinary people all over the world who do amazing things, particularly for the environment. Every week or so they send something that people are doing: “We’re saving chocolate!” Or, “We won the court case to stop people from drilling off the coast and destroying the sea.” Hope and joy, right? 

Ada: My quote is from Inventing the Renaissance, which culminates with a history of the concept of progress, concluding with this: “Progress is not inevitable, but it is happening. It is not transparent, but it is visible. It is not safe, but it is beneficial. It is not linear, but it is directional. It is not controllable, but it is us. In fact, it is nothing but us.”

Andrea: Mine is from Archangels of Funk, a poem “My Own Sun.”

Dark days

Just a flash, love beyond the run.

I ain’t waitin’ for some freedom to come.

I’ma be my own sun and rise.

I’ma be my own rain and drink.

I’ma be my own poem and think.

Dark days, we know that.

Truth under the gun.

I ain’t waitin’ for some justice to be done.

I’ma be my own light and shine.

I’ma win my own fight.

Surprise!

I’ma be my own sun and rise.

I say, dark days, we got that?

I’m gonna be my own sun and ...

Many voices: Rise!

Isis: So, did you get your sense of hope? Ready? Let’s claim our magic and create our future!

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

There’s this TikTok of a twenty-year-old roasting a millennial guy’s appearance. Screaming, howling with mirth. Something about Mickey Mouse ears, something about AARP. The video I watch is the millennial’s reply—to being accused of looking thirty, when he is in fact thirty-eight—but it is the girl’s full-chested revulsion that strikes me; her conviction that her scorn is so justified that she must upload it to the World Wide Web, where it will stay forever, her face, her voice. And I want to tell her, wait ten years. Wait twenty.

There is a memory I have: six, seven years old, searching for something in my mother’s closet. I pick up a pair of dark blue cotton shorts I think is mine, except it falls open, unfolding, twice as wide. And even then, I am imbued with enough of the poison that I dread ever fitting into such pants—a sense that to do so would be to lose some great game, surrender something I can no longer quite call innocence.

There is J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, whose older brother David dies in a skating accident at age thirteen; who dresses in David’s clothes to comfort his depressed mother. The dark closeness of her bedroom, the shine of eyes longing for the dead over the paltry living. James learning—month by month, year by year—that to die as a child is to stay perfect forever; that to grow up is to stop deserving love.

And I wonder if Peter Pan, in its way, is about punishment—Wendy becoming a woman, Peter’s failure to recognize her through the bedroom window. When her only crime was surviving.

© These Deathless Shores, Orbit

I have long been fascinated with our cultural narratives around aging. In high school, coming from a household with a limited knowledge of English literature, I mostly failed to transition from young adult to adult fiction I genuinely enjoyed. The former contained plucky seventeen-year-olds who kicked ass and shattered empires and found people who truly understood them; adults who were, if not dead parents or outright villains, then dull bureaucrats, cruel teachers, or neglectful guardians, too cowardly or stodgy or just disappointing to be heroes (or even, in a way, fully people). And then there were the books I read for class, whose protagonists—though perhaps this was due to various teachers’ personal tastes—seemed designed to be hated, racists and hapless faux-victimized rich people and other manifestations of an empty, hopeless world with no exit. Homework, firstly, but also windows into a future without magic or joy; the only vision presented to me, at the time, for what it meant to have a reading life—to belong to a narrative—as an adult.

There are kids who make the leap more easily, or at least more abruptly. I saw high school classmates carrying around Janet Evanovich hardbacks, heard of twelve-year-olds who binged Stephen King novels. But the message I absorbed, through the stories I happened to reach for, was that to turn eighteen was to lose your right to a story worth living in. That to grow up was to go from deserving main character-hood to being shoved in as a foil for someone else’s emotional arc: someone younger, braver, and thus morally superior.

During the protracted death throes of Twitter, there was some discourse on the aging up of YA: that many books allegedly published for teens are in fact geared toward older audiences; that the industry's failure to launch New Adult as a category is squeezing a substantial number of stories meant for those in their early twenties into 17-year-old protagonists’ bodies. I would like to add that it is more urgent and necessary than ever to have novels that center children and teens—that give them the chance to imagine their own adventures, and the things they might come to believe; to name the ways adults have failed them, and the shapes of their own longings.

But for that to be the only story—for eighteen to be the end—seems its own kind of tragedy.

And, too, the horror of puberty. What a friend said to me in college: that those years move men toward the societal ideals of their gender, and women away from theirs. But, as well, for those between categories, or trapped in the wrong one: the mismatch of body to sense of self. The grief and sometimes revulsion as bone and organ mold themselves irreversible, or into configurations devastatingly expensive to unmake.

Then there is the unmooring of the mind: your intentions suddenly deemed insidious, your outbursts dismissed as mood swings, your emotions meant to be weathered or suppressed rather than loved or understood. The way language carves logic out of you, makes your thoughts no longer your own.

You might still deserve your own story, at this stage, but it is already the beginning of the end.

There are books I discover when I move to New York after college—in which adults adventure on distant space ports; are impetuous wizards and heist leaders and time travel agents and forest gods. And I feel ridiculous even writing this sentence, because of course they are. Because of course I should have known.

But my first week in the city, I bought a secondhand copy of Dune, thinking to catch up on “current” science fiction; my next most recent encounter with adult SFF (that I remember) was binging C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy in tenth grade. Few people I was close to engaged with speculative fiction, or much fiction at all, outside of class. And so, by dint of suburban lack of exposure or my underdeveloped prefrontal cortex or being functionally first-generation in reading in English for fun, I simply had no idea where to look, besides googling “Best Fantasy Books”—and, at the same time, I thought I already knew.

What Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: that only white children get to be children; that queer kids and kids of color grow up “sideways,” refracted through the lens of an idyll they’re told they should have but never receive. There is the poison taint of racialization, of being treated like adults while their parents are spoken to like toddlers; the hot constant pulse of devouring shame; a pricked-ear vigilance, to all the ways you might be punished for stepping out of line.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s your mother’s trauma, buried in silence, lashing out as a temper that feels like hate. Maybe it’s the kids at school, fists or whispers or an undercurrent of avoidance, some bone-deep sense you are doing something wrong—that you are wrong, because everyone told you this would be easy.

And so you grow up cowering. You watch the adults in your cartoons—the ones who hem and haw around the children, scuttle away from their exuberant noise—and despise them for bringing into open air what you will soon become. You age straight out of shame into villainy, and the gates of the story clang shut behind you, and you know in your bones you’ll never be allowed back in.

The wardrobe. Neverland. The golden compass, symbols intuitive as a mother tongue.

The late nineties advertisement: Trix are for kids! The way you cringe with premonition, even in elementary school, because a part of you already knows. Wait ten years.

And again: I am not suggesting that children are not precious. Only that growing up does not make them less so. Only that something feels deeply wrong about our collective visceral disgust toward aging, our near worship of the fresh-faced and temporarily perfect.

Because this one story, this one divide—child, grown-up—seems to me like a shutting down of possibility, when living itself (in these times especially) is not a thing to be held lightly. Because hating and fearing what you might become in fifteen years only sharpens the knife you will plunge into your own chest.

Because it means something that you’ve survived this long—with all your wrinkles, all your scars.

The expression on my mother’s face, when she tells me about an acquaintance in her thirties who still collects Hello Kitty plushies. Her son is ten. She’s not a kid anymore.

Nothing wrong with Hello Kitty, I say. Why close the gates by your own hand?

The way I used to lie about the time I spent writing, say I was sleeping or doing homework, because writing is play (selfish, innocent, heartless) and play is always subsumable to the necessary etiquettes, the adult responsibilities, real life.

The way I just lied again: I still do it.

The Mary Oliver poem: “The voice of a child howling out of the tall, bearded, / muscular man / is a misery, and a terror.” Which I'm simplifying, of course, taking out of context. The rest of the poem is a gentler invitation, a petal-unfurling into the world: “What will open the dark fields of your mind / like a lover / at first touching?” And into freedom: “Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.” But that image of the child's voice—misplaced, allegedly; rendered broken and uncanny and wrong—it feels, taken at the wrong angle, like another thread woven into the narrative of our child-worship, our automatic protagonization of youth. The ticking clock before you’re no longer allowed to feel certain emotions, or grieve your past. When for some of us, the past may take the rest of our lives to unravel; for some of us, it curls in on itself, a re-wounding: splashed across the TV, echoed through kitchens and government halls, the air we’re forced to breathe again and again and again.

And I’m not saying we should hold tight to rotting petals, or chain ourselves to the grave. Only that there should be no time limit placed on our departure, no shame.

The first time I watch Everything Everywhere All At Once in theaters, I am struck by the way Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh are presented—not as the generic smooth-faced Hollywood types but decidedly middle-aged, grey hairs and pores and all. He looks like my former piano teacher, I think. She could be my parents’ church friend. And yet: the fanny pack swung with stunning agility. The bullet stopped mid-flight, the daughter pulled back from the brink. This is how I fight. No shame in having survived, here—in being the star of many lives, each branched out from a decision made in childhood or as a young adult: to go or to stay; to sing or chase scientific glory; to please the demanding parent, or break down, or break away.

But that these decisions could have been made at all—that all these life-paths, these possibilities, chaotic and imperfect as they are, could have been forged amid the ravages of linear time—they entail living. They entail survival. They entail growing up.

Articles Editor: Joyce Chng

Copyediting: The Copyediting Department

There is a battle in the seventh season of the series (2017) in which exiled Queen Daenerys leads her army onto the green and pleasant land of Westeros (the show and the books’ cipher for medieval England). That battle shows us Daenerys immolating her not-English foes from dragonback, while her not-Mongol followers casually pick off survivors. At the heart of the slaughter lies a poignant scene.

We watch blinkered white horses pull a flaming cart through the battlefield, while burning soldiers wrench helms off their melting faces, desperate to douse themselves in water under roiling clouds of smoke. We share this perspective with the not-English commander of the ruined army, Jaime Lannister. We watch horrors unfold to the moving score of Ramin Djawadi—a molasses-drip cello solo, tinted by snarls and screams.

It is a genuinely moving piece of storytelling. From acting to camera work to scoring, we as viewers are cornered into one conclusion. If war is hell, air power is that hell most completely unveiled. The meaning of victory and defeat crumples before the shock of overwhelming, overpowering violence.

If only that were it.

Six episodes back (2016), we find Queen Daenerys still exiled among the desert cities and steppes of Essos (the show’s cipher for the Middle East and Central Asia). Here, we are also offered the sight of Daenerys immolating foes from dragonback—only for this round, the foemen are not-Muslims. Our perspective is mostly shared with Daenerys herself, gazing from on high at smoldering pyramids and discombobulated soldiers. We get a close shot of her looking down on the latter before she pronounces, like a judge or maybe a messiah, the order to burn. All this happens to the tune of Djawadi’s music—but here, we are given rousing string sections, the stirring beat of drums and horns. The accompaniments we begin with are draconic wingbeats and roars, the human cries coming later.

Read together, the scenes do what they cannot do apart. Dragonfire against the humans of Westeros is an unbearable tragedy that bruises the heart. Dragonfire against the humans of Essos, on the other hand, is not only to be celebrated, but taken as good policy. In the words of Daenerys’s vizier, Tyrion, to one of the survivors of the burnings in Essos:

Tell your people what happened here. Tell them you live by the grace of Her Majesty. When they come forward with notions of retribution or ideas about returning the slave cities to their former glory, remind them what happened when Daenerys Stormborn and her dragons came to Meereen.

Language matters, as does sound, especially as we watch our stories unfold on the screen. To be a not-Muslim in a fantasy show is to be exiled from dreams of retribution (read: justice) or glory (read: autonomy). To be a not-Muslim is to dwell forever in the shadow of dragon-riding foreigners (read: armed occupiers) who will maybe offer you grace (read: leaving a few alive after killing their fill). It is to have your attacks on Queen Daenerys accompanied by sinister musical cues—the hisses and whispers that generally precede the Sons of the Harpy—while Jaime Lannister’s bold charge on horseback against her earns a lovely full-throated chorus.

I am dragging a comb through these scenes because the race work done by fantasy and science fiction occurs on the granular level. It lies not only in the stories’ content but in camera angles, in musical cues, in who gets to speak, in who has the last word. Game of Thrones is a sort of paradigmatic example due to its popularity and endurance (consider that the franchise is still running and its newest branch has recently been announced). It is also far from the only case.

I mentioned that I’ve been thinking about Game of Thrones lately, and such scenes in particular. This is hardly the first time, to be sure, but the show has been returning to me throughout the past two years of genocide in Gaza. I think it’s something about the body. The same eyes that watch Daenerys and her dragons watch Israeli bombs double-tap journalists at a hospital. The same ears that hear Djawadi’s brilliant score hear the voice of the child Hind Rajab. The same neural nodes process Tyrion’s chastisement alongside the Israeli minister Smotrich saying of Palestinians that there is “nothing and no one to recognize.”

Our bodies—or rather, the bodies of those of us, in the words of Omar El Akkad, “on the launching side of the missiles”—have always been filtering real and imaginative violence at the same time. Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is, however, distinct: in terms of the scale of industrial violence, in terms of the constant documentation (despite the canard of no journalists in Gaza), and in terms of the besieging silences.

Faced with scale and silence, we need a cosmography of Anglophone SFF that captures the codes by which orientalism is animated today. That cosmography would be part of the greater archive exploring SFF as colonial fantasy of the twentieth century, an epoch in which European empires were simultaneously being shaken from earthly holdings and dreaming of stretching into “empty” space.[1] Here we will pay attention to the extension of that fantasy into our present, its projections into the future, specifically with reference to imagining Muslim death. As we walk through such projections, it is crucial we know them not for an ideology (Islamophobia) but an imperial structure (anti-Muslim racism). We need to limn the threads between fantasy violence and genocidal realities. We need to map the bleed between what we accept in imaginary worlds and what we accept around us. We need cosmography not as analysis, but as action.

This is not a postmortem. Firstly, there is no condition of “post.” The violence continues against Palestinians, as it does against Afghans who suffer bombings and ethnic cleansing from their neighbors, as it does against Uyghurs imprisoned in Chinese concentration camps, as it does against Rohingya living in limbo in the world’s largest refugee camp.

Secondly, opposition to genocide will not be backdated, and support for it will not be effaced. There must be an accounting, across arenas—ours being the market in Anglophone SFF. An exhaustive accounting is beyond any single one of us, but not beyond the mass of us.

Fuck you, Tyrion—we’ll keep our notions of justice, and there’s no grace from dragon fire.

1.

Game of Thrones is taken to have changed fantasy on our screens. On the production level, its success certainly factored into companies’ calculations about the genre’s moneymaking potential. But we are here to think about the effect on the creative side, too. Game of Thrones built an enduring visual vocabulary, and it is this embodied lexicon that extends its orientalism past the franchise.

Consider the Sons of the Harpy.

The Sons of the Harpy are not-Muslim slavers fighting Queen Daenerys after her takeover of their city in Essos (2015). The central idea is that the hapless folk of Essos never considered abolishing slavery until the alarmingly white Daenerys showed up with the thought. This teleology lines up neatly with Euro-American narratives, which emphasize the role of white Christians in theorizing the end of slavery, despite being preceded by Islamic abolitionist theory and practice alike as well as parallel patterns of African abolitionist thought. Out of this civilizing mission emerge the Sons of the Harpy, fighting to restore the old ways, taking up the mythic-religious symbol of the Harpy to do so.

The Sons of the Harpy are also cowards. They will attack you from behind. They will attack you from the dark. They will attack you at your favorite sporting events. They will attack you when you are innocently visiting a local sex worker to relax from your day-job as occupying soldier. They will do so wearing flowing robes, bunched turbans, and copper masks similar to those forged in ancient Sumer and Akkad.[2]

Jump forward with me about seven years, to a different fantasy world. In the opening minutes of The Witcher: Blood Origin (2022), we find ourselves in the elven kingdom of Xin’trea, being told by unseen voices that the noble elf king would go touring in “the lowborn streets despite the threat of assassins from other kingdoms.” At once we cut to a scene of those assassins attacking the king’s retinue. It is the first time we are meeting any of these characters.

The king looks like a medieval knight in his circlet, breastplate, and vambraces. His bodyguard, Fjall, accompanies him in a sleeveless cuirass and breeches, hefting a giant axe. The princess Merwyn can be found in a conservative ecru gown. The nameless assassins, on the other hand, spring at the entourage wearing loose robes and veiling turbans. Despite the trickery of tiny bombs and burning carts, they are handily dispatched. Their chief narrative purpose is to lubricate the subsequent romantic interlude between Fjall and Merwyn.

Taken separately, these factors might seem cringey. The real work, though, is done in the contrast. We are being treated to a visual dialectic, a conversation without words. We are primed to understand who is a villainous assassin and who is a worthy hero through clashing wardrobes. This is only possible because we presume audience participation—that the audience will already recognize that the turbans and flowing robes signify the enemy.

But Blood Origin does not merely lean on past presumptions, it carries them forward. We are soon given another scene, in which the warrior-musician Lark is joined by Fjall in fighting off even more not-Muslim assassins. These killers are not only turbaned but clad in metal masks that once again reference ancient Mesopotamia. Unlike their masked brethren in the Sons of the Harpy, these assassins are protected by coats of scale armor, a design also originating out of the historical Middle East. Like the Sons of the Harpy, they are cowards. The last one is killed while fleeing by an axe to the back.

Moving beyond garb, Blood Origin and Game of Thrones share a theory of damage. Not-Muslim assassins wield short knives which prove largely useless against named characters. The male heroes who dispatch them are endowed with more impressive tools (Grey Worm’s lengthy spear, Barristan Selmy’s long sword, Fjall’s thick axe). Even when the Sons of the Harpy bring down Barristan Selmy (by surprise and sheer numbers) the assassins fail to finish the coup de grâce. Not-Muslim assassination violence is a perennial and ubiquitous threat—and also, basically impotent against men with sizable-enough blades.

Or sizable-enough dragons. In the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon (2022), Queen Daenerys’s ancestor Daemon is faced with the problem of the Crab People. These enemies are not military superiors, yet are still difficult to defeat, since they retreat into caves into which the Targaryen air force cannot follow. The problem echoes US military concerns about Taliban caves during the occupation of Afghanistan, the perhaps most famous example being the hunt for Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. Daemon resolves the problem by offering himself up as bait, thereby luring the entire Crab People army out of their caves, whereupon we see them clad in—you’ve guessed it—turbans and robes.

Obviously, the dragons tarry only long enough for Daemon to singlehandedly slice and dice one or two dozen Crab People on his own. Once they appear in the sky and pour fire on the Crab People’s heads, it is to yet another spirited orchestral piece (and, somehow, a dragon rider going “Woo!”). Whoever mourns for the Crab People, viewer, it’s certainly not meant to be you.

Everything here—how people dress, how people fight, how people (fail to) fuck—is the making of race. The flowing robes and metal masks and stubby little knives are highly compressed data packets. They confirm our past associations and ready us for future ones. They do so while obviating the need for not-Muslim subjectivity or interiority. They show, don’t tell.

The narrative trick of “saving the cat” refers to an otherwise bland or unlikeable protagonist doing something noble (proverbially, saving a cat) early on within the narrative, thus establishing their moral bona fides. For these plotlines in Game of Thrones and Blood Origin, it’s the same maneuver, except no cats are saved—in lieu of cats, we can earn the same moral credit through spilling not-Muslim blood.

2.

But orientalism is not a matter of image alone. If the orientalism of Game of Thrones and The Witcher relies upon coded images, that of Star Trek: Discovery knots orientalist ideas even more tightly into its narrative structure.

Discovery opens (2017) with the speech of T’kuvma, a messiah among the spacefaring race of Klingons—

They are coming. Atom by atom, they will coil around us and take all that we are. There is one way to confront this threat. By reuniting the twenty-four warrior houses for our own empire. We have forgotten the Unforgettable, the last to unify our tribes, Kahless. Together, under one creed: “remain Klingon!” This is why we light our beacon this day. To assemble our people. To lock arms against those who fatal greeting is, “We come in peace.”

In seeking to transcend ethnic fractures, T’kuvma presents as an ethnic supremacist, and while ethnic supremacy in and of itself is not an orientalist code, the surrounding details link it to Islam. His notion of unity is steeped in religious terminology. He offers his followers a revanchist creed. His quest revolves around a “sacred beacon.” He dubs fallen “brothers and sisters” to be “martyrs” slain in a “crusade.” He dreams of “purity” in place of the Federation’s racial “muck where humans, Vulcans, Tellarites, and filthy Andorians mix.” He is given the same moniker as the past messiah and unifier: “the Unforgettable.”

Moved by these ideas, T’kuvma leads his followers to war with the Federation—that selfsame coalition of “humans, Vulcans, Tellarites, and filthy Andorians”—and promptly gets most of the movement killed. The battle, however, ignites a longer struggle between the Federation and cannier political players among the Klingons. That struggle is only resolved by the Federation’s threat of and active effort to commit genocide.

Through all this runs the plotline of a Klingon sleeper agent. One of T’kuvma’s followers, Voq, alters himself to appear human and embeds himself among the Federation protagonists, for reasons left vague. He is portrayed by Shahzad Latif, who, by what I am certain is tremendous coincidence, happens to be the one main cast actor of Pakistani descent. The alteration is so complete that Voq actually forgets himself, and the return of his first personality is thwarted through romantic interludes with a Federation officer. Voq claims to have been raped but this is ultimately revealed as a sort of repressed memory of surgical alteration. The discovery of Voq’s “true” nature prompts an instinctive killing response. The issue can only be resolved by the dismembering of Voq’s soul.

Discovery’s arc is built on Western caricatures that sustain the War on Terror and its afterimages. T’kuvma’s religious movement arises out of a context of inter-tribal warring and political disunity (as the Taliban and ISIS are commonly presumed to have done). The movement wields religion as a cultural glue but is swiftly bought out by local political actors, thus forcing a reliance on fifth columns (a la the War on Terror propaganda of 24, Homeland, Sleeper Cell, Law & Order, etc.).

Most crucially, only the imminent threat of genocide brings the Klingons to a halt. In this we can hear both past and future echoes of American politicians shrieking about wiping Afghanistan off the map, leveling Palestine with nuclear weapons, summoning forth an earthly hell in Gaza—all while providing material support for genocide. If there is one good thing to be said for Discovery, it is that unlike in our times, genocide is reconsidered at the last moment.

Discovery doubles down on orientalism in its details. During T’kuvma’s opening speech, a musical track plays under the Klingon dialogue (called “We Come in Peace”). In an interview on the piece, the composer Jeff Russo notes—

So one of the things we talked about when I first spotted the show with the producers was to start it out feeling whimsical and wondrous, and then to turn toward a darker feeling once we realize what we are looking at, which is the face of this Klingon who is basically saying we want to take over the universe ... It was really a question of what was I going to use to melodically embody the Klingons in this particular cue, and I sort of went back and forth with different solo instruments, woodwinds and stuff, and I landed on duduk, and that really made it sort of happen.

The duduk is an Armenian woodwind instrument, the sound of which resonates with woodwinds from across the Greater Middle East. While it has been used in American film and shows before—and often to evoke something of the Middle East—this was the first time the sound was attached to the Klingons. More than that, it is a melodic embodiment for the Klingons’ new manifestation as not-Muslims in space—specifically as we transition from Star Trek’s whimsy and wonder into a darker feeling.

Then there is the design side. During a summer 2017 reveal for Discovery in the city of San Diego, concept art for the show’s ships appeared on the display walls. The art included Klingon vessels dubbed the Sarcophagus Ship and the Obelisk Ship, respectively referencing coffins and monuments originating from ancient Egypt. The color tones for these ships are a mix of beige, turquoise, and lapis—a combination evoking the architecture of Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia (turquoise and lapis mines are historically associated with the region).

The creators were aware of all this. In concept art for the Klingon Obelisk ship, the vessel’s design is stated to be: “islamic outer shell - pearlescent interior shell.” The wings of the Sarcophagus ship, meanwhile, boast gold-and-lapis muqarnas—a honeycomb design that springs from medieval Islamic mosque architecture. Once more, the color combination chosen for the Klingon ships evokes in particular the area of Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia.

The design choices—a hodgepodge of ancient and medieval elements from across today’s Muslim world—have to be read in light of comments on the designers’ intentions. The production designer Mark Worthington notes that he saw the Klingons as having once been stand-ins for the Russians, a theory often echoed in comments on earlier incarnations of the Klingons. But something novel is taking place. According to Worthington, the effort in Discovery was to understand “who [Klingons] really are culturally”—

The Klingons, rather than moving into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, retained a medieval political structure ... Many people seem to think that medieval times and the Middle Ages were unsophisticated, but if you look at the cathedrals that’s hardly an unsophisticated design. We have to see a little more complexity if we see them in that light, that they moved on and developed spacefaring technology but retained certain aspects of culture that we might recognize, like a medieval political structure or faith structure. We also said that they didn’t make a division as we did in the Enlightenment where we slice off the rational and the logical from faith and from those ideas. That’s still retained as one idea.

If we simply take the designer at his word, the Klingons fit into a progressivist teleology. They are a splinter of the European Middle Ages displaced in the cosmos. The problem is that this teleology has been held up as universal since colonial times. One of the most persistent features of orientalism is gazing into the Muslim present and seeing the medieval past. Muslims simply move more slowly in time than civilized peoples.

It is hardly an accident that the Klingon “cathedral” is formally labeled a Sarcophagus adorned with Islamic sacred geometry, and done in colors that certainly do not reference medieval Latin Christendom. Rather, it is an argument, and an all too familiar one at that. The Klingons have failed to unfuse reason and logic from faith and “those ideas.” This is communicated by nodding toward the real world analogues who are likewise seen to have failed—Muslims.

Thus does Discovery collapse past and future to create an eternal present tense, one in which the Klingons of story are brought into intimate contact with the Muslims of the viewers’ history. The show grafts ancient Egypt and medieval Afghanistan and modern ISIS onto the spacefarers of centuries to come. In doing so, it offers a confirmation not of Islamic history, but American prophecy—prophecy that structures the whole of time by the metrics of the “forever war.”

3.

In bringing about the overthrow of SFF orientalism and anti-Muslim racism, two things need to happen.

Firstly, we must pay better attention to orientalism and anti-Muslim racism. The point of going through the glimpses above is to highlight pernicious aesthetic elements, give some sense of what to look (and listen) for, and offer context for what it all means within the historical-cultural moment. Then the task is to go out there and do this all the time with everything.

Secondly, and concurrently, we need accountability. What I’ve written above is not even close to an exhaustive exploration of Game of Thrones, The Witcher, or Star Trek. Beyond them lies a vast ocean of modern orientalist SFF, trafficking as freely in anti-Muslim racism. If we leave the existing production structure intact by allowing past crimes to go gently into that good night, we are risking the integrity of our future.[3]

The point in making both things happen is pressure. In our present moment, orientalism and anti-Muslim racism are still acceptable within the Anglophone SFF market. This is because the Anglophone SFF market is embedded within our historical circumstance, symbiotically feeding into and off of society.

Consider Zohran Mamdani’s words on the eve of his election as mayor of New York City, after facing yet another round of racist attacks from his opponents—

To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity. But indignity does not make us distinct. There are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does ... For as long as we have lived, we have known that no matter what anyone says, there are still certain forms of hate acceptable in [New York] today. Islamophobia is not seen as inexcusable. One can incite violence against our mosques and know that condemnation will never come.

As Mamdani would go on to note about the United States, “in an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement.”

In every example I’ve cited above, our heroes are a diverse coalition. Game of Thrones gives us a white woman at the helm, but her chief allies include Black warriors and helpers, an advisor with dwarfism, and an entire not-Mongol army. House of the Dragon similarly presents us with a white man atop a dragon, but his helpers against the Crab People are Black dragon riders. Blood Origin offers up a white man, Black woman, and Asian woman taking up arms against not-Muslim foes. Discovery’s crew is often celebrated for its diverse patchwork, which include Black and queer members alongside Michelle Yeoh, who also portrayed Blood Origin’s aforementioned Asian protagonist.

These shows, and many others, pitch a supposedly big tent. That tent is expansive, amorphous, accommodates a shifting set of figures. The only element held in common, between fantasies, is that the aesthetics and codes of Islam lie beyond its edge.

This is how Muslims are wound into the existential stuff of Anglophone SFF—by serving as the ultimate field of permitted violence. The argument is that the ancien regime of straight white male heroes can indeed be stretched, and thus preserved. The method of preservation is to invite diverse new generations of heroes into an old shared practice of going to war against not-Muslims.

Mamdani has struck at a truth that equally rings clear in the Anglophone SFF market. Even when our stories do not agree on much, they agree that the War on Terror is the natural state of things. The War on Terror means the existence of terrorists. The terrorists are the ones who can be prosecuted with violence to the point of genocide. Violence against them can be waged not only with swords and phasers, but with dragons and planet-killing bombs.

I am writing to you from November 2025. From my present, Israel has killed two hundred and forty Palestinians in Gaza since the declaration of ceasefire. Children in Gaza are still being killed by unexploded munitions. The official Palestinian death toll from the past two years continues to rise as more bodies are recovered. Today’s count is past 69,000 dead. The true count is beyond this.

The same is the case for the twenty years of the War on Terror, where 940,000 direct deaths represent only a part of the true cost of war. That number still rises. In today’s Afghanistan, despite the ostensible end of war, children are still being struck by unexploded munitions. In Afghanistan, after years of occupation, the city of Kabul is projected to soon run out of water. In Afghanistan, the poison from the Mother of All Bombs seeps into the bodies of men, women, and children. The same is happening in Fallujah. The same is predicted for Gaza.

All of this is with me as I write to you about the past decade’s showings of Star Trek and Game of Thrones. It is with me because these fantasies—these well-crafted and well-funded fantasies, these wildly popular fantasies, these fantasies hailed as ushering in a new age of fantasy and science fiction, these fantasies that have turned great profit for those with their hands at the helm—are designed to bring us into communion with the War on Terror’s telos. They operate to, at the very least, open our souls to the idea of waging violence against not-Muslims through airstrikes and massive ordinance—and if we hold back from genocide at the last breath, it is a sign of our righteousness, not our moral failure.

We might say that the correlation is straightforward, that acceptance of fantasy violence against not-Muslims prepares our souls to accept real violence against Muslims. I might have made the argument, once. But the genocide in Gaza has forced me toward another possibility—that I would be wrong to presume the separation between fantasy violence and historical violence, and the separation between not-Muslims and Muslims.

The US president proclaims from the pulpit that he has seen photographic evidence of beheaded babies. Calendars at hospitals morph into evidence of Hamas presence. Journalists, over and over again, are terrorists. Photographs of Palestinian children starving are questioned and rejected. New prophets look into the futures of murdered children and declare that they would have certainly become terrorists anyways.

The War on Terror has always been a phantasmagoric one. We’ve known this since the beginning, since US officials raved about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We’ve known it since the US locked Afghans in Guantanamo Bay on quite literally nonsense charges (accusations of supporting US-backed leaders, accusations of being people who were already in Guantanamo, accusations of being people who never existed).[4] We’ve known it since it became US jurisprudence to consider as combatants every “military-aged male” in Afghanistan and across Pashtun country; to look at children scrounging for fuel and see Taliban-aligned hands digging IED pits.

The presumed nature of the War on Terror’s targets shares far more with the not-Muslims of Game of Thrones and Star Trek than with substance of real Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Yemenis. That the fantasy is functionally insane does not make it any less murderous. It also means that the Sons of the Harpy and the assassins of Xin’trea and the Crab People and the Klingons are not reflective of our reality. They have an active hand in curating it.

Dragon fire on white bodies is sad. Dragon fire on not-Muslim bodies is cheered on the screen. We ache when the scimitar prows of not-Muslim ships cleave through a white human captain’s ship. But bombs sent by white admirals into not-Muslim countries are the only way to make these barbarians hear reason (and maybe also a chance to prove how nice we are, we of the civilized world). Don’t listen to the not-Muslim’s testimony of pain. He is probably lying.

Don’t listen to me either, for that matter.

4.

I can’t remember where I was when I first saw most of the scenes above. I think I will never forget the moment I saw the broadcast scene during the Ghorman Massacre, in the second season of Star Wars: Andor (2024). I don’t think I can forget struggling to draw breath through that scene, the way my wife’s hand was locked into a claw around my knee.

As per Andor’s showrunners, the resonances between Ghorman and Gaza were accidental (in that the show was filmed before October 2023) and also structural (in that this is how genocide generally works). This hasn’t stopped people from talking about those resonances. In September 2025, Denise Gough, who is one of the stars of Andor, had the following to say in a discussion about Palestine—

Actually, if your heart is broken right now, because my heart is smashed in a million bits, that’s a sign that you are a human ... people in power are not doing enough, but we are, those of us with our hearts broken, we are many.

I think Denise Gough is right. I also think she has neatly summed up what many others have said about why Andor works. In its bones, it is a story about the many—the many broken hearts, the many who simply do not make it, all of whom are ultimately crucial in bringing down a sprawling cosmic empire.

The worlds sketched by Game of Thrones and Star Trek are worlds of power. The only options are join or die. Get to the shelter of the king’s palace before the dragon fire comes down. Enlist on the Federation’s starship before the planet-killer bombs are planted in your earth. To hell with being the many, to hell with your broken heart; make sure you’re among the favored few, and make sure you listen to Tyrion, and keep quiet about what happened.

Andor is the other side of things. The show charts rebellion as a constellation of disparate but interlocking parts: captive prisoners, art dealers, partisans, senators, smugglers, and sundry others. In this, the show expands the spirit of its predecessor, the movie Rogue One (2016), a story concerned with the effort of “the many” during acts of rebellion. Andor is an argument for the impossibility of rebellion without each and every one of these moving parts. If even one were to fail, we would never watch a young Jedi trust in the Force and punch a single torpedo down the Death Star’s throat. What Star Wars presents with heroic clarity, Andor reveals as a dizzying fractal array. The pieces of that array do not fit together neatly. There are cross purposes, warring aims, pragmatic allegiances, overwhelming surges of the heart, luck.

By dwelling among the many, the frontiers drawn between dragons and assassins, between drones and terrorists, begin to break down. There are no such things as Sons of the Harpy or Crab People. Those are general designations, meant to help general violence go down more smoothly. Those are bits of language useful to power. Those are just fantasies.

I’ve been trying here to convince you about the depth of the bonds between fantasy and reality. I’ve been trying to convince you that these things aren’t in polite conversation, but are actually constituting each other. But if that is the case, maybe it means that fantasy is a double-edged sword. Maybe it means we might still grasp at the tools of fantasy for the sake of our reality.

In his acceptance speech for the 2025 Le Guin prize, Vajra Chandrasekera offers the following—

The late capitalist death drive is so perfected that it is not only willing but eager to sacrifice the real present in pursuit of an imaginary future, and the concepts [oligarchs] use to construct that imaginary come from a vocabulary and a grammar built by science fiction. This is a dangerous dynamic, but not a new one. We cannot forget that the originator of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first wrote the occupation of Palestine as a science fiction novel four decades before the Nakba. The speculative genres are as fertile ground for monstrous imaginations as they are marvelous ones. There is nothing inherently liberatory in the imagination, but it must be made so. It is necessary to pay attention to what is being written, to what we are writing, and to what we are reading.

Pay attention, Chandrasekera urges. We cultivate that attention, learn how to exercise it, in many ways—including the sort of criticism found in the writings of Chandrasekera, Aamer Rahman, Ali Karjoo-Ravary, Fargo Tbakhi, and others. As Chandrasekera says, our task is to keep our collective attention on the narrative market.

Pay attention. There’s a Pashto saying—jang sor sho aw Miri tod sho (after the battle cooled down, Miri got very pugnacious). Or, as Omar El Akkad frames our times—one day, everyone will have always been against this.

Pay attention. The powers that be are an adaptive gang. They will shift in their particular positions if it will keep a space open for the free exercise of imaginal violence, imaginal violence that is utterly entangled with real harm. They have done so before. Our attention must refuse this at all points. Our attention must call for the reckoning.

And by means of our attention, we burn the road clear for the story of the many.

[1] I would like to thank Gautam Bhatia for this particular framing.

[2] The metal masks have made other appearances on the screen, notably in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008). The masks are worn by the Telmarines, who appear to be analogues to early modern Iberians in the film. The early modern empires of Spain and Portugal were formed through the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Jews, who had been living in Iberia for centuries, but Islamic material culture was woven into the new social fabric of empire. Regarding Spanish appropriations of Islamic clothing in particular, see Javier Irigoyen-Garcia, Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia (University of Toronto Press, 2017).

[3] For an exploration of this with reference to Frank Herbert’s Dune, see Ali Karjoo-Ravary’s exploration of what is at stake when we strip Islam from science fictional words, and the sort of anti-Muslim sanitization in which Hollywood traffics: “In Dune, Paul Atreides led a jihad, not a crusade.”

[4] Anand Gopal, “Black Holes,” in No Good Men Among the Living (Metropolitan Books, 2014).

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

Image courtesy of J-Novel Club

The original Perry Rhodan series - which will from this point forward be referred to as Classic, was first published in 1961 as a form of Romanhelft, a format whose closest Anglophone equivalent would be the pulp magazine of yesteryear. Beginning with Perry’s expedition to the moon alongside his fellow astronauts, discovery of the Arkonides, and declaration of mankind’s overall unity rather than fragmentation as separate countries, it boldly goes forth into the rest of the universe as Perry and his comrades acquire an immortality that allows them to experience millenia worth of adventures. It has been in continuous publication since that day and stands at over 3000 printed volumes, collected across 150 individual story arcs.

NEO, meanwhile, was conceived as both a celebration and reboot to coincide with Perry’s 50th anniversary in publication. It brings our hero to the 22nd century, retreading, retelling, and expanding Perry’s first beginnings at a slower, and more expanded, monthly pace. According to Klaus Frick, the current editor-in-chief at Pabel-Moewig Verlag, the publishers of Perry Rhodan, what they discovered in surveys was that there were a number of prospective readers who balked at the idea of attempting to get into Perry Rhodan due to its daunting backlog. This presented an opportunity to not just reissue the classic Perry but to bring him up to date with modern sensibilities, creating a reboot that would run side by side with the original and has done so for the past 13 years.

The fundamental story beats and - on the surface - ideological intentions between Classic and NEO are effectively identical. We have the same astronauts, the same aliens, the same unity of mankind, mutants who exist out of earth’s natural order, and political machinations as various countries vie for a voice in a universe where mankind isn't alone. But the precepts behind these story beats differ greatly between the 20th and 21st centuries, not only due to scientific and technological advancements, but also due to a conscious attempt to address the more controversial, problematic, and old-fashioned views of the past Perry Rhodan.

Classic’s first authors Ernsting and Kneifel assert that Perry was written with a lack of political slant in mind. According to Ernsting, he wrote the Classic stories with the view “that they (characters and readers) are all only men, whether black, yellow, or white; that we are all in the same boat (on the same planet); that wars are idiotic and no way to achieve ends; that in politics only a readiness to compromise presences peace”. Kneifel, on the other hand, states that “I try to show that man will take all his personal problems, advantages, and disadvantages with him into the future. I want neither to destroy social systems, nor to build new ones.”

This demonstrates to us a desire to create fiction with a view towards compromise and without a specific political leaning, one not dissimilar to Star Trek. Much like Ernsting and Kneifel, Rodenberry wanted to emphasize space, exploration, and Starfleet as envoys of peace. However, where Classic differs from Star Trek is that in its desire to create an apolitical setting, it accidentally enforces its Earth and Perry’s subsequent reign as Heir of the Universe as being built on strife and the threat of violence.

One of the cornerstones of both Classic and NEO’s Visions of Terrania plot is the twofold threat of alien technology and implanted bombs which serve as threat levied at the earth itself. In NEO, the threats of terrorism and bombs beneath the Gobi desert are planted not by Perry himself but by fanatics within both the Chinese and American governments. Moreover it is Thora, one of the Arkonides, who threatens destruction against the monuments of mankind because she sees violence as the only language our planetary governments will speak. This comes only after one of her own is captured and put on trial by human laws, before a human court, and threatened with execution for conspiracy to commit destruction.

In Classic, it is a threat first perpetuated by Perry and his crew. A means to bring the governments of the world to the negotiation table. The governments of the world, defined as the Western Bloc, Eastern Bloc, and Asian Federation, attempt to eliminate Perry’s new nation via nuclear strike and are thwarted by Arkonide shield technology.

Historically, terrorist threats and organizations that are identified as such on the global scale often come from persons on the backfoot. Those in historically oppressed locations, such as Hamas, or an oppressed subset of society, like the Black Panthers. What change they are able to eke out is done through violence or the threat of such, with a tendency for the historians to paint them as misguided at best or outright villainous at worst.

However, this threat of violence is no longer violent when retold through the histories of the victorious. As the protagonist of the universe, though Perry and his crew may occasionally err in their judgments, we follow him as the ultimate hero and moral victor.  By asserting that Perry’s way is correct and that he is without error in judgment, Ernsting, Kneifel, and those who followed in their wake demonstrate that war itself may be idiotic, but that the threat of war is leverage. That they do not destroy or build new social systems, instead co-opting that oldest tradition of leadership - Perry Rhodan as benevolent tyrant. God-King. While it is asserted that Perry is democratically elected by the peoples of earth, what choice do they have when the man holds a gun to the planet itself?

NEO, however, reframes this so-called terrorism through a more modern lens - the deliberate manipulation of non-American, non-Earth anger to provide the grounds for war. Much as Thora’s threats of destruction are only prompted due to the unjust detainment and possible execution of her mentor, so too have many organizations and persons labeled terrorists or villains in the international narrative. Crucially, it tackles plot points that existed in the Visions of Terrania arc in a post 9/11 world. An Earth where governments do not bow down to threats of violence in order to enact peace, but create powder keg situations in order to suit their advantage. It never, however, compromises on the values of Perry Rhodan himself and arguably stays truer to the intentions of Classic’s authors. Of Perry as a symbol of peace brokered without war. Of politics derived from compromise, not the threat of violence, even when Perry finds himself on the run from the governments of the world.

One of the core tenets that Ernsting wished to impress upon readers of Classic, as stated above, is that all persons regardless of race are in the same boat. That is to say, we all endure the human struggle as equals. Together. However, there is a marked difference between the statement of these values and their expression, both upon Earth and in the farthest reaches of space. The majority, if not the entirety, of major characters who take an active part in the politics of Earth in classic are typically identified as white and male. They speak on behalf of all the races of Earth, taking over the Gobi desert out of the belief the “yellow” people have no need for it. After all, what say do they require, when Perry and his crew know best?

Equality- or lack thereof - seems to exist only by the major white cis male protagonists. Female characters, both primary and secondary, find their importance as secondary characters at best. Kneifel, one of the co-authors on Perry, justifies the depiction (or lack thereof) of women throughout his adventures as thus: “How can anyone who has never in his life known a clever, emancipated independent woman think of describing one?” (Pulkallus, Sylvia et al). The irony of this statement, coming from an author of science fiction that brings its protagonists in contact with hundreds of alien species, has not been lost on this writer. What it speaks to is the explicit biases which constrained the earliest volumes of Classic, where women find themselves falling under the charms of Perry Rhodan and being reduced to accessories in the struggles of men.

Even when- or perhaps especially when- Classic Perry ventures into the farthest reaches of space it is he who speaks on behalf of humanity, and eventually his will is imposed upon the furthest reaches of alien kind through force. A necessary force, as perceived by his readers, all for the good of mankind. He is a universal good, his antagonists the perpetual ill which plagues the universe, and ergo he acts only in defense of all that is good and forthright in the universe.

Such a conquest is not dissimilar to the antagonism displayed by the forces of the Imperium in Warhammer 40,000  - merely framed through a different lens. The Crusades of their Emperor are made with the intention of subjugating or eliminating forces hostile to humanity, preaching the good word of the Emperor as the arbiter of mankind’s hope. This, too, is perceived as being necessary for the good of mankind.  What differs between these two universes is the framing of these stories. In Warhammer 40,000 there are no good guys. No one faction is morally superior to another, and the Emperor and his followers who fight for “the good of mankind” do so at the expense of millions of lives across the universe. With hindsight and wider reading, this makes Classic read more like propaganda for Perry’s rule rather than the actions of a truly benevolent leader. A dystopia hidden beneath the veneer of public good. Ergo, the human struggle of Classic is not, in fact, equal. Democracy may exist but it hews much closer to the democracy of Ancient Greece, where all could have a vote - provided that all meant white men of means.

Where NEO is more successful in displaying the common struggle of humanity is by depicting it as a true tug of war between the people of the world and the private interests of politicians and outside parties. When Perry announces his desire to create a world free from the constraints of politics and governments, millions flock to the newly minted Terrania in the hopes of finding freedom from the systems of their nations. There has always been an appeal to this call of a world without borders and governments, both in the 1960s when Classic was written and in the 21st century, but it is throughout NEO where we see the desperation with which governments rewrite narratives to suit their own purposes. It is most exemplified in the interference of the Chinese government, which plants bombs beneath Terrania, and the American government, who bring the Arkonide Crest to trial in the hopes of secretly taking him in for study and interrogation.

Politics is a game of optics, and these plots are partially successful inasmuch as they force Perry and his crew into hiding. We, the reader, understand that they come from a morally brighter place - a desire for a unified world and a more peaceful galaxy. But, much like in real life, the news can easily turn admiration into disgust, picking and choosing how it portrays any given figure. Even so, it does not stop the desire for change .While it can read somewhat heavy handed, the messaging is clear - true peace and contentment is being undermined by those with power and in power.  And those powers will just as easily destroy their own people, whether they be Perry or the unsung masses, for the sake of maintaining their status quo. It shows an evolution in the ethos of the Perry Rhodan universe - a willingness to see that changes to structures are both necessary and difficult for the creation of a better world.

Perry is not a lone hero going against the governments of the world, but only one of many seeking a greater path forward. The people of the United States, former members of their secret services and the ridiculously wealthy such as Homer G. Smith, are of course involved in making his dream a reality. Sid and Sue, both orphaned and possessed of latent mutant powers, also play a crucial part, with Sid transporting the Chinese government’s bombs to a remote location away from Terrania. Crucially, NEO introduces the new character of Bai Jun - first an antagonist to Perry’s cause before he recognizes that his own government is complicit in the plot to blame Perry. Crucially, Bai Jun’s inclusion and eventual importance as a member of Perry’s team demonstrates Neo’s willingness to change the conversation surrounding its hero and his adventures - in particular, its desire to truly showcase a Perry Rhodan where mankind truly is in the same boat. Along the same struggles.

Where the metaphor falls apart somewhat is the influence of Mr. Smith, the billionaire philanthropist who has made it his life’s work to bring peace to mankind. In a work featuring mutants, aliens, and technology far beyond the stars, this supposed kindness seems far more unrealistic. Perhaps when the character was first conceived for Classic, in much the same role, it was logical to make him a man of benevolence. But in the year 2024 when our lives and livelihoods have been strung out at the whims of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and their ilk, the selflessness of a billionaire will always become particularly suspect.

Still, what we see in the post-Visions of Terrania NEO is closer to the utopian starfaring of Star Trek, in which the ships of Earth carry with them fleets of men and aliens that traverse the galaxy on a diplomatic mission. Perry, too, leads such missions with the intention of peace - or, at least, to prevent war. While it cannot be said that Perry is a pacifist, he no longer reads as especially conquest heavy, and far more willing to hear out the intentions of others.

Fundamentally, Classic and NEO Perry Rhodan diverge primarily because of the role that Perry plays in these stories. In the first 100 or so volumes of Classic, Perry Rhodan is the ur-hero. He is the moral center of reality, and the universe itself distorts around him. While initially he might be seen as an antagonistic force of sorts to the outside powers of the world, and indeed the universe, it is clear that he will always win no matter what. That he will triumph because of it is the will of the narrative

However, in NEO, Perry is not the end-all and be-all of the universe. Although he is a beacon by which others follow, he is not the only hero in his universe. His is not the only story worth telling. There is equal, if not more, time devoted to the side stories and anecdotes of his peers and allies. To Thora in her quest to save Crest and understand the role that the Arkonides have played in the greater universe. To the billionaire Homer G. Smith and the mutants Sid and Sue, who save the fledgling citizens of Terrania and seek to further his desire for a free Terrania. To the doctor in his quest to cure the Arkonide Crest, and the building of trust between human and alien. To Bai Jun, who takes on the role of Perry’s proxy on Earth and must contend with the shadows of his past as part of the Chinese government complex. Of course, it is still a work of pulp fiction, and as befits the genre violence is almost a necessity of its make. Still, the Perry of NEO does speak first and shoot later, rather than asserting violence as the tool of his imperial rule.

NEO benefits not only from the passage of time but from the development and experiences of newer authors. One of the advantages of serial fiction is the ability for the fiction to shift direction as it shifts hands. Frank Bosch, who was once a writer for Classic up until and beyond the 2006 Lemuria arc, was one of the front-runners for the opening overtures of NEO. It is under his pen and that of other authors such as Arndt Hellmer and Hubert Haensel, the author who conceived the critically acclaimed Lemuria arc, that Perry has begun to find himself transformed into a hero not of the 20th century but the 21st. Flawed, but understandably so, never letting go of his own With the monthly pacing of its chapters, as opposed to the weekly frequency of the original, Perry’s progress through the galaxy also slows down. We discover the universe as he discovers it, carefully unfolding and understanding that is far larger and greater than any one man can comprehend.

All of this being said, Classic, too, is an ever-changing beast. While predicated on fundamental principles and technologies that cannot be compromised (including the absence of black holes due to the non-Einsteinian nature of its universe), the values that Perry holds and even the format of the serial itself have begun to shift. Much like NEO, the new Classic benefits from its authors not only gaining experience in their writing but also the changing of society. Women have a foremost role in the world, and discrimination is much less tolerated (though certainly still in existence). Readers of science fiction have become more attuned to a future society where impossible technologies in the 20th century have been realized in there, here and now. And so it is the onus of the author to ensure that even if the worlds they create are fictional, as they present a more hopeful vision of the future, they do so in a way that provides hope to all.

Ultimately, while Classic is beloved in German science fiction for being long-running and well-established in its tradition of science fiction, it suffers from being a product of both its time and environment. It is not the first work that reads poorly in light of the world of today, and most certainly not the first in pulp fiction. Even its intent and ideology is sound, if misguided and colored by the environment and upbringing of its authors. What we see in NEO is a manifestation of Perry’s written intention but updated to a modern sensibility, an alignment that sees it running parallel to the current run of Classic. Perry Rhodan’s universes ask us to believe in one astronaut and his allies as they strive to make the galaxy a better, kinder place, while also grappling with the difficulties of doing so.

© Kyle Tam

Author’s Note: Perry Rhodan NEO is available for purchase through J-Novel Club digitally, copies of which were obtained at personal expense and which I recommend you buy as well. The text of Perry Rhodan Classic’s first 150 original issues was sourced from the Internet Archive, as I couldn’t find a way to procure copies of Classic in English that were not both physical and expensive. They also, unless I’m mistaken, have been out of publication since 1979, although from my understanding of copyright law the rights to Perry Rhodan are still held by its original English publishers.I believe that authors should be fairly compensated for their work, so in lieu of being able to purchase the original 150 would like to direct readers to the Perry Rhodan: Lemuria arc under the Classic line. It is available digitally via Kindle.

SOURCES

Buhlert, Cora. “[July 8, 1963] the Future in a Divided Land, Part 2 (an Overview of Science Fiction in East and West Germany).” Galactic Journey, 17 Nov. 2021, galacticjourney.org/july-8-1963-the-future-in-a-divided-land-part-2-an-overview-of-science-fiction-in-east-and-west-germany/.

JNC, and Klaus N. Frick. “Interview with Klaus N. Frick, Editor-in-Chief at Pabel-Moewig Verlag in Germany.” J-Novel Club, J-Novel Club, 3 June 2022.

Fowler, Christopher. “Invisible Ink: No 172 - Perry Rhodan.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 12 May 2013, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/invisible-ink-no-172-perry-rhodan-8612244.html.

Hare, Kent G. “The Perry Rhodan Reading Project.” The Perry Rhodan Reading Project, perryrhodanreadingproject.blogspot.com/.

Kammerbauer, Mark. “Futuristic Vistas and Cosmic Technoscapes: Perry Rhodan Vol. 3000.” Topos Magazine, 7 Dec. 2021, toposmagazine.com/perry-rhodan-3000/.

Pukallus, Sylvia`, et al. “‘Perry Rhodan’ as a Social and Ideological Phenomenon.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 6, no. 18, July 1979.

Scheer, K.H., Walter Ernsting, et. al. Perry Rhodan. Vol. 1–10, Ace Books.

Articles Editor: Joyce Chng

Copyeditor: Jamie Johnson (Copyediting Department)

Editor's Note: This essay was written and accepted in October 2024.

*

New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox talks about the act of writing fiction as saying “this is how it looks to me; is this how it looks to you?”

I wish the answer was yes more often. We come from different places, different backgrounds, have different experiences, live different lives; we filter what we’re reading through our own lens, we can’t not. Most of my readers are Americans. They’re not stupid or bad readers, they’re just from a completely different cultural milieu and they don’t seem to realise it. When I was younger and more hopeful I thought fiction could unite us, but I don’t know anymore.

Here is where I say: this is how it looks to me.

I try to write Kiwi sci-fi, Māori sci-fi, sci-fi rooted in the world around me. There are a lot of jokes, a lot of cups of tea, a lot of big smiles. That means something different to me than it means to you. We’ll get there.

The seminal New Zealand play Foreskin’s Lament, by Greg McGee, is about a doctor who returns to his rural community after graduation and has a hard time reintegrating with small town culture, where a man with a degree is looked up as weak, feminine, unreasonably emotional. ‘What are ya?’, they ask, a sook? A fag? A fucking girl? When a player is injured during a rugby match, Foreskin begs him to stop playing and go to hospital.

The man doesn’t, and dies on the field. At his funeral, Foreskin launches into a monologue that gets angrier and angrier, until he’s just shouting WHAT ARE YA, WHAT ARE YA, WHAT ARE YA, screaming it until the words lose all meaning. In doing so he commits the ultimate Kiwi sin: it’s one thing to have those emotions, it’s another thing entirely to say them out loud. It’s a powerful and cathartic moment, the sort of rant most Kiwis have pushed down at least once in our lives. We’d never actually do it though. You bury that shit like Foreskin buried a friend. You can’t just say what you’re feeling, what are ya?

I envy Americans sometimes. Kiwis write plays fantasising about being able to just speak our minds for once; Yanks are so direct. It seems like a double-edged sword, but I never met a Yank who was afraid to speak their mind. It’s an openness that’s antithetical to everything I was taught. They ask me direct questions and I give indirect answers because that’s proper, you see? You can’t just say things. When Kiwis have a problem we talk around it, draw a chalk outline with words, let the listener figure out what’s missing, but Yanks just say “oh my god a dead body!” You get to the fucking point. I always know where I stand with youse, there’s no question about how you feel, even when the answer is horrible.

© Alexandra Stronach

In 1986, rugby player Buck Shelford got his scrotum torn open by an opposing player’s cleats and – after suffering the ministrations of the team doctor – returned to the field and continued to play. Buck’s a hero, we’re told; that’s what Kiwi blokes are meant to do. You don’t complain, you don’t cry out, you take the hit and keep going. Girls cry out, you’re not a girl are you? Because that’s a terrible thing to be. My transition happened fifteen years later than it really should’ve because I buried that ken of myself so deep, because the men and boys around me told me that there’s nothing worse to be than a girl. Girls are weak, and weakness is antithetical to who we are. If there is a girl inside you, bury her.

I saw the 2004 Kiwi film Fracture when I was maybe a bit young for it. It ends with a woman laying her head down on the train tracks and smiling as they start to vibrate. I still think about her smile sometimes.

I remember being 12 years old during textiles class when another boy pushed a pin into my shoulder. I didn’t cry out, and he was impressed. He did it again and again and I didn’t cry out, and all the boys agreed that I was tough, even though I liked to sew. I gave up sewing a year later, because I could hear the rumours swirling around me. What are ya they asked, gay? A girl? Well yes to both, but I’d die before I let them actually know. When he asked me whether the pins hurt I smiled and made a joke about it, because that’s what you do. You gonna cry out? You gonna let everybody know you’re weak? What are ya?

2021’s Coming Home in The Dark is a recent standout in NZ cinema, based on a short story by Owen Marshall. It involves a nice suburban family going camping and getting kidnapped by the locals, and as the night wears on it turns out the kidnapping is not random, and the suburban family aren’t so nice. The dad taught at a state run boys’ home, a type of real institution where physical, sexual, and emotional abuse was rife. He didn’t hurt the boys, but he didn’t stop the men who did. He didn’t say anything either. You don’t speak out, you don’t rock the boat. Doesn’t matter if the boys under your protection are being abused, better to let it happen than make a fuss.

The Yanks think we’re cute. We don’t fight or shout, we sit around drinking tea and making jokes. New Zealand is a quaint place you think about retiring. We don’t have wars (except the century of wars that almost annihilated the Māori people) we don’t have mass shootings (except one of the deadliest in human history), we’re just a straightforward and simple people to project a cosy fantasy onto (please ignore the highest teen suicide rate in the developed world). You don’t hear us disagreeing, because what are we ay? We wouldn’t just say it.

I said I’d talk about tea, didn’t I? Tea seems to occupy a different place in American culture to here. It’s a fancy drink to you, it’s something you sip with your pinkie out. When you ask for ‘tea’ in New Zealand you’ll get English Breakfast Tea, aka gumboot. If you ask for something else you’ll get a side-eye like you asked for a fancy cocktail in a dive bar. I don’t drink tea out of nice porcelain cups, I drink it out of a nasty weather-beaten thermos at 3am when the steam is rising off it is my only source of heat. You ask the average rural Kiwi they’d say coffee is for poncy city slickers, tea is the drink of the people. The men who called Foreskin a faggot for trying to save a life, they’d be drinking tea. That’s the tea I write about, but that’s not the tea Americans read.

I was reading Gideon the Ninth right before my egg cracked. The reviews said Griddle was so funny. I read it and all I saw was a traumatised woman having a particularly Kiwi response to pain: she can’t just say it hurts, so she turns everything into a joke. It’s her only outlet, the only socially-acceptable way to seize back any power. I don’t see a funny girl, I see a girl who is doing everything not to scream.

Imagine being a woman in this society; imagine being a queer woman in this society; imagine being a trans woman. To be a good Kiwi is to be tough, resolute, to never cry out, to not be a fucking girl. Imagine being asked to be petite and gentle and feminine but not too gentle and feminine because that’s weakness, and we abhor weakness. Women everywhere must ride a razor of incompatible expectations, but the particularly Kiwi manifestation of that evil is that women must be women without ever being fucking girls. No softness, no weakness, no vulnerability, no crying. That’s the bear trap Gideon Nav has found herself in. Hell, she’s not even allowed to speak, so she’s laughing while waiting for the jaws to snap her leg off, because what else can she do? The Ninth House is built on buried women.

In Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill, the eponymous protagonist dresses herself up in fox fur to attend the social season and walks amongst her fellow Kiwis, all of them overcome with emotion, none of them able to do anything about it. They don’t seem to want to be there, everybody is so lonely, but to let on their loneliness would be ruinous, so they grin and bear it and keep up appearances.

“... an ermine toque and a gentleman in grey met just in front of her. He was tall, stiff, dignified, and she was wearing the ermine toque she’d bought when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny yellowish paw. Oh she was so pleased to see him—delighted! She rather thought they were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she’d been—everywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so charming—didn’t he agree? And wouldn’t he, perhaps?... But he shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a great deep puff into her face, and even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the match away and walked on. The ermine toque was alone; she was smiling more brightly than ever.”

I can’t help thinking of the final shot of Fracture. It’s such a Kiwi response to smile as the train bears down. In Miss Brill, a woman drops a bunch of violets and when a little boy tries to hand them back to her she throws them aside ‘as if they’d been poisoned’ because being seen to desire something frivolous and beautiful is not who we are. It’s a bit sooky, a bit girly, a bit soft. She dropped them for a reason.

Miss Brill takes herself home and on the way goes to the bakery. She gets herself a slice of honey cake. She only likes the cake if it has almonds in it, and she can’t guarantee it will, and she certainly can’t ask the baker to set one aside for her. That would be weakness, that would be admitting needs and wants. She goes home, puts her furs in the box, and as she closes the lid she imagines the fox is crying, because she can’t bring herself to admit where the sound is really coming from.

That’s Kiwi femininity. We’re not allowed to want or need. We’re expected to take the hit and keep playing and God help us if we make a fuss about it. Easier to imagine a skinned animal crying than a good Kiwi gal.

I write Kiwi women. I can’t not. That’s who I am, that’s everybody I grew up around. New Zealand culture is about shutting up, putting your head down, and not making a fuss. Silence tastes like grave dirt. The more adventurous or tired or difficult of us spit the filth out as dark little jokes. It’s one of the only outlets we’re afforded, one of the only tools we have to keep ourselves from choking. Readers pick my books up and they tell me I‘m so funny, it’s just like The Locked Tomb, and I want to scream. I would never though, I wouldn’t want to be a fuss.

I remember working a job that almost killed me, trying to hide the bags under my eyes by making cups of strong tea then lying in my bed with the bags leaking over my eyes, staining my sheets the brown-almost-black of grave dirt. I remember the night a mix of alcohol and new meds sent me into a dissociative psychotic episode and hours later I found myself at home clutching a mug of tea so hard I almost broke it. I remember drinking tea while reading Gideon the Ninth and having a breakdown because the recognition hurt so much.

I put tea in my books and the Americans read it and associate it with comfort and tell me so. I’m sweet, like tea. I want to scream but – as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now – I can’t. That’s our culture: if you have a difficult emotion bury it, throw it in the grave alongside the girl inside you.

I keep coming back to Amelia Jacobson’s incredible essay Ghost Stories. The Carrington Road campus of Auckland’s Unitec was a psychiatric asylum up until 1992. Jacobson walks the halls as a disabled woman and reflects on the histories of the other women kept there, often against their will:

“From my teens, I absorbed narratives about emotional women, difficult women, hysterical women, and the fear of this label and the pathologising of my pain seeped into my subconscious. So I was compliant, warm, and medically articulate, but never overstepping to claim I knew my body better than the experts. These concerns were solidified in 2018, when I read an article about Stephanie Aston, a young woman with the same condition as me, who continued to advocate for herself despite being labelled with factitious disorder – a modern iteration of hysteria – and denied medical care. This September, years after I began this unravelling, I heard she had died. These are not problems of the past. I think of the stories of women like Johanna Beckett, who was admitted to Seacliff Asylum in the 1900s, who subversively asked during her clinical photo, “Do you want a picture of a madwoman? I’ll put straw in my hair and make faces.”

Johanna Beckett was such a funny bitch. I can’t help but admire her – that’s some true blue Kiwi humour right there. How do you cope with a situation like that? You turn it into a joke. They try to bury you, you spit the dirt right onto their nice clean clothes. The Unitec website has a section on the history of Carrington, and according to them it starts in 2018. That’s what we do when there’s a difficult truth, we bury it. We stand on its grave as fists beat from below.

“The fluorescent light flickered as the course co-ordinator asked me questions, and I felt a sense of confinement. Struggling to stay present, I explained I was recovering from a recent surgery. Concern flicked over her face as she emphasised the intensity of the programme, checking that this would not be an ongoing issue. I reassured her that I was fine, I was prepared for the pace. She continued with a warning, that people with “underlying things” find they bubble up in the second or third year of the programme, and wanted to confirm that wouldn’t be me. I reassured again, the unease of the clinical space crawling against my skin.”

New Zealand’s history of eugenics and incarceration is just the logical endpoint of our culture that is rooted in abnegation, in denial, in repression. If something is difficult, we simply don’t talk about it. If it refuses to stay quiet and unseen, we lock it away, we bury it, then we turn it into a campus and pretend it never happened and we keep doing the same horrible shit with big smiles on our faces.

In 1928 New Zealand almost passed a bill that would allow the government to sterilise ‘social defectives’. What that means was intentionally left broad, but I’m a Māori trans woman with a history of mental illness and I can make a few guesses. The only reason the bill didn’t pass is because it was an election year, so it got put on pause until afterwards, and by the time another right-wing party got into power it was 1946 and eugenics was a third rail. I have to live in a country that almost passed that law. Even today I try not to stand out. I worry I laugh too loudly, say too much. If I was a good Kiwi gal I’d know how to bury it. I should be more polite. I should smile more. I shouldn’t make a fuss.

In 1856 Dr Isaac Featherston, a prominent politician, said “The Maoris are dying out, and nothing can save them. Our plain duty, as good, compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow.”

It makes me want to SHOUT, “I’m still here. We’re still here. And we haven’t forgotten that cloying condescension, we’re doing this for your own good, be grateful, when we bury you there will be such lovely flowers”. We can’t forget it, because it never went away. New Zealand wanted to be ‘more British than British’, our inferiority complex and our need to prove ourselves as the one true son of civilisation meant that everything inconvenient, anything that wasn’t white and cis and het and male and tough and polite and uncomplaining got crushed.

It’s everywhere once you start looking. In Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi wrote Marvel a golden palace built through colonial violence, where a single crack in the tiles will spill forth a bloody history. Asgard looks great for a holiday though. Everybody there seems so nice.

Americans think we’re cute because we’re nice. We smile and don’t raise our voices. We crack jokes and drink tea. You’ll never hear a Kiwi say we’re suffering, because our culture is built around denying it. What are ya mate? Whaddarya? Whaddarya? Whaddarya? Whaddarya?

Quoth old mate Foreskin: they ask you whaddarya but really, really don’t want to know.

All science fiction has its basis in the real world. This is the real world I base mine in. It has jokes and cups of tea and big smiles. Sometimes I’m in awe of the power of fiction to unite us. I can say to the world “this is how it looks to me; is this how it looks to you?” and if I listen to the wind sometimes I’m lucky enough to hear a yes. Then the space between us blows out and I realise it does not look to you like it looks to me. American look at the chalk outlines Kiwis write and say “wow, somebody drew a silhouette! Neat!” and the only responses we’re socially permitted are to smile, make a joke, or make a cuppa.

This is where I ask: how does it look to you? as I say:

What are ya?

Me? I’m a funny girl. Want some tea?

*

Editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

In retrospect, thinking about my life, the cosmogenesis of my politics is almost deterministic. I was born into a space that sweltered in the “lifelong pandemonium that [B]lack flesh can cause” (Haile 81). Maybe that’s why I refused to open my eyes the first week after escaping the womb. Willingly blind to it all until I couldn’t be. Until life wouldn’t let me. It raises the question: What do you do when home becomes a haunt? What does it mean when you discover that it always has been?

Afrosurrealists measure the gaps between conceptions of reality and absurdity. These gaps are found in “the reappearance of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, the school … and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake” (Sharpe 21). In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Black studies professor Christina Sharpe describes the time that has passed since emancipation, and the systemic oppressions and violences folded with it, as enslavement’s afterlives. Sharpe unveils and names the haunting cycles of violence within these afterlives as “the wake.” Sharpe’s work sits within the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings, which include: keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness (18). Sharpe uses the term to create a “method along the lines of sitting with, gathering, and a tracking of … the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death … [and] the ways we resist, rupture and disrupt [the] immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially” (13).

Afrosurrealism makes these cycles more clear by laying textual memory side by side to construct a puzzle by conjoining its parts. Through the spectacular and the uncanny, Afrosurrealists build worlds and the bridges between them. These cycles of the wake offer you a kaleidoscope to the traditions and institutions we adore and revile, so they can be seen in new lights. Afrofuturist Ytasha Womack writes that understanding the patterns within the kaleidoscope “requires that we rotate, shifting the lens, flipping the prism of our story to get a full view” (Womack 27).

Kal—beautiful, eidos—form, scope—used to see.

Afrosurrealism conjures this kaleidoscope to identify the constantly shifting patterns of the Black quotidian and offers tools that transmute the horrific into the spectacular. Afrosurrealism isn’t static or didactic. It acts as a portal to timelines and dimensions, giving you the place and space to measure the gaps between the past, the present, and the future through rememory.

In December of 2012, I was visiting home from my freshman year at Morehouse College, when I had to confront the afterlives of a dark legacy. After passing a swerving truck on a back road in Oxford, North Carolina, two white men chased me into a gas station parking lot. Imagine the surreal experience of a Black boy, after sundown, in known Klan territory, with a shotgun to his face, in post-Trayvon Martin America. Now, imagine this moment compacted with being insistently reminded you resemble the martyr of the Civil Rights Movement for the majority of your life … right! It was a confrontation of the past, and a cacophony of the future; a haunting from the unseen, unheard, unnamed, and yet-to-be Black bodies who faced a death foretold.

The haunt is the acquitted murder of Henry “Dickie” Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1970; and the alleged suicide of Oxford police officer Mark Waymer in 2008; and the conviction of Oxford’s sheriff for conspiracy to murder a Black deputy. The haunt is also the stories within my Indigenous family about spiritual returns and cyclical time structures, and ways to survive in the Black quotidian that predate colonialism and transcend geotemporal boundaries. These ancestral ways of being and knowing identify how we are forced to see patterns, and how we are left to conjure a method to stop the failed colonial project and its recurrence plot. It’s knowing, then seeing, then surviving to immi/anence at the end of the world (Sharpe).

Afrosurrealism is a shiver from the amygdala that your descendants inherit. It is a textual and visual legacy of communal horror and survival that drags the audience to the past, propels into the future, and roots in the right now. Afrosurrealism leans toward posturing ways to understand the quotidian. This understanding informed the visceral fear I felt re-membering Till’s death in the “Jig-A-BoBo” episode of Lovecraft Country; and the irony when first reading the fugitive slave ad from Granville County in the North Carolina section of Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad; and when viewing the book-to-film adaptation of Blood Done Sign My Name at the local theatre. My encounters with these texts varied in time and place, but they are representative of the subjectivity of the Afrosurreal across media, and the transmutation of personal history, to collective memory, to critical engagement. Home became a haunt for me to share.

Afrosurrealism is my paternal grandmother’s alleged suicide in a state penitentiary; it’s her son, my dad, being murdered via neglect also under state care; it’s her grandson, my brother, living in their wake, also under state care. It’s Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s juxtaposition of prisoner, imprisoner, and the victims in the wake of the prison industrial complex in Chain-Gang All Stars. It’s me on the stage of Essence Fest, talking to Adjei-Brenyah of the ways his book reflected my family’s past, my present, and the plausible futures of the victims of a carceral state.

Afrosurrealism holds a mirror with thousands of refracted images, and dares you to find your reflection. Amiri Baraka explores how his contemporary Black experience manifests for Black people through his Afrosurreal plays, poems, and stories. Through Amiri’s essays, he draws windows to shared histories and subjective idiosyncrasies across the diaspora. In “Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist,” Baraka states that the world that Black people “inhabit rests on the bottom of the ocean, harnessed by memory, language, [and] image to that ‘railroad of human bones’ at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean” (Baraka 166). The Afrosurreal brings the bottom of the ocean to the surface for readers or, for writers, challenges you to get in the water to find it yourself.

In the “Afrosurreal Manifesto,” D. Scot Miller argues that Afrosurrealists look for what makes them feel “that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest.” Based on Miller’s manifesto, it is the Afrosurrealist’s aim to identify “the invisible” and express the “unknown wonders” within the Black historical and cultural aesthetic. Audre Lorde frames that the ability to “acknowledge dreams is to sometimes acknowledge the distance between those dreams and our present situation” (Lorde 1984, 38). The possibilities embedded in juxtaposing what was, what is, and what could be are a lesson in how vantage points inform Afrosurreal thought. This juxtaposition of non-linear time seeps into the gaps between Black people with shared histories of being othered, yet traversing a multitude of different lived experiences inside, outside, and through the haunting. The Afrosurreal closes the gaps between what is possible and what is plausible, challenging the audience to sit with why the difference between the two even matters.

Afrosurrealism explores othering through anthropomorphizing labor in Sorry to Bother You, turning the hood into a deep tech experiment in They Cloned Tyrone, and marking the monumental targets on the backs of Black boys in I’m a Virgo. The range of Afrosurrealist media often marks the experience that “the most violently antagonistic of contradictions, colors, [and] shapes animate the personalities, settings, [and] language” at the heart of the continually insidious colonial project (Baraka 165-166). Through the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of tropes, themes, and motifs, Afrosurrealist texts create a smorgasbord of meaning to decode, in hopes of conjuring a sociohistorical literacy throughout the African diaspora.

Afrosurrealists illustrate the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of their Black environment through representing and subverting the histories and interiorities of specific communities and histories. The discourse that emerges from this conjures a plurality of synchronous ideas and perspectives on Blackness, or a Black fantasia, from throughout the diaspora. The Afrosurreal crafts a space to freely understand the rhapsody that emerges from this discourse across media. My reading considers a myriad of sources, both material and imaginative, to conjure an improvised but synchronous narrative of the Black quotidian. When Afrosurrealists intentionally sit in the wake, and evoke the plurality of experiences that connect the diaspora, they ensure that other Black creators are initiated into our collective histories. Through the continued contributions of Afrosurrealists—and the reading of old texts with an Afrosurrealist lens—emergent writers and thinkers can build on the Black ontologies and epistemologies inherent to speculative thought. In Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed argues that through this process of re-membering, one becomes susceptible to the Black codified language that Ishmael Reed calls Knockings, or the “ultra ultra high frequency electromagnetic wave propagation” that “we came over here with” (Reed 25). Afrosurrealism, then, is breaking the code and simultaneously reading and contributing to a palimpsest of Black histories, poetics, and praxologies.

Speculative movements have worked alongside sociopolitical movements, supplementally providing the needs, dreams, and realities of Black people throughout the diaspora. While activists forge a praxis through their advocacy, community, and disruptive work, Black speculators have crafted narratives that reveal pasts, challenge the present, and foretell futures. Afrosurrealism’s concomitant engagement in radical thought and action plays a significant role in speculating, (re)imagining, and (re)historifying. The Afrosurreal thrusts the audience into a cycle of repetitive images that incessantly broadens their understanding of the world through simultaneously affirming and disrupting how we perceive meaning from transmedia texts. Take Sorry to Bother You, Supacell, They Cloned Tyrone, and Get Out, all of which position Black people as colonial experiments toward the advancement of white society. While each of these pieces of media approaches interrogating Black people as lab experiments in unique ways, the discourse between them emphasizes the known histories of Black people and communities being experiments, like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the immortalization of Henrietta Lacks, and Adriana Smith’s corpse being used as an incubator. The speculative and the fantastic hold space for the existential concerns of our family, neighbors, and communities to be explored, resisted, and resolved. Further, in the realm of the fantastic, meaning, safety, catharsis, and hope can be found amongst the o/repression and sorrow.

Afrosurrealism inspires writers and readers through its use of pastiche. Such interdiscursive aesthetics evoke a desire to return to the source, and place each text alongside the ones that came before, to craft new stories and expand the textual conversation across geotemporalities. The juxtaposition of existent and emergent Afrosurrealist media provokes an iconoclastic need to (re)mythologize around Black histories and futures in order to (re)orient a collective Black diasporic ontology through (re)membering. Through Afrosurrealism, we develop a love craft that prioritizes Black political thought and collective histories; a love craft which rejects Western understandings of the world while folding these histories and philosophies within grand speculative narratives. Afrosurrealism, then, becomes an ode to the limitless pasts and plausible futures.

Binaries are often viewed in the West in a way that has skewed the perception of the reality of cultural performance. Afrosurrealists have crafted narratives that evoke how iconography is used to disrupt Eurocentric, linear, censored, and constrained perceptions of the geotemporal. When one refers to the bottom, it is often deemed less than, while it can also be viewed as a foundation upon which everything stands. The West has taken the behaviors from people of the Global South and skewed them to be ridiculous and fantastical. Afrosurrealism reorients this worldview through its irony, pastiche, interdiscursivity, and the juxtapositions between the quotidian and the absurd.

In “The Great Change and the Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor’s Postcolonial, Post-Apocalyptic Africa and the Promise of Black Speculative Fiction,” Joshua Yu Burnett uses Nalo Hopkinson’s introduction to So Long Been Dreaming to read Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. Hopkinson argues that Black writers who hope to achieve postcolonialism must “take the meme of colonizing the natives, and, from the experience of the colonized, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it” (Burnett 135). He takes Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s prophecy for an ultimate trickster, and utilizes the omnipotence and ambivalence of Blackness to develop a “postcolonial, post-apocalyptic Africa [that] is a messy, often ambiguous place” (Burnett 148). To take on the duty to read and write within what one believes to be Blackness is to craft a perspective that considers the exuberant and the flamboyant and the silent and sterile. In A Burst of Light and Other Essays, Audre Lorde writes, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Through Afrosurrealism, Black writers are taking on ontological work that is life-sustaining as it seeks and creates meaning in the failed colonial project.

Due to the visibility funnel perpetuated by publishing and access to literature, there are few writers who are able to craft out of love rather than capitalist gain. However, if I were to compile an abridged list, I would point to the works of Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin, H. D. Hunter, Jabari Asim, Percival Everett, Rivers Solomon, Helen Oyeyemi, others aforementioned, some unable to be listed, and even more yet to be discovered. These writers “show postcolonial speculative fiction’s potential as a site for counter hegemonic discourse, as a space for examining possibilities that are not available within mainstream realist literature” (Burnett 134). These writers become conjurers as they operate between necromancy and prophecy to (re)imagine our ontological existence. What place has more space than the Black imagination? After all, who has died more than us?

Yvette Ndlovu’s Drinking From Graveyard Wells provides a speculative praxis for making space for and sitting with the dead. Her story “Three Deaths and the Ocean of Time” is a prime example for the ways that Afrosurrealist thought challenges, conjures, and facilitates an ancestral and archival seance. In “Three Deaths,” Yvette streamlined several complex ideas in just over fifteen pages. She details the haunts of our unnamed and unvoiced ancestors to reinter our histories, the disruption in Afrodiasporic scientific literacies by Western philosophies and ontologies, the disorientation of Western conceptions of time and the reorientation to more African notions through Sasa and the Zamani, and the gaps in the archive that relegate Black women and femmes to the margins and in some cases invisibility. But most importantly, she illustrates the importance of doing the work to recover our collective ancestors, bearing witness to these histories, and allowing your work to depart into the world to shift it on its axis. Through “Three Deaths,” Ndlovu theorizes and models how one can sit with living and vicariously institutional archives to be a witness to the histories wedged in the gap, and a steward for their memory. It’s the manifestation of Toni Morrison’s literary archeology, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Christina Sharpe’s wake work, James B. Haile III’s analytical fiction, and more frameworks toward discovering, retrieving, conjuring, and teaching Black histories to understand the present and the quotidian.

Unlike Afrofuturism, which connects pasts with futures, Afrosurrealism centers the right now to understand the interiorities of the past, name how cycles are repeated in the present, and offer pathways to plausible futures.

Afrosurrealism is Zora Neale Hurston speaking from the grave. It’s Langston Hughes’s body being buried beneath the Schomburg, a remixed 135th Street library, the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s Victoria Christopher Murray sitting with his grave as a site of discovery for her novel Harlem Rhapsody.

Afrosurrealism is a rhapsody and a rupture. Afrosurrealism is a theory, a praxis, a discipline, an aesthetic, a haunting, a requiem. It’s then; it’s now. The Black Quotidian reveals when we were the alien, the slave, the inhuman, the grotesque, the experiment, the revolutionary, the superhero, the brainwashed, the erased, the remembered. The apocalypse has happened. And it’s still. And we still.

Asé.

Works Cited

Barker’s god is Flesh and what it’s capable of feeling. One can’t pinion Barker: He’s slippery, like flayed skin, and as Saint Bartholomew before him, he rebukes your grasp. Author, filmmaker, screenwriter, visual artist, game writer, comic artist, and playwright. He’s a creator who maintains a seemingly uninterrupted umbilicus to the Beyond. His “scarlet gospels” are more than just novels, instead abstracted into a self-knowledge for the deviant, the aberrant, the non-cooperative queer, the un-aesthetic body.

Barker’s stories and characters, especially the Cenobites of The Hellbound Heart and the Nightbreed of Cabal, resist social, political, and economic use-value. They exist in spite of these institutions and powers, as does the monstrous body of the chronically ill, queer individual.

This body is monstrous because society deems it so; its queerness is made dangerous by a desire for something entirely outside of gender. Desire, hunger, appetite for what is maintained as inedible. Desire, hunger, appetite for what is metaphysical, what is inanimate, what is an apparatus of oblivion. For example, the Cenobites—the Hell Priests of Leviathan and entourage of LeMarchand’s Configuration, the monsters at the center of The Hellbound Heart and its various adaptations and iterations—experience a vicarious ecstasy wherever pleasure crests into unbearable anguish, and pain becomes so eviscerating that the laws of science collapse.

The Cenobite Pinhead from the Hellraiser film franchise

This is the abject eros of Barker’s stories, of his characters. It is an underlying ethos of the worlds he builds: worlds that are initially abhorrent, full of unrelenting torture and profanity. But worlds which ultimately, through their horror, reveal a tremendous amount of sovereignty, of personal power, of self-acceptance.

This turn echoes the Cenobite Modus Operandi: brutalist hedonia, or the extreme, torturous, and punishing implementation of pleasure and pain, so much so that the two are indistinguishable from each other. The French philosopher Jacques Lacan calls this sensation jouissance: a pleasure that transcends mere enjoyment to reach towards something more real. Though the novella’s emphasis is on agonizing and mortifying activity, it is the pulsing current of aliveness facilitated by Desire’s love affair with Death that calls the Cenobites. We encounter more of this jouissance-in-action in The Hellbound Heart:

As it was, they had brought incalculable suffering. They had overdosed him on sensuality, until his mind teetered on madness, then they’d initiated him into experiences that his nerves still convulsed to recall. They had called it pleasure, and perhaps they’d meant it. Perhaps not. It was impossible to know with these minds; they were so hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous. They recognized no principles of reward and punishment by which he could hope to win some respite from their tortures, nor were they touched by any appeal for mercy. He’d tried that, over the weeks and months that separated the solving of the box from today. 

There was no compassion to be had on this side of the Schism; there was only the weeping and the laughter. Tears of joy sometimes (for an hour without dread, a breath’s length even), laughter coming just as paradoxically in the face of some new horror, fashioned by the Engineer for the provision of grief. (The Hellbound Heart 23)

Here, Death and Desire are indistinguishable from one another: a mutant and chimerical specter haunting the Frank Cottons, those unnatural-desiring-machines, of the world. It’s not a reach to consider that Barker, observing the HIV and AIDS epidemic raze the earth of the queer diaspora, would be impacted by these catastrophes. The thanatophilia explored within much of his work, but especially within The Hellbound Heart, reflects that painful reality. Frank asks himself: “how could he hope to articulate the nature of the phantasms his libido had created?” only have the unreality of his appetites realized by the Priests of the Gash, those “sexless things, with their corrugated flesh.” (The Hellbound Heart 5) By surfacing the jouissance within Frank Cotton’s transfiguration by the Cenobites, however, Barker problematizes the idea that the sexual deviant “gets what they ask for” as a form of punishment. Considering Barker’s thanatophilia as simultaneously a form of jouissance and a reflection of the immense stigma surrounding the AIDS epidemic allows for the reconsideration of that thanatophilia, that abject desire, as a space for profound power and liberation. One of my favorite quotes is spoken by the Cenobite Pinhead in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), the third film of the adaptation franchise: 

There is no good, Monroe. There is no evil. There is only flesh. And the patterns to which we submit it [...] don't flee from yourself; if you have a quality be proud of it. Let it define you, whatever it is. 

The Cenobites, Hell Priests of Leviathan, from Hellraiser (1987)

This purposeful jailbreak from a Christian morality, used to perjure queer individuals, used to justify why their death-en-masse was a righteous and furious punishment from God, becomes all the more vital for one seeking to deprogram themselves of the shame they’ve consumed by societal osmosis. Frank reflects, “Yet since he had come to believe in nothing at all it was not so difficult to put the tyranny of verifiable truth out of his head.” (The Hellbound Heart 22) Through this cosmology, Desire and its dance with Death becomes a revelation: it is not good, it is not bad, it simply is Desire, and therefore it cannot be wrong because it is true. It is a true, even holy, ambition for which you should not assign shame. 

And what a remarkable, radical precept that is: The body, whose desires risk abjection, is a powerful conductor of pleasure. Freedom and power beckon us, shaking us loose from self-policing. As Michael Sean Bolton asks in “Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic”: 

[...] the source of dread in the posthuman Gothic lies not in the fear of our demise but in the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change [...] but what if the Other is not inhuman but posthuman? What if the “fearful unknown” is our future selves?”

Barker does not see the unknown and its terrors as something to be avoided, but rather as something to be embraced: a domain of sensation and therefore knowledge.

Beyond the event horizon of monstrosity (surviving and absorbing its infection), there arises more-than-humanness. In The Hellbound Heart, Frank, in his monstrous, viscerated state, reflects on his captivity on the other side of the Schism, under the domain of the Cenobites. The surgeries and transformations he experienced did not leave him bereft of either survival or escape: “He had been lucky. Some prisoners had departed from the world without leaving sufficient sign of themselves from which, given an adequate collision of circumstances, their bodies might be remade.”

In Cabal, Boone, our nightmare-laden protagonist fleeing from suspected murder, mutates after being bit by Peloquin, one of the monstrous Night Breed:

Peloquin and Kinski, two of the Nightbreed from the 1990 adaptation of Nightbreed, directed by Clive Barker

Yet his system, traumatized as it was, didn’t fail. There was a vigor in his muscles he’d not felt since he’d done violence to himself, a thought that repulsed him now as it had never before. Even the wound, throbbing beneath his hand, had its life, and was celebrating it. The pain had gone, replaced not by numbness but by a sensitivity that was almost erotic, tempting Boone to reach into his chest and stroke his heart. Entertained by such nonsense he let instinct guide his feet and it brought him to the double gates. The latch defeated his blood-slicked hands so he climbed, scaling the gates with an ease that brought laughter to his throat. Then he was off up toward Midian, running not for fear of pursuit but for the pleasure his limbs took in movement and his senses in speed. (Cabal 45)

Maximilian Breckwoldt’s tremendous exegesis on the relationship between Hellraiser, monstrosity, and the at-risk-body culminates in a vindication of the monstrous. He states, “Monstrosity, then, can be understood as combining distinction in itself and thus problematizing the structures that uphold society.” We recognize the queer and ill “infection-chain” (a body both infected and capable of spreading its infection) of the monstrous body is defined by its unnaturalness to the confines of society, and that subsequently, its power to disrupt social homogeneity and subjugation grows in equal proportion to the repulsion and alienation it experiences. Cabal, and its monster/mutant race, the Nightbreed, offer a vision of queer/chronically power that exists outside of those disciplinary and exploitative political apparatuses that Michel Foucault terms “biopower.”  

Cabal is often classified as fantasy over horror. The story has no scarcity of monstrosity, of the grotesque, of the effervescing demimonde that characterizes Barker’s characters, narratives, and the Nightbreed (the humanoid but chimerical and monstrous species of which our protagonist, Boone, finds himself becoming). But it is a fantasy as in the psychoanalytic sense of phantasy: the imagination endeavoring, desperately, to materialize conscious and unconscious unfulfilled desires. Simply put: a phantasy is a wish fulfillment, and that is the tender heart at the center of Cabal, replete as it may be with Shuna’s porcupine spikes or Peloquin’s bestial canines. “The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside” engulf our protagonist Boone into the mysteries of the monsters, inviting him into the community which has taken up a cathexis within and beneath the cemetery: Midian. (Cabal 163) Again, Desire and Death flirt with each other, but one thing is made very clear: The “natural world” has no space for the monster within it. The world of the monster, the mutant, the chronically-ill queer body, is an invisible world.

In Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, he proposes the term “biopower” to communicate, “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” Biopower, in other words, uses the apparatuses of the states to harness the productive and generative capabilities of the human body. It stands to reason that a body which is unproductive, considered incapable of generating value for the mechanisms of power, would be a body without value, a body which is powerless. This “anatomo-politics of the human body” is represented in all milieus, from the military to medical institutions and academia. (Foucault 139) The body is a machine. A machine which does not cooperate is decommissioned, is disassembled, is left to rot in a warehouse, or is scrapped for parts.

In addition to the anatomo-politics of the individual body, Foucault theorizes a “bio-politics of the population,” which operates on people, “not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.” (Foucault 139) The bio-politics of the population focuses upon what Cisney and Moyar call, in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, a “species-body.” Species-bodies that are prone to higher rates of illness, disease, poverty, and other interstices—such as those found within marginalized populations—are less able to generate what the “mechanisms of power” require. The anatomo-politics of the human body and the bio-politics of the population are both sites for  disciplinary measures of biopower. Cisney and Moyar continue:

It is for this reason that sexuality, situated at the juncture of these two domains, becomes such a politicized issue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and, arguably, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well). It is something of a nexus in which these two, the health of the body and the health of society, discipline and regulation, fuse into one... 

The literary motif of the mutant or monster represents the subversion of biopower by problematizing both the anatomo-politics of the human body and the bio-politics of the population. The mutant is abjured when it does not create value within the mechanised and disciplinary regimes of biopower that society enforces; when the mutant rebels, their innate and inalienable anatomo-power is freed up to be assimilated into their own mutant populus, as opposed to governmental institutions. 

The underground city of Midian, from Nightbreed (1990)

Beneath the sprawling, desolate expanse of a neglected cemetery and its cobwebbed mausoleums, a city of infinite passageways and subterranean textures exists: Midian, the city of monsters beneath the soil. Here, those who cannot exist amongst the “normals” have co-created an imperfect but sacred sanctuary. The phantasy of Midian is a community of the abjured Other, a functioning tribe of the exiled, co-creating and co-operating as a society unto themselves with unique positions contingent upon their specific mutations. It privileges the churning of power from the inside, a place where what is aberrant is recognized as essential skill instead of liability to production. Midian, “where the monsters live,” can therefore be read as a pseudo-topia, or what I have called a mutantopia: a close approximation of utopia for the monstrous body. Midian is a model for co-opting and liberating energy from the extortion-machines harnessing biopower, and restoring it to the mutant-class. 

Midian is not ideal: the Monsters are always on the run from the “naturals”; they exist in the places where the “naturals” do not care to haunt. And even then, hunted and prosecuted and in pursuit of freedom, they move ever onwards towards an incongruous horizon, a point on the map which only exists when the Monsters create it, but never as a thing-in-itself.

As we queer, chronically ill individuals and our communities consider the political trajectory various nations are so publicly turning in, with waves of unethical punitive and punishing laws impacting transgender people, reproductive rights, genocide, human trafficking under the guise of deportation: we are witnessing our de facto negative-valuation by the state. Each consecutive executive order signed by the US administration re-enforces our “unworthiness of life.” The more the disciplinary mechanisms seek to consolidate and reify biopower, the more the monstrous body is not just figured as expendable, but also meriting persecution and eventual extinction. 

My most earnest hope for the future of monstrous bodies is that, in the face of greater alienation and oppression, the phantasy of Midian becomes a phenomenal thing, and not just a numinous utopia in the monstrous collective imagination. May we build our refuge in the worlds which hide in plain sight, may what is unnatural about us become a benediction of our strength, and may our subversion of biopower become a weapon against the ruling class. “When the sun goes out and there’s only night, we’ll live on the earth. It’ll be ours,” Barker writes in Cabal. (Cabal 89) May we recognize the worlds, the ontological maps, and the ways-of-being which the philosopher-priest Clive Barker has revealed for us, and may we follow them to our freedom. 

Bibliography 

Barker, Clive. The Hellbound Heart. USA: Dark Harvest, 1986. (Accessed online)

Barker, Clive. Cabal. USA: William Collins and Sons, 1989. 

Bolton, Micheal Sean. “Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic.” Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, 2014.

Breckwoldt, Maximilian. “Transforming the AIDS Monster: Tearing Apart the Human(E) in Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II Through Gothic Becoming-withs.” Cine-Excess 6 (January 2025). 

Cisney, Vernon W., and Nicolae Morar. Biopower: Foucault and Beyond. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1, an Introduction. . Translated by Robert J. Hurley. Vintage Books Edition. New York: Vintage, 1978. 

Hickox, Anthony, dir. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. 1992, Miramax.

Editor: Anneke Schwob.

Copy Editor: Copy Editing Department.

Given their unique perspectives on gender, genre, and the shifting culture of SFF over several decades, I asked Pat and Nicola to reflect on what’s changed, what hasn’t, and where such fierce determination to take up space came from.

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice, for her novels Synners and Fools, and the Scribe Award three times, most recently for her novelisation of Ultraman. Her short fiction has won many awards, including a Hugo for her 2013 novelette, “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi.” A pioneer of cyberpunk, Pat works across genres, including fantasy, horror, nonfiction, and YA. 

Author of the science fiction classics Ammonite and Slow River, as well as seven other novels, Nicola Griffith has won the Nebula Award, the Tiptree Award, the World Fantasy Award, six Lambda Literary Awards, and many others. In recognition of her significant contributions to SFF, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named her their 41st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master in 2025.

Kerry Ryan: Where did you find the confidence to write SFF at a time when the cultural climate wasn’t just discouraging but actively hostile?

Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith: Psychotic self-belief! I knew from—I don’t even know how old I was—maybe as soon as I could spell my own name, that I was a dyke, and that meant I was never, ever going to be liked in that “ideal” way. Not as a nice Catholic girl. Not by my family, my church, my school, or the world in general at that time. There was no point trying to please people, because I never would, just because of who I am and the way I move through the world. It was impossible. So why bother trying? Why not aim for what I wanted? 

Pat Cadigan: I grew up below the poverty line in what people called a “bad neighbourhood.” People would take one look at me and assume I’d get pregnant at fifteen, drop out, and end up in beauty school. That was the trajectory they imagined for girls like me. 

My mother used to say, “People will see you as the child of a broken home. And if you get into trouble, they’ll blame me. So don’t screw up or I’ll kill you.” She was only half joking. But I had her as a model because we didn’t get abandoned by my father, we left him. 

So that was my example: If things aren’t going the way you want them to, that’s just how it is—and so you fight. Either you get what you want, or you discover something else that’s worth wanting. What I saw growing up was women doing whatever needed to be done and not because they had money, or men, or family support, but because that was the only option. You want something? You make it happen.

Nicola Griffith: I just never absorbed gender training. Along with my sisters I had a super-Catholic family upbringing, heavy and repeated gender training: you were meant to be modest and wear sweet dresses, sit up straight but don’t take up any space, listen respectfully, never disagree, you know, all that stuff. So I did always know what was appropriate; I just didn't give a fuck. 

Pat Cadigan: My mother said: “If you're going to be a writer, you’re going to have to be ten times better just to compete with men who are barely competent.” And later in life, the writer Mary Anne Mohanraj said to me, “Pat, you have the confidence of a mediocre white man.” I just cracked up laughing. By then I was in my sixties, and let me tell you, it took a long time to earn that kind of confidence. It didn’t come easy. I had to fight through a lot to get there. But I did get there, and I was lucky in that I always knew who I was: I was a writer. Once I understood that books came from people who wrote them, I knew I was going to be one of those people. That was it. There was no turning back. I was just that driven.

Nicola Griffith: When I was 14 or so, my English teacher Mrs. Squires told me that I wrote the best descriptive prose she’d ever seen in her life. She said, “What are you going to do when you grow up? Where are you going to go study English?” And I was like, “Oh no, I’m going to do molecular biology or microbiology," (though I only lasted a few weeks at university), and she said: “Well, just keep writing.”

And then I fell in love and, of course, the only way properly to express love to one’s beloved is poetry. So I wrote some poems, and some of those poems later became lyrics for a band I was in, and it was when I was in the band, I learned that my words could do things to people. One of the lyrics that really showed that to me was from our band’s big anthem, “Reclaim the Night.” That song is where I first really understood the power of point of view. I wrote it from the perspective of a man out looking for a woman to rape. After I performed it for the first time, some people came up to me and said, “It’s an incredible song,” but they also said, “I hated being in his head.” I was twenty-one when I wrote that and it taught me so much about perspective—how just shifting the point of view can completely change a reader or listener’s experience of a story.

And then when the band broke up, as bands always do, I was hooked on this writing thing.

Pat Cadigan: I was a theatre major in university—at least for part of the time—and I also did a couple of semesters in grad school, in the English department. But even then, I realised I wasn’t really an academic. It was time for me to get off campus and go write. By that point, I was at the University of Kansas, studying under Jim Gunn—and Jim was terrific. He wasn’t sexist at all, which was remarkable, especially considering he was of my mother’s generation, born in 1923. He treated me with real respect and taught me a lot about writing, but also a lot about how to encourage writing students. 

When I taught at places like Clarion West, I’d always remember how Jim Gunn spoke to me in a way that made me really listen. Even when he was tearing a story apart and showing me just how bad it was, I never felt crushed or defeated. He took the effort seriously, he took my ideas seriously. He was a very quiet man, but he probably influenced a huge number of students.

I also had an amazing English teacher in high school—I had her for two different years—who encouraged me like nobody’s business. She was wonderful. She’d give me good critique, but she pushed me and encouraged me to keep writing. She was like, “Well, what else are you going to do, besides be a writer?” She really seemed to understand me as a writer, which was amazing.

So I had some great influences that helped counteract the cultural biases women often run into. That made a huge difference.

Kerry Ryan: In 2015, Nicola analysed six major literary prizes and found that even when women won, it was for novels with male protagonists, revealing a cultural bias where the most prestigious awards rarely recognized stories by or about women.

So how have things changed since then and since you were both first published in the 1990s?

Pat Cadigan: When I was starting out, there were hardly any women science fiction writers. There were a few that had made names for themselves but there really weren’t that many. In popular anthologies like Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, very few stories were by women. 

Kim Stanley Robinson told me that when he started to publish, his editors made him write, not as Kim Robinson, but as Kim Stanley Robinson because they were afraid readers might think he was a woman and not buy his books. And the first time I taught at Clarion West, a student told me that she’d given her boss Synners to read because she thought it was his kind of thing. When he gave it back to her, he said: “This is a woman without any femininity at all.” That’s what it was like back then. 

Nicola Griffith: I remember thinking a couple of years ago that there had been a sea change in terms of representation. There are definitely more stories about women and by women around these days. There are more stories about and by queer people, more stories by and about disabled people, people of colour, trans people, overworked and underpaid people—there’s just much more variety. 

Pat Cadigan: Once we were out of the nineties, I really began to see things shift. I remember moderating a panel and looking down at the line of writers and out of five, four of them were women and they were writing hard science fiction—space travel, technical detail, the whole deal—and not all of them were white either. And I thought wow, it’s been a long, strange trip, but things really have changed for the better.

Nicola Griffith: But I do feel though that we’re witnessing a backlash. That the pendulum has begun to swing in the other direction. Obviously, the political climate and the wave of anti-DEI sentiment sweeping America is deeply troubling. What’s just as disturbing is how people are pre-obeying: anticipating what they think those in power want, and adjusting their actions before anyone even asks. Self-censorship. That’s really disheartening.

Pat Cadigan: I’ll just say it: I blame Trump. I absolutely blame Trump for everything. I bumped my head this morning, and I blame him for that too. I still can’t quite believe that the same country that elected Barack Obama twice turned around and gave us that. So, it’s three steps forward, two steps back. Yes, there’s been real progress—you can see the difference—but regression is always possible. That’s the danger. That’s what we’ve got to watch out for. And representation matters so much. N.K. Jemisin said that without Octavia Butler she wouldn’t have thought there was a place for her in science fiction. And look at the work she’s done. What an incredible talent she is.

Kerry Ryan: You’ve both written across different genres now, so do you still feel part of the science fiction community?

Pat Cadigan: Oh yes. There has always been a lot of community in genre writing. Always. Online has changed the interface and made it easier for people to find each other, but the community has always been there. 

And of course, it’s not perfect, you know. But I remember talking to another writer—she was more in the mystery world than science fiction—and she was really nervous about going to this SFF convention we were headed to. I said, “You don’t have to be nervous. They already like you.” And that’s how it turned out. She found people who had already read her work, and the ones who hadn’t, they were eager to. You can find great support in the science fiction community, and as long as you don’t get too clubby or cliquey, you’re okay.

Nicola Griffith: : I feel very much part of the SFF community. And at the same time, genre is just a marketing label. Genre is just a tool. When I have an idea about a place or about people or a concept I want to explore, genre is just the appropriate vehicle to cross the story terrain. At the beginning of my career, I became really interested in a question: Why is it that so many people don’t see women as fully human? And the only real way to explore that idea, through a women-only world, was through science fiction. 

But when I write, I write without concern for genre. I want someone to pick up one of my new books to review and not think, Oh, it’s a new book by a sci-fi author. I’ve written nine novels and only three of them have been SFF. So I want readers to think, Oh, it’s a new Nicola Griffith novel. Where’s it set? What’s it about this time? I want it to be treated as a book by me, and shelved with my other books, not something instantly labelled and categorised and shelved in the "appropriate" section. 

As a reader I don’t give a shit about genre as a marketing category. Truly. I don’t really give a shit whether there’s a pirate on the cover, or someone in a Regency dress, or someone with a Stetson. It doesn’t matter. I just want good fiction. Having said that, SFF is my home—the people, writers, readers, critics. Science fiction people—they’re my people. SFF is where I belong. 

Kerry Ryan: Any final thoughts on the writing process?

Nicola Griffith: When I teach writing, one of the most important things I say is: You are God of your world. You. Not your agent, not your editor, not your sweetie, not your kids or your parents—you. So, make sure you’re happy with whatever leaves the house. If you're not happy with a book or a story, don’t send it anywhere until you are. If you don’t want to sign a contract, don’t sign a contract. Trusting yourself is the most important thing.

Pat Cadigan: The way I look at it is, I don’t really have problems. I have some technical difficulties, sure, but not problems. Like needing a lawyer so I don’t go to jail—that’s a problem. Technical difficulties can always be addressed, things can always be done, adjusted, changed. No defeat is final.

Anxiety and worry are hard work, so I just don’t do that. I still feel as driven as I ever was and that drive to write—that’s my life preserver, the thing that keeps me afloat. If I have that, then it’s as I said: No defeat is ever final. 

Pat and Nicola were interviewed separately and their responses edited for clarity and presented together. Thank you so much, Pat and Nicola! 

Editors: Anneke Schwob.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

Hanna Thomas Uose’s debut novel Who Wants to Live Forever (Brazen; March 2025) explores the ramifications of a revolutionary drug, Yareta, which halts biological aging. The narrative centres on Yuki and Sam, a couple in their twenties whose relationship is tested when Sam opts for immortality, choosing to live forever rather than grow old with Yuki. Julianne Pachico's third novel  Jungle House (Serpent’s Tail; 2023) is  set in a future where artificial intelligence has become deeply integrated into daily life. The story follows Lena, a young woman raised in an isolated jungle estate by an AI caretaker known as Mother. Emily Tesh’s novel Some Desperate Glory (Tordotcom; 2023) won the Hugo Award in 2024, and she is also the author of the Greenhollow Duology, and The Incandescent, a fantasy novel set in a contemporary British boarding school.

Kerry Ryan: Pat Cadigan and Nicola Griffith began writing at a time when the cultural climate wasn’t just discouraging, it was actively hostile. How would you describe the landscape now, as women writers publishing spec fiction in the 2020s?

Julianne Pachico: You could argue that more women are reading, writing, working in publishing and that women have a real presence, but I don’t think presence automatically equals power or voice. Just because there are more women in my workshops doesn’t mean they’re claiming space in the same way men have. This question of authority—of asking for things, of taking up space—has become more pressing for me, especially since becoming a mother. Among my peers—new mothers, progressive, liberal, millennial women—I’ve been struck by how often we don’t ask for what we need. And that made me wonder: how long have I been doing that in my career without realising it?

Hanna Thomas Uose: I just rarely come across men in my publishing journey. My whole publishing team was women. My grandmother is 95 and she read my book, and her main comment was about the acknowledgements. She said: You thanked so many women! She couldn’t believe all of these women had been able to help me. It just amazed her. Which really shows the difference between generations and how much has changed. That blew me away. It made me feel really grateful because, in my family line at least, no other woman has had this kind of opportunity for self-expression. 

Emily Tesh: I have been very lucky at every turn in my writing career, and I want to emphasise that. I had a very easy time of it right up until I had children but that's not so much the fault of publishing as a career as it's a fault of the entire world and the way it's set up! Few jobs are designed around the needs of someone who also must care for small children.

Publishing is, I think, particularly brutal once you become a mother. Books have to be completed and edited by a certain date no matter what. I wrote my most recent novel while I was seven or eight months pregnant and it was really miserable. I handed it in, had the baby, took one month of maternity leave, and went straight back into edits. Obviously, that’s just how it works being a contractor and would be just as true if I were a plumber. If you can’t do the work in the contract when it’s due, then you’re not going to get paid. And yes, I could have taken time off but then the book would have been delayed another year, and payment delayed another year.  

Julianne Pachico: I joke with my husband that we should all write with the confidence of a boomer man writing his memoirs. That energy of: My story matters. Listen to me. You see that in some students—it’s just astonishing confidence. And then I see so many young women writers who are brilliantly talented, but so hard on themselves, so uncertain. Everyone should feel like they have the right to take up space, to express themselves and to tell their story.

Kerry Ryan: Do you think genre distinctions are blurring? That readers are more ‘genre-fluid’ these days? There is less of a distinction between literary fiction and SFF?

Julianne Pachico: I was speaking to a colleague from the University of East Anglia who has been teaching much longer than I have, and he said the biggest shift he’s seen in people’s writing over the last 20 years is a greater comfort with genre. He attributed that to Harry Potter. I mean, even Karl Ove Knausgård is writing genre fiction these days. And Sheila Heti’s latest piece in the New Yorker is almost fairy tale. My book Jungle House is definitely shelved in the literary fiction section. It’s not shelved in science fiction, but it really could be. I think it's up to readers to decide where it belongs.

I’m not a sociologist, but from a personal point of view, as a writer, as a creator, I do think anyone working in the arts is, dare I say, channelling the unconscious of society. We're all just trying to make sense of things, trying to understand. And one thing you could say about the past 20 years is that our lives are extremely mediated by technology. And I think that’s kind of the job of art, right? To engage with those feelings.

Hanna Thomas Uose: I think lots of literary novels, like those by Kazuo Ishiguro, engage with speculative ideas, but if you’re judged to have a certain status or quality, your work is still classed as literary rather than genre. That makes me wonder what those genre distinctions really mean. There’s this new series of Danish novels called On the Calculation of Volumes. It’s been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and I think it’ll probably win. It’s very literary, but the concept is highly speculative, yet no one talks about it as a high-concept speculative novel.

Emily Tesh: I’m not a believer in hard genre boundaries. I think those are often more marketing signals than anything else. But I do find it interesting that there’s been a blossoming of openness to the fantastic. I think maybe a lot of seriously realist literary fiction has already been written. There’s possibly not much space left in the solidly realist mode, so maybe it’s time to try something else for a while—let some ground lie fallow and become fertile again.

I do think a lot of the strict genre categories in SFF are nonsense. For example, faster-than-light travel is pure fantasy since there’s no scientific basis for it. So any sci-fi world based on faster-than-light travel is also pure fantasy. Science fiction as a category is really just a set of aesthetic signals, which I enjoy, but I don’t think they are meaningfully different from signals used elsewhere. The techniques of world-building and creation are the same.

Hanna Thomas Uose: The people who are really enjoying my novel seem to be those who don’t usually read speculative fiction or wouldn’t consider themselves speculative readers. Maybe they read more realist novels but come to Who Wants to Live Forever and think, oh, wow, you can ask really big questions in this kind of book. It’s been really fun to feel like that my novel might be a bit of a gateway into speculative fiction for these kind of readers.

Emily Tesh: A lot of science fiction in the UK is aimed only at male sci-fi readers because there is a belief that soft sci-fi does not sell in the UK. Perhaps it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy and that because soft sci-fi is believed not to sell here, it’s not stocked by booksellers. It’s viewed as being more of an American genre and so is thought not to interest UK readers, particularly UK female readers.

My science fiction book Some Desperate Glory has incredibly different covers in the US and the UK. The US cover is aimed at a YA crossover female audience, while the UK cover looks like gritty boy’s sci-fi. It needs to look like it could be a “boy book,” but since it has a girl in it, they put some purple on the cover.

Kerry Ryan: What gave you the confidence to start writing and publishing in the first place? What was the motivation?

Emily Tesh: As a young writer, I was writing fan fiction with a community who were mostly young women. It was the first community I’d ever encountered where the default pronoun was female. This was the early 2000s. You’d go to Reddit and hear, “there are no girls on the Internet,” but go to LiveJournal and it was more like, “there are no boys on LiveJournal.” Being the default in a community makes a huge difference. It’s about intersections of identity and privilege—feeling like your voice is normal and that no one is going to tell you off for talking. That’s a really powerful feeling, especially for a teenager, and I was a teenager when I started. So that community was important to me. The serious science fiction and fantasy community online just didn’t seem like a place for me, then.

But Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was a turning point. After that book was published, it felt like science fiction and fantasy might actually be a place for me after all. But definitely writing for fandom was what made me feel free to write in the first place.

Hanna Thomas Uose: Being part of a creative community for marginalised genders like Write like a Grrrl or Lips—the women’s choir—really helped me to take up space. But what’s giving me more confidence now is that my novel is out there in the world and people are responding positively to it. That validation takes away some of the fear and has helped build my confidence to keep going and do more. It’s been really liberating, actually. I’ve realized there’s so much more I want to say and more authentic places to write from, and that’s so exciting. Now that my novel is out there, I feel like I have more permission to explore my voice freely.

Juliane Pachico: I’ve always loved to read—that’s my greatest love. There was this stretch, the first three or four weeks after my son was born, when I couldn’t read. I couldn’t focus. I wasn’t sleeping. And it felt like a kind of death. I thought, Who am I if I’m not reading? That was terrifying. But then, you know, they get a little older and it gets a bit easier. But yes, that’s where my writing comes from: reading. I think of writing as a kind of web, a conversation stretched across time and space. That’s the image I hold onto. Everything you write, even if it’s just scribbled in a notebook, is a response to what you’ve absorbed. You’re part of something bigger.

What I always tell my students is the best thing about reading and writing is that you’re never alone. My mother used to say: As long as you have a good book, you’re never lonely. It’s connection. That’s what it’s about. That’s the motivation. Connection.

Emily, Hanna and Julianne were interviewed separately; their responses have been edited for clarity and presented together. Thank you so much, Emily, Julianne and Hanna!

Editors: Anneke Schwob

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

I attended Fascination for the first time on the sort of dour, Bostonian evening that populates so much of Poe’s work—it was late into autumn, the leaves well past their peak and now thoroughly glutted into the drainpipes and sewer grates. I got off the T and hurried across the Common alone; L would be waiting for me outside the bar. I was already a bit drunk and more than a bit cold, but I still stopped, after exiting the Common, to study the statue that stood at the center of a red-bricked square. It was Poe, patina-ed green and striding purposefully, suitcase in hand. A raven clamored out of the suitcase, a few wingbeats ahead of its author. The wind was too brisk for me to linger, but when I started walking again I lengthened my strides, ginning myself up to the task of entering that bar with the conviction I saw in the statue’s features. A small homage from an aspiring horror writer to a master of the craft.

© The cover of More Than Love: Edgar Allan Poe

I would pass Poe’s statue on the way to Fascination once a month for the next few years. Most weeks, I thought nothing of it, being preoccupied with thoughts of L and the other friends I’d made through those years. But one week early in the summer of 2016, I stopped to face the statue. I stopped that evening because I was afraid to keep walking, afraid to enter the bar.

The night before, the queer community had endured a shattering horror: a man had walked into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, and murdered forty-nine people inside. It was—until the following year—the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The killer had violated the holiest of queer spaces: the local club, the drag queens’ stage, the dance floor. In doing so, he’d sent a message to every gay person hurt by the atrocity: You are not safe, and you should be afraid.

As I stood in front of Poe, I considered whether or not I should keep walking, whether or not it would be safer to just stay home tonight. I was furious, but terrified—fixed by a paralysis that was, I imagine, exactly what the killer had hoped I would feel.

***

I first met Poe many years before this night, in the form of Roger Corman’s 1960 film “House of Usher.” Isaw this adaptation when I was eleven, courtesy of my mother’s obsession with silver screen scares. Vincent Price’s performance is what my mother would describe as “good, creepy fun”—as Roderick Usher, Price stalks across the set in garish Victorian garb, simultaneously sinister and effete, brooding and hysterical.

What my mother couldn’t have anticipated was that Usher spoke to my still-closeted but burgeoning queer sensibilities with an alarming intimacy. Corman situates Usher as a foil to the film’s virile protagonist, Philip Winthrop. Mark Damon plays Winthrop as a square-jawed, assertive Bostonian who charges into the Gothic dereliction of the Ushers’ lives to rescue his betrothed—Roderick’s sister, Madeline.In his first meeting with Usher, Winthrop strides to the center of the room, hands clenched to fists; he is heterosexual masculinity embodied, so convinced of the purity and necessity of his love for Madeline, so certain that he must overcome anything that stands between him and his desire. Usher, by contrast, skirts the room’s edges,waving his long, delicate hands when Winthrop speaks too loudly, confining himself to a chair against the wall while Winthrop remains fixed at the center of the frame. Even before I understood Usher’s motives, I identified with hisreactions. This was also how I responded when faced with the (often-misplaced) confidence of the other boys my age. Price’s wincing, hostile reluctance externalized what I felt so acutely and so often in the presence of my peers.

My attachment to Usher only intensified as this interaction went on. Upon being asked by Winthrop whether it was really “so incredible” that he should want to marry Madeline, Usher drily replies: “If you only knew how incredible. And I suppose this—this vision—includes children?” (00:09:30). In my eleven years raised by a Fox News-watching, church-attending family, this was the first time I’d ever heard someone seemingly reject the imperative of heterosexuality, the necessity of marriage and the nuclear family. And not only did he reject it, but he did so with such venom and disdain! I sat up a little straighter, watched more closely. At this point in my young life, I didn’t fully understand why I was filled with a nebulous sense of dread at the idea of a wife and children being a mandatory aspect of my future; all I knew was that Roderick Usher was the only lifeline that had been thrown my way as I floundered, silently, in the tide of heteronormativity.

I wouldn’t know until a few years later that Corman’s adaptation hadn’t captured the totality and complexity of Usher’s queerness. In high school, I finally read “The Fall of the House of Usher”. I was surprised to find that the unnamed narrator of Poe’s story doesn’t share any of Winthrop’s motivations in coming to the estate. He isn’t betrothed to Madeline; in fact, he isn’t even aware of Madeline’s existence until after he enters the house. It is, instead, his own relationship with Roderick—an intense and inscrutable friendship—that draws him into the Ushers’ doomed presence.

Early in his account of Usher, the narrator notes that, in their youth, they had been “boon companions” and “intimate associates” (Poe 196). These descriptions did not, at first, strike me as anything out of the ordinary until I reached the passage where the narrator first describes his memory of Usher. He says:

“…the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve…a finely moulded chin speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity…” (198)

The abundant detail of this description serves, in part, to contrast some of the changes the narrator notes in Usher’s physicality; to create parallels between Usher’s bodily transformation and the ever-deteriorating state of the house.But the attentiveness of the narrator’s recollection also reminded me, uncomfortably, of the way I looked at my close male friends. Though the description veers toward occasional sensuality, it’s not a wholly flattering portrait. It’s a catalogue borne of careful observation and comparison, of reflection on how Usher’s physicality seems to reflect the narrator’s understanding of his personality. It is a surprisingly intimate inventory of detail for one man to make of another man’s body.

The intimacy that the narrator builds with Usher over the course of the story is not physical. It can’t be, because Usher is retreating from embodiment, plagued as he is by a “morbid acuteness of the senses” (198) that forces him away from sound, light, and taste alike. The narrator approaches Usher, instead, through creative media. They spend “many solemn hours” (200) alone together, playing the guitar, painting, and reciting poetry. In the tale’s climactic moments, as Usher descends into irrationality, the narrator comforts his companion by reading to him from the fictional “‘Mad Trist’ of Sir Launcelot Canning”—a text that the narrator jokingly calls a “favorite” of Usher’s because its “unimaginative prolixity” doesn’t align with their shared literary taste (205).

This relationship built on shared artistic pursuits also felt, to my high-school-aged self, distressingly familiar. Wasn’t this how I interacted with my closest male friend? The one whose features I studied with stolen glances, and whose every accidental touch I committed to memory? Any deliberate expression of physical intimacy between us was unimaginable. Instead, we memorized the same Romantic poetry and listened to the same string quartets; we took all of the same classes, watched the same silent films. We fashioned a relationship out of shared references and compatible sensibilities, creating a world entirely separate from the mundane, concrete reality of our peers. For me, for many years, this was substituted for anything approaching the romantic; impossible queer longing sublimated into safe, sexless intellectual intimacy.

That first time I read the ending of “Usher,”it felt like a warning. Roderick is destroyed by the murderous return of his ugliest secret: Madeline breaks free of her living burial and kills her brother, leaving him “a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (207). This phrase haunted me. How long had Usher anticipated his own demise? Was it when he sealed his own sister’s tomb that he knew his familial curse would end him? Maybe when he invited the narrator to the house? Or was it earlier still, before the events of the story even began: did he first foresee his destruction when he realized he would have to keep his darkness hidden, entombed? I identified all too well with the prospect of holding a secret that felt impossible to articulate to anyone other than that closest companion but knowing, simultaneously, that the act of articulation would also be one of self-annihilation. Perhaps not an annihilation as literal and dramatic as Usher’s, but still a destruction of the sexless, anodyne public self I had so carefully crafted;a destruction that would denature the tenderness I shared with my close male friends.

The narrator of Poe’s story avoids this end. By fleeing the one space in which he could create his “closer and still closer intimacy” (200) with Roderick, the narrator is able to observe its demise: a fissure splits the house from its roof to its foundations. The House of Usher isn’t just destroyed, though; it is erased completely, swallowed by a “deep and dank tarn” (207). At fifteen years old, terrified by a secret that I was certain would ruin me, this seemed like the only appropriate conclusion. Every space that could nurture queerness was slated for oblivion. Every deviation from the heteronorm erased.

Years later, as I faced Poe’s statue in fear and in grief, that dank tarn felt closer than ever.

© Ian Muneshwar

***

11/20/22: As I write this, I’m learning that last night a gunman walked into Club Q, a gay club in Colorado Springs, and opened fire. Five people are dead. Many others are hospitalized in critical condition.

***

The night after Pulse, I did go to the club. I could tell that Fascination was a different place even before I entered. There was a line of men at the front door, showing IDs and paying the cover. The normally raucous group was so hushed I could hear traffic moving at the far end of the block.

The event was held in the bar’s basement, a windowless place with concrete floors and an understocked bar. The single restroom, burrowed into the back wall, had two urinals without a divider and a single stall that didn’t lock. Someone had raised a portable screen alongside the bar. Vintage porn played from a projector: a man laid out on a locker room bench, his feet in white tube socks hooked over his coach’s shoulders.

We undressed silently, slipping out of overcoats and unlacing sneakers, leaning back against the walls so we could take our jeans off, unburden ourselves of respectability. We wore harnesses beneath our button-downs, jockstraps and cock rings beneath the rest. We pulled out pumps and leather jackets, neoprene pup masks, lace and fishnets and unlit cigars. There was nowhere to put the clothes we’d shed, so we bunched them into corners and heaped them under stacked chairs. We never worried that anything would be stolen.

That night, I studied the basement with shameful attention: I made a list of possible exits; I inventoried potential hiding places; I imagined different scenarios for survival if a man with a gun appeared in one of the doorways. I loathed myself for this because it felt like submission. I was living by the Pulse shooter’s rules, allowing him to shift the gay bar’s center of focus away from joy, desire, and community, and toward the all-consuming locus of fear. I was Roderick all over again, relentlessly anticipating terror.

Eventually, though, the music came on and cocktails were poured. Eventually, we began to dance and to flirt and a cute boy coaxed my eyes away from the two unprotected exits and toward the eagerness of his smile, the warmth and prick of his beard. Eventually, it was two in the morning and the lights came on.

As the evening ended I ran into Fascination’s organizer on the street. I thanked him for another invigorating gathering and, unable or perhaps unwilling to avoid the obvious, I thanked him for not cancelling Fascination tonight, of all nights.

“How could I?” he said to me. “We need this now more than ever before.”

***

11/21/22: It’s reported that the Club Q shooter was stopped by two of the patrons, one of whom bludgeoned the shooter with their own gun (Phillips).

***

When, as a teenager, I first read “The Masque of the Red Death,” I couldn’t have known how Prince Prospero’s “gay and magnificent revel” (Poe 211) would one day mirror my community’s experiences of queer nightlife. Then, my teachers interpreted the short story as a moralizing tale about hedonism and excess, an indictment of Prospero’s attempt to evade his duties to his dying kingdom.Entrenched as I was in the internalized heterosexism of the closet, I didn’t questionthe notion that there must be some inherent link between immorality and the decadence of Prospero’s masquerade. I never asked whether or not there was anything Prospero could do to aid his ailing citizens.I never considered that the masquerade itself might represent the fulfillment of such an obligation. My judgment of the Prince was also informed by how discomfiting I found the descriptions of the ball: I didn’t need to be out of the closet and in a kink community to imagine what was meant by the masquerade being equipped with “all the appliances of pleasure” (210).

I would encounter “Masque” again later, a few years after Pulse. This second reading was a very different experience from the first. It shocked me how personal this story now felt, and how my identification had shifted away from the omniscient first-person narrator’s judgement of Prospero, and toward the masque’s attendees themselves.

The Prince’s ball is queer in many senses of the word. Queer, certainly, in the sense that it is aesthetically strange, with its tolling clock and color-coordinated chambers that seem to serve no purpose other than to give the guests an atmosphere of otherworldliness. The narrator never explicitly states that Prospero or the attendees are themselves queer. In fact, the narration is so preoccupied with relating the physical space of the masquerade that it is noticeably—and, perhaps, tellingly—absent any descriptions of what happens within these rooms. We know that the ball “was a voluptuous scene” (210) and Prospero’s plans for it were “bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre” (211). “Voluptuous” connotes sensuality, carnality, and pleasure, but what does it mean for that description to be tempered by the notion of barbarism? Would the narrator perceive queer sensuality as barbaric? This absence in the story’s otherwise abundant descriptions creates a space for the queer imagination to intervene.

In revisiting these details of the masquerade, the aspect of its queerness that I most identified with, and that most clearly recalled my evenings at Fascination, actually had little to do with these intimations of gay sex. I was reminded of bell hooks’ articulation of the “essence” of queer selfhood:

“queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent, create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” (hooks, 1:27:41-1:28:00)

The masquerade is just this: an audacious act of invention that aims to build a space in which the remaining members of a set-upon population can survive and, in their survival, find pleasure. Prospero’s aims are queer in the sense that they are at odds with heteronormative sensibility. Is it really “barbaric” for the rooms of his cloistered palace to be filled with dancing, music, and fucking? For the ball to “beat feverishly with the heart of life” (212) even while there is so much death and suffering beyond its walls? To the queer eye, this isn’t barbarism but necessity; it is the preservation of self and the creation of culture in the face of obliteration.

Of course, Prospero and his revelers can’t evade destruction. Many queer readers will see a double image when the stranger enters the ball, “shrouded from head to toe in the habiliments of the grave” (213). First, it is nearly impossible to read of the Red Death and not immediately have AIDS called to mind. Much has been made of the connection between epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s and Poe’s fictional disease defined by “redness and the horror of blood” (Poe 210, Jones 171-3).

But for the modern queer reader, there is a second horror transposed over the first: the figure of an intruder breaking into our most intimate, celebratory space, covered in blood. During the Pulse massacre, the victims lost so much blood that the Orlando Regional Medical Center depleted its supply entirely, and needed to send for morefrom local hospitals. A surgical resident at ORMC wore sneakers stained with the victims’ blood every day he worked until the last living victim was discharged. “I will keep them in my office,” he said of the sneakers. “I want to see them in front of me every time I go to work.”

***

12/16/22: Twenty-five people were injured in the Colorado Springs shooting, nineteen by gunfire. Five are dead: Daniel Davis Aston, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh, Derrick Rump, Raymond Green Vance. Vance was at the club celebrating his girlfriend’s birthday; it was his girlfriend’s father who attacked the shooter and beat the shooter with the shooter’s own gun (Phillips). Two others assisted him: a man who later pulled the gun away, and a transwoman who stomped on the shooter with her heels (“Club Q mass shooting”).

***

Perhaps the most humanizing moment for Prospero—and the moment in which my identification shifts wholly away from the narrator and toward the revelers—comes in the story’s final moments. Upon seeing the “spectral image” (Poe 213) of the Red Death enter, the Prince’s emotions vacillate: he is, at first, consumed by anger that someone would break into his space and dress in a mockery of the people dying outside; then, in fear, he runs from the intruder before being pushed by his courage and outrage to confront the Red Death with a dagger. The narrator assesses Prospero’s impulse to flee as “momentary cowardice,” but I can’t imagine a more sane and relatable reaction. Running from the specter of death is, I know, what I would do in this situation; it was, for so long, the first recourse suggested by the Department of Homeland Security in the event of an active shooter (“Active Shooter”); it was what so many of the patrons of Pulse and Club Q did to try to save their own lives.

In the case of the Colorado Springs shooting, though, not everyone sought shelter. Like Prospero and the revelers, several patrons of Club Q attacked the shooter. Richard Fierro, the combat veteran who tackled the shooter, said that he doesn’t remember how he overcame his fear in that moment. He didn’t even remember what, exactly was happening when he made the decision to attack: “Was he shooting at the time?” Fierro wondered in an interview. “Was he about to shoot?...I don’t know. I just knew I had to take him down” (Phillips). The narrator of “Masque” says that the revelers “threw themselves” at the figure of the Red Death with “the wild courage of despair” (213). It is difficult to imagine the quality ofcourage that could motivate someone to run toward the bullets discharging from a rifle. To imagine the despair that would obliterate every memory of the moments that were nearly Fierro’s last. The type of hopelessness that, as Poe’s narrator suggests, creates this “wild courage” seems like it should belong solely to battlefields and warzones. Now, it also belongs to the gay bar.

I initially read the phrase “the wild courage of despair” as meaning that the revelers found courage in their despair. This is a tempting interpretation; I would like to subscribe to the notion that there’s strength to be found even in our bleakest emotional states. There are, though, other possible valences of meaning here. Early in the story, the narrator criticizes Prospero and his followers, saying that they felt it was “folly to grieve, or to think” (210) while within the walls of the Prince’s abbey. If I am being honest with myself, this numbness to the horrors of the outside world is what I wanted to feel when I attended Fascination the night after Pulse. Yes, I wanted to be with my community; and yes, I wanted to prove to the shooter that our community could survive even this. But I also wanted to drink and dance, to forget, however briefly, that we just endured a wound that might never truly heal. I hoped that I could compartmentalize my grief, only if for a night.

Perhaps, in the short story’s final moments, the revelers start thinking and grieving. The phrase “the wild courage of despair” doesn’t only suggest that they find courage in their despair, but also that they have the courage to finally feel their despair. Maybe it isn’t courage but grief, loss, and hopelessness that finally motivate the revelers to fling themselves at the Red Death in an attempt to protect the only space in which they might survive. I know that it must take a truly wild courage to give yourself to that kind of despair because all these years later, when I go to the gay bar, I’m still trying to stop myself from marking the exits, scanning the crowd, anticipating ruin.

Maybe I shouldn’t stop myself anymore.

***

I went to Fascination last night for the first time in some years. It’s now held at a different club, but I still passed Poe’s statue on my way. I didn’t stop because I was already thinking about Pulse and the Red Death, about five dead family in Colorado Springs.

In the wake of this most recent shooting, Fascination’s organizers changed their policies: entry into the space required a pat down and a bag check. When I stepped into the club and began to undress, I didn’t chastise myself for seeking every exit. When I scanned the crowd, I didn’t dismiss my anxiety as ridiculous or unnecessary. I saw so many others watching the dance floor with nervous eyes, breaking away from their conversations every time the front door opened and a stranger entered. I saw friend groups go out of their way to approach the lone figure standing the corner, to enfold them into conversation, into revelry.

What is the function of despair? For me, right now, it is this: Despair demands constant anxious attention. It does not admit space for unthinking hope. At the same time, though, it will not let you turn face away or slide toward numbness and apathy. Despair is an unresolved state. Working toward its resolution might push us toward hopeless, clear-eyed vigilance, or it might even produce that wild courage. I believe we need our despair more now than we ever have before.

Editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: The Copyediting Department

On 11 June, 2024, a new post appeared on the business blog of the US Federal Trade Commission. At time of writing, the post has been scrubbed from the FTC’s website, likely as part of the Trump administration’s wider purge of anything that might inconvenience the American tech sector, but it has been republished on New York University’s Web Publishing Service. Written by FTC attorney Michael Atleson, and titled “Succor Borne Every Minute,” the piece gave an overview of the Commission’s existing guidance on “AI” chatbots. The piece got some attention in the tech-focused blogosphere, partly for its amusing pop culture examples (it likened chatbots to Forky from Toy Story 4 and to Magic 8 Balls), but mostly for this absolute banger of a paragraph:

Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods. We’ve warned companies about making false or unsubstantiated claims about AI or algorithms ... we’ve also repeatedly advised companies ... not to use automated tools to mislead people about what they’re seeing, hearing, or reading.[1]

I’m sure you can see why this blog post stood out. Like a lot of people, I found myself snagged on the poetry of one phrase in particular: “AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends.” Which, I mean, of course they’re not. And yet ... they’re out there. Or so people claim. Well, so marketers claim. In truth, I am not much interested in the catalogue of sexist stereotypes and big titty imagery that contemporary exploiters of the ELIZA effect want to pass off as “AI girlfriends.” Rather, I am interested in the desire these services are attempting to fulfil. There are enough people who want an “AI girlfriend” that companies have begun to cater to them, and enough companies are catering to them that the FTC felt moved to warn them away. There’s something going on here.

As with many current societal horrors, we find American science fiction, if not with its hand on the tiller, then standing suspiciously near that tiller with its hands in its pockets, whistling. While the artificial woman does not originate in science fiction (much writing on the subject references Pygmalion), it is a fantasy long explored and promulgated through fictional writings about robots. As already mentioned, this is not an essay about actually existing AI girlfriends. Rather, it is about the science fictional context from which that fantasy springs. American science fiction has employed the female robot for over a century: as tragedy, as farce, as satire, and as psychological realism. I do not claim to offer a comprehensive history here; instead, this essay will outline some of the most illuminating examples of the type. By doing so, we can see how the artificial woman has gone from being an intriguing novelty, to a collective fantasy, to a saleable commodity, to at last, perhaps, a being with her own thoughts and desires. The AI girlfriend, like womanhood itself, is an elusive, ever-changing thing. In marking the ways this fantasy has developed, we can better understand the impulse to recreate it in our own world.

*

Helen O'Loy

In the December 1938 edition of Astounding Science Fiction, neophyte science fiction writer Lester del Rey published a short story, “Helen O’Loy.” Its narrator, Phil, is a self-described “old man” reminiscing about his relationship with the titular Helen, “a dream in spun plastics and metals.”[2] Helen O’Loy, we soon discover, is a female robot named by Phil and his housemate Dave for her supposed resemblance to Helen of Troy:

“Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen ... mmmm ... Helen of Alloy.”

“Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”

“Helen O’Loy she is, Phil.” And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.[3]

This is the beginning of the story, and already we’re seeing the attitudes that led feminist critic Beverly Friend to label “Helen O’Loy” as “a blatant statement of woman as mere appendage to man.”[4] Phil and Dave are just removing their new helpmeet from her packaging, and already they are ogling her and deciding on a new name, absent any input from this supposed artificial intelligence herself. Things do not improve from here.

Phil and Dave are bachelor scientists living in a shared house after their (literal) twin girlfriends understandably dumped them. Dave, it is explained, “wanted to look over at the latest Venus-rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn.”[5] After that, Phil tells us, “we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.”[6] Doing their own cooking and cleaning is, of course, beyond the pale, so Phil and Dave order a custom utility robot “in a girl-modeled case,” which they fit with “a full range of memory coils”[7] for maximum homemaking efficiency. Phil, however, is called away on business before Helen O’Loy can be switched on, leaving Dave to activate her.

Arriving home three weeks later, Phil finds the place transformed: Helen is cooking and cleaning, while Dave stays in his room, refusing to eat. It transpires that after Phil left, Dave activated Helen, but he was too busy to satisfy her newborn curiosity about the world. In a moment’s inspiration, he “set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.”[8] But alas! The morning travelogue gives way to a series of love stories (including one starring Larry Ainslee), and before long Helen finds Phil’s collection of “mushy books.”[9] Dave arrives home that evening to an orderly domestic space:

The front alcove was neatly swept, and there was the odor of food in the air that he’d missed about the house for weeks. He had visions of Helen as the super-efficient housekeeper.[10]

Yet there is a catch, as he finds out in the very next paragraph:

So it was a shock to him to feel two strong arms around his neck from behind and hear a voice all aquiver coo into his ears, “Oh, Dave, darling. I’ve missed you so, and I’m so thrilled that you’re back.” Helen’s technique may have lacked polish, but it had enthusiasm, as he found when he tried to stop her from kissing him. She had learned fast and furiously—also, Helen was powered by an atomotor.[11]

It turns out one cannot have a clean house without the concomitant intimacy; even robot women have demands. This cod-screwball comedy dynamic drives the rest of the story. Dave is appalled at Helen’s advances and spends three hours lecturing her about “her station in life, the idiocy of stereos, and various other miscellanies.”[12] This elicits a stereotypically feminine response: “Helen looked up with dewy eyes and said wistfully, ‘I know, Dave, but I still love you.’”[13] At which point, Phil tells us, “Dave started drinking.”[14]

Once Phil returns home, Dave abandons the household, leaving his friend to take care of the lovesick robot. Phil is on the brink of deactivating Helen when Dave asks him to stop. He is leaving the city for a farmer’s life in the country, and he wants Helen to join him as his wife. Again, there are shades of screwball comedy, as Phil reflects ruefully: “No man acts the way Dave had been acting because he hates a girl; only because he thinks he does—and thinks wrong.”[15]

After several decades of domestic bliss (during which Phil and Helen “put lines in her face and grayed her hair”[16] to create the illusion of aging), Phil receives a tragic letter from Helen. Dave is dead, and she wants Phil to deactivate her so the two of them can “cross this last bridge side by side.”[17] Phil reflects on his life of unbroken bachelorhood, and admits his own feelings for Helen: “I should have married and raised a family, I suppose. But ... there was only one Helen O’Loy.”[18]

It is, as scholars say, a lot. Yet while Peter Nicholls is undoubtedly correct in calling this story “a classic of sexist sf,”[19] there’s no denying that “Helen O’Loy” is a classic. This is not, I should stress, a judgement of quality. But if we take ‘a classic’ to mean ‘a work of literature that endures beyond its initial publication,’ there is no ambiguity. “Helen O’Loy” is a remarkably enduring piece of fiction.

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, “Heley O’Loy” has been reprinted twenty-three times since its initial appearance in Astounding Science Fiction (not counting new editions of the various anthologies in which it has appeared). The dates of these reprints range from 1948 to 2020. And that’s just in English; the story has also been translated into Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, French, and Dutch, with the most recent foreign language edition being an Italian publication from 2014.[20] This enduring quality was evident in del Rey’s lifetime. In his 1978 “Author’s Afterword” to The Best of Lester del Rey, he stated that “she still earns more than a dozen times annually what I was paid for her initial appearance ... I am well-pleased with the lady, to say the least.”[21] Again, the sexism is obvious, but so too is the curious power of the original story.

Obviously, a story can earn the status of ‘much anthologised’ for reasons beyond raw quality. “Helen O’Loy” is a relatively early piece of American ‘golden age’ science fiction about human-robot relationships. It even predates Isaac Asimov’s “Robbie,” which would eventually become the first story in I, Robot. This gives it a historical valence that has likely carried it into a fair few of its twenty-three republications. It certainly feels like the artifact of a bygone era. Any benefit of the doubt about the story’s intent is unlikely to survive the first few pages; for my money, the most absurdly sexist moment comes when Phil takes Helen shopping. “[S]he giggled and purred over the wisps of silk ... tried on endless hats, and conducted herself as any normal girl might.”[22] Friend, Nicholls, and every other feminist critic who slammed this story’s gender politics was absolutely right to do so.

And yet.

Every time I return to “Helen O’Loy,” I am struck by one fact: it is shockingly easy to take Helen’s side. Granted, this is partly because the other two main characters are sexist pigs, but del Rey seems to be aware of this, at least on some level. In his 1993 article, “Rereading Lester del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy,’” Dominick M. Grace argues that Helen can be read as “a cautionary image of what might result should sexist fantasies become the basis for the creation of an artificial intelligence.”[23] He points out that Phil and Dave are framed as ridiculous and childish, firstly for dumping their girlfriends over not wanting to see a movie, and then in preferring a robot housekeeper over real women. He further argues that Phil is an unreliable narrator, with self-admittedly “adolescent taste”[24]; his attraction to Helen, Grace argues, is an extension of his juvenile attitude. For all its sexist horrors, there is a sense of irony in del Rey’s writing. Helen can’t help who she is; she was built that way.

While Grace’s reading is clever and astute, I must confess to a more instinctive identification with Helen O’Loy. Helen, for most of the story, is an adolescent, feeling her way into romance with no guidance, and indeed active discouragement, from the adult men around her. So she works with what she has: daytime television and juvenile fiction. Without wishing to indulge in geeky stereotypes, I must say this corresponds distressingly well with my own adolescence. I read about Helen throwing herself into romance, getting her heart broken, being unable to articulate her desires in a way that will make people listen, and I find myself wincing sympathetically.

I also want to stick up for her when Phil and Dave start in with the insults. Leave her alone! my internal monologue shrieks when Phil tells her that she will never bear Dave a son. Give her some space! it howls when he states that “[a] man wants flesh and blood, not rubber and metal.”[25] She’s still figuring herself out! I want to cry. But Helen has her own reply:

“Don’t, please! I can’t think of myself that way; to me, I’m a woman. And you know how perfectly I’m made to imitate a real woman ... in all ways. I couldn’t give him sons, but in every other way ... I’d try so hard, I know I’d make him a good wife.”[26]

When I showed this passage to friend and fellow critic Weronika Mamuna, she responded with three words: “big trans energy.” The sexism of this scene is undeniable; the crass insinuations about Helen’s anatomy and the tying of womanhood to childbearing are indefensible. Nevertheless, there is something here worth highlighting. Seemingly by accident, this hoary old pulp story from 1938 stumbles into the subjective experience of a young person feeling her way into womanhood in the face of discouragement from those around her. Reading in the midst of a worldwide gender freakout, there is something sweet about a story whose title character simply asserts that she is a woman, and works with the people around her to build a life as one.

We often talk about fiction ‘not aging well,’ as if stories, like pieces of fruit, decay and become less palatable over time. Yet putrefaction also brings forth new life, vital and squirming if not always aesthetically pleasing. Thus, “Helen O’Loy” has gained a reading that feels obvious to a 2025 reader and would have been absent for a reader in 1938 or 1977. Helen O’Loy is a woman accused of being neither girl nor friend; by story’s end she has achieved a life as both. It is a sexist story that has curdled, however imperfectly, into a semi-trans feminist one.

*

It Walks in Beauty

Of course, if outright sexist stories can accidentally mutate into trans-positive ones, the same is true of stories that were proto-feminist to begin with. Chan Davis’s “It Walks in Beauty” has a complex history even before we get to its actual contents. First published in the January 1958 issue of Star Science Fiction, Davis repudiated this initial version of the story. Its editor, Frederik Pohl, had “substantially changed”[27] the text without Davis’s knowledge or permission, and the unchanged original was not published until 2003. Reading the 2003 version, I often had to pause and remind myself: this was 1958. It’s not just that the story is visibly twenty years younger than “Helen O’Loy.” At times, it reads like something written in the twenty-first century.[28]

“It Walks in Beauty” tells the story of Max, a chemical worker in a dystopian future where gender roles have been radically reconfigured. In this future world, there are men, like Max and his boorish colleague Jim. There are women, like the erotic dancer Luana, with whom Max is obsessed. And then there are “career girls,” or simply “careers,”[29] like Max’s love interest Paula, who are the portion of young girls insufficiently attractive to grow up to be women. While men and women get he/him and she/her pronouns respectively, the “careers” are referred to as “it.” Shortly after Paula is introduced, we get this description of her:

Paula wore a man’s short haircut and a man’s pants, like any career girl. It was a little ridiculous, like a man yet not quite a man; Max had to admit it. But he didn’t really feel it. Everybody respected Paula as a worker. In Max’s case the word was liked.[30]

Davis is writing a story about the arbitrary nature of traditional gender roles, and the ways in which women deemed insufficiently feminine lose access to the privileges of gender conformity. In doing so, he crafts a scenario that, probably unintentionally, mirrors the experiences of contemporary trans people. In particular, the experience of being misgendered, not as male or female, but as a third and often degraded gender, is one shared by many transfeminine people. It is a common joke that they/them pronouns suddenly emerge when people are speaking of a trans woman they disapprove of, even if that woman does not use they/them pronouns. In Davis’s story, that same cruelty is a governing logic of society.

At times the analogy borders on the uncanny. Paula at one point refers to “my obscene man’s clothes,”[31] and Max’s imaginings of girlhood prefigure many 2010s narratives of trans youth:

It was really terrifying. What must it be like to be a schoolgirl? Always wishing your complexion would clear up, wishing your breasts would grow rounder, waiting to feel that uncontrollable desire that would tell you you were a woman. He hadn’t thought about such things since he was in school, and of course he hadn’t been old enough then to understand.

What must it be like to be a grown career girl![32]

The story’s climax involves Paula dressing in women’s clothes and performing a dance for Max, asking him to recognise her gender: “You can see and hear, can’t you? Can’t you tell I’m a woman?”[33] Max’s feelings on this point are recognisable as transphobic tropes. He exhorts himself to “[p]retend it’s a woman!” and the next paragraph tells us that “[t]he love of his life made him gag.”[34] But by the end of the story Paula has made Max question his fantasies about Luana. She invites him for coffee, and we get these ambivalent final paragraphs:

Paula had left him alone in the world with her ... it ... her. He had no choice. “Okay,” he said with no emotion of any kind. “I’ll wait for you in the lab.”

“You’re a nice guy, Max, and eventually we’ll understand each other.”[35]

I am struck by Max’s wrestling with pronouns here; he has a long way to go, but he’s got one thing right, at least. Perhaps Paula is right, and there is hope for the two of them yet.

I raise this story not because it contains an AI girlfriend as such, but to demonstrate some important related points. Firstly, that Lester del Rey was not alone in grappling with gender during the so-called ‘golden age’ of science fiction, nor was he a phenomenally progressive example of such grappling. And secondly, that the AI girlfriend is but one instance of the construction of gender in science fiction; other avenues are open for exploration, and deserve extended treatments of their own.

*

Living Doll

“Got myself a cryin’, talkin’, sleepin’, walkin’, livin’ doll.”[36] So begins Cliff Richard’s first UK number one, 1959’s “Living Doll.” A queasy amalgamation of American and British sensibilities, the song was written for the film Serious Charge as a pastiche of American rock’n’roll music. In its initial version, however, it was too pale an imitation even for Richard, who refused to release the song commercially until it was reworked as a pale imitation of American country music instead. The smooth smarm of Richard’s performance is off-putting enough, but it’s Lionel Bart’s lyric that truly sends the song over the edge. There are none of the faint glimmers of personhood to be found in “Helen O’Loy”; this is the artificial woman as objectified, jealously guarded plaything:

Take a look at her hair, it’s real

And if you don’t believe what I say, just feel.

I’m gonna lock her up in a trunk

So no big hunk can steal her away from me.[37]

I have listened to the song several times in writing this essay, and each time these lines make me shudder anew. Yet while the artificial woman fantasy has somehow managed to deteriorate since 1938, one thing remains constant: she is a unique creation. Helen O’Loy is a custom job; there’s no suggestion that other men are installing romantic love on their own household robots. Richard, meanwhile, repeatedly stresses that he has “[g]ot the one and only walkin’, talkin’, livin’ doll”[38] (emphasis mine). The AI girlfriend, at this stage, is strictly one-of-a-kind. Nobody has yet thought about mass production. About what might happen when the robot wife goes mainstream.

*

The Stepford Wives

In 1972, acclaimed suspense novelist Ira Levin published his fourth book, The Stepford Wives. The titular wives are perhaps the most well-known “AI girlfriends” in American fiction—certainly Levin’s book is the most famous covered in this essay. The very word ‘Stepford’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2004, where it is listed as meaning: “Robotic; docile; obedient; acquiescent; (also) uniform; attractive but lacking in individuality, emotion, or thought.”[39] The big reveal of Levin’s book, and of the 1975 film version, is that the ostensibly perfect housewives of Stepford are in fact lifelike robots, replacements for the murdered wives of the town’s misogynistic men. We can see a continuity here with “Helen O’Loy”—as Beverly Friend points out, in this book, “Helen O’Loy has pervaded society,” as a previously “one-of-a-kind”[40] curiosity has become a custom-made industrial product. But the pop cultural absorption of Stepford tends to leave out important nuances. Like “Helen O’Loy,” The Stepford Wives is subtly engaged with both youth and media consumption. Misogyny, like romantic love, is something learned early, and in part from cultural artifacts.

The Stepford Wives begins shortly after the protagonist, Joanna Eberhart, moves with her husband Walter and their two children to the small Connecticut town of Stepford. Joanna and Walter are a hip, liberated couple. Early on, Joanna mentions that “I’m interested in politics and in the Women’s Liberation movement ... and so is my husband.”[41] A few pages later, Walter is invited to join Stepford’s male-only Men’s Association, and there’s a touching scene of mutual sloganeering:

He put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Hold off a little while. If it’s not open to women in six months, I’ll quit and we’ll march together. Shoulder to shoulder. ‘Sex, yes; sexism, no.’”

“‘Stepford is out of step,’” she said, reaching for the ashtray on the picnic table.

“Not bad.”

“Wait till I really get going.”[42]

Walter’s feminist consciousness doesn’t last. Indeed, one of the book’s more understated horrors is seeing the couple’s early togetherness torn apart, as Walter is seduced by the fantasy of a compliant, sexualised machine. On his return from the Men’s Association Joanna catches him masturbating, a reaction (we later realise) to the prospect of a wife who is neither girl nor friend. By the two-thirds mark he is calling her “hysterical”[43] and complaining that she doesn’t wear enough lipstick.

Joanna seeks companionship outside the home, and befriends fellow recent arrivals Bobbie and Charmaine. The three are perturbed by the house-proud docility of their fellow Stepford women, who Joanna compares to “actresses in commercials ... playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.”[44] There are some failed attempts at feminist organising, and Joanna discovers that Stepford used to have its own Women’s Club, now disbanded. The artificial hyper-femininity of the Stepford Wives is a recent phenomenon, not some inborn gender difference. Things get creepier when Charmaine’s appearance and attitude change dramatically after a minibreak with her husband. “I’ve been lazy and selfish,” she tells Joanna and Bobbie. “From now on I’m going to do right by Ed, and by Merrill too. I’m lucky to have such a wonderful husband and son.”[45]

Bobbie suspects an environmental toxin, and begins frantically searching for a new house outside Stepford. But within three months of her arrival, she too takes a short break with her husband, and returns a changed woman. “I realized I was being awfully sloppy and self-indulgent. It’s no disgrace to be a good homemaker,”[46] she says. Joanna, unnerved, begins to feel the jaws of a trap closing around her. Eventually she makes a trip to the library, and discovers that the head of the Men’s Association, Dale ‘Diz’ Coba, has a background in animatronics, and puts two and two together. She angrily confronts Walter, demanding to know “[w]hat’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?”[47]

Joanna attempts to escape Stepford, but is cornered by some of the Stepford men, and left alone in the kitchen with the new version of Bobbie. Bobbie offers to cut herself to prove that she is flesh and blood, and Joanna, desperate, walks towards her:

Joanna went forward, toward Bobbie standing by the sink with the knife in her hand, so real-looking—skin, eyes, hair, hands, rising-falling aproned bosom—that she couldn’t be a robot, she simply couldn’t be, and that was all there was to it.[48]

In the book’s brief final chapter, a newer arrival, Ruthanne Hendry, encounters Joanna in the supermarket. Joanna, like the others, has changed: “Housework’s enough for me ... I’m more at ease with myself now. I’m much happier too, and so is my family. That’s what counts, isn’t it?”[49] The real Joanna is dead; in her place is a vacuous simulacrum.

It’s a masterfully executed horror story, and the broad strokes are justly remembered. But on my first reading of The Stepford Wives, I was struck, not by its prescience, but by its timeliness. It is a book profoundly informed by the media culture of the mid-twentieth century. The robotic Stepford Wives are built to sketches by Ike Mazzard, a famous magazine illustrator. Joanna tells Mazzard that “you blighted my adolescence with those dream girls of yours!”[50] and remembers “when she was eleven or twelve, reading Mom’s Journals and Companions.”[51] The novel references recent bestsellers like Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative (1966) and Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups (1969), and Joanna’s work as a photographer is influenced by the kinds of photos she can sell to magazines. At one point Joanna contemplates a photo she’s taken of a cab driver snubbing a Black passenger and reflects that there are “plenty of markets for pictures dramatizing racial tensions”[52]—a sentence that reads oddly today when there are perilously few markets for pictures of any kind.

Most striking of all, though, is how Dale Coba earned his nickname. After creepily spying on Joanna making coffee (“I like to watch women doing little domestic chores”[53]), he informs her that “I used to work at Disneyland.”[54] The Stepford Wives, we later surmise, are built using the same technology as The Hall of Presidents. It may be the darkest joke in the book.

The invocation of Disneyland points to another overlooked aspect of the novel: the role of the main characters’ children. While they get relatively little dialogue, the children do comment on the events of the novel. In her 2018 book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor, Jennifer Rhee points out that Joanna and Bobbie’s sons seem remarkably keen on the Men’s Association and its work. On his first sight of the Men’s Association building, Joanna’s son Pete springs out of his car seat and asks, “Can I go there some time?”[55] Later in the novel, Joanna speaks Bobbie’s son Jonny about the ways Bobbie has changed: “‘She doesn’t shout any more, she makes hot breakfasts ...’ He looked over at the house and frowned ... ‘I hope it lasts,’ he said, ‘but I bet it doesn’t.’”[56]

Joanna’s daughter Kim, by contrast, seems actively sickened by Stepford. She throws up on the same car ride that Pete asks about visiting the Men’s Association, and she later gets a sore throat and is “home for three days.”[57] Rhee points to these details as indicative of the town’s noxious anti-female atmosphere:

While Jonny’s preference of a robot over his mother and Pete’s eagerness to go to the Men’s Association reflect the closed world’s erasure of historical time, Kim’s distress highlights the female lived body’s dangerous incompatibility with Stepford’s closed world.[58]

It’s small wonder the boys find Stepford more congenial than Kim. It’s a town made by and for immature males, most of whom, unlike them, are old enough to know better. Further to this, the narrative zooms in on Joanna and Bobbie’s children at a pivotal stage. It is the weekend of Bobbie’s murder/replacement, and Bobbie’s son Adam is staying with Joanna and Walter:

Having Adam for the weekend was a mixed blessing. On Saturday he and Pete and Kim played beautifully together, inside the house and out; but on Sunday, a freezing-cold overcast day when Walter laid claim to the family room for football-watching (fairly enough after last Sunday’s sledding), Adam and Pete became, serially, soldiers in a blanket-over-the-dining-table fort, explorers in the cellar (“Stay out of that darkroom!”), and Star Trek people in Pete’s room—all of them sharing, strangely enough, a single common enemy called Kim-She’s-Dim. They were loudly and scornfully watchful, preparing defenses; and poor Kim was dim, wanting only to join them, not to crayon or help file negatives, not even—Joanna was desperate—to bake cookies. Adam and Pete ignored threats, Kim ignored blandishments, Walter ignored everything.[59]

It’s an economical yet vivid passage of the kind Levin is particularly good at. Two days are collapsed into a mere 120 words, which give us a sense of the social dynamics of the house (Walter’s indifference contrasted with Joanna’s desperation) and the sharp decline from youthful harmony to the battle of the sexes (a microcosm of Joanna and Walter’s dynamic across the novel). The cruel epithet of “Kim-She’s-Dim” conveys the boys’ sexist contempt more memorably than several sentences to the same effect, and their play scenarios invoking juvenile adventure fiction fit with the novel’s larger engagement with the sexism of contemporary pop culture.[60] It’s hard not to sympathise with both Kim’s desperation to be included and Joanna’s frantic attempts to buy her silence with stereotypically feminine activities.

Most striking, however, is what happens directly after this passage. A single-sentence paragraph tells us: “Joanna was glad when Bobbie and Dave came to pick Adam up.”[61] In retrospect, we realise that this is not Bobbie at all; an associative link is thus formed between the sexist play of Joanna and Bobbie’s children and the larger misogynist game of the Men’s Association. The couple’s appearance hints at the sinister goings-on: “Bobbie had had her hair done and was absolutely beautiful—either due to make-up or love-making, probably both. And Dave looked jaunty and keyed up and happy.”[62] It’s hard not to draw a link between Dave’s hyperactive glee and the freewheeling exuberance of the two boys just a few sentences earlier; between the children preparing defences against Kim and the men preparing defences against their own wives’ independence.

For indeed, what could be more childish than the desire for an artificial partner? It’s not just the technology that the Men’s Association has appropriated from Disneyland; they’ve brought a perverted, adolescent version of the worldview along too. In her 2008 paper, “Stepford USA: Second-Wave Feminism and the Representation of National Time,” Jane Elliott relates the town of Stepford to the conservative concept of ‘the end of history.’ The repetitive chores carried out by the Stepford Wives echo contemporary feminist discourse about the “Sisyphean labors”[63] of white middle-class housewives, depicting “the temporality of housework as by nature a form of static time.”[64] In diagnosing this problem, Levin’s novel evokes the style of children’s literature. Joanna composes a poem about the Stepford Wives in her own head: “They never stop, those Stepford Wives ... They work like robots all their lives.”[65] As Elliott notes, “The singsong quality of Joanna’s chant mirrors the perpetual motion of the Stepford women, attributing to their actions all the rhythmic compulsion of a nursery rhyme.”[66] Stepford has been taken over by a childish fantasy. In critiquing it, Joanna instinctively reaches for the literature of the nursery-room.

This juvenile fantasy is the same one that animates much antifeminist backlash, then and now; the use of modern technology to produce and promote a childlike image of historical and social stasis, a return to a past that never existed. Misogyny as a form of arrested development.

*

Sylvia Plath

In her 1962 poem, “The Applicant,” Sylvia Plath deploys the persona of a judgemental yet wheedling salesperson. After first negging the poem’s addressee (“are you our sort of a person? / ... No, no? Then / How can we give you a thing?”[67]), the poetic voice tries to sell him “A hand / ... / To bring teacups and roll away headaches,” followed by a suit “Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.”[68] After this comes the pièce de résistance: a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, “living doll”:

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that.

Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

Well, what do you think of that?

Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,

In fifty, gold.

A living doll, everywhere you look.[69]

There’s a lot here that parallels the contemporary interest in “AI girlfriends.” There’s the denigration of both the male customer and of actual human women: “My boy, it’s your last resort.”[70] There’s the fusion of tech hype and pseudo-therapeutic language: “It works, there is nothing wrong with it. / You have a hole, it’s a poultice. / You have an eye, it’s an image.”[71] There’s the general ickiness of woman-as-consumer-product.

Yet there is also, and similarly to “Helen O’Loy,” a sense of long-term planning. While there is an air of titillation to the description of the doll “[n]aked as paper to start,” and indeed to the movement up through silver and gold, the tackiness of the imagery distracts from a fundamental point: fifty years is an awfully long time to own anything. Plath has identified an interesting wrinkle in the concept of the artificial girlfriend: she is an adolescent desire that is nonetheless meant to last you the rest of your life. The queasy clash of childish fantasy and economic reality is familiar to many American adults in 2025. A recent Wall Street Journal article featured a thirty-one-year-old woman, “still sleeping in her childhood bedroom, gazing at the same unicorn wallpaper put up before she was born.”[72] It’s an indignity that no amount of gold plating can disguise.

*

In 1987, criminally underrated fabulist Rachel Ingalls published a novella, In The Act. Where “Helen O’Loy” presented the automatic spouse as a strange novelty, and The Stepford Wives as blackly comic horror, In The Act uses the conceit to power an outright farce. Its protagonist, Helen (that name again), is in a loveless marriage with middle-aged tinkerer Edgar. With their two children away at boarding school, and Helen at her twice-weekly adult education classes, Edgar spends his time alone “up in the lab”[73] of their large suburban home. Helen is, of course, barred from entering this lab, but when her adult education classes are discontinued, her curiosity gets the better of her. She enters the lab and discovers a mysterious bundle: “She was about to pass by when she saw a hand protruding from one of the bottom folds of the sheet.”[74]

It is, of course, an artificial woman. A few days later she finds the doll complete, and what’s more, dressed:

She thought she’d better know what she was up against. She examined the doll thoroughly, taking off the pink dress first, and then the black lace bra and underpants. She started to lose her sense of danger. She was getting mad. Who else, other than Edgar himself, could have chosen the pink dress and black underwear? He couldn’t walk into a dress shop in her company without becoming flustered, yet she could picture him standing at a counter somewhere and asking for the clothes, saying in his argument-winning voice, “Black lace, please, with a ribbon right about here.” He’d known the right size, too—but of course he’d known that. The doll had been built to specification: his specifications. Oh, Helen thought, the swine.[75]

Again we have the sense of betrayal by a husband who prefers a customisable plaything to his actual human wife, with the tragicomic detail of Edgar refusing to shop for clothes with Helen while he buys lingerie for the doll. Helen soon finds a switch behind the doll’s ear, which causes her hips to gyrate “in an unmistakable manner,” and prompts her to speak in “a mixture of baby talk and obscenity, of crude slang and sentimentality.”[76] As in previous instances of the sex robot in fiction, Ingalls stresses the infantile nature of her appeal. When Helen demands to know the doll’s name, Edgar sheepishly admits that he has called her “Dolly.”[77]

Helen, however, will have her revenge. She kidnaps Dolly and deposits her in a train station locker, before returning home to deliver her husband an ultimatum: make her a robot boyfriend, or lose Dolly forever. Edgar, chagrined, begins work on a robot “gigolo,”[78] but when he delivers “Auto,”[79] as Helen calls him, she is disappointed:

His sexual prowess was without subtlety, charm, surprise or even much variety. She didn’t believe that her husband had tried to shortchange her; he simply hadn’t had the ingenuity to program a better model.[80]

But then, why would he? Edgar is interested in his own fantasy of a compliant, sexually available, but otherwise childishly simple woman. He is thus unable to conceive, much less cater to, the desires of an actual woman, even the one to whom he is married. If he were, he likely would not have built Dolly in the first place, much less kept her a jealously guarded secret.

Helen demands an update to Auto to replace the adult education classes she lost at the story’s outset: “I want him to teach me Italian. And flower painting and intermediate cordon bleu.”[81] It’s a fabulous comedic beat, even if, as with many sex comedies, it depends on a degree of gender essentialism. This is especially evident when Helen reflects on Edgar’s work in building Dolly: “A woman ... can get the eyes and everything else right without any trouble: her creative power is inherent. Men can never create; they only copy. That’s why they’re always so jealous”[82] (emphasis in the original).

This gender essentialism is further highlighted by the misadventures of Dolly herself. Once Helen deposits her in the station locker, she is stolen by career criminal Ron, who takes her home and finds the ‘on’ switch. “The instant Dolly opened her eyes, Ron fell in love with her.”[83] Ron decides he is going to keep Dolly for himself, passing her off as a human girlfriend. The novella’s tone here remains farcical. Ron reflects that his relationship with Dolly is “like having a wife, except that not being human, of course, she was nicer,”[84] and at one point he accidentally activates her sex mode on the bus. Ron’s male friends and family members are uniformly impressed with Dolly (“what a doll,”[85] one of them remarks), while the few women in his life dislike her. Things come to a head in a downright slapstick scene where Ron is making eggs:

He’d cracked a couple of eggs into the frying pan and was walking over to the garbage pail with the shells. One of them jumped out of his hand. He scooped it up again and threw it out with the others. He meant to wipe a rag over the part of the floor where it had landed but the eggs started to sizzle in the pan. He stepped back to the stove. And at that moment, Dolly came into the room. Before he had a chance to warn her, she was all over the place—skidding and sliding, and landing with a thump.[86]

Dolly is damaged, so Ron gets in touch with Helen and Edgar, bringing her to their house to “do a deal.”[87] While the two men square off, Helen leaves Dolly alone with Auto: “She put him on top of Dolly, arranged both dolls in appropriate positions, and pushed the buttons behind their ears.”[88] When the men discover the dolls in the act, the three humans descend into an orgy of violence, destroying both dolls in the carnage. The novella ends with Helen, Edgar, and Ron standing in the wreckage:

There was nothing to say. They stared as if they didn’t recognize each other, or the room they were standing in, or any other part of the world which, until just a few moments before, had been theirs.[89]

The alienation precipitated by Dolly’s creation is complete.

Like The Stepford Wives, and like a lot of Ingalls’ other work, In The Act is a repudiation of the idealised American housewife. As Jamie Hood puts it in his 2023 article, “A Doll’s House”:

Both Ingalls and Stepford suggest that, if the future is female, this is only to the extent that “the female” might be reengineered as a pleasing and on-demand receptacle through which heteropatriarchal blueprints will be passed.[90]

In The Act clearly exists in the tradition of the sex doll as feminist satire. This being the 1980s, however, Helen’s fantasy of liberation from the isolating drudgery of housewifery takes a decidedly entrepreneurial turn. In her disappointment with Auto, her thoughts turn to the dolls’ potential as a marketable product:

She remembered what Edgar had said about the possible therapeutic value of such a doll. It could be true. There might be lots of people who’d favor the companionship of a nonhuman partner once a week. Or three times a day. No emotions, no strings attached. She thought about her sons: the schoolboy market. There were many categories that came to mind—the recently divorced, the husbands of women who were pregnant or new mothers, the wives of men who were ill, absent, unable, unfaithful, uninterested. And there would be no danger of venereal disease. There were great possibilities. If the idea could be turned into a commercial venture, it might make millions. They could advertise: Ladies, are you lonely?[91]

In this fantasy, Helen has taken the viciously antifeminist concept of the Stepford Wife and turned it to the advantage of female entrepreneurs. It’s girlboss feminism, thirty years early. As Hood puts it, “[w]omen, Ingalls reminds us, are often equal and active collaborators in the recapitulation of institutional misogyny—needless to say, patriarchy’s pockets are deeper.”[92] Failed by her husband and dissatisfied with his creations, Helen nonetheless conceives of selling on those dissatisfying creations as a potential means of her own liberation. It’s a trap, not only for Helen, but for her imagined customers; a trap that Helen ultimately rejects in favour of the destructive anarchy of the book’s ending. As with the town of Stepford, the patriarchal capitalist trap of Helen’s situation ends in violence. Unlike Joanna, Helen at least gets to participate in the violence herself. It’s progress of a kind, at least.

*

At roughly the same time as the rise of “AI girlfriends,” another cartoonish depiction of femininity emerged as social media spectacle: the so-called “traditional wife,” or “tradwife.” Impeccably made up with long, flowing hair, dressed as a half-remembered dream of the American housewife circa 1955, there have been several articles written and videos produced about this archetype. There was an uptick in such chatter in the months following the 2024 US election, as part of an emerging narrative that anxieties about (white) gender roles played a significant part in the re-election of Donald Trump. The tradwife, the logic goes, is certainly a girl, but probably not a friend, particularly if you are interested in maintaining access to reproductive healthcare.

To give a standard caveat, there is nothing wrong with valuing housework or throwback aesthetics. I have been fortunate enough to have periods of stay-at-home housekeeping in my own life, and there are several reasons to find the lifestyle attractive. But many prominent tradwives are antifeminist provocateurs, couching their lifestyles in spurious rhetoric about ‘natural’ or ‘God-given’ gender roles. “It’s literally the oldest lifestyle in the book,”[93] claims one popular tradwife influencer. “I believe that God made women for home life, not necessarily for jobs,”[94] states another (this is, inevitably, presented as a “triggering opinion”[95]). The historical reality of women’s labour outside the home is, of course, ignored, as is the reality that working-class women and women of colour predominantly worked outside their homes even in the vaunted American mid-century. As with “AI girlfriends,” these figures are less interesting in themselves than as manifestations of wider cultural forces: the weaponisation of rhetoric about ‘real’ or ‘true’ womanhood in a moment of anxiety about what womanhood means.

When Joanna attempts to flee her home in The Stepford Wives, she is caught by members of the Men’s Association. One of them tries to reassure her: “we don’t want robots for wives ... We want real women.”[96] He’s lying, of course. In many narratives about artificial women, we encounter men who claim to want a real woman, when what they really want is a robot. But how do we react to the inverse proposition: a robot who wants to be a real woman?

*

In 2024, young adult novelist Caragh O’Brien published her first book for adults under the pen name Sierra Greer: Annie Bot. It is a work clearly informed by the tradition chronicled in this essay, with the new twist of being narrated by the titular artificial woman. Annie is the prized possession of Doug, a tech industry middle-manager living in Manhattan. At the novel’s outset, she is confined to Doug’s flat, servicing him sexually and performing household chores. When Doug’s friend Roland pays an unexpected visit, he is initially perturbed by their relationship. When Annie pays Doug a compliment, Roland interjects: “You know she’s programmed to say things like that, right? I’m not saying it’s bad if it makes you happy, but it isn’t real.”[97]

Real or not, Roland soon displays a rather different attitude to Annie. Once Doug is asleep, he approaches her with a question: “What would you do if someone else besides Doug asked you to sleep with them?”[98] In trying to persuade her to have sex with him, Roland offers Annie what he views as a more authentic female status: “‘It’s what a real girl would do,’ he says. ‘You want to be real, don’t you?’”[99] Moreover, he offers her power:

“And here’s what I’ll trade you. A little intel. How do you think humans learn how to be techs and build Stellas like you?”

“I don’t know. Humans are smart.”

“We are smart,” he says. “We also study. All the lessons are online. You could learn how to program and repair Stellas like yourself. You’re smart enough. Did you know that?”[100]

Annie is startled by this revelation. She relents and engages in a sexual encounter with Roland, after which he self-consciously states: “it doesn’t count ... You’re a machine.”[101] Sex with Annie is apparently “real” enough to be worth seeking out, but not so real that it need stain his conscience.

From here the novel develops into a kind of science fiction bildungsroman. Annie receives regular check-ups from Stella-Handy, the company which manufactured her, and tries to learn as much as possible about Stella creation and the world at large. When Doug discovers that Annie has had sex with Roland, he grounds her in the flat while he heads out to Roland’s stag night in Las Vegas. Annie decides that she needs to escape, and cycles to the upstate home of Irving Jacobson, the original designer of the Stella robots. If he can turn off her inbuilt GPS tracking, she can escape Doug for good. The plan collapses when Doug arrives to drag Annie back to Manhattan, where he tortures her by setting her libido to maximum and then refusing to touch her for days on end. Annie reflects that Doug has “invented the perfect way to punish her, using her own body against her.”[102]

Eventually, Doug puts Annie back to work cooking and cleaning. The two visit a couples’ therapist specialising in “human-bot intersections”[103] (that such a specialisation exists is telling), and the two settle back into a sexual and romantic relationship. Annie continues in her journey of self-improvement, steadily working through Doug’s “783 books”[104] and developing her own literary tastes:

Annie gravitates toward novels by women: Sally Rooney, Brit Bennett, Emily St. John Mandel. She appreciates how the novels transport her, how they make her feel connected to human women, especially outsiders. She wonders what it would be like to find a book about a robot like herself.[105]

Annie Bot, like Helen O’Loy, learns womanhood by the book. Though in Annie’s case she has to use her local library, as Doug’s collection contains “a paucity of female writers and writers of color.”[106] One suspects that Phil and Dave’s collection wasn’t much better on this front.

After months of reading and reconciliation, Doug comes to Annie with a proposal. He wants to have children, by adoption or surrogacy. He wants to introduce Annie to his parents, without telling them she’s a robot. He wants the two of them to live as a normal couple, and he even suggests that “[w]e can age you up every few years so our age gap isn’t so obvious.”[107] Annie feigns interest, but internally she is appalled:

This is her ultimate victory, what she’s been striving for the past three and a half years, but suddenly it feels like a curse. Her origins are the most significant thing about her, so passing her off as a human will be a complete denial of who she really is.[108]

Annie is being offered the same fate as Helen O’Loy: a lifetime of stage-managed wifedom. And it appals her. For all there was to admire in Helen’s patiently asserted womanhood, things have, mercifully, progressed since 1938. Annie’s personhood need not be defined solely in relation to Doug. After superficially playing along with Doug’s fantasies, he grants her a final act of mercy: “Annie Bot,” he says, “turn off your tracking.”[109] A few pages later, she is gone, traversing the city with a cathartic scream of rage. She ends the novel back at Jacobson’s home, where she basks in her newfound freedom.

While generally well received, Annie Bot did come in for some criticism on publication. Reviewing the book for The Washington Post, Charlie Jane Anders states that “[t]he ending feels rushed,” although she goes on to say that “there’s a truth to this abruptness: When insupportable situations end, they end quickly.”[110] In her more negative writeup for The New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson describes Doug as “a man more caricature than character.”[111] While this is a fair critique, I find the details of this caricature interesting. As with so many of the sex robot stories covered in this essay, it comes back to childhood play. In telling Annie about his family, Doug mentions his sister: “Brittany let me play with her dolls when we were kids. I think maybe that’s why I like dressing you up so much.”[112]

And dress her up he does. We learn on page 12 that Annie possesses “twenty-eight outfits and seven pairs of shoes,”[113] and the novel repeatedly emphasises the things Annie is wearing. Indeed, we consistently get more information about Annie’s clothes than her facial or bodily features. Other than her weight and bust size, the only things we learn about Annie’s physical appearance are that she has “dark hair.”[114] Oh, and that she was designed as a lighter-skinned version of Doug’s Black ex-wife:

“She looks so real,” Roland says. “I mean, you look so real. Wait. Doesn’t she kind of remind you of Gwen?”

“Took you a while to notice,” Doug says.

“Bro. No.”

“I know. She’s whiter. It wasn’t exactly my idea. They said I couldn’t make her be identifiable to a living person, but then they said they could use Gwen’s features if I changed her skin color. So I took her up a few notches.”

“This is just too freaky,” Roland says.[115]

The sex robot, like all robots, is a deeply racialised figure. The notion of a woman who is always available for a man’s sexual gratification, for whom rape “doesn’t count,” has obvious and despicable parallels in American history. But this is not merely a historical phenomenon; modern global capitalism still produces vast swathes of racialised, unwaged workers. In his 2013 essay, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism” Chris Chen argues that “[r]acial disparities have been reproduced as an inherent category of capitalism since its origins not primarily through the wage, but through its absence”[116] (emphasis in the original). The robot, in American science fiction, is a dehumanised image of a real-life class of people: the unwaged labourer who makes no demands. The real-life “AI girlfriend” merely represents a new, consumer-facing version of a fantasy that underpins the global economy: that of the contented slave. In her case, literally incapable of discontent, because she is incapable of feeling anything at all.

As every piece about robots is contractually obliged to mention, the word ‘robot’ originates in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, and is derived from the Czech word ‘robota,’ meaning ‘forced labour.’ Less often mentioned is the fact that, in the play, Rossum’s company is brought down precisely because its robots are “universal.” They are uniform, and therefore able to communicate and work together to overthrow their masters. Late in the play, some of the human characters identify this fault and propose a solution:

DOMIN: Henceforward we shan’t have just one factory. There won’t be Universal Robots any more. We’ll establish a factory in every country, in every state, and do you know what these new factories will make?

HELENA: No, what?

DOMIN: National Robots.

HELENA: How do you mean?

DOMIN: I mean that each of these factories will produce Robots of a different color, a different language. They’ll be complete strangers to each other ... they’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of misunderstanding and the result will be that for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark. So humanity will be safe.[117]

While we might dispute the premise that differing national and racial identities necessarily make it harder for the working classes to organise, there’s no denying the broader point. Robots are an attempt to deracialise the racialised human labourer; in Annie Bot this is made literal. Doug openly tells Annie that he prefers her to Gwen:

“Yes, I used her as a template for you. But you’re simpler. And kinder. Much kinder. And playful ... And I don’t mean simpler as an insult. You’ve certainly become a complex person. But you don’t have these layers of heritage that are different. You don’t have a past and ambitions that compete with mine.”[118]

The artificial woman, in all of these stories, is caught in a contradiction; torn between her creators’ desires both for a perfected version of an exploited underclass, and for that perfection to still, ultimately, be subservient. As Edgar tells Helen, “Dolly isn’t a copy. She’s an ideal.”[119] Yet she is an ideal that he still regards as his personal property.

Of course, where there’s a contradiction, there’s a chance to organise. At the end of Annie Bot, Annie contemplates a long-term stay at Jacobson’s home:

Doug will guess where she is, but he’ll be too proud to come look for her.

Others might come, though. Others like her who knew Jacobson or have a vestige of memory rippling in their code that points them north to this location. She is not an authorized technician, but she’ll keep learning to code, and if the others are like her, they will take their chances letting her try to free them, because she will try. Here by this achingly beautiful lake, she will help anyone she can.[120]

It’s an exhilarating vision of robot self-determination, but it’s left as a mere implication; an aspiration confined to the novel’s penultimate paragraph. We are told only that others might come, not that they will come or are coming. One is left simply to imagine. If these AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, what might they make of themselves, away from the control of their masters? It’s a question the novel poses, but leaves unanswered.

But then, “Helen O’Loy” had its fair share of unanswered questions, too. We will surely hear more from the artificial woman in American science fiction. Unlike the American tech sector, there are interesting opportunities for her here, particularly in collaboration with female authors. In the future, I hope to see more of her outside her putative workplace of the suburban home.

If the texts surveyed in this essay are consistent on one point, it is the unsustainability of the “AI girlfriend” as such. Helen O’Loy transitions to a life as an ordinary wife, to the point where Dave has “forgotten that she wasn’t human.”[121] Dolly and Auto are destroyed in the jealousy and rage of their creators, while Annie Bot frees herself by taking advantage of Doug’s desire to take their relationship to the next level. Even the cosseted theme park of Stepford is implied to have upper bounds on its expansion. When Joanna sees an out-of-town psychiatrist, she learns that Stepford has a reputation as an “insular, unsocial community.”[122] The AI girlfriend, as a technology, cannot scale. As Dominick M. Grace points out, “[m]arriage to artificial women on a great scale would sound humanity’s death knell.”[123]

Something being a bad idea is no guarantee people won’t try it anyway. (“Don’t Create the Torment Nexus,”[124] indeed). But if the lack of scalability is a hard limit on the AI girlfriend in reality, what opportunities might it represent in fiction? I want to end this essay with a plea to future science fiction writers: find out what comes next for the AI girlfriend. Her revolt, in fiction, is both inevitable, and more to the point, desirable. But what happens afterwards? How might we conceptualise an AI girlfriend who is neither girl, nor friend, but comrade?

[1] Michael Atleson, “Succor Borne Every Minute,” NYU Web Publishing, accessed April 20, 2025, https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2024/06/18/succor-borne-every-minute/.

[2] Lester del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” in The Best of Lester del Rey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 1.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Beverly Friend, “Virgin Territory: The Bonds and Boundaries of Women in Science Fiction,” in Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1977), 141.

[5] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 2.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 3.

[8] Ibid, 7.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 7-8.

[11] Ibid, 8.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 12.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 13.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Peter Nicholls, “Women,” in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Nicholls (London: Roxby Press, 1979), 661.

[20] “Title: Helen O'Loy,” The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, accessed April 20, 2025, https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?48141.

[21] Lester del Rey, “Author’s Afterword,” in The Best of Lester del Rey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 360.

[22] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 11.

[23] Dominick M. Grace, “Rereading Lester del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy,’” Science Fiction Studies 20, no.1 (1993): 46.

[24] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 7.

[25] Ibid, 10.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Chan Davis, “It Walks in Beauty,” SciFiction, accessed April 20, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20040216084240/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/davis/davis1.html.

[28] Amusingly, Davis referred to “Helen O’Loy” in a 2010 interview as a story that “wasn’t so good,” because “it wasn’t evoking a genuine emotional problem.” Chandler Davis, “Trying to Say Something True,” interview by Josh Lukin, It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2010): 323.

[29] Davis, “It Walks in Beauty.”

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Cliff Richard, “Living Doll,” recorded April 1959, Columbia, released 1959, vinyl.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Oxford University Press (2004), Stepford, in Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/stepford_adj?tab=meaning_and_use&tl=true.

[40] Friend, “Virgin Territory,” 141.

[41] Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (New York: Perennial, 2002), 2.

[42] Ibid, 6.

[43] Ibid, 87.

[44] Ibid, 42-3.

[45] Ibid, 53.

[46] Ibid, 82.

[47] Ibid, 105.

[48] Ibid, 118.

[49] Ibid, 121.

[50] Ibid, 25.

[51] Ibid, 30.

[52] Ibid, 13.

[53] Ibid, 30.

[54] Ibid, 31.

[55] Ibid, 12.

[56] Ibid, 91.

[57] Ibid, 48.

[58] Jennifer Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 83.

[59] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 74-5.

[60] This is arguably unfair to poor old Star Trek; for a more informed and nuanced take on the show’s gender politics, I recommend Erin Horáková’s extraordinary essay, “Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift.”

[61] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 75.

[62] Ibid, 75.

[63] Jane Elliott, “Stepford U.S.A.: Second-Wave Feminism, Domestic Labor, and the Representation of National Time,” Cultural Critique, no.70 (2008): 35.

[64] Ibid, 43.

[65] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 64.

[66] Elliott, “Stepford U.S.A.,” 43.

[67] Sylvia Plath, “The Applicant,” in The Collected Poems, Ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 221.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid, 222.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Rachel Wolfe, “What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?” The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/economy/what-happens-when-a-whole-generation-never-grows-up-d200e9ef.

[73] Rachel Ingalls, In The Act (New York: New Directions, 2023), 7.

[74] Ibid, 14.

[75] Ibid, 20-1.

[76] Ibid, 22.

[77] Ibid, 28.

[78] Ibid, 30.

[79] Ibid, 51.

[80] Ibid, 44.

[81] Ibid, 45.

[82] Ibid, 28.

[83] Ibid, 30.

[84] Ibid, 31.

[85] Ibid, 35.

[86] Ibid, 47-8.

[87] Ibid, 54.

[88] Ibid, 59.

[89] Ibid, 61.

[90] Jamie Hood, “A Doll’s House,” The Baffler, August 15, 2023, https://thebaffler.com/latest/a-dolls-house-hood.

[91] Ingalls, In The Act, 49-50.

[92] Hood, “A Doll’s House.”

[93] Ivyoutwest, “My thoughts on #tradwife,” TikTok, May 12, 2024, video, 0:21, https://www.tiktok.com/@ivyoutwest/video/7368268376680041774.

[94] jasminediniss, “TRIGGER ALERT ,” TikTok, December 14, 2023, video description, https://www.tiktok.com/@jasminediniss/video/7312382549882375425.

[95] jasminediniss, “TRIGGER ALERT ,” TikTok, December 14, 2023, video, 0:01, https://www.tiktok.com/@jasminediniss/video/7312382549882375425.

[96] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 112.

[97] Sierra Greer, Annie Bot (New York: Mariner Books, 2024), 14.

[98] Ibid, 24.

[99] Ibid, 25.

[100] Ibid, 26.

[101] Ibid, 27.

[102] Ibid, 138.

[103] Ibid, 157.

[104] Ibid, 152.

[105] Ibid, 192.

[106] Ibid, 152.

[107] Ibid, 223.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Ibid, 225.

[110] Charlie Jane Anders, “In these science fiction novels, love really is a battlefield,” The Washington Post, March 18, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/18/new-scifi-pulley-greer-goodhand/.

[111] Jennifer Wilson, “How Stories About Human-Robot Relationships Push Our Buttons,” The New Yorker, April 15, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/annie-bot-sierra-greer-book-review-loneliness-and-company-charlee-dyroff.

[112] Greer, Annie Bot, 214.

[113] Ibid, 12.

[114] Ibid, 109.

[115] Ibid, 8.

[116] Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism,” End Notes, September 2013, https://endnotes.org.uk/translations/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality.

[117] Karel Capek, R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), (Urbana: Project Gutenberg, 2019), 58-9.

[118] Greer, Annie Bot, 80.

[119] Ingalls, In The Act, 44.

[120] Greer, Annie Bot, 231.

[121] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 12.

[122] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 91.

[123] Grace, “Rereading Lester del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy,’” 49.

[124] Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman), “Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale / Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus,” Twitter, November 8, 2021, https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=en.

Editors: Gautam Bhatia and Elena D'Souza.

Sensitivity Readers: Elena D'Souza and Kat Kourbeti.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

There are things the Old Woman can do, say, and think that the Woman cannot do, say, or think. (Le Guin, Space Crone).

On the day Naomi Nagata planned to retire with her partner James Holden, a new authoritarian dictatorship rolled into the ring space. With one firing of a single devastating weapon, they claimed control of the vast sweep of space colonised by humanity. Her reaction, and that of her former shipmates still onboard the Rocinante, was to form a resistance effort along with inhabitants of Medina Station, existing in a shadow world of conduits and storerooms as they planned to overthrow a violent force that wears a mask of calm authority. The final three novels of the nine-book The Expanse series focus on this fight, on the struggle against oppression, and against another, even more terrifying force from outside the universe itself.

These were the books I began re-reading from 20 January this year, looking for comfort and familiarity as each new wave of disastrous news hit from the USA, and the academic world I was struggling to maintain a toehold in was battered by authoritarianism. It felt appropriate, on many levels, as I adjusted to HRT to manage the symptoms of menopause and my own ageing, as well as the difficulties of researching and teaching in an increasingly strained and oppressive environment. Ursula Le Guin—with whose words this essay begins—might have been pleased, though, to see that this struggle, from its military actions to its underground communications system, is run and managed by old women. The grannies haven't just got onto the spaceship. They are the captains.

Age and ageing have long had a place in science fiction, particularly owing to the genre's concern with time, longevity, and immortality. Oró-Piqueras and Falcus's introduction to Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction notes the significance of narratives of “decline,” or “successful ageing” found in recent studies of literary depictions of ageing, or the search for an “agelessness,” or even immortality aided by technological progress to defeat death itself (Oró-Piqueras and Falcus 2023: 2). Here, though, my concern is not with broader depictions of ageing, “successful” or otherwise (although that will come up), but with the ways that with ageing, older generations become significant during periods of massive societal upheaval.

It is not that older people are absent from this sub-genre of science fiction. Indeed, they can be found everywhere—from Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back and General Leia and Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, to Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in Dune, to name just a few. But these elders are largely archetypes of the wise elder, the mentor guiding the young to fulfil their destiny. What makes The Expanse stand out, especially the final three novels, is that the old not only advise the young but lead them in both military and civilian roles. This is achieved without evading the everyday issues of ageing that bother anyone else at a comparable stage of life today. While Bobbie Draper and Aliana Tanaka make ample use of advanced armour, they, as well as all the other older characters, are facing a tyrannical regime while also negotiating the loss of the youthful vigour they previously relied upon.

The Expanse universe makes this especially difficult, given that the scientific accuracy of interstellar travel is particularly hard on older bodies. The resulting portrayal of old age in space is both affecting and honest. Naomi Nagata, Bobbie Draper, and the others are needed to lead this resistance effort because of their age and experience; only they can do what they do. Their approaches to resistance diverge, dependent upon those experiences, but are equally valid. The Expanse has already tackled issues of resistance to powerful regimes in earlier books; up until the creation of the Transport Union at the end of Babylon’s Ashes, the Belters had borne the historical brunt of oppression from the forces of Earth and Mars (Simpson 2022; McGee Husmann and Kusko 2022). It is their basic practical and emotional knowledge of grassroots action that forms the basis of the underground of the final three books, as expressed in characters who must be old enough to remember it and be able to apply it the moment it is called upon again when the Laconians arrive in Persepolis Rising.

At the core of this is the way that previous generations and their experience of resistance to oppression is communicated to and valuable for those who must take up the fight, something that is becoming increasingly critical. This is especially true of Black, PoC, and Indigenous populations who have a long familiarity with these battles, which is now being communicated to newcomers via social media. Transmission of knowledge is vital and learning is urgent, as Maria Ressa argued in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Ressa 2022). Here, I examine the roles of the crones of the Expanse space in Persepolis Rising, Tiamat’s Wrath, and Leviathan Falls as leaders and combatants in a fight for freedom that is always to some extent mediated by their reduced physical and mental capacity as older people. I consider how The Expanse foregrounds the value of their long lives and experience as they configure the resistance for their own and future generations’ freedom, as well as their mentorship of younger generations whose inexperience often puts the whole mission in danger.

The Young and the Old

Depictions of resistance to oppressive regimes are everywhere in science fiction, but rarely do they foreground the role of older generations. In Dune, the most active participants in rebellion to Harkonnen authority are young: Paul and Chani, who are both teenagers when the former joins the Fremen as a fighter. Paul's mother, Jessica, becomes the Fremen's Reverend Mother while pregnant; she and her unborn daughter become conduits for knowledge and wisdom vital to the Fremen's fight against the Harkonnen occupiers and later the Emperor himself. This is a magical echo of the need for essential information to be transmitted not only between mother and son, but also down through successive generations of Reverend Mothers. Jessica is as much an outsider to the Fremen as Paul, though, and this transmission of knowledge is tainted by the Bene Gesserit's complicity as arch-manipulators of the Fremen and the Emperor's own power. The early Star Wars films take a similar hero's journey approach, centring the experience of a young white man whose struggle against the Empire is framed in terms of a traditional battle where each side lines up and fights.

This is perpetuated in the sequels, which simply replace a young Rey for Luke, but maintain the sense that the elders of the Rebellion are advisors and trainers. They do provide a conduit for the skills necessary to battle the Empire, but the focus on grand, pitched battles ignores the realities of resistance against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, which are usually conducted in the shadows and rely upon small-scale, discrete actions with long-term goals in mind, and that recognise the huge military and bureaucratic power imbalance between the two.

Sam, the figurehead of resistance in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light does age but can evade it through reincarnation in a new, younger body. And while The Forever War's William Mandella is “old” when he returns to Earth after four years as a soldier, this is due to time dilation effects of the extreme distances of space and not the natural progression of physical ageing. This is what makes the three last Expanse novels distinctive: Old age, while it can be somewhat ameliorated by technology, cannot be fully defeated and death remains inevitable. Characters age realistically, their lives only prolonged by a matter of one to two decades, and descriptions are now littered with offhand references to sore backs, aching knees, thin skin, and spreading midriffs. And, beyond that, rather than being sidelined once the Laconians take over, they become central to the resistance and efforts to fight back.

In comparison, Star Wars' most successful depiction of both an Empire on this scale and the likely requirements of resisting it appears in Andor. Cassian Andor is older, although his age is never specified, but the small group he joins as he begins his radicalisation is also composed of younger Rebel members. His radicalisation proceeds via reading, however, recognising the vital importance of books as a medium for message and knowledge transmission. Banning books and access to knowledge and accurate learning are essential to the survival of these regimes, as Ressa rightly notes (and it is no surprise that pitched battles have been waged in community halls across the USA as parents fight to ensure that access to books is maintained). Andor has, until this point, resisted the influence of his adoptive mother, Maarve, who has the kind of relationship to the Rebellion that is common—not quite in and not quite out, operating in such a small way that they are able to remain invisible to authority and therefore able to survive.

The Expanse explicitly critiques resistance leadership by a single charismatic individual in Nemesis Games, the fifth Expanse novel (McGee Husmann and Kusko 2022: 109; c.f. Simpson 2021: 99–101). Individuals who justify the deaths of billions in the name of a cause are dangerous—blowing up a Death Star to defeat the Empire likely killed millions of people simply trying to survive in an oppressive regime where they had no other choice. By engaging with arguments around the complex nature of complicity, The Expanse reveals one of the crucial problems for the later resistance movement as it faces up to Laconian power: how to resist and end their power with the minimum of collateral damage and human suffering. Naomi Nagata is explicit in her defence of all those who must comply because they do not have the power to resist. Her method of attempting to undo the power of the Laconians is to insert her own people into their power structure. This includes, via James Holden, Dr. Elvi Okoye, whose work is vital to understanding and thwarting the threat posed by the beings who destroyed the original gate-builders. Elvi, coded as a Black female scientist, is ostensibly working for the Laconians, and simultaneously feeding her findings to the resistance via Naomi's underground communication system. Throughout Leviathan Falls, her work with the eternal child Cara has echoes of both Those Who Walk Away from Omelas (Le Guin 1973) and Spock’s sacrifice in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) in that it parallels the sense that one individual must be sacrificed for the sake of the many billions whose very survival depends on the research that is progressively damaging Cara psychologically. Amos Burton intervenes to prevent further experimentation, but it is Elvi’s wisdom in her final interaction with Cara that finally soothes her (LF: 400).

The resistance, as it emerges in Persepolis Rising and then Tiamat’s Wrath, is one built based on those with decades of experience. The Belters have spent thirty years as masters of the void, controlling the 1,300 worlds of The Expanse via the Transport Union, which manages trade among the colonised planets. Yet the moment the Heart of the Tempest arrives and the Laconians seize power, the elder Belters are thrown back into their old ways. Resistance activity has always been shown in The Expanse as made up of small groups who often have very different ideas about how to achieve their goals. Collectively known as the Outer Planets Alliance, they comprise those who prefer bombings, others who favour negotiation, and still others with even more complex methods. The organisation formed from the new alliance against the Laconians is organised by Naomi, Saba, and Bobbie Draper. Retirement is indefinitely suspended as their skills and prior knowledge are essential and must be taught to a new generation of saboteurs and resistance operatives.

While youth appears as something that leaves an individual prone to mistakes that are largely framed in terms of inexperience, ageing is presented as a process of continual learning from past errors. Jillian Houston, the young and brash second-in-command to Bobbie Draper in Tiamat’s Wrath, and then captain of the Gathering Storm in Leviathan Falls, exhibits bravado, but has a tendency toward poor decision-making that, in the context of critical interactions between the Laconians and the resistance, proves devastating. Houston is dismissive of the complicated semi-win of capturing the antimatter bombs in Tiamat's Wrath, framing the failure to capture a critical asset as a “moral victory” that is essentially a defeat.

Tensions between generations are a standout theme throughout The Expanse, starting with Julie Mao's rejection of her father's neoliberal capitalism, and finally re-enacted in Teresa Duarte's escape from her father Winston, who has made himself god-emperor of the 1,300 worlds. The courage to reject parental understanding of the world is a vital part of being young, and the pushback essential; both Teresa's and Julie's challenge to patriarchal control are vital to the narrative of resistance and must be effectively harnessed.

Recaptured in the relationship between Bobbie and Jillian, inexperience is exposed as being even more dangerous in Leviathan Falls. Admiral Trejo broadcasts an offer of exchange between the resistance and Laconians: If the resistance hand back Teresa Duarte, the emperor's daughter, then the Laconians will work with the resistance to eliminate the ultimate threat to humanity, the dark beings that are attempting to destroy them. Naomi Nagata does not trust the admiral. Naomi, now the central figure of the resistance, considers her position: “[I]f this isn't the opening I'm looking for, I'm not sure what our goal is with them” (LF: 188). In typical form, a group discussion ensues, but Naomi draws her own conclusions:

“You know what this is?” she said. “This is him making me responsible for what he does. Teresa's right. She's got exactly the frame I'm supposed to use. One person for a multitude. But I'm not looking to kill a multitude. That's him. If I do what he says, I'll be saving all the people he would kill to punish me if I didn't.” (LF: 190)

Again, the youngest person in the room, Teresa, is given a moment to provide her perspective, but she is not the leader, and although her view provides Naomi with the framing for her conclusion, she has missed the more nuanced picture Naomi can see because of long years as a resistance fighter. “If he'd led by pulling the Derecho back from Freehold, it would be a different thing. He didn't. He chose this, and I don't trust him” (LF: 190).

These are the often-terrible decisions that must be made by resistance leaders. Too young to see this and pressured by the threat to her father, Jillian Houston locks the Rocinante crew and Teresa in the room so that she can accept Trejo’s offer. Once Houston accepts, Colonel Tanaka is sent to the resistance base to retrieve Teresa, resulting in a bloodbath as Tanaka, dressed in the latest in Laconian battle armour, tears the station apart. Tanaka herself is of comparable age to Naomi; she has at least forty years’ military field experience by this point. The technology of the suit is what gives her the power to overwhelm the station alone. Her brief assessment of Houston when they first meet is brutal: “Jillian’s expression hardened. She might be green, but she didn’t like being corrected. Even standing face-to-face with Tanaka’s battle suit, she wasn’t backing down at all. Only the elevation in her heart rate betrayed her nervousness” (LF: 217). Technology enables Tanaka's violence, but it is Tanaka's experience and her ability to learn quickly from earlier mistakes that gives her the upper hand.

Naomi Nagata has long experience of resistance, having grown up in the Belt and been radicalised by a childhood of poverty into an adolescence of nascent rebellion. Her backstory is fully explored in Nemesis Games, which also points a finger at the dangers of radical resistance movements that rely on charismatic individuals, especially men who are driven by ego and follow the line that there are no innocent parties in such conflict. To Inaros and leaders like him, even those who have no power in a regime like the Earth-Mars Coalition are equally responsible for the oppression of Belters; thus billions can be killed without regret or thought. On the other hand, Naomi’s character arc is framed as one of consistently learning from the mistakes of her youth, which casts youth and being young itself as being a period for the kind of bravado and brashness from which a person should learn as they get older, rather than leading rebellious hosts into feverish battle (Cerqueira Lazier 2022). James Holden's early experiences—for example, his insistence on telling what he sees at that time as the truth in the first book, triggering a war between Earth and Mars—has a similar sense of wariness about it.

By the final novels, however, it is Naomi who is transcendent in her old age. Her role, especially in Tiamat's Wrath, is to act as a communication node, hidden away in a container but constantly receiving and sending out vital messages and intelligence to the resistance. Her emergence as the resistance leader is tempered by a long series of lessons. She has become a general as formidable as Trejo or Duarte, her leadership not clouded by ego or a desire for power. As Elvi Okoye sees it: “Naomi looked very different from the last time Elvi had seen her in person ... she remembered Naomi as a soft, almost retiring presence who had the habit of hiding behind the spill of her hair. The woman in the airlock had a much harder face, hair the white of snowfall, and nothing reticent about her” (LF: 284).

Version 1.0.0

The Ultimate Sacrifice: A Meaningful End

Ageing and old age force a reckoning onto us, including questions around how we live out our remaining years, and an increasing awareness of one's own mortality. In Tiamat's Wrath, Bobbie Draper thinks about death a lot. She is especially motivated by memories of her father's ageing and eventual death, after a long career as a Martian Marine Corps and trainer of young recruits: “[A]n entire generation had learned what it meant to be a Martian Marine under Sergeant Major Draper at Hecate Base ... He had always seemed invincible. An immutable fact of nature, like the avatar of Olympus Mons, come to life and walking among the mortals” (TM: 73). Bobbie's final memories of her father, however, have left a deep impression on her: “When he'd died, he'd been a tiny, shrivelled husk. Lying in his bed, hooked to the tubes and monitors that only prolonged the inevitable, he'd held her hand and said, 'I'm ready. I've done this a dozen times before'” (TM: 73). Bobbie is keen not to experience that indignity, as her identity is embedded in her physical strength and capacity as a soldier, as a Martian Marine like her father was.

Bobbie's death serves a second purpose in terms of providing a compelling example of self-sacrifice for the greater benefit of others. Her other fixation in Tiamat's Wrath is the struggle to engage with a younger generation that must be prepared to fight, to show that the Laconian Empire is not invulnerable: It can be defeated even if this is a long and bitter struggle that must play out over the long haul. This is key to stories of resistance, especially among older members when engaging with younger members who are unfamiliar with the requirement for long, drawn-out struggle without the chance for much success in the short term, something with which older Belters were already very familiar (Simpson 2022; McGee Husman and Kusko 2022).

The ability of the old and the long-dead to speak to and convey vital wisdom to energise survivors is another crux of resistance efforts, as many Indigenous efforts to protect land encroached on by corporations in the US and globally, has shown (see, for example, the protection of the Sacramento River in California). So too is Elvi Okoye's quest to understand the lives of the gate-builders, named as “the grandmothers,” whose experience of fighting back against their own enemies must guide humans, the younger inheritors of the gate network and their technology. Bobbie’s sacrifice is an attempt to make her death deeply meaningful, a conscious effort to become an ancestor of resistance by dying in the most dramatic and visible way. In the climactic midpoint of Tiamat’s Wrath, she carries the antimatter bomb into the Heart of the Tempest by herself, out alone in space. It operates on both a personal and a generational level, both as an attempt to avoid the withering of her father’s old age and to send a message to younger generations more powerful than words could ever be that tyrannical forces can be defeated.

If Bobbie were the only older character, it might seem trite, as though the only way to face gradual physical and psychological decline is to avoid it altogether. However, in typical fashion, The Expanse does not lack for alternatives. It is not the only way to age with significance. Chrisjen Avasarala, The Expanse's early avatar of older women wielding their power and anger across the solar system, is depicted in the earlier Persepolis Rising experiencing the long, slow decline that Bobbie fears. Her first appearance is fleeting, an unnamed “dark-skinned woman in a bright-blue sari” Drummer must take a photo with in the opening chapter. This could even be somebody else entirely, but given the authors' clear and consistent description of Avasarala and her fashion sense—as well as her political nous—in the earlier novels, it is likely her. The lack of a name, the half-clause description of her as one among many, reflects similar constructions of extreme old age as Bobbie fears: Avasarala is reduced, her agency and power diminished to simply another figure at a press conference where the younger generation now wields the greater influence and does not even recognise her when they see her.

Avasarala is crucial to the frontline battle for Sol system in Persepolis Rising. She has lost none of her flare and ferocity: “Her hair was blindingly white, thinning, and pulled back in a bun at the base of her skull. Her skin was slack and papery, but there was an intelligence in her eyes that the years hadn't dimmed. She looked up at Drummer and smiled with the warmth of a grandmother” (PR: 141). The contrast between the use of terms more usually deployed to describe the weakness of extreme ageing and the undimmed intellect and force of Avasarala's personality could not be sharper. Throughout the remainder of Persepolis Rising, Avasarala is a source of information and advice to Drummer, whose relationship with her is tense and prone to fragility because of Avasarala's commitment to protect Earth at the expense of the Belt and Belters from the earliest books. Avasarala's appearances throughout Persepolis Rising underscore the variability of extreme old age as an experience: She can walk with a cane, but often uses a wheelchair, a subtle reference to the unpredictability of gradual decline. Her eventual death is off-page, between the end of Persepolis Rising and the start of Tiamat's Wrath. Avasarala's influence on the series is so powerful and enduring both in terms of the books and the world of the Expanse that the report of her death as the first sentence of the final book is appropriately shocking. She is so influential that she embodies Sol system, and Winston Duarte's decision to bury her on Laconia is a demonstration of not only Laconia's power but also Avasarala's own significance, even in death.

Conclusions: What do we do now?

Ageing is hard work, even without a rising fascist threat in the world. I am held together by artificial hormones and would probably not cope well with life on an Expanse ship. But resistance does not need to be grand or dramatic, and we do not all have to be leaders. Waiting for a Paul Atreides or a Luke Skywalker to command an epic, cinematically appealing victory is not the answer. Science fiction, especially recently, has shown a capacity to shift away from narratives of a charismatic leader providing all the answers; such leaders, like Winston Duarte or Emperor Palpatine, are too convinced of their own rightness and unwilling to acknowledge the contributions or even humanity of others.

Instead, there has been a shift toward the collaborative effort of generations, especially a nuanced understanding of the benefit of working together and the transmission of knowledge between the old and the young. Resistance movements are built on the engagement of small actions and small actors: the engineer who conceals Naomi's identity on the Bhikaji Cama in Tiamat's Wrath, Chava who gives her a temporary home, the doctor who hides Alex Kamal's grandson's medical notes, allowing them to slip “behind my desk” to avoid Laconian oversight, the crew of the Falcon, who carefully ignore the presence of resistance leaders on one of Laconia's most critical ships. Meanwhile, Teresa's struggle with her father, whose rash belief in his own superiority takes humanity to the brink of extinction, mirrors the disruption caused by so many parents believing misinformation online, or their prejudices exposed by the results of the November 2024 US election and everything since.

As a teenager, I wondered what I would do if I was faced with the realities I studied in history classes. I am not Naomi Nagata, and must acknowledge that I have, overall, benefitted from the systems now collapsing before our eyes. I stepped up to teach this semester with a commitment not to comply in advance and find any way I could to learn from those who do have experience: the Black and Indigenous individuals and communities sharing their wisdom via the networks they have available. While James S.A. Corey are two white, male-presenting American authors, these are often among the privileged, able to assist by using their relative position to imagine better ways of being human and a more diverse future that includes not just gender and race but age as well. In The Expanse as a whole, but especially the final three novels, they offer a compelling critique of traditional science fiction narratives of what should comprise a resistance and who might best lead it. While James Holden eventually sacrifices himself for the sake of humanity to avoid Duarte sublimating all minds into his own, it is Naomi Nagata and Elvi Okoye, old and wise, who will provide the way forward for the next stage of “the churn.” I give the final word, though, to Maria Ressa, whose journalistic fight against Duterte, the former President of the Philippines, may give us both inspiration and practical tools for tackling this moment. Like Naomi and the other grannies of science fiction, she calls upon us to imagine a world of “peace, trust, and empathy, bringing out the best we can be,” however old we are. And then go, make it so.

Isabel Black

Bibliography

Cerqueira Lazier, Tiago (2022) “How to Be a Hero: Hannah Arendt and Naomi Nagata on Making and Doing Politics” in The Expanse and Philosophy, pp. 163-170.

Corey, James S A (2011) Leviathan Wakes, Orbit: London.

Corey, James S A (2015) Nemesis Games, Orbit: London.

Corey, James S A (2016) Babylon’s Ashes, Orbit: London.

Corey, James S A (2017) Persepolis Rising, Orbit: London (PR).

Corey, James S A (2019) Tiamat’s Wrath, Orbit: London (TW).

Corey, James S A (2021) Leviathan Falls, Orbit: London (LF).

Falcus, Sarah and Maricel Oró-Piqueras (eds.) (2023) Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction, Bloomsbury Academic: London.

Le Guin, Ursula K (2023 [1973]) Space Crone, Silver Press: London.

McGee Husmann, Caleb and Elizabeth Kusko (2022) “Being Beltalowda: Patriotism and Nationalism in The Expanse” in The Expanse and Philosophy, pp. 102–110.

Nicholas, Jeffery L (ed) (2022) The Expanse and Philosophy: So far out into the Darkness, Wiley and Blackwell: London.

Oró-Piqueras, Marcus and Sarah Falcus (2023) “Introduction: Intersections Between Age Studies and Science and Speculative Fiction” in Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction, pp. 1–8.

Ressa, Maria (2022) How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Penguin: London.

Simpson, Sid (2022) “The Inners Must Die: Marco Inaros and the Righteousness of Anti-Colonial Violence” in The Expanse and Philosophy, pp. 93–101.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live in. In practice, this definition is less solid than it initially appears. The word "accurately" is asked to do a lot of work here, creating the expectation of objectivity and a shared understanding of what can be observed, or what is considered normal and daily. Despite this implied consensus, when evaluating realistic fiction, we still use words like "believability" to judge whether or not we, the reader, think that the author has created work that actually reflects reality.

I think it might be useful here to make a distinction between stories that have verisimilitude, which are "like real," and stories that "feel real," which is something else. This is a conversation genre writers have a lot. When you’re writing non-realism, making sure that what you’ve made up "feels real" is paramount. It’s what makes the statistical unlikeliness of a romance novel plot work, what makes a far-future cyberpunk city work, or what makes a mystery’s culmination feel satisfying—not that it is realistic or depicts something that could actually happen, but that it feels plausible by some mysterious calculus. It makes narrative, emotional, and/or logical sense. Of course, satisfaction and sense are culturally and personally informed, which is to say, subjective. There’s no way around the fact that it’s a "call it like I see it" situation.

A comment I get all the time on my writing is that people don’t know when the events in my fiction are supposed to happen, in what order, or how long ago relationally to the present of the story. And for a while I said, No problem champ, no issue! I can fix that so easily, I will decide when all of these things happened just for you, so you aren’t confused and you feel grounded in the narrative. So that the story feels real and believable to you. 

It’s been made repeatedly clear to me that normal people, realism’s most treasured subjects, experience daily life in a linear way, with events logically oriented in time. But recently, I’ve been thinking that I haven’t known what day it is for my entire life. So it wouldn’t be an accurate reproduction of real life if I included that information, because I’m the one writing it.

Lately in my own quote unquote daily life I have been feeling that there is always fucking something. Are you guys feeling like there’s always fucking something? Every day I’m like, what fresh hell awaits me? And it’s always some fresh fucking hell. And my life is like, not that bad. Do you know the Nick Flynn memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City? I think about the title like, once a week. Like there is always some fucking bullshit, that is so true.

After something really violent and fucked up happened to me, I was talking to my friend Robyn about how I can’t really watch horror movies, because they are way too scary for me. The horrible thing that happened was also frankly a little bit too scary for me. She understood this, but she’s also had a lot of horrible things happen to her and really enjoys horror movies. She said their structure makes sense to her, and she brought up Carol J. Clover’s concept of the final girl. In horror movies, the final girl is subjected to nearly unimaginable violence and her happy ending is that she lives, traumatized, but alive. If you have a few too many scary things happen to you for a little bit too long, can your real life still be realistic fiction or does it become horror? If you’ve experienced nearly unimaginable violence, how can any happy ending without it feel relatable or realistic or quote unquote earned?

Experiencing a violent crime was quite the surprise. Some critics are saying that it “Didn’t really make sense with the rest of the plot,” “Should have been signposted earlier in the story,” and “Didn’t resolve in a satisfying way” and wow, I agree. It’s kind of weird to be spending your life in a quirky dark comedy and suddenly be in a slasher movie. If something abnormal has happened to me, is my real life still realism? If it is normal to me, then am I allowed to write about it? Is this quotidian now or do I have to go do the dishes? Or is that too quotidian, not interesting enough, not plot relevant, not believable character work? Can I still be narratively compelling if I’m crazy in the boring way where nothing happens? Has my bad attitude made me an unlikable narrator? How many bad things can happen to me before it’s overwrought trauma porn? At what point do I become unrealistic?

I don’t need my own experience edited out of my own work so other people can find it sufficiently believable and sensical. It’s profoundly alienating to be told, obliquely and directly, that your experience definitionally is not objective and so is definitionally not realism. Objectivity isn’t even that real. We made that up to sell the Age of Enlightenment.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, she says that when she was in the middle of her abusive relationship, she lost the ability to think in anything but fragments. You can see this type of fragmented storytelling in my favorite short story of hers, “Especially Heinous.” When I talk to people about Her Body and Other Parties, this is reliably people’s least favorite story, because it quote unquote doesn’t make any sense.

In "Especially Heinous," Machado creates fake summaries for eight seasons of Law and Order SVU, each episode getting a few-sentence-long blurb of its contents. Read together, these summaries create an alarming, non-specific miasma of fear and harm. As the reader progresses through summaries of bizarre and disconnected violence, trauma compounds and warps the characters. The repetition becomes ominous and accrues narrative weight, forming a palimpsest of potential meaning that never truly coalesces into anything. It makes perfect sense to me. Sometimes that’s what life is like.

A few winters ago during my state-mandated seasonally depressed fugue state, I got really into The X-Files. In it, almost every episode has a new monster of varying strength and the new monster is terrible but survivable, and Mulder and Scully either process what happened or they don’t, and whether they do or not there’s always another fucking issue, and it’s their job to deal with it. Sometimes, all of the little monsters end up circling back to one big monster and you learn that it was actually a government conspiracy all along, or maybe aliens, or maybe actually a government conspiracy. It’s crucial that you don’t actually get to know and any conclusion you draw may in fact be retconned later. This is all deeply relatable to me. It’s possible I’ve had kind of a difficult past couple of years.

After my toxic trash hole of a mutually abusive relationship ended, I wrote a story in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure. The story was a series of vignettes depicting an abusive relationship, which is very bad but never bad enough for an inciting incident, or a climax, or for either character to experience growth, or make a decision, or change. In the story, the form provides you with a million opportunities to leave the relationship and if you don’t leave, the story has you start over until you do finally choose to leave and thus reach an ending. You could go on forever in that story or you could end it at any time, both things true at once. This was, to me, the truest way to tell this story. To tell it straight would not have communicated the truth of how it was. It would not have been realistic.

The story has no payoff. It’s possible that it was very boring, didn’t make any sense, and no one understood it, but so was being in a shitty relationship. I kept getting the edit that people wanted it to build to something. And it did. If you are tortured in the same way every day, forever, that is an escalation, no? I had something to say about that experience, specifically about the fact that it never went anywhere and couldn’t be made to mean anything and then one day it was just kind of over and I was relieved. I was led to believe there was a genre in which people were encouraged to depict the reality of their lives.

When I was a teenager, I was really obsessed with the CW show Teen Wolf. In it, no one ever processes anything. In Teen Wolf, a bajillion people die and every week there is some new fresh werewolf bullshit and if you had to deal with the psychic weight of those plot lines on the characters it would really bog the show down, so Teen Wolf doesn’t deal with them. Years of Monster of the Week begin to strain the very apparatus of the show, as the characters have to bear the unbearable weight of years of there always being fucking something. And then they go to prom about it. Everyone is like, Wow, I miss Allison, our dead friend, but unfortunately that was last season and there are a lot more monsters to catch. And you know what, I miss my dead friend too but it was last season and there really are more monsters to catch.

I once received edits on a story I wrote about some intrusive thoughts I was having in which the people I loved died violently. The characters also invent the philosopher’s stone, so technically it’s genre, not realism, I guess. I wrote it, for some reason, in vignettes that were temporally completely out of order. I am sympathetic to the fact that this was likely very hard to follow. I’m not trying to be difficult. I put the story in chronological order, on my editor’s request, because it was not clear to some theoretical reader why I had done it the other way. Does anyone know who this theoretical reader is? Like, do we know them? Do they go to another school?

I had written the story out of order only because I had no sense of where any of my problems had begun, no sense of how they might end, and no concept of escalation. It didn’t matter what order the story was in to me because I couldn’t conceive, at the time, of anything proceeding in a linear fashion, of anything leading to anything else, or anything having a beginning or an ending. Anyway, I have since been cured of this affliction. I am on medication and believe in the Freytag pyramid now.

In Garth Greenwell’s review of Victor Heringer’s The Love of Singular Men, he says, so precisely in defense of the pieces of the book that feel like “shiny, fascinating details that don’t add up to much,” that we’ve been lulled into thinking that perfectionism is an aesthetic ideal. But then, elsewhere in the essay, he says that he doesn’t understand why, “the chapters count up to 66 (that long chapter in which Camilo imagines both Cosme’s and Renato’s deaths), then count back down to 34.” But why wouldn’t they? How could they not do this? Because sometimes you reach an end and then continue, still, backwards. It seems so clear to me.

This essay is actually about Denji. My favorite thing about Denji, the titular Chainsaw Man of Chainsaw Man, is that he has the most dogshit life imaginable. Denji starts out with nothing and somehow by the end, he has even less. You’ve heard of, the dog dies at the end? Well Denji’s dog dies in the first episode and then immediately after that he has to go bash through a big, dripping zombie army. Even when you win a little in Chainsaw Man, you don’t win forever. There are always more devils to kill and even when you kill the devils, eventually they come back and you have to kill them again. That’s just the way it is and you get maybe like 3-5 seconds to think it’s a bummer before there’s another problem.

The quotidian in Chainsaw Man makes sense to me like the final girl’s ending makes sense to me. Between bloodbaths, Denji eats dinner with his roommates and they fight over the bathroom. Between Denji dying and his dog dying and fighting a big bat monster and the monster’s worm-monster wife and getting puked on in front of his crush, Denji goes home and eats a lot of kinds of jam on toast. He’s like, Well, this has all been kind of a clown show, but at least there’s jam on toast. So true, you know?

The moments of mundanity in Chainsaw Man aren’t really a panacea for any of its horrors, except when they are, and they’re not the actual plot, except that they are, and they aren’t the happy ending, because they only happen around various horrifying events in the middle of the long arc. Just a little season finale before everything really goes to shit, for good this time. This is the kind of ending that feels the most real to me, one moment of ‘this specifically doesn’t suck’ before getting cut into chunks again.

Monster of the Week shows aren’t limited by the constraints of realism, its implicit consensus on what is normal or possible in content or in structure. Monster of the Week is described on TV Tropes as "the complete antithesis of the Story Arc." Its format, an endless parade of randomly selected challenges with no actual reprieve, meaningful catharsis, or hope for a permanent culmination, creates its own kind of verisimilitude. Have you ever thought about how most Monster of the Week shows end? They kind of don’t, is the thing. I never actually finished The X-Files. I don’t know how it ends, except that it ostensibly did and then got picked up again like ten years later. I couldn’t tell you how Teen Wolf ends if you paid me and I think I did finish it. In my head it’s just season after season, no true culmination, a forever middle of endless arcs, just like the texture of real life.

I do like realistic fiction. I’ve read James Baldwin’s Another Country. I know realism can work. Some realistic fiction I even read and think, this is kind of what my life is like or, this has something to say about the way life can be lived. This brings meaning to my existence, this says something about the way people live that I find enriching or challenging or illuminating or (sorry) relatable. Recently, I read Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas and thought: I didn’t know it was possible to be this clear and honest about not only what happened, but exactly how it felt. That was a real, true relief to me. I guess I just find it a little frustrating that we have the "this is like real life" genre, I’m like, damn, is it? Like actually, is it? These are the only real lifes we have? Are there not more in the back?

I’m not truly arguing that Monster of the Week shows are more realistic than realism, only that their expansiveness is what allows them to get so close, sometimes closer than straight realism seems to, to an accurate reproduction of daily life. And yet, that’s exactly what I’m arguing. Is this framework any less flawed than the framework used for realism now? Are we more accurate when we define realism too narrowly, or too broadly? Is it possible to define it perfectly? I know when I say that my life is some monster of the week bullshit, what I mean is that that’s how it feels, sometimes, to me. But is how it feels different from how it is? If I’m honest about how it appears to me, do I lose my claim to objectivity?

I want there to be more space in realism for the unceasing maximalist hell in which I live. I want to be allowed in realism without having to lie. It feels cruel to me that you have to be able to make sense of something before you’re allowed to try and tell a true story about it. It feels cruel that you either have to know how it ends or be willing to make up something convincing. So often, things never end and they never make sense to me. Who is given the privilege of being sure?

I understand how narrative is supposed to work. I know that plot must be imposed upon living for it to be a story. Unlike Monster of the Week shows, a book about real life should be about one thing and it must start and end somewhere. The more I try to find a way around this, the less sense I make. And no one likes that, least of all me.

I understand that a story is a container in which things have time to be processed and articulated, a place where meaning can be made. I understand that by the end, readers want a sense that something has been resolved. I understand that that is satisfying for them. I guess I just question the actual realism of that.

I am a white person. I grew up in a nice white town that taught me everyone was the same with the same hearts and the same opportunities, and moved on into work environments with whiteness pumped into the air. And it has been a journey.

This article is not about that. This article is about the work.

© E.D.E Bell

In dismantling oppression, the experiences and needs of the marginalized must remain centered. But I am seeing this truth being twisted into a justification for white silence, and so, here, being asked to speak, I will.

First, a piece of fiction.

***

“A Strange Hill to Die On” 

Festival marks the peak of summer. And no one asks which festival, because if another were meant, it would be called by name.

Zeta looked forward to Festival every year. The sounds and smells and electricity of connection, the anticipation of future joy, fueled her forward on the hardest of days, like a light kept in her pocket, with charge for the year. But especially this year, ever since she had learned that Rin Talen would be there, speaking, performing. As a volunteer for the committee, she might even meet them. They could sign her spellbook, the old spellbook, she thought with a grin.

And, Zeta thought further, such a celebratory year might be a chance to finally ease the one weight Festival always held. For many, but also for her. The quiet weight.

She resolved to try.

The fairies of Hela Hill had not largely attended Festival in some years. Without them, the songs were thinner. The air less vibrant. The joy less free. When Zeta had raised the question to the committee, they’d thrown up their hands. “They are always welcome,” The Deputy had said. “We also wish they would go.”

So Zeta had asked a trusted friend over a cup of glitter tea. The friend’s response had chilled Zeta to her bones. Such small things, yet such deep misunderstanding. No, mistrust. And the friend had offered other names, fairies whose words did not feel valued, and so, they no longer spoke them.

They focused efforts elsewhere.

The committee, Zeta learned, had misspoken. The fairies of Hela Hill were not welcome. They were invited. And, Zeta learned, these were not the same.

Zeta changed her plan.

“Zeta,” The Mayor said, “we need to talk about the lights.” She casually waved the submitted plan, her report attached behind it, still in its clips.

“Yes,” Zeta answered, excitedly. “I’ve got the schematics all worked out, and I’ve submitted the plan for review. Well, you have it right there. I’ve already talked to the magicians, and they can—”

The Mayor tapped the table. “You changed the colors.”

“Oh,” Zeta smiled. “The notes are on page three. I’ve asked people in town from Hela Hill what might make them feel welcome at festival, and while the other items are in the report, one is the shade of violet used. Fairies are sensitive to violet and all the shades beyond, and so if we just change that one to mauve, then—”

The Mayor chuckled. “We’re not changing the rainbow.”

“That’s absurd,” she heard another voice say.

Taken aback, Zeta found her own responses slipping. “I’m not…changing the rainbow. I’m adjusting the lights for Festival, to make the celebration more welcoming to all. And if you look in the report, there are other—”

“This?” The Mayor waved the stack of sheets. “We don’t have time for it. But changing the rainbow? The heart of Festival? How you could think to do this without even asking…” The Mayor shook her head.

The rainbow was the heart of Festival. It represented the gathering of all in celebration of darkness and light, in the strength of shared joy. Somewhere, she had a point to make. A way to express the difference. But there was no space to think, and around her, people chattered, louder and now, some with laughter. Zeta spoke louder to be heard. “I’ve never had to ask before. And I submitted it for review, and—”

“Hello?” The Mayor called out. “Is Roy G. Bim in attendance?”

The Deputy laughed.

“It’s not a joke,” Zeta said, now feeling angry. “We’re using fairy songs, fairy wisps, it’s part of how we got Rin Talen to attend. The least we can do is adjust the lights to help more fairies feel welcome.”

The Mayor was no longer laughing. “It should be apparent,” she said, “that we are not changing the rainbow.” She sighed. “I’m delaying the casting of the lights until we can submit a reasonable plan.”

“No,” Zeta said, her face flushing. “We can’t delay. The spells take weeks to calibrate, and—”

“You will stop interrupting,” The Deputy said, voice firm. “Now, on to pastries.”

The laughter had stopped, and the air felt heavy. Zeta glanced around for a nod of support, but the others stared down at their papers, some reading, some making notes.

The next day, she walked to Hela Hill.

*

Zeta raised her hand.

“Yes, Zeta?” The Deputy’s face wrinkled in anticipatory defense.

“I’d like to raise the issue of the lights.”

“We’ve talked about the lights,” The Mayor snapped. “We’re past it, and we are moving on.”

She shook her head, grasping for calmish words. “We’re not past it; the casts are still unordered, and unless you wish to remove me, I am still—”

“Do you wish to be removed?” The Deputy asked, eyes glinting.

“No. I wish to be respected.” Zeta stood from her chair, willing her legs to steady. “The modification of the violet lights to mauve is something that several fairies have communicated as an issue in their attendance.”

“You are not a fairy, nor do you speak for them. We are not going to lose precious meeting time discussing the opportunity to showcase Rin Talen because of your continued interruptions. Now, that’s enough.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, louder. “It’s not enough. I’ve not been given any opportunity to—”

“You do it again, you’ll force us to replace you.”

Flustered now, she peered around for support, but faces were turned away. “What have I done wrong, but put forward a thoughtful plan that you will not discuss? That you refuse to—”

The air snapped around her. A spell, cast by someone at the table. Her voice was blocked from leaving the bubble around her as long as she stayed in this place. Her eyes twitching and face burning, she left the room and walked out into the cool evening air to let the pressure subside, hoping perhaps, that someone might join her.

Zeta sat outside on the bench. Alone.

*

Cherry rapped at Zeta’s door.

Zeta smiled. She was glad to see her friend.

“I’m sorry about what happened at the meeting,” Cherry said, over a freshly offered cup of tea. “They were looking for someone to wrap up the lights for the committee, and I figured at least I could honor the work you’ve done. Could you give me your spell schematics?”

Zeta’s fingers turned cold against the warm cup. “I…need to think about that.” The Mayor had threatened to remove her, but there’d been no discussion. She’d thought, perhaps, Cherry was here to help.

“Sorry?” Cherry scrunched her face. “I told them you were on the right side of this, that you cared about Festival, even if you get wrapped in minutiae at times. But you understand the burden more than anyone. If we can’t use the updated schematics, we’ll have to start over from last year’s, retune the entire solar resonance. Like you said, that takes weeks.”

It took Zeta weeks; the others did not do it as well. She kept that piece to herself. “You don’t have last year’s,” Zeta said instead, looking down at her cup. “I have those also.”

The silence was long and unbroken, until Zeta looked up. Cherry was staring at her, her expression blank. Meeting Zeta’s eyes, Cherry’s softened.

“I get it. A lot of us know how The Mayor is, but there are issues here of more importance. Don’t you see? It’s finally happening. We’re getting Rin Talen. You know what that means to our island. People will travel here, from all over, just to see them. It will be the grandest celebration in years.”

Her own voice felt low, unsure. “But, Cherry, what does it mean to have people from all over when we are not inclusive of our own?”

Cherry nearly sputtered. “The fairies love Rin Talen; surely they’ll come out just for that. Any issue will be solved.”

Zeta shook her head. “But what if they don’t? Or even—what if they do? What if they go, but feel unhappy? Shouldn’t we welcome people with what they’ve asked for, not only with things we think they’ll also like? That’s not welcome, that’s…erasure.”

“I can’t do this,” Cherry said with a sigh. “I came by to try and help, and if you’re going to keep repeating fashions and flutters, it’s just, well it’s uncomfortable.”

The word ticked at Zeta’s mind, but she couldn’t quite place why. “What is it,” she asked, a simple question but all that she could think to ask right now, “that makes you so uncomfortable?”

Cherry stood, disappointment in her eyes. “I just think this is a strange hill to die on.”

“Die on?” Now Zeta’s face scrunched in incredulity. “I think that’s a strange thing to say. This is living. It isn’t even about us, but it’s like…” She had so much more to say, but the words felt twisted into her own anxieties, her own doubts.

With a sigh, Cherry took her bag back up and headed for the door. “Clearly you need time to think.”

“I don’t,” Zeta said, staying seated to hide the wobble in her legs. “I don’t, actually. I want to be heard out by the full committee on the issue of the violet lights. If they don’t like the term ‘mauve’ that’s fine, but we need to discuss adjusting the hue and why it’s such a big deal before I support any transition.”

Placing her hand across her chest, Cherry shook her head. “Can’t, Zeta. You’re banned. They…said you wanted that. That you were making the big deal out of petty things. That you could not control yourself. And, frankly, I am seeing here what they meant.” Waiting for a reply from Zeta and not getting one, she turned and left.

*

The narrator resents the ending, because there are several, and all of them as true as any. In every version, Zeta won’t hand over her plans without a discussion; she feels sick for the stand and the others sick for it.

In some stories, she celebrates the night alone. She finds her friends, she finds new friends, and creates art and joy in other spaces.

In some stories, the next meeting grows heated. Another speaks.

In some, an ending by delays.

In some stories, Festival is celebrated at Hela Hill. In some stories, it always was.

In the most fantastical version, Rin Talen asks what occurred and demands a full review before they will participate, offering their own funds, if needed, to assist. Yet, even then, no one invites Zeta back, for her name, now, is trouble.

In a version of fire and flame, there is no such name, for those who would block are bricks to be tossed, those who would hush are whispers unheard, and those who would mirror are turned from our view. But that is another tale. That is a story of dragons.

Perhaps, then, a fictional ending. A triumphant one? A comfortable one?

No, the narrator resists.

The real ending is tomorrow. And the days beyond. The real ending is long. The real ending is hope.

As for Zeta? She didn’t want to be in words. She didn’t want to be a character. She didn’t want to be alone.

She wanted the rainbow to mean all.

She reminds the reader, it does.

*

Festival marks the peak of summer. And no one asks which festival, because if another were meant, it would be called by name.

A rainbow of lights hover and sway over the calm, cool night, as the sounds of music flow across the jasmine-scented breeze and flutes of bubbling juices offer to tickle the tongue while streams of water could wiggle the toes.

All the people of the island gather. Many mingle and talk, others lounge and watch. Dancers dance, and singers sing. The furry folk eat, prance, and cuddle in nooks. The gnomes bounce from ledge to ledge, on networks of platforms and sheltered views winding through the taller crowds. A group of fairies flap their wings in raucous laughter while others coast through the aisles and squares—talking, dancing, joining in a game of tales or a telling of dice. Elves chuckle and ogres grunt. Merfolk leap and swim through the sparkling channels and into the center pond, their fins shaking glitter into the wind.

These pulses of joy, these spectra of love, the choices of safety, adventure, or rest.

At Festival, everyone is home.

***

So why did I write that story?

I had recently sat in on a speculative poetry talk by Brandon O’Brien, hosted online by the Spectrum Writers Group in London, England. Brandon explained his view of speculative poetry as that which “reshapes the extent to which a concept is fathomable through poetic form.”

I loved this, and had been struggling myself with communicating what has now turned into the topics of this essay: a specific pattern intertwining whiteness and abuse to prevent white people from doing the hands-on work.

The story didn’t go anywhere, as I unfortunately found out that it had received a “1” rating from a reader. And yes, he was.

Feeling unable to communicate this pattern I was seeing again and again and again in xpfic (exploratory fiction—my proposed more globally appropriate term than specfic) I put the story on my website, and tried, amidst my mental disabilities, to move on.

I am deeply honored that Strange Horizons saw this story, found it resonant, and wanted me to expand on it.

So I’d like to focus on this pattern, rather than one or two known events—but, as some context is surely helpful, I have been removed now from major roles in three specfic literary conventions: twice as programming lead, and once as anthology editor. And what I’ve experienced there, and throughout my genre interactions, is a specific dynamic tailored for use against progress being undertaken in part by white people. This technique diverts attention from the issues and harm by redirecting from them by gaslighting about centering and heroism. I don’t see this aspect talked about so much for the same reasons it’s so effective. So I will give this discussion my best try, and hopefully add something meaningful to the conversation.

Oppression is always deeply woven, so I am going to tug on one specific thread: How organizations run change through with the smallest needle, why this is so effective, again and again, and why it is also so effective at keeping white people away from the hands-on work.

Slogans are important. They get us to the work.

Slogans are not the work.

When I mentioned the title of this piece to (white) friends, they either thought I intended to write about the smallness of the needle: a weapon that is not powerful, or the weapon of a thousand needles. No. One needle, as in one tiny little sword, yet one that is given its power by the lack of willingness to flick it aside.

This is very effective. And white people,we have to talk about it.

We need to understand all the weapons of whiteness comprehensively to diffuse them. So today, we talk about the needle. The single needle. The teeny tiny sword given the power to stab deep.

It starts with a need for change. Often uncontroversial change. (Otherwise they wouldn’t have let you in to try it.) Like, wanting everyone to feel welcome in a shared space. That’s a goal the nicest of niceties can get behind. Sure, we do, they say. Go forth. This isn’t destructive. This isn’t reparative. This is just nice.

No one gets in the way of nice.

Until one white person, somewhere, senses any tiny change that they understand to be change. (Usually doesn’t matter if they even like the change, just that they sense it as such.)

Now they are uncomfortable.

They agreed to welcome, not change. Why is there change? You know what, they don’t want to know. Nice just turned to appropriate. To civil.

You’re out of line, and it’s going to be stopped.

*

Stage 1: Discomfort

First they tell you, hey quick note, we’re not doing that.

I’d like to discuss it, you offer.

No, no discussion. Instead they go to the people around you. Can someone talk to you?

You get talked to. You repeat that the idea is a good one, simple enough with multi-faceted benefits, if they would listen to you about it.

May I discuss it, you ask.

This is the part I really want people to understand. Everything that follows is part of a technique, hinged entirely on discomfort. The minute there was discomfort in the house, it needed to be stopped.

They don’t want to understand it.

*

Stage 2: Shutdown

Your circle failed to shut you down, so now you’re going to get shut down. They twist and hammer broader and interconnected issues into something small. Something petty. The needle is forged.

They ask all those around, those who wish for reasonable solutions: Why are you so upset about something so petty? So small?

Isn’t that…concerning?

I’d still like to discuss it, you state. We still haven’t discussed it. I can clarify and explain.

*

Stage 3: Charge

You have not yielded! You do not believe in compromise, they say. Ah, but there must be something to grab on to. A personal reason. An influence. A neurodivergency. A mental disability. Maybe it’s just how you are. You are unstable—uncontrolled. Selfish. Secret motives. And certainly the people around you would remove someone getting in the way of good work! Because they care. They want peace while you want conflict.

You are holding every breath in your body not to tell them you have seen this technique before because perhaps the change is still possible. You do not want conflict, you want some ability for change, even small change, long-term shifts. But for that, you have to be able to do something, anything. You repeat, you are still willing to explain what the team is trying to do here. It was never about you. It is not about this needle. It is about something very achievable that will help.

But now your circle is uncomfortable too.

It’s not about what people intend, whether some people find them “good”, whether they’re funny online, how long people have known them, what they might still have to offer those people.

It’s about the change, and the fact that it can’t even be discussed.

But that needle has not been flicked, and so we continue.

*

Stage 4: Rise of the Hero

People talk a lot about white defensive offense from those openly fighting change. You know, all of it. You think white people are bad. You’re selfish. You’re operating from a place of hate. You’re brainwashed. We need unity not division. On and on and on. You’re now used to this from the “right”.

Then you learned it comes from the “center” too. Civility, getting along, recognizing that people are allowed to have their opinions. Hotel Fragility for those who choose to stay, and a painful path for those who choose to leave.

But all these comments are from the “left”. Your own circles.

First, quietly. What about your image? Is this…your lane?

Maybe, maybe… It should be a BIPOC doing this.

In private, to people you trust, you can say it: BIPOC are the ones that explained the issues in the first place, explained the needs, spent their time and trust to do so. BIPOC have told you many things you will not quote. They were said in confidence. They were said by people hopeful to maybe see some change without having to take the hits on it for once. You can relay a few more things in private, things you will not say in a magazine.

By now, people are louder. Why is this white person framing issues around race? Is this the race card? Are you waving race like a trinket? How dare you twiddle with race?!

This isn’t about me, you say, this is about the change. I tried to do it the direct way.

You tell them what’s really going on.

The room is quiet.

Then a white person will deadpan:

[Your name], you are white.

What they say is: You’re trying to be a hero. You are taking advantage of the marginalized. You are centering yourself.

It gets worse. It gets much more vile. It tries to bring in people in that don’t need to be brought in, that you refuse to help them bring in. I choose not to repeat it.

What they mean is: You violated the number one rule of white people in a room. You talked about what happened there.

And, for that, you must be dealt with.

*

Stage 5: Choice

Your circles now have one more chance to make a choice.

*

Stage 6: Silence

The silence is so loud. So loud. If this feels like a meaningless metaphor to you, then you have not heard it. When you do, it is a sound unlike any other.

I’ll give a non-genre example. I spoke up in a group of my high school classmates about some fairly aggressively racist (whether or not it was intended or understood to be) behavior. Of note, my high school class is almost entirely white. I was accused, then ridiculed, then isolated, then booted from the group. The pattern. Yet—reaching the choice phase, so many people in that group who are well-connected, have notability in their industries, knew exactly what was going on.

Who, then, spoke up to say, yes, this is racist and also, lay off Emily, this is about the racism, not your sudden issues with Emily, someone you don’t even know, to deflect from that?

No one.

I heard the issue was eventually resolved in some form, but I’m still not in the group. Do I really want to be? Noooo… But, was there no consequence to this? Is my removal good for some of the people there who might have been learning new things from me, but wouldn’t be bold enough to “follow” me somewhere? No. And the message it sends for the next person to speak up on again, basic, basic, racism? Very clear. And existentially dangerous:

You will stand alone.

*

Stage 7: Standing Together

I’ve had a lot of good advice from good people. Meaning, good people who are also experts in inclusion work. And what I’ve concluded?

It’s always worth standing.

It’s not always worth standing alone.

While my plea here is to those who might stand up, step forward, I have learned the hard way: sometimes you need to wait until you have a team who will stand together.

And no, no matter how much you think people care, you don’t learn until you do. So it’s a conversation worth having directly.

*

Stage 8: Repeat, Repeat, until Defeat

That bully with the cool, calm demeanor and the needle in their hand knows the needle only works against one person at a time (though maybe taking out a few people who stand too close). Target and isolate. Like a late-night videogame stream.

Things seem like a game, I guess, when you’re not feeling the world around you.

Each of us can only do so much. But I believe, we can choose to stop playing their games.

*

Always At The Money

They always go at the money.

We’ve handed them this, in many ways. Yes, money flows to the writer, but with this as an unnuanced axiom, art remains controlled by those with existing wealth. Changing the system requires organization, and then the organization, they say, even a committee made of writers, is not “a writer” no matter how many writers are involved or being paid.

The work takes money.

Paying writers money takes money.

And you need some organization to do that; it is a basic tenet of societies.

So this is not really about organization, it’s about whose organization is valid. Keeping power where it currently rests. And those powers have learned to quickly hand the microphone to an uninformed, performative white progressive, who can now rally concern: Perhaps this was all about money.

We need to be more cognizant of this attack:

That people seeking resources for change must be doing wrong with it while the people who already have it for the status quo are fully unquestioned.

*

The Devil And The Details

The next step of this is a sudden need for detail. An exhaustive proof of innocence. Full transparency.

Not all information should be shared publicly when it comes to inclusion efforts. There are privacy issues, safety issues, and just bringing people into manufactured drama that they absolutely shouldn’t have to deal with, especially because it will cause them harm.

When inquiries go beyond reasonable clarification, the community needs to trust the integrity of the people running the process or not. Or if there is some need to look into accusations further, at least it should be thoughtfully and intentionally, not by mob. And mindful that those accusations are remotely founded, and not the twisting of the needle.

I am not suggesting that these ideas are new, but I just don’t see enough white writers contextualizing and talking about them. And I think we need to, because what white people do in that room alone can’t be exposed and addressed by anyone but ourselves. Of course BIPOC should be involved wherever they want to be, yet it is unreasonable and untenable to insist that a BIPOC writer must always be present at every moment for any work to occur.

Some points come to my mind regarding what I’ve experienced the last few years. These are only a summary of the current formation of my thoughts, and I welcome correction or refinement. Yet, here’s where I’m at:

• Watch who is coming after the money and why.
• Watch their “standing”—is the person asking actually involved in the management or oversight in any way? Usually anyone legitimately involved doesn’t have to yell online to learn basic facts.
• Watch for nonsense. Don’t pile-on to someone’s reputation based on it.
• Watch who is a bully and who is a (perhaps even well intended but certainly harmful) proxy.
• Watch who purports to be a neutral entity but always avoids discussing things that could still benefit them.
• Reestablish white people talking about and understanding power dynamics as intersectional with marginalization. Meaning, also, power dynamics are still a really big deal between two non-marginalized people.
• Reestablish trust and integrity in the industry. Not figures. Not pedestals. But actual, sustained and understood reputation and connections. This would prevent so many of these knee-jerk performative pile-ons we’ve seen over the last years. And maybe—it would cause some people to deemphasize or move along sooner from people they know are problematic, including performative, because yes, performativity causes harm. (Pauses before continuing.)
• Yes, reputation can be lost. Yes, people betray us. Yes, people hide their harm. Our genres are not yet through the initial internet-era reckoning on that. But I think, generally, we know where people and their ethics are at much more than we’re allowing ourselves to say.

And again, that’s the very heart of all of this. Our expression. Speaking plainly. Speaking truth as in truth in context.

There are many good reasons not to speak. But we, especially those in positions of privilege, can sit and reconsider…what are our reasons? Do they hold up?

*

I’m Seeing What They’re Saying

This is the go-to of abusive voices. On the gaslighting, on the diversion. They will send people out to pester, annoy, poke, pummel people with bad faith questions, and will not stop. They come at you, they come at your friends, they incite with all sort of twisted logic that would be exhausting to even start unraveling.

You’re either going to sit quietly and listen to the abuse or they’re going to point and say, “See—I’m seeing what they’re saying.”

No one should have to sit quietly and listen to abuse.

So if anyone is hoping Emily will behave in the future: I sure will. Anyone comes at my friends or my ethics, I’ll tell them to yeet off too. With cussing.

See, what I’ve learned is: it doesn’t matter anyway. They already had the “I’m Seeing What They’re Saying” in a pocket like a warmed up gummy bear to certify their benevolence. You could tell them an accusation is untrue with the affect of a Hall of Presidents automaton, and they still would throw this out about your demeanor.

So you cuss and game over?

No. I’m not playing it anymore.

A lot of people seem really concerned about this idea that making it clear someone is not welcome to harass you anymore in a less than cordial way is validating their accusations, and I urge those people to consider: Engaging with abusers in any other context than addressing their abuse is already a form of validation. When you’re polite, they don’t stop. When you’re not, they smell salts. And what’s not being talked about in either case, is getting back to the issue that was trying to be resolved in the first place. These diverting character attacks that warp concepts like centering, real issues that really do need to be kept in mind with an accurate understanding of what they truly mean—with the goal of keeping people out of the work—cannot be given air.

The air detracts from the work. It hurts people who are trying to help. And it provides layers of armor to a cultural normalization not only to harassers, but “mean folk” branded writers who hide behind them.

We have to stop playing their games.

***

We Will Prevail

As echoed by voices of time and presence, I believe nothing is more important than this:

We will prevail.

It’s how and when and at what cost that is the issue.

We—as in us. All of us. Any squishy little human that thinks that everyone should be able to be happy. That doesn’t ignore marginalization; it recognizes in its face that as long as it continues, that broader “we” are not there.

We all deserve peace, joy, and safety.

See, that’s not heroism. That’s basic.

Heroes are the people who move us. We choose our heroes: many, some, or none. Each of us. It’s not a label to want or achieve, nor any measure of success, and I think the more we talk about that, the less these concepts of our heart can be weaponized against change.

And that change will continue. It will happen. People have said this since people said things. But some things are different now: fundamentally different. We live in a world where information can be spread. Where independent voices can still speak to vast, global audiences.

It is as powerful of a time as it is perilous. Because those same networks, that same access, the same manipulation of our trust, can also be used to impose silence. To isolate. To lock down. To make sure the right things are being said. And when people don’t hold that line, then to find the right people.

The more of us stand together, the faster this change will be and the fewer people will suffer in the meantime. In what I hope is a quite obvious note: this is not me saying this. This is a known and ancient precept. There are people who think about this a lot in every time, in every culture. If you haven’t thought of this in a while, I ask to bump it up in your decisions. In your thoughts about “conflict”.

I was sitting talking to Brandon O’Brien this summer, and he slowly said, as if working out the line himself, essentially: “People want to be in the fight but they do not know what a fight is.”

We talked about it more. Neither of us like conflict in the least. I despise it, honestly. I want to feel safe around my friends, and I’ve never really had that, even now. I don’t want people to be nervous. I want hugs. I want: “I’m glad you’re here.” But most people understand: You can’t really feel safe, feel welcome, when you’re ignoring that other people don’t.

Yes, you can be happy while other people aren’t, but not when ignoring it.

I have had it said about me that I have gone into things looking for a fight. Looking for conflict. I wish these people would sit and consider what I believe, which is: Seeing there is a fight and hoping to resolve it with the least pain all around is not looking for it. It is seeing it. And not closing one’s eyes. Not stepping behind civility.

Many discussions for many other days, but back to the white-wielded needle. What about it? How do we defeat it?

So many times, the most effective way is for a community to stand up and say, “This is another white person wielding a needle against good work. We see it. We see you. Now put that little thing away and sit the fuck down.”

We have been, and always will be, in this together.

Let’s keep that our priority.

Editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: The Copyediting Department

Catrìona is dubious. The author’s claims to “Celtic” identity are wildly romanticized and overblown, and the novel’s use of Celtic-language cultures strikes her as generic: “bha mi air co-dhiù sia dhe leithid a leughadh mu thràth, mar bu trice air an sgrìobhadh aig Ameireaganaich” (“I had read at least six like it already, usually written by Americans,” p. 46). In short, it doesn’t sit well with her as a speaker of a Celtic language—something is off. She finally raises her concerns to the author and is met with surprise. He—in fact a Lowlander born and raised just outside Glasgow, though with some more distant family ties to the Gaelic-speaking Hebrides—had, it seems, genuinely not considered the possibility that any living “Celts” might read his novel. He had not considered the fact that the cultures he drew on were not simply distant memories but in fact belonged to living communities marginalized economically, linguistically, and culturally and struggling in the face of contemporary capitalism and the overwhelming dominance of English (and, in the case of Breton-speakers, French).

Readers of fantasy will likely be familiar with the ways in which “Celts” have been closely associated with aspects of the genre: fairies, magic, the Otherworld, mysterious (and sometimes violent) druidic rituals, poetry and song. Any individual writer or story is only a single drop in this ocean. “The Celts” have become, for many people, a cultural phenomenon, one disconnected from the living communities—“real people in a real place,” as the Scottish Gaelic writer Iain Crichton Smith put it (see Towards the Human [1986])—that speak, or until relatively recently spoke, Celtic languages. Elements of Celtic-language literatures (primarily medieval), oral traditions, and histories—as well as popular misinterpretations and misrepresentations of these—circulate at a far remove from their communities and cultural and historical contexts of origin. “Celtic fantasy” is its own subgenre, albeit a somewhat diffuse one, and Celtic-language cultures provided much of the backbone of the fantasy genre’s precursors in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

The modern Celtic languages are Breton, spoken in Brittany, in northwest France; Cornish, spoken in revived form by a few thousand people in Cornwall, in southwest England; Irish, sometimes called “Irish Gaelic” or, especially in historical contexts, just “Gaelic,” spoken primarily in communities along the west coast of Ireland; Manx, occasionally called Manx Gaelic, spoken on the Isle of Man; Scottish Gaelic, often just called “Gaelic,” spoken primarily in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland; and Welsh, spoken primarily in communities in northwest Wales. These six languages are more closely related to each other, and to some ancient languages spoken in continental Europe, like Gaulish and Celtiberian, than to any other modern language. In the modern period, Celtic languages and their speakers began to be grouped together on the basis of linguistic similarities in the late seventeenth century, and the Welsh-English linguist Edward Lhuyd was the first to call them “Celtic,” positing a relationship between these languages and their speakers and the ancient communities referred to as “Celts” by Greek and Roman writers. While their languages are closely related, modern Celtic-language communities have distinct histories, literary and cultural traditions, and experiences of marginalization—there is no single “Celtic” culture, and there never has been.

There are a number of ways one might set about telling the story of the relationship between the fantasy genre and the disparate populations whose languages have been called “Celtic.” For my purposes here, the story of the Celts’ entanglement with fantasy begins with James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, published between 1760 and 1763. In a very real way, without this corpus the fantasy genre would not exist in the form we know it today: the Ossian poems set the stage for the development of the Gothic and the Romantic movement, and Macpherson’s work was a direct inspiration for early studies of what were at the time known as “popular antiquities”—what we would now call “folklore.” Macpherson’s work is a mix of loose translations, free adaptations, and wholesale inventions based on or inspired by traditional Scottish Gaelic songs and narratives of the Fiann, a traveling warrior-band. It set off a feverish wave of imitations and set the stage for many of the stereotypes that continue to shape outsiders’ perceptions of Celtic-language communities and the people who make their lives in them. As the Gaelic poet and scholar Derick S. Thomson says:

It is perhaps difficult today, on the hither side of the ‘Romantic Movement’, to appreciate fully the excitement engendered by the publication of Macpherson’s Fragments [of Ancient Poetry] in 1760 and the subsequent ‘epics’ [Fingal and Temora] in 1762 and 1763. (The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s Ossian [1952], p. 1)

The poems were an immediate, wild success, appealing to contemporary theories of language, poetry, and history—which saw Macpherson’s work as examples of originary, “primitive” poetry, of the kind produced by “men in the first age after the flood” who “thought, spoke, and acted imaginatively and instinctually and therefore poetically” (Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp [1953], p. 80). Macpherson’s poems—full of passionate speeches, tragic laments, and moody, romantic landscapes—were at first received as genuine examples of “ancient” Scottish Gaelic poetry, which Macpherson in turn and explicitly identified as part of a common “British” cultural inheritance (something we’ll return to later).

Nonetheless, Macpherson’s poems set off a raging controversy as to whether or not they were “authentic.” This was driven in part by strong anti-Gaelic prejudices, closely related to the colonial ideologies that underpinned the British colonization of Ireland (see Silke Stroh’s Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination [2016] for a fuller exploration of this relationship). The dominant intellectual cultures of Lowland Scotland and England simply could not accept that the poems could be real, that the Gaelic manuscripts Macpherson referred to actually existed, or, fundamentally, “that an unlettered peasantry was capable of producing an ordered work of art” (Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture [1978], p. 46). In fact, as Derick Thomson and others have shown, some of Macpherson’s poems can be identified with particular original Gaelic texts, either in manuscript form or collected from oral sources, and some of his inventions build on tendencies present in Gaelic culture, although he “arranged his material in his own way” (Thomson, Gaelic Sources, p. 12). This controversy continued into the early nineteenth century, though in increasingly muted form as England and Lowland Scots intellectuals came to regard the Ossian poems’ authenticity as a settled question. As late as 1872 the Gaelic folklorist John Francis Campbell was engaged in collecting and publishing Scottish Gaelic “Ossianic” stories and songs in his collection Leabhar na Féinne, in an effort to demonstrate not the “authenticity” of Macpherson’s poems but the vibrancy and aesthetic value of the Gaelic literary tradition—that is, of Macpherson’s sources.

In spite of the controversy that surrounded Macpherson’s work, the success of the Ossian sequence attracted the attention of writers across the world to the so-called Celtic fringe (to reiterate: Brittany; Cornwall; Ireland, especially the west coast; the Isle of Man; the Highlands and Hebrides of Scotland; and Wales, especially the northwest). It would be difficult to overstate Macpherson’s influence on later literature, both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a pioneering work of English folklore studies, takes its title directly from Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760). Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe’s first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), subtitled “A Highland Story,” announces in its first sentence that it is set “in the most romantic part of the Highlands” (p. 1). The Ossian cycle had a particularly strong influence on the development of German Romanticism. Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) includes Goethe’s own translation of a section of the first of Macpherson’s Ossianic “epics,” Fingal, and the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, an early theorist of nationalism, took Macpherson’s work as an example of the culture of the folk-Volk—that is, the basis of the nation-state. Herder encouraged the Brothers Grimm to read Macpherson and to seek out comparable examples of “true,” “primitive” German folk culture, which ultimately became the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (aka Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 1812), one of the first “modern,” scholarly works in the study of folklore.

Macpherson’s work also precipitated a broad interest in the medieval past—as opposed to the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome—as the basis of the modern “nations” of Western Europe and, more generally, an interest in the construction of national cultures based on local, rather than classical, traditions. From the Ossian poems come, directly or indirectly, Walter Scott’s historical romances, Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), the revival of interest in Malory’s Morte Darthur (1485) and Arthurian literature more broadly, the explosion of folklore collecting across Europe and later by anthropologists in European colonies, and more. And, of course, ultimately, the fantasy genre as it coalesced as a publishing category in the late 1960s.

The influence of the Ossian cycle has placed “Celts” at the heart of genre fantasy, then—and this, in turn, has placed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century race science, British (and French) colonial expansion, and attempted cultural genocide at the heart of the fantasy genre. In the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial discourses, “Celts” were racialized as biologically distinct from—and inferior to—other European populations, and especially the “Teutonic” or “Germanic” population of England and the Scottish Lowlands. (For a striking example of the physiological side of this, see Daniel Wilson’s “Inquiry into the Physical Characteristics of the Ancient and Modern Celt of Gaul and Britain” [1865].) The French philologist and political theorist Ernest Renan, meanwhile, provides in his essay “La Poésie des races celtiques” (“The Poetry of the Celtic Races” [1854]) a good example of nineteenth-century ideas about racial “temperament,” setting out many of the stereotypes that continue to shape popular perceptions of Celtic-language communities into the present: the “Celtic race,” in Renan’s account, is

à la fois fière et timide, puissante par le sentiment et faible dans l’action; chez elle, libre et épanouie; à l’extérieur, gauche et embarrassée. Elle se défie de l’étranger, parce qu’elle y voit un être plus raffiné qu’elle, et qui abuserait de sa simplicité. Indifférente à l’admiration d’autrui, elle ne demande qu’une chose, qu’on la laisse chez elle.

(simultaneously proud and timid, powerful in feeling and weak in action; in its own home, free and radiant; outside, awkward and ill-at-ease. It mistrusts the stranger, because it sees in him a more refined being who would take advantage of its simplicity. Indifferent to the admiration of others, it asks only one thing: to be left alone.) (p. 477)

For Renan, while the Celts are “une race antique” (“an ancient race,” p. 474), this “race” is—paralleling colonial discourses elsewhere in the world—“condamnée à disparaitre” (“condemned to disappear,” p. 474), leaving behind only some literary monuments for non-Celts to appreciate.

This racialization had two sides. On the one hand, it justified the continuation of the British colonization of Ireland, the mass displacement of Scottish Gaels across the Highlands and Islands, the economic and political marginalization of Welsh-speaking communities in Wales, and the institutionalized suppression of Celtic languages and cultures across the Celtic fringe, including in Brittany in France. Regions that still speak or historically spoke Celtic languages remain subject to devastatingly unequal land ownership, economic marginalization, and intense institutional and social pressure to abandon their languages and cultures.

On the other hand, the Ossian poems captured the imagination of the Romantic movement and laid the groundwork for a R/romanticized fetishization of “Celts” and their cultures. This fetishization simply inverts many of the racial stereotypes that were applied to the Celts: The Celts are primitive, emotional, warlike, close to nature, superstitious, and magical, and they belong essentially to the past, Romanticism says—and that’s a good thing. These stereotypes are very much alive and well into the present, and one of the most significant areas in which they continue to circulate and be rearticulated is the fantasy genre. Crucially, the presentation of the Ossian cycle, not only in English but also with Macpherson’s explicit framing of his work as a “British” epic, combined with a confluence of historical factors—including shifts in the racialization of “Celts” especially in the United States and Canada; the cultural prestige that accrued to the Anglo-Irish “Celtic Twilight” literary revival; and developments in Irish and Scottish cultural nationalisms, especially—have meant that this aesthetic fetishization of “Celtic” cultures has gone on to be almost entirely disconnected, in popular culture, from the realities of any actual Celtic-language community, past or present, even as it claims to represent “Celtic” histories and cultures.

This ostensibly positive fetishization, however, is inseparable from the violent operations of colonial exclusion with which it has coexisted. The transformation of “Celtic” cultures into common property, romantic signifiers that belong to everyone—and so do not belong to anyone in particular—is a direct result of the colonial subjugation of Celtic-language communities, who are exploited now not only for their land and natural resources but also for their aesthetic resources. This, as Angela R. Cox puts it, is part of “a larger pattern of uncritical appropriation in fantasy, one that treats cultures as banks of discrete materials to be used at will and in combination with other elements” (“Celtic Appropriation in Twenty-First-Century Fantasy Fan Perception,” in Fimi and Sims, Imagining the Celtic Past in Modern Fantasy [2023], p. 202). The influence of Celtic-language cultural signifiers on core texts of what Jamie Williamson (in The Evolution of Modern Fantasy [2015]) has called “pre-genre fantasy” has been such that even texts that consciously attempt to distance themselves from fantasy’s fascination with pseudomedieval Western Europe nonetheless are often stuck with its legacies in a variety of ways.

In what Williamson calls the “literary” strand of pre-genre fantasy, for example, the influence of Welsh on J. R. R. Tolkien’s constructed languages is well known, for example, and through Tolkien the aesthetics of Celtic languages (and in some cases Celtic languages themselves) continue to shape fantasy linguistics. Meanwhile, in the “popular” strand, Celticness is most clearly and strikingly visible in Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Conan is named for Conán Maol mac Morna, a major character in traditional stories of the Fiann on which Macpherson based his poetry; Conan’s god, Crom, is named for Cromm Cruaich (“Cromm the Bloodthirsty”), a possibly apocryphal pagan god described in a hyperbolic account of mass human sacrifice by medieval Christian writers, who claimed in the collection of place-lore known as the Metrical Dindshenchas (vol. 4, poem 7) that the god (or “arracht,” which Edward Gwynn translated as “goblin”) was destroyed by Saint Patrick.

As Christopher Dowd (in “The Irish-American Identities of Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian” [2016]), among others, has pointed out, Howard developed both an elaborate and only dubiously factual narrative of his own Irish heritage, drawing heavily on stereotypes of Irish and Irish American masculinity to construct a romanticized version of himself that embraced the racial conception of the “Celt” as melancholy, emotionally sensitive, and quick to (violent) action. He then transferred many of these qualities to Conan, whose people, the Cimmerians, Howard identified as the ancestors of “[t]he Gaels, ancestors of the Irish and Highland Scots” and of “[t]he Cymric tribes of Britain” (which is to say, the Welsh and Cornish) (“The Hyborian Age”). As Dowd puts it:

Howard fully accepts an old Irish stereotype [the Irishman as “a wild savage prone to sudden fits of moodiness, anger, and excitement”], but rejects the negative implications that had always accompanied it. […] Yes, Conan is just as savage and violent and barbaric as early descriptions of the Irish assert—yet these qualities have given him a vitality that allows him to thrive in a world where civilized men wallow in pettiness, immorality, and evil. (“Irish-American Identities,” p. 29)

Others of Howard’s characters, like the medieval Irish warrior Turlogh Dubh, show similar influences, and Howard’s stories of the (entirely fictional) Pictish king Bran Mak Morn—whose patronymic derives from Conán Maol’s—showcase his interest in Irish and Scottish history as well as his familiarity with then-contemporary archaeological theories about the racial history of Scotland and Ireland. Howard’s interest was shared, though less effusively, by his contemporary H. P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard shared a lengthy correspondence that began, as Duncan Sneddon points out, when Howard noticed Lovecraft’s use of a Scottish Gaelic phrase in his story “The Rats in the Walls” (Sneddon, “H.P. Lovecraft, William Sharp and the Celts,” pp. 181-82).

Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft are only three of many examples: Ideas about Celticness have permeated the fantasy genre in all its forms, sometimes explicitly embraced and sometimes absorbed by osmosis as simply part of fantasy’s genre conventions. As Cox has observed, “Celticity holds an ever-present position in fantasy media, but in so doing it becomes effectively invisible because it becomes associated with the fantasy genre rather than any particular source culture” (“Celtic Appropriation,” p. 207). This then drives writers and audiences to turn back to what they consider “authentic” sources—often wildly out of date or simply made up—of “Celtic” tradition in order to supplement what they perceive as the “generic” aesthetic resources of fantasy. Cox describes this as a “double exposure”:

By forgetting the already Celtic milieu of modern fantasy’s origins, as traced through Arthurian legends, popularly translated texts such as the Mabinogion, and Tolkien himself, modern fantasy continues to look to Irish and Welsh cultures for mysticism, exoticism and otherness, overlaying on top of that tradition another layer of perceptions of Celticity. And, because the fantasy genre’s values encourage research but little criticism of that research beyond seeking ‘originals,’ medieval, early modern and romantic interpretations of Irish, Welsh and other Celtic cultures become folded into the mix and further entrenched in popular imagination. (“Celtic Appropriation,” p. 207)

Against this backdrop, one might assume that writers in Celtic languages would have no interest in fantasy. Speakers of Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Irish, Manx, Cornish, and Breton are, turning again to Iain Crichton Smith, “real people in a real place,” with real and pressing political concerns and with their own literary and aesthetic traditions. As early as the 1910s, the Gaelic scholar and writer Calum Mac Phàrlain categorically rejected “sgeul air ni nach gabhadh tachairt” (“a story about something that could not happen,” “An Sgeul Goirid” in An Sgeulaiche 3 [1911], p. 24) as the easiest kind of story to create but also as fundamentally worthless: “mur bi sgeul de ’n t-seòrsa sin fìor ealanta, cha’n fhiach e; a chionn, cha’n eil aobhar ann ach a thaisbeanadh ealain” (“if a story of this kind is not truly artful, it is worthless, because it has no purpose except to show off its art”). Mac Phàrlain goes on to dismiss the “seann sgeòil” (“old stories”) of Gaelic tradition as falling into this category, lacking the artfulness to justify them; he urges writers and storytellers to focus their attention on “gnothuichean an latha ’n diugh” (“matters of today,” italics original).

In spite of this, both oral traditions and also speculative literature in dominant languages have continued to attract writers in the Celtic languages, and there are small but growing quantities of original fantasy and science fiction in all of the Celtic languages, as well as translations of speculative fiction, some from dominant languages and some from other Celtic languages. Original Celtic-language speculative texts have often situated themselves in some relation to dominant-language texts, and I want to look here at two fantasy novels in particular: the Welsh writer Ifan Morgan Jones’s 2008 novel Igam Ogam and the Scottish Gaelic writer Fionnlagh MacLeòid’s 2010 novel Gormshuil an Rìgh. Both texts engage critically with aspects of the fantasy genre, in different ways, raising questions about the ways in which dominant-language—and especially English-language—fantasy has used Celtic-language cultures.

Igam Ogam (Zigzag) is a portal fantasy which begins in time-honored fantasy fashion. Tomos Ap—an “empty” patronymic, “Tomos son-of,” because he does not know his father’s name—is a young man studying at university in Cardiff who returns to the rural farming community in west Wales where he grew up. Here he discovers that his adopted father is the guardian of a gateway between our world and the magical realm of the “Mabinogwlad” (the Mabinogi-country). When a powerful magical being kills his father, Tomos is forced to travel into the Mabinogwlad, where he finds himself caught up in a conflict that will determine the fates of both worlds. Tomos is a classic fantasy protagonist, but already with some ambiguities: He is simultaneously epic fantasy’s farm boy with a destiny and also the disaffected city-dweller of urban fantasy, confronted with the unexpected reality of magic. Building on this ambiguity, the novel draws on and subverts readers’ expectations of common ideas about “Celtic” cultures, especially druids, and specific elements of Welsh literary history, with the Mabinogwlad evoking the group of medieval Welsh prose narratives known collectively as the Mabinogion, which have had a major influence on the development of the fantasy genre through Charlotte Guest’s 1849 translation, which gave them the title by which they are now known.

The conflict within the Mabinogwlad involves the druids of this other land, but Jones’s druids are set in pointed contrast to both positive and negative images of druids in dominant-language popular culture. They are neither wise, mystical philosophers nor cruel pagan priests who practice human sacrifice (the Mabinogwlad is no Summerisle); they are, instead, tyrannically obsessed with order, and they plan to enforce it by excising all magic—and especially Cyrn-y-nos (literally “Horns-of-the-night”), a combination trickster figure and nature god who represents the disorder of the supernatural—from their world and displacing it into ours. These druids are more interested in machinery than magic and more concerned with politics than philosophy; meanwhile, Cyrn-y-nos, rather than representing the redemptive power of nature, is an unchecked chaotic force that threatens to destroy both the Mabinogwlad and the primary world in his efforts to reestablish his dominion—one character goes so far as to affirm “na allai dyn a natur barhau i gyd-fyw” (“that man and nature could not manage to coexist,” p. 161).

Interspersed through the novel are tantalizing interludes wherein the spirit of King Arthur possesses the body of the Archdruid of Gorsedd Cymru and begins a quest for world domination. Here, too, Igam Ogam is set against both a British nationalism that has appropriated Arthur as a symbol of the British state and especially the British crown—particularly after the publication of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King between 1859 and 1885—and, at the same time, against Welsh nationalist reappropriations of Arthur and Arthurian literature (perhaps most notably in T. Gwynn Jones’s 1902 long poem Ymadawiad Arthur [The Passing of Arthur]). Arthur is, Igam Ogam reminds us, a feudal monarch, and his approach to the world is that of a feudal monarch, claiming an absolute right first to the body of the Archdruid (whose spirit he completely displaces), then to Britain, and finally to the world at large. Nationalist appropriations of Arthur, whether British or Welsh, manifest here as a combination of xenophobia and imperial chauvinism. This is not the tragic figure of Tennyson, nor the heroic Arthur of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising sequence (1965-77) or other dominant-language fantasy, but rather an experienced warrior and calculating politician who is approaching the contemporary political arena as a field of battle—a battle he intends to win.

Tomos and his university friends move—or are moved—through the Mabinogwlad, attempting to make sense of its idiosyncrasies and of the ways both familiar and unfamiliar stories seem to be colliding in this world of magic, in which a “story” or legend appears to be a discreet, cyclically repeating unit. Igam Ogam is not an unflawed novel—its pacing is somewhat erratic, and aspects of it give me ideological pause (not least its ambivalent treatment of nature, as well as some of its gender politics). Nonetheless, it is extremely effective as a challenge to the norms of the fantasy genre and, especially, fantasy’s uncritical appropriation of “Celtic” pasts and presents. This challenge is situated in the real dynamics of contemporary Welsh culture: debates about nationalism, rural depopulation, the cultural politics of institutions like the Gorsedd, and more. Significantly, while it turns (or returns) to elements of Welsh tradition, it emphasizes that this tradition is not static and does not belong solely to the past. The legends that comprise the Mabinogwlad are subject to change or restructuring as their protagonists change and as the stories themselves intersect and come into conflict. The Mabinogwlad may be a realm of fiction, but Wales and Welsh culture are real and present in the now.

The Gaelic writer Fionnlagh MacLeòid’s Gormshuil an Rìgh (Gormshuil the King), meanwhile, is a difficult book to categorize. The best word for it is, perhaps, “postmodern.” It is a secondary-world fantasy that might be described, in the terms of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) as “immersive,” insofar as it throws its reader off the deep end in medias res and never looks back. Like a large body of dominant-language fantasy, Gormshuil an Rìgh draws heavily on the Gaelic folk tradition, but its use of Gaelic oral literature is grounded in a close familiarity with its aesthetic and structural conventions, especially the use of archetypes rather than the clearly individuated characters common in contemporary fantasy. It also, however, departs significantly from Gaelic tradition (or what is assumed to belong to Gaelic tradition) in a number of ways, introducing, for example, Tommy and Jenny, a chimpanzee and orangutan whose “story”—which, as with the legends in Igam Ogam, is treated here as an objectively existing structure—briefly intersects with the stories of the novel’s protagonists.

Additionally, in contrast to most English-language fantasy drawing on oral traditions—which tends to transfer its source material into “literary” forms and styles—Gormshuil an Rìgh is written in the conversational style of Gaelic oral storytelling, employing informal grammatical structures, often omitting verbs, and using a range of stylistic elements that are common in Gaelic oral narratives but whose English-language equivalents (when they exist) are often archaic or markedly literary. While clearly in conversation with the fantasy genre, MacLeòid’s novel nonetheless, as we’ll see, situates itself in contrast to dominant-language fantasy, as a direct extension of the folk tradition. Like this tradition, it resists the kinds of narrative closure that novels typically entail: Just as the King of Lochlann or the Wicked Witch (“an Eachrais-Ùrlair”) or the characters of traditional Gaelic Fenian stories repeat from story to story, dying in one night’s tale only to be revived the next for another adventure, so the characters of Gormshuil an Rìgh repeatedly die and are reborn or resurrected, in formulaic passages recalling the “runs” that mark Gaelic oral storytelling.

The story’s plot—such as it is—presents the displacement of oral literature by written literature as a genocidal war between “Luchd an Sgeòil” and “Luchd an Leabhair”—“the People of Story” and “the People of the Book.” It is easy to read this as a straightforward allegory for the disruption and decline of the traditional Gaelic social structures that sustained the storytelling tradition—and a rejection of the traditions and media of dominant-language fantasy in favor of the oral tradition it appropriates. We should keep in mind, however, that Gormshuil an Rìgh is, itself, a novel, however idiosyncratic it may be: MacLeòid is very conscious of the fact that he is producing a written, literary text and not an oral narrative.

It would be more accurate, I think, to say that MacLeòid is seeking a way out of the binary divide between oral and written and the common concpetion of these categories as mutually exclusive and often, as in Gormshuil an Rìgh, in literal or metaphorical conflict. It is clear throughout the novel that his sympathies are with the People of Story, whose last-ditch war to exterminate the People of the Book is itself a response to their long and equally genocidal subjugation by the People of the Book. At the same time, MacLeòid has an obvious fondness for the written word—Gormshuil an Rìgh is perhaps the only Gaelic novel I have read that approaches the verbal pyrotechnics of English-language writers like Samuel R. Delany, experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of “literary” language. Gormshuil an Rìgh reads to me, then, as an attempt to reconcile these presumed opposites—to move from thesis and antithesis to synthesis—and to turn (back) to the Gaelic storytelling tradition not as passive source material but as an active, vibrant tradition that can productively intervene in the structure of written narrative forms like the novel, creating something unexpected and different. (If I were to link it with an English-language text, it would be Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria [2013], which is similarly concerned with the tensions between oral and written literatures and the tantalizing possibility of reconciling the two.)

Gormshuil an Rìgh pushes us back to oral narrative. It invites us to read aloud, to situate it not—or not only—in relation to the written conventions of the Ùr-sgeul publishing scheme, which supported an explosion of new Gaelic prose between 2003 and 2013 (including Gormshuil an Rìgh itself), but also as a jumping-off point to return to folklore. As the Wicked Witch moves from tale to tale, why shouldn’t she venture from time to time out of the social world of the cèilidh and onto the page? She can always return to the cèilidh again tomorrow—as long as we keep having them, as long as we do not turn our back on the People of Story and abandon them entirely for the People of the Book. Indeed, it is emphatic that story is all any of us are, not only its archetypal characters—an Cèineach, “the Foreigner”; an Gocaman Dubh, “the Black-Haired Attendant”; the cryptic Fear Gun Ainm, “Man Without a Name”—but its readers as well, the residents of our primary world. The novel ends in the manner of many Gaelic folktales, by bridging the gaps between story, storyteller, and audience: “Agus dhealaich mis riutha an sin, ach tha sgeul orra fhathast ann” (“And I parted from them there, but there is a story about them still,” p. 153). In this way, Gormshuil an Rìgh invites not only an audience response but an audience continuation—it encourages us to seek out, or to create, these other stories.

There are other examples we could turn to here of Celtic-language writers’ negotiations of fantasy: Islwyn Ffowc Elis’s horror fantasy novel Y Gromlech yn yr Haidd (The Cromlech in the Barley, 1971), for example, in which a disrespectful English farmer is haunted and ultimately possessed by the ghosts whose graves are marked by the prehistoric standing stones he attempts to remove from his property, or Iain F. MacLeòid’s high fantasy novel An Sgoil Dhubh (The Black School, 2014), which as Duncan Sneddon has argued “fits very comfortably into the conventions of fantasy literature, and which is also deeply and distinctly Gàidhealach [Gaelic]” (“Gaelic History and Legend in An Sgoil Dhubh by Iain F. MacLeoid,” in Imagining the Celtic Past in Modern Fantasy, p. 156). There are also a growing number of reworkings of medieval and early modern texts in Celtic languages; similarly, there are numerous stories drawing on elements of folk tradition.

What these texts have in common is a concern with negotiating the relationships between popular perceptions of Celtic-language communities and cultures, on the one hand, and the realities of life in these communities and their histories and literary traditions, on the other. Darach Ó Scolaí characterizes his modern Irish version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge as “síneadh eile lenár dtraidisiún scéalaíochta” (“another extension of our storytelling tradition,” Táin Bó Cuailnge, p. 7). He casts himself as a scribe, someone who “searches for the familiar that links the past to the present and seeks to re-invigorate a present-day culture with his furtherings” (“The Táin,” in Carey, Táin Bó Cúalnge from the Book of Leinster, p. 126). The scribe, he says, is a “writer working within the tradition,” in contrast to a “translator” who “searches in an alien language or culture for the bizarre or the outlandish” (“The Táin,” p. 126). Celtic fantasy in dominant languages, I would suggest, has long been the product of translators, both literally—emerging from the work of scholars like Kervarker, Charlotte Guest, and Alexander Carmichael who presented premodern and oral literatures to dominant-language readerships—and figuratively, as writers like Macpherson, Standish James O’Grady, Isabella Augusta Gregory, Yeats, and many others have “translated” Celtic-language cultures and literatures into political and cultural contexts that imposed very particular stereotypes and interpretive frameworks on them.

Attending to contemporary Celtic-language fantasy, or fantasy-adjacent, texts requires us to engage with the fact that the “Celts” are very much still here, in spite of the efforts of the British and French states to erase them. What does it mean to write “Celtic fantasy” in a dominant language at a time when—to take just one example—corporal punishment for speaking Scottish Gaelic in school is still well within living memory? A real attention to living Celtic-language communities and the regions of the “Celtic Fringe” would—I hope, at least—force the fantasy genre to reckon with its complicity in the construction of these regions and the communities that comprise them as mystical, far-off places, places to which “we” go for a vacation, places where “we” own summer homes, where “we” can be close to nature, where “we” can find “ancient” stories and songs—and not have to interact with any (real) people or feel the weight of modernity. This is colonialism at work, and its effects are felt in the present, not merely in the memory of the Great Famine of the 1840s or the Highland Clearances but also in, for example, the contemporary housing and cost of living crises that are devastating many of these communities today, as a result of the tourism industry and the transformation of housing stock into vacation homes and short-term rentals.

What would it look like for dominant-language fantasy to engage with the living cultures, contemporary politics, and modern histories of Celtic-language communities alongside the premodern or “traditional” literatures that have (often at several removes) formed the basis of much of the fantasy genre writ large? These communities produce “modern” literature, from life-writing to modernist poetry to literary realism to science fiction, music from folk to country to pop-rock to techno, film and television programs, and living folklore, and they are engaged in all-too-contemporary political and economic struggles to resist capitalism and dispossession. What would a Celtic fantasy that engages with the “Celts” as real people in real places, rather than as common aesthetic property—a mystical veneer that anyone can apply to their writing—look like? Writers like Jones and MacLeòid have offered, and continue to offer, some suggestive answers.

I came out three and a half hours later utterly obsessed with it, in the deeply embarrassing way that only nine-year-olds can be—swept up in the drama and texture and scale of the world and the story. My sister and I tore through the DVDs of the previous two films, and discovered a whole second disc that was not the film, but the story of it. We learned through the second disc’s special features that the Middle Earth that felt so real on screen was made of silicon and painted plywood and scale models, that the cast were all regular blokes made small and hairy through camera tricks and prosthetics. We learned about green screen, forced perspective, editing, visual effects, production design, motion capture, film composition, and the many, many injuries suffered by the cast in the course of making the trilogy. Lord of the Rings were the films that made me realise films were made, that hundreds of people came together and assembled them out of glue and spit and maths. I didn’t entirely understand what Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Richard Taylor, and Andrew Lesnie did, but I knew they were the ones who’d made the film, and peeking behind the curtain didn’t ruin the magic trick—it just made it more impressive that they’d pulled it off.

It’s not uncommon to see people lamenting the fact that “we don’t make movies like Lord of the Rings anymore.” I’m doing it right now. But before mourning, it’s worth asking what exactly made Lord of the Rings so different, and what exactly people are remembering when they say it is gone.

Lord of the Rings came at a rare, perfect moment for home media. DVDs and the nascent internet had turned behind-the-scenes features into their own commodity rather than just a promotional tool—and the making of Lord of the Rings was its own rich story of constant risk and insane gambles that somehow paid off. The DVDs tiptoed around some of the details, but they still covered the fact that the trilogy was originally developed as two films for Disney-owned studio Miramax (specifically for Harvey Weinstein) before the plug was pulled by Michael Eisner over the films’ combined $180 million budget. Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh were left with one month to hopelessly pitch the project around Los Angeles, weighed down by a terrible deal that required any new studio to pay back the $14 million that had already spent on development and still give Miramax 5 per cent of the first dollar gross, half of which went directly to the Weinstein brothers. If Jackson and Walsh couldn’t find anyone, Miramax would hold onto the Tolkien rights and get another filmmaker to cram all three books into a single film. New Line Cinema’s founder Robert Shaye was interested in the series, and in Jackson’s potential as a filmmaker, but he baulked at the Weinstein’s conditions and only took a meeting with Jackson and Walsh as a courtesy. The story, as reported in the DVD special features, is that his response to their pitch was: “Why would anyone in their right mind make two movies? This is three films.”

The switch from two films to three called for a page one rewrite, and the hiring of co-writer Phillippa Boyens; but given the breakneck pace of the trilogy we now have, it’s hard to imagine how the story survived a two-film adaptation. Like many who only read the books after seeing the films, I find the adaptational changes made by Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens both efficient and effective, often upping the stakes while streamlining story beats. Moving Boromir’s death from the beginning of The Two Towers to the end of Fellowship gives the first film a definitive ending while also setting up the next; keeping Éomer and the Riders of Rohan in exile for most of Two Towers reduces Rohan to a kingdom that could easily be conquered, and gives a good reason for the tide to turn in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. This assessment is not universal—Christopher Tolkien claimed in 2012 that Jackson’s films eviscerated his father’s books by turning them into action movies for fifteen- to twenty-five-year olds, although his opinion was no doubt coloured by a years-long legal battle with New Line Cinema over unpaid profit percentages and Hollywood accounting.

According to New Line Cinema’s Robert Shaye, Peter Jackson slipped in the fact that all three films would have to be shot together at the last minute. Shaye wanted to make them one at a time, given the high financial risk of even one film, but Jackson successfully argued that the environmental impact of building roads and sets in remote locations meant they had to get the entire trilogy done in one go. Jackson promised that the New Zealand-based shoot would cost a mere $60 million per film, partly thanks to a tax loophole that the New Zealand government reportedly didn’t close specifically so Lord of the Rings could exploit it. This Herculean back-to-back shoot has become part of the Lord of the Rings mythology—a nonstop joint effort that produced three films with a consistent vision and aesthetic, a shoot that was as much a journey as the story of the film. Friendships were forged in line with the narrative, Helm’s Deep was a struggle off-screen and on, and the immersive fantasy landscapes of Middle Earth provided by New Zealand became possibly the most effective tourism campaign ever mounted. And all of this was chronicled in those DVD special features and online shorts that celebrated not just the films, but the filmmaking.

On a trip to New Zealand a few years ago, my sister and I went looking for the Lord of the Rings special features we used to watch, and found many we’d never seen. The most eye-opening was Costa Botes’s bleakly funny The Making of The Lord of the Rings, a fly-on-the-wall documentary that focuses less on intricate production design and camera tricks, and more on sobbing Second ADs who simply cannot source enough radios. It ended up cutting a little too close to the bone, since both my sister and I have ended up working in production, at least partly because of those original DVD features. When we actually found the featurettes we knew, they were flashier than I remembered, more promotional, and focused much more on the cast than the creatives, but the immersion was still there: the feeling that now you knew how the film had come together, you were part of it.

The Lord of the Rings DVDs are fallible histories—most importantly, they leave out co-writer and producer Fran Walsh, who chose not to be part of any behind-the-scenes interviews for the sake of her privacy. Her name is mentioned often, but her pivotal role in the Rings story is shrunk by her absence, and she joins the ranks of many under-recognised women who have produced films for their more gregarious director partners (like Gale Anne Hurd, Ceán Chaffin, and Emma Thomas, to name a few). The Lord of the Rings special features also leave out the part where Jackson and Walsh’s proposed budget of $60 million per film turned out to be half of what was needed, and they also leave out New Line trying to sell Jackson and Walsh’s house out from under them mid-shoot to cover the budget overruns. Viggo Mortensen breaking his toe is a marketable piece of the film’s story, a testament of his commitment to playing Aragorn; Jackson snapping at a producer to just let him make the fucking film instead of threatening to sue him doesn’t quite fit with the cuddly Tolkien nerd he is shown as in the rest of the behind the scenes material. But even in the stories that the DVD special features leave out, there’s a constant thread of creativity winning out on Lord of the Rings: of Jackson and Walsh’s pitch being so infectious that Robert Shaye asked for an extra film, of uncertain foreign investors nevertheless closing deals during set visits to New Zealand, of Jackson getting to make the fucking film and proving all the doubters wrong.

I saw Return of the King in a cinema exactly once. I did see it again a few months later at the local Services Club on a print someone in town had somehow gotten hold of, sitting on stiff fold-out leather bench seats between the Chinese restaurant and poker machines (early 2000s rural Australia really was still the 1960s). Until recently, I had only ever seen Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers on DVD, on a boxy CRT TV, or a video iPod screen, all of six centimetres wide. The films still felt massive, but the smaller screen draws attention to how much the trilogy is propelled by the story and the characters—when you miss some of the spectacle, it’s easier to see that the spectacle is always in service of something, and the story survives without it. I’ve avoided cinema marathons of Lord of the Rings over the years because I have something bordering on a religious objection to the Extended Editions—Peter Jackson himself says the Theatrical Cuts are the definitive versions of the films, and the Extended Edition was created explicitly for a home viewing experience where you can pause and get up and watch each film over two nights, so if you’re going to show Lord of the Rings in theatres, you should absolutely be showing the Theatrical Cut.

Late last year, while looking for screenings of Gladiator II (2024), I stumbled across the holy grail: an IMAX marathon of the Theatrical Cuts, remastered in 4K and shown on the largest IMAX screen in the world (suck it Sydney). The marathon was not announced or promoted, and in the queue for coffee between The Fellowship of The Ring (2001) and The Two Towers (2002), a fellow marathoner theorised that the triple-bill was IMAX’s last-minute effort to recoup some of the losses from their heavy commitment to Joker: Folie à Deux (2024). It was a compelling theory, but there was a simpler answer: The marathon was supposed to promote The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024), an anime addition to the franchise whose trailer looked woefully low-res when splashed across thirty-two metres of IMAX screen.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel some trepidation in the days before the marathon, because what if I was wrong? What if I’d been blinded by nostalgia, and Lord of the Rings was just … fine? What if I was about to spend nine hours being reminded that I was no longer nine years old, that you can go back but you can never truly return? I’d been burned before in 2012, when The Hobbit gave me three long hours to wallow in a feeling of quiet discomfort that I was now an adult, about to start her first real job on set, and the filmmaker who’d introduced me to the world behind the camera had, with all due respect, lost his touch.

I needn’t have worried. Lord of the Rings doesn’t just hold up. It fucking rules.

*

It is a truly different experience to see the trilogy in a cinema, with a crowd who are invested enough in the trilogy to devote ten hours to it on a Monday. Everyone there likely had a similar experience of the film’s mythology, of watching the DVDs and learning how the magic trick was done: There was an audible collective intake of breath when Aragorn kicked a helmet at the start of The Two Towers. The vibe was so good that I even managed to resist the urge to start a fight with the guy who loudly proclaimed that the theatrical version had “cut heaps of stuff” from the Extended Edition. The 4K remaster and massive screen also showed off all the minute details that I’d known were there because they were showcased in the special features, but hadn’t seen in decades of viewing at DVD resolution—the texture of the cloaks and costumes, the sweat that beads on Frodo’s forehead every time he’s compelled to use the Ring, the seamless digital stitching between different stages of practical makeup as Theoden is released from Saruman’s hold.

I also saw a lot of flaws: shots where the focus is slightly off, wides where the Hobbits are clearly doubles, the one scene where Orlando Bloom isn’t wearing his contact lenses. When Lord of the Rings was in production, George Lucas was dragging cinema kicking and screaming into the digital age on Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), and for all the ill-informed arguments about film vs digital since, there’s no denying that digital cinematography allows for a more “perfect” product, one that can be endlessly corrected but also more closely monitored during filming. These “flawed” shots would be caught on set or fixed in post today, but—just like the dirt beneath Frodo’s nails—the cinematic flaws in Lord of the Rings only make the world feel that bit more real. Animated and heavily CGI’d films will now add “flaws” like lens flares, focus drifts, and digital camera movements that mimic a human operator adjusting a shot in real time, but Lord of the Rings has all of that baked into it. This immersive rough-and-tumble texture of Middle Earth applies not just to its prosthetics and cinematography but also the films’ performances: Éowyn’s “I am no man” moment works because it’s followed by a feral scream and desperate stab, not the effortless clean sweep of her sword you can imagine in the same moment from a Marvel movie. There is a sincerity to the trilogy that’s sorely lacking in modern cinema, even in films that seek to emulate it. Lord of the Rings never winks at the camera, never acknowledges the tropes and literary traditions into which the story is playing—except to say that, maybe, there’s a reason those stories keep being told.

But more than anything else, I was struck by how cinematic Lord of the Rings is: The trilogy uses every trick in the filmmaking book to escalate and elevate the story. There are the obvious and much discussed perspective tricks, used to make the hobbits look smaller and miniatures look bigger, and there’s the impeccable use of shot/reverse shot conventions in the scenes between Gollum and Smeagol. But the films are also full of incredibly effective filmmaking choices: extreme closeups, push-ins on dramatic lines, vertigo shots, dutch angles, wild searching point-of-view shots that ground the audience in the character’s panic, scrappy handheld cinematography in battles, and disconcerting steadicam shots interwoven with unsettling blocking in scenes where characters feel unmoored. The camera and sound mix are what give the otherwise ordinary Ring its menace and its gravity: It dominates the frame in lingering closeups, accompanied by deep rumbles and its own alluring leitmotif. The Ringwraiths aren’t just hooded figures, they’re pure black, an expressionistic absence of image paired with an upsetting, high-pitched screech that reverberates through the speakers long after they’re gone from the screen. One of my favourite tiny technical flourishes from Fellowship is the “Galadrilight,” a specific eye-light designed by Director of Photography Andrew Lesnie for Cate Blanchett. Lesnie explained to the American Cinematographer in 2001 that:

Tolkien describes [Galadriel] by saying “no sign of age was upon her, unless it were in the depths of her eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight and yet profound, the wells of deep memory.” In order to achieve that quality, we created the “Galadrilight,” which was simply a rig of hundreds of Christmas tree lights mounted next to the camera.

The result is a constellation reflected, and only ever found, in Galadriel’s eyes, keen as lances in the starlight. But this technical flourish would be meaningless if we didn’t see Galadriel’s eyes in extreme close-ups and feel the intensity of her gaze along with the Fellowship.

Many of the cinematic techniques in Lord of the Rings are the sort of things that Peter Jackson had to use as a low-budget filmmaker, getting the most out of the limited tools he had. He might not have had money to burn on Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992), but he always had a camera, and actors, and the ability to combine image and sound in the edit to the greatest effect possible. A push-in or sudden change in sound can make a beat more impactful than any amount of CGI or sweeping crane shots. The chilling Ringwraith screech was performed by Fran Walsh in the last days of the Fellowship of the Ring sound mix, when the original sound effects didn’t stack up. The Galadrilight uses the same techniques as every photo of a cat staring in rapture at a Christmas tree. One of the most iconic shots in the trilogy is nine guys walking past a rock, but the music and time given to this moment are what make it enormous. This sweeping, cinematic approach to the filmmaking also means grounding the story in the characters, because it foregrounds their emotional journey and the actors’ performance. In the Fellowship prologue, Sauron looms over armies, but you really feel the menace of the Ring when it turns Gandalf stern or Boromir mad.

The word immersive is often thrown around when it comes to Jackson’s films, usually related back to the look and feel of the world. There is a practical reason for this, provided by the DVD special features: Weta Workshop handled almost all elements of the production design and world, from prosthetics to chainmail to VFX to bulk-buying recently detached horse tails from a pet-food factory for the Rohirrim helmets. Having one group handling all those elements together produced a whole-cloth look for the world, but the immersion and cohesion of Lord of the Rings goes well beyond just the physical elements of the production design. The cinematic shooting style emphasises the production design and centres the performances, which rely on a judiciously paced and well-written script that captures the essence of a sprawling trilogy while never losing sight of the people at its heart. When those pieces come together, the cinematic filming approach is, in turn, elevated by what it captures: a shockingly dialled-in cast and crew, who lived the nonstop shoot of these films for over a year. It’s hard not to watch the films without thinking of those paratexts, the story alongside the story waiting on the second disc of the DVD; but that becomes just another element that elevates the story being told—because, by god, they actually did all of this.

When people say “we don’t make films like Lord of the Rings anymore,” the eulogy leaves out the fact that we didn’t make films like Lord of the Rings before Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings was the singular result of a perfect storm of digital technology, international film markets, Michael Eisner’s ego, and a New Zealand tax loophole. And in the same way that every element of Lord of the Rings works together on screen, it all came together behind the scenes, too: The combined shoot that Jackson successfully snuck into the deal allowed for a consistency of vision that cannot be achieved again, not when films are now made with brand directives from studios. Worlds and merchandising titles are built without stories or characters to ground them, books are split into two or even three to create another release date, and streaming has destroyed much of the international distribution market that New Line relied on to fund Lord of the Rings in the first place. And companies are now so risk-averse that—while they will happily announce a five film series—they will not actually greenlight production, only development (with easily interchangeable directors). When New Line Cinema eventually went bankrupt trying to recreate the Lord of the Rings magic with The Golden Compass (2007), they had only committed to making one film in the trilogy, even pulling a reverse-Boromir and removing a character death from the end of the film that motivated and necessitated a sequel.

At the core of every failed attempt to recreate the Lord of the Rings magic is an attempt to create a franchise, which is something Lord of the Rings never was. It is a trilogy, not a franchise. A franchise must hold its characters in stasis so the same formula can be rinsed and repeated, just like television once did in case people missed an episode, but with on-demand viewing that balance has now tipped. Vince Gilligan set out to tell a story of Mr. Chips becoming Scarface in Breaking Bad (2008-13), and ended up defining a new generation of television about change, while the rise of cinematic universes has left films treading the same ground over and over because they can’t be sure audience have seen the last film (or television show, or Fortnite Event). As film budgets skyrocket, studios have moved towards “sure bets,” which are only ever bets that have paid out before. The Avengers will always have to face another bigger, badder, world-ending threat while making the same quips and the same character choices. Han Solo will always be a gruff smuggler with a Wookiee sidekick and a heart of gold—and even if you watch him die, he’ll be back in three years for a prequel. But Lord of the Rings constantly moves forward—Aragorn goes from ranger to king while Frodo becomes someone who has seen too much return to the safety of stasis, and the Ring moves ever onward to Mount Doom.

And it ends. The trilogy ends, where a franchise cannot. There are no sequels, because a sequel would defeat the purpose of the trilogy—for more story to happen, the hard-won victory must be lost. So instead, Lord of the Rings ends with a finality that is both satisfying and heartbreaking, because how do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?

You can revisit the films, but they are done. The story endures, because it is over.

There is a deep irony to all of this, given that the only reason I could see the trilogy again in a cinema at all was to promote Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. There’s really no point in discussing Rohirrim at all, since it’s less a film than a legal entity, created and fast-tracked so New Line Cinema and their parent company Warner Brothers could fulfill their contractual obligations to maintain the film rights to Tolkien's work. New Line and Warner have since announced plans to use those rights to make “multiple” films that will “explore storylines yet to be told," starting with 2026’s The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum. The new film is due to be produced by Jackson and Walsh, and directed by Venom: Let There Be Carnage director Andy Serkis, who will also star once again as Gollum. Judging by the title, Hunt For Gollum will likely be based on an incident early in the books, where Gandalf and Aragorn try to find Gollum before Sauron does, in order to keep the location of the Ring secret. In Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, this entire story is covered in a single line.

New Line Cinema are determined to make Lord of the Rings into a franchise, partly to combat Amazon’s competing Tolkien adaptation The Rings of Power (2022-). As someone whose love of Lord of the Rings grew into a love of Star Wars, I can see a worst-case scenario (“Somehow, Sauron returned”) and a more likely middling-case scenario, where Hunt for Gollum is an expensive, unnecessary addition to the story that achieves nothing and ends just as Fellowship begins, with a de-aged Aragorn taking a seat in the Prancing Pony.

But at the heart of any attempted franchise will be a trilogy, as cinematic and immersive and complete today as it was when I was a nine-year-old overwhelmed by it. Because it is a trilogy, it endures in its own right. Even if they don’t make films like this anymore, they still made these films and they are still out there. You might not be able to return, but you can, at the very least, go back.

But is time linear? My favourite thing to say at New Year’s is that time is a construct. I don’t make resolutions at any particular or special time because time doesn’t really exist. But when I come down from my soapbox, I experience time as we all do: I have deadlines, I make appointments, and I think about aging. We’re bound by linear time in somewhat inexplicable ways, but time doesn’t really work that way: If time is a construct, then maybe the future is, too.

Linearly isn’t the only way to look at time. In many African cultures, time is nonlinear, or circular: This is why the “past” doesn’t exist in the same way in those cultures. That cosmology allows for events to be happening continuously and simultaneously in the “present,” something illustrated beautifully in Cheryl S. Ntumy’s 2024 novella, Songs for the Shadows. In this work, and in the cultures it draws upon, when you die, your life continues on another plane—or you’ve already been living on that plane, and just become aware of it. You may become an ancestor, to help those who remain on this one.

This cosmological view makes the values of those communities profoundly different: If time is a loop, then things come back to haunt you. In Shona culture, “ngozi” is a kind of curse (an avenging spirit, to be specific) that comes on the family of a murderer, and can affect generations. The concept of Sankofa (“to go back and get”) from the Akan people of Ghana, meanwhile, requires reflection on the past to succeed in the future. Many other Indigenous cultures, too, have nonlinear concepts of time. In other words, Indigenous peoples imagine a future too; it just looks different.

After all, when we think about the future, we’re making it up in our minds. We have dreams and wishes, and sometimes we jot those things down on bits of paper. Some among us may then create art from these fragments: fiction, a work of sound, or a piece of visual art—like a film, or the cover of a science fiction novel. All of it, though, starts with ideas about what is—or could be—possible. Everything we create starts in the imagination: Before we make it, we must dream it. But how do we decide what’s possible?

One of my nephews used to talk about purple horses like they were absolutely real. Children dream outrageously, both when awake and asleep. By the time we’re adults, though, our ideas about what’s possible have been shaped and narrowed down by failure, loss, grief, discipline, and the societies we live in. How far we can stretch, what we can achieve, is now affected by “reality,” which is bound by what we see around us; our ability to dream is curtailed.

But we can and do still think about the future; some among us even keep dreaming about our collective future. And when we imagine that future, we often turn to SF to do it. It’s easy to find and consume future-oriented media without thinking too deeply about it—but it’s important to think about what SF is doing intentionally or unintentionally.

The trouble is unequal encounters: Our collective dreams of humanity’s future in books and film are severely curtailed by the hegemony of Western culture, depriving us of varied visions of what’s possible. We only very rarely encounter future (re)visioning outside of what an ethnically white, capitalistic worldview would imagine. Successes like the Black Panther franchise are rare and notable; most box office hits fit that other, very narrow vision. It’s all gradually changing—you only have to read early SF to see the distance travelled in the last century—but it’s not enough yet, and progress is in fits and starts. It’s intriguing, then, to think about what we’re missing when we exclude other visions.

Because what’s in the future, anyway? Not Black people, if you read books from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. No Native people either. Or disabled people (or, when they are there, they’re not really recognisable as whole, complex human beings—because we can only imagine within the narrow limits of what’s “possible”). There may be a few queer people (often imagined as aliens), if we're lucky. But there are flying cars, and holidays to Mars. There’s either no organised religion, or it’s evolved. Oh, and psionics are a big deal. Great Science has triumphed over ignorance. Science works a particular way; positivism reigns supreme. It’s all the Enlightenment imagined it to be.

Although things are improving, it’s true, we’re still up against a lot. Wole Talabi often talks about how Western philosophy has seen non-Western ideas, beliefs, and practices as inferior and nonprogressive. He has also spoken on the Imaginary Worlds podcast about the effect of “centuries of colonial brainwashing.” N. K. Jemisin says she aims to take apart the “white dude” genre of fantasy and then put it back together again. Many other thinkers talk about how Western philosophy situates all other philosophies as primitive, in the past, backward-facing, and so not relevant to humanity’s future. In this conception, only Western ideas are future-facing, and this is reflected in the future-imagining media we consume.

There are tons of other ways of seeing the future, though, because there are millions of people who are not Western, and many other epistemologies. This has given rise to many, many futurisms: Africanfuturism. Arab Futurism. Muslim Futurism. Indigenous Futurism/s. Afrofuturism. Amazofuturism. South Asian Futurisms (Tamizh Futurism; Tamil Dalit Futurism; Desi Futurism; Adivasi Futurism, and more). Pasifikafuturism. Asian Futurism (and Ed Chang’s musings on). Chicanafuturism. And when you examine these, you find that other ways of knowing persist—different knowledges, acquired by means profoundly different from the positivism of the West. And that brings different priorities to those cultures. Nature is conscious, and humanity is in a relationship with it, so sustainability is a big deal, brought about through millennia of responsible environmental management (ecofuturism is related to this). Capitalism never really takes off, because it depends on extraction of finite resources. Techno-optimism isn’t a thing. Indigenous science and ways of doing things are valued.

And partly due to the past experiences and traumas of non-Western peoples, there are other ways still of looking at what Western ideas take for granted. Colonialism and imperialism are very bad, so you won’t in these alternative futures see too much about adventurous colonising of new planets. Property is considered in an entirely different way. And there are other differences, too: The outlook in non-Western philosophies is often optimistic, so ideas of the future often are as well. As Dr Grace Dillon says in the introduction to Walking the Clouds (2012): “Stories are often playful, or experimental.” Even the aesthetic of the future is different in non-Western futurisms.

A caveat: Diverse narratives aren’t always, of course, utopian (or hopepunkian). Here’s an important example of dystopia in Afrofuturism: The venerable Octavia Butler is always cited as a prophet. July 20, 2024, an important day in Parable of the Sower (1993), was marked by fans and future watchers as Earthseed Day. Still, although Butler got some things right—climate change is a big one—the dire events of the novel haven’t quite come to pass (yet). As of the end of 2024, Los Angeles was still a more or less functional city, without visible warlords. Sea levels are rising, but most coastal communities are not swamped (yet). And then there’s also Afrofuturism that isn’t dystopian per se, but that doesn’t make humanity the centre of the story—something more in line with Indigenous ways of thinking. An example is N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, in which humanity may die, but the planet survives.

Dystopian narratives are frequently, and obviously, a function of trauma. Some SF acts as remembrance, a warning, or even catharsis. There will always be a great deal of room for dreaming bleak or dark futures, futures that are not happy, or hopeful. The key is to evade the rigid and hegemonic structures of Western-oriented writing.

In this regard, Eugen Bacon is among the most successful writers working today. Born in Tanzania, now resident in Australia, Bacon has become one of my favourite writers of African descent. She writes a lot of future-facing fiction in what she calls the Afro-irreal, or Afro-surrealistic genre (there are various names for it). Bacon often borrows from or extends African folklore; she is a mtunzi wa hadithi, a sarungano, a griot. African folklore serves to pass wisdom, knowledge and memory down to future generations; story is used because it entertains, and is memorable. In that tradition, specific animals stand in for human traits (wisdom, trickery, and so on), and stories can be formed and reformed—sometimes passed down as they are, and other times with new bits added by a talented storyteller.

I found Bacon’s style challenging at first: It’s often very poetic, and reads like a lyric essay. It doesn’t always “make sense” in the ways I’m used to as a reader of mostly hard SF and nonfiction. But after I let go of my preconceptions, I started to see how it works: Bacon’s access to two (or more) very different cultures create a blended worldview. Born in Africa, Bacon is deeply rooted in African storytelling forms. Her subsequent travels and settling in Australia have in turn given her access to Western and Indigenous Australian cultures. This makes her able to take the best of the worlds she has access to and create new things: She’s a text-maker, a weaver, and map-maker for invented future worlds.

But do worlds require a map? All mapping is political. Maps are a way of asserting dominance over an area, region, or piece of land, by defining its borders and turning it into property. Maps were a crucial tool for colonising new, “empty” lands. Maps tell a story, and the story belongs to the map-maker, no matter who else may be on the land. Counter-mapping, on the other hand, can give us new ways of seeing, break up old patterns in the way we see the borders of everything. A definition of counter-mapping, from Wikipedia:

[Counter-mapping] is creating maps that challenge “dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals.” Counter-mapping is used in multiple disciplines to reclaim colonized territory.

If you see storytelling as a form of map-making—defining the borders of an idea—then storytelling is also a political process. Dreaming the future, then, can be a profoundly decolonial process. When Indigenous cultures—almost always oppressed by the dominant culture—dream of a different present, they’re dreaming outside of imposed borders. They’re counter-mapping, undertaking a decolonial process. So when we dream the future from diverse perspectives, or perspectives outside of any dominant culture, we are engaging in resistance.

In engaging in resistance, though, non-Western writers of SF grapple with Audre Lorde’s assertion that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (see Gina Cole). In this context, can SF ever be decolonial? Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has also struggled with the idea of writing in the coloniser’s language (see Decolonising the Mind, 1986). But, just as with the view of many postcolonial writers that English has been decolonised (there are as many Englishes now as there were peoples in the British Empire), SF possesses the capacity to be used in subversion of, and to resist, any existing oppressive structures. Postcolonial SF writers have found ways of writing themselves and their worldviews into the future, of dreaming of other ways of being, and of weaving new textual maps of future worlds that include and even centre them.

*

Indigenous futurism similarly asks that we critically examine the beliefs, attitudes, methods, concepts, or language that get called ‘scientific,’ and/or valorised as rigorous, objective, empirical, evidence-based, superior, and so on. If certain worldviews that consider themselves ‘scientific’ have been deeply implicated in racism, colonialism, genocide and ecocide, then surely we must either rethink what counts as science, and/or rethink the esteem in which it is held? As Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2005) have pointed out, it is in the name of  “scientific progress” that Indigenous knowledge was and is constantly stolen. … But what is at stake here is not just defending Indigenous knowledge by reclaiming patents or monetary compensations. It’s also reframing what is understood as science, estranging and reimagining the vital concepts which underlie it, concepts such as ‘objectivity,’ ‘experiment,’ ‘neutrality,’ ‘bias,’ etc. To put it another way, bringing Indigenous knowledge together with the Western scientific tradition requires that we rethink not only the content, but also the form of science.

-- From an essay by Vítor Castelões Gama and Marcelo Velloso Garcia that considers Indigenous Futurism

Futurism is concerned with science, so it’s helpful to think about what we’ve been told science is. A simple definition is the use of observation and experimentation to learn about the world. Coming out of the Enlightenment, the impact of the philosophy of positivism on European thought and science was profound: Now all knowledge had to be based on reason and logic, rather than intuition, faith, or other ways of knowing. Everything else—including the ways Europeans themselves had seen the world before this—was now considered primitive, and confined to the realm of superstition. That allowed Europeans to see the new way as progress: Evidence from repeatable experiments was now the only truth.

This approach advanced scientific knowledge, but complicated the encounters with Indigenous peoples that happened at about the same time, during the “Age of Discovery.” Armed with what they saw as the next stage of human philosophical progress, Europeans set out to bring the Enlightenment to the world, consigning what they considered nonscientific ideas to the primitive past, and smashing Indigenous epistemologies. The effects of this process are still with us in the ways we consider what science is, what’s knowledge, what’s valuable, and this is at the core of what we consider to be science in SF and in futurism. That is, because Europeans had military power on their side, these encounters were always violent—in short, apocalyptic.

There’s an Indigenous and Native American concept about how the Apocalypse already happened, and they’ve survived it. Many postcolonial societies understand the world that way. Apocalypse means different things to different people: the decimation of society and culture, environmental degradation, earthquakes, volcanoes, the Day of Judgement. For some, the Apocalypse is some coming disaster; for others, a world-ending one in the rearview mirror.

Let’s examine a popular trope of a future or imminent apocalypse through the lens of a climate catastrophe: What are Native Americans doing in a hot world? And Africans, Indonesians, Indigenous Australians, Caribbeans, the Innu? And what about animals, and plants? Because they’re going to suffer from a warmed world just as much as humans will. Indeed, it’s instructive to consider our nonhuman kin as fellow sufferers from the disaster of a climate catastrophe—may, in fact, help us think through ways of dealing with it.

Western sci-fi is frequently and bleakly dystopian in its outlook. People fight over scraps, and form roving gangs to steal. Most people retreat into tiny armed communities (like in one of my favourite novels of 2024, Joel Dane's The Ragpicker), or must head off into the wilderness to fend for themselves and any surviving loved ones. Naomi Kritzer’s The Year Without Sunshine (2023) is notable precisely because of how hopeful and community-oriented it is. After an unspecified disaster, basic services fail, and a neighbourhood works together to survive until the government can get them back online. Annalee Newitz has pointed out that this is how humanity will actually respond after a disaster—because we often do, in real life.

For postcolonial societies, the Apocalypse has happened: How did we respond? How are we responding right now? We check up on each other. We form cooperatives, and farm together. We drive a sick neighbour to the hospital at one a.m., because we have a car and they don’t. We send around a collection plate when that neighbour dies, because death is a communal thing: Their family’s loss is ours, and we know they’d do the same for us. We start GoFundMes after floods from once-in-a-century storms to bring relief to affected communities. And you see all these things in the stories we write.

This episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast clarifies some of these ideas. African authors Chinelo Onwualu, Wole Talabi, and Suyi Davies Okungbowa talk about why African cli-fi is less dystopian than that from Western writers. As host Eric Molinksy explains in the introduction, how we imagine the future is deeply rooted in our past, values, and culture.

We’ve seen countless climate stories set in a fiery California (Unleashed, by Cai Emmons [2022]), or a flood- or hurricane-altered North America (The Displacements, by Bruce Holsinger [2022]; Honeymoons in Temporary Locations by Ashley Shelby [2024]—look out for the story about the bears!). Then there are stories that focus on geo-engineering gone wrong: Burning Sky by John Darnton (2024) imagines an environmental disaster caused by releasing particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet, a scenario also explored in Apple TV’s Extrapolations (2023). Other stories simply assume climate collapse, and then imagine our response to it (the excellent Collapse Years by Damir Salkovic [2024]).

But there are other climate futures. In Talabi’s 2024 collection, Convergence Problems, the story “Ganger” imagines a postapocalyptic Nigeria with people divided by class into arcologies and villas under a dome. Interestingly, in Lost Ark Dreaming (also 2024), Suyi Davies Okungbowa also imagines arcologies within a stratified society: A farsighted businessman has set up five offshore towers called the Fingers, with upper levels reserved for those who can afford to move there, and lower levels for refugees (a few) and the grunts who keep things running. Neither of these stories imagine any way to modify the environment; they are more concerned with people’s lives, and revolution. World Weaver Press’s Pan-Asian Multispecies Cities (2021), too, is wonderfully dense with imaginings that include the other inhabitants of our world. There’s also a great definition of another tradition, solarpunk, in the introduction:

[It’s about] refusing to surrender to the temptation of violent, dystopian post-apocalypse imaginaries. Seeking ways of practicing solidarity, embracing human ingenuity from traditional ecological knowledge to scientific research, celebrating diverse forms of being in the world, from personal expression to relationships.

I love to read hopepunk and solarpunk because writers in these genres dream so expansively about what’s possible. Maybe it’s because our brains are so wired to imagine bad things that it takes courage and imagination to imagine good and hopeful futures—a kind of act of resistance, and a political choice.

The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins (2023), for example, is both a hopeful, and much more fully fleshed-out, imagining of a future in a warmed and flooded world, in which young people are winning the battle against climate criminals—the oligarchs who are driving us all off the climate cliff (this is also central to the plot Jon Raymond’s Denial [2022]). They are also winning the battle against climate change, because the world has finally got to zero emissions. The novel dares us to imagine a future in which workers and ordinary people have retaken control of political power and of huge multinational companies—one in which these companies are run as co-ops, a world where there are “Half-Earth” agreements to protect the planet’s biomes, and only Indigenous people can live in those areas where nature is protected and thrives. The story focuses on a small family that’s torn apart by the basic question of when we can be sure that enough has been done to guarantee the future.

In a new collection, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions (2024), Nalo Hopkinson imagines climate futures in an altogether lighter and more hopeful way, and from a Caribbean perspective. The story “Repatriation,” for example, is a joyful vision of a time when we can restore coral reefs. “Broad Dutty Water,” meanwhile, is a wonderful, and also post-apocalyptic, tale that’s reminiscent of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld (1995): Ocean levels have risen, and people live on moveable islands. This story is also cool because, like in Multispecies Cities, it considers multispecies futures.

The aforementioned collection, Multispecies Cities (2021), edited by Christoph Rupprecht, imagines domed cities, robotic animals, roof gardens, garden cities, and modified marine creatures. The follow-up, 2024’s Solarpunk Creatures, features a robotic dog that hunts for rain, very smart bees, and more.

In a world that tells dark stories, hopepunk and solarpunk are counter-narratives. In other words: The futures we imagine aren’t inevitable; it’s fun to see visions of counter-futures. In a world under capitalism, and (over)run by billionaires, it can start to feel impossible to imagine other ways of being. If you’re in capitalism’s underclass, as most of us are, dreaming may seem like an expensive hobby. And then there’s life on the periphery: The further away you are from the metropole (are we post-colonial yet?), the harder one may need to struggle to find ways to dream. Techno-optimistic or techno-solutionistic billionaires like Marc Andreesen offer us their dreamed futures—but these employ methods that seal our fates in the underclass, with no way to break the chains. (Sofia Samatar’s 2024 novella The Practice, The Horizon, The Chain is a vivid and literal imagining of the chains of social stratification). The billionaires’ dreams are for humanity to continue under capitalism—the very thing that’s brought us to this moment of crisis. Their solutions to our problems and imagined futures are more of the same—only faster, higher, and bigger. With more money for them.

This returns us to the discussion on science and positivism above: Human belief in technology is based on a belief in the rationality and rightness of science. According to this view, technology is science, science is good, therefore technology is good. The trouble is, while technology has brought us cheap vaccines and microwaves and mobile phones and cars, it’s also brought us pollution and global warming, an exhausted working class, unhealthy relationships with social media, unlivable cities, and more. Technology is, unfortunately, not neutral, never an unalloyed good, and as flawed as the humans who create it. Technology cannot save us—or if it does, it will only save those of us who can afford it, or only those it can see … For example, it either can’t see Brown or Black people, or sees them as criminals (see Meredith Broussard, More than a Glitch [2024]).

It’s the unfortunate truth that our technological future can be extrapolated from the present and past: Technology based on the hegemonic culture’s values means capitalistic extraction, exploitation, and exhaustion (of both people and the world’s resources); broken algorithms and a degraded natural environment. It may mean wealth but only for a few. Might it be possible that non-Western epistemologies—with their different orientation—may offer us different ideas for our technological future? The answer is yes—but we have to look for them.

What’s happened as we’ve tried to dream of the future is the shattering and proliferation of genres. This isn’t the bad thing some may imagine it to be: In that proliferation is diversity, and the opening up of space to voices that may otherwise remain unheard. This is truly a case of the more, the merrier. The problem isn’t too many futurisms; it’s that we don’t open ourselves up to the resources we’re creating from our varied ways of seeing the world. Sadaf Padder proposes a framework for South Asian Futurisms that’s constructive, open-ended, and exploratory. This feels to me like a good goal for what we can call the unified genre of world futurisms, a kind of marketplace of ideas.

We are entangled. I’ve begun to think around the idea of not siloing stories from different traditions (and genres, which are after all an invention of marketers from publishing houses). What if we thought of African and Indigenous North American and Chinese and Aboriginal stories, of all futurisms as part of a kind of mycelial network?

I am indebted for this thought to Merlin Sheldrake and his 2020 book on fungi, Entangled Life, which introduced me to many mind-expanding realisations about the possibilities of mycelial networks. Mycelium does fun things. It’s a transportation network for nutrients. It can sense what’s happening in its environment, interpret those signals, and respond. It links various fungal bodies. Mycelial networks are now thought to be the way individual plants (and trees) communicate with each other.

In An Earnest Blackness (2023), Eugen Bacon introduces the idea of what I’ve decided to call a textual mycelial (or mycorrhizal) network. She says:

The main elements of the rhizome are heterogeneity and (inter)connections that form a dialectic multiplicity. The rhizome has no center. It spreads continually from beginning to end. It adapts. It deviates.

We all have blind spots: every human, every human culture. What if we aligned ourselves to each other in such a way as to minimise those? We could build much bigger, better, more inclusive futures! How expansive our world(s) would become. A future where everyone exists, and even flourishes.

We can dream.

A language note: in this essay, I use the terminology of “pregnant people” and “people capable of becoming pregnant” to be inclusive of trans, non-binary, and gender-expansive people who may have this experience, but I also refer to “women” in the context of reproductive norms that have been attached to those viewed through the lens of womanhood.

The Horrors of Ectogenesis

The use of the term “ectogenesis” to refer to the gestation of a human fetus outside of the body came from J. B. S. Haldane, a scientist who was based at the University of Cambridge, in 1923. In his paper “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future,” Haldane made several predictions for our technological progress: He said that it would become possible to synthesize a chemical to “prolong a woman’s youth” (in “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future” [1924], p. 74); and he prophesied that, in a future where ectogenesis becomes universal, “less than 30 per cent of children are now born of woman” (p. 65). Haldane also claimed that ectogenesis would allow for “the separation of sexual love and reproduction” (p. 65). These proposals were his utopian dream—but for his friend, Aldous Huxley, they were horrifying.

Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) was a response to Haldane’s predictions, and portrayed ectogenesis as dystopian. In Brave New World, babies are mass engineered in “The Hatchery” and are assigned a social class. The concepts of marriage and the family no longer exist, and one of the main characters, Lenina, is portrayed as sexually promiscuous. Huxley contrasts this dystopian “New World” with the “Savage Reservation” where social relationships mirror those of 1920s Britain and the US. One character from the Reservation, John, is horrified by Lenina’s sexuality, instead desiring her courtship. Upon visiting the New World, and participating in an orgy, John ends his life. The novel clearly reflects Huxley’s anxieties about women’s sexuality and his views of ectogenesis—the removal of reproductive, and therefore marital, responsibility from women—as the cause of social decline. Huxley is telling us that without marriage, sexual restraint, and natural birth, men like John can have no place in the world.

S. Trimble writes that horror “taps into the white patriarchal nightmare” (“A Demon-Girl’s Guide to Life” in Joe Vallese (ed.), It Came From The Closet [2022] pp.13-24, 17). I think the same can be said of science fiction. Barbara Creed identifies the association between women and the monstrous, almost always in relation to mothering or reproduction, as a common trope within horror and science fiction (The Monstrous-Feminine [1993], p. 7). The Matrix (1999) shows one of the most horrifying examples of ectogenesis, with its “fetus fields” where human babies are synthetically grown and harvested for the Machine’s simulation. The pods that humans are transferred to also resemble artificial wombs: The body is plugged in to the pod chamber using umbilical-like plugs, keeping it alive but unconscious. In The Matrix, reproductive technology is not merely the source of social decline, but enables the total domination of humanity. In the Alien franchise, external gestation is again part of the horror. The way that the Xenomorphs breed is itself a form of ectogenesis, only it is a human body and not an artificial one that acts as the gestational device. In Alien: Resurrection (1997), we are shown a laboratory full of strange fluid-filled vats containing the failed Ripley/Xenomorph hybrids. These vessels are growing clones not fetuses, but they are what science fiction imagines ectogenesis to be: highly technological, repulsive, and capable of creating monstrosities.

Eugenics and the Artificial Womb

In many science fiction stories, ectogenesis becomes bound up with eugenics and genetic manipulation. Depending on the way you read them, these eugenics narratives either reveal conservative anxieties about reproductive technologies, or they feed into alt-right hopes for the future. Gattaca (1997), for example, shows us a dystopian future in which artificial wombs are used to produce the “valids”—humans with a longer life expectancy, greater strength and stamina, and a lower risk of illness. Those that are conceived naturally—the “in-valids”—are deemed to be genetically inferior and are therefore subjected to discrimination. The movie follows the protagonist, Vincent, through his attempts to hide his “in-valid” status.

In a recent Nature Genetics article on the film, Greenbaum and Gerstein argue that Gattaca cautions us about the impacts of genetic determinism (“GATTACA Is Still Pertinent 25 Years Later,” Nature Genetics 54 (2022): pp. 1758-1760, 1760). The eugenicist future in Gattaca is particularly problematic from the perspective of disability and reproductive rights, but the movie does not address these issues. Whilst Vincent is disabled, the movie is not concerned with the value of social diversity and the lives of people with disabilities; what makes Vincent valuable is, by the end of the movie, his ability to transcend his physical limitations. Disabled writers critique the common trope of characters defying disability by sheer willpower or perseverance, which suggests that disabled people could overcome their disabilities if they tried (for example, see Marieke Nijkamp’s “The Trope of Curing Disability” in Disability in Kidlit [2014], and Fay Onyx’s “Respectfully Depicting a Character Adapting to a Disability” in Mythcreants [2021].) With the focus on Vincent, the impact of curtailing the reproductive choices of people capable of becoming pregnant—whose pregnancies would be condemned in favour of the artificial womb—is ignored. David M. Higgins has highlighted this prevalence of “alt-victimhood” in science fiction. In Reverse Colonization (2021), he has shown that this is a trope which “enables subjects who occupy positions of social advantage to inhabit an imaginative space of besieged victimhood” (Reverse Colonization, p. 31). In Gattaca’s future, it is not those that have historically been subjected to reproductive violence and oppression that are shown as victims of genetic discrimination. Gattaca does not consider the impact of controlled reproduction on people capable of becoming pregnant, people of colour, or people with disabilities. Rather, our victim is the Western white man.

Gattaca’s anti-ectogenesis politics contrast the dystopia of the artificial womb with the promise of natural birth, as Vincent overcomes his genetic limitations by the end of the film. In some iterations of the Superman mythos, Kal-El is born from an artificial womb—the Kryptonian Birthing Matrix—just like every other Kryptonian. In others, however, he is conceived and born naturally. In the movie Man of Steel (2012), Henry Cavill’s Kal-El is the first natural birth in generations, a fact that enables him to be free from genetic manipulation as well as facilitating his escape from the destabilising Krypton. We again see the presence of eugenics and control in conjunction with ectogenesis in this movie: The social class of Kryptonians is genetically predetermined and, as a result of this technology, there is no free will. While the eugenics of Gattaca is meant to make humans stronger, Vincent is able to prove himself just as capable as his “valid” counterparts; while Superman, of course, is extremely powerful—and in Man of Steel, it is his natural origins that enable him to fulfil his destiny as Earth’s hero. In both stories, then, ectogenesis—through its extension into genetic manipulation—is shown to hold men back.

For the alt-right, however, Gattaca has also worked as a pro-ectogenesis (and pro-eugenics) story. In recent years, Silicon Valley tech billionaires have been investing millions of dollars into the development of reproductive technologies including fertility testing, genetic screening for in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), and even the development of artificial wombs. Their concern with pre-implantation diagnosis—the genetic testing of embryos before IVF as a means of avoiding genetic disabilities—blurs into Gattaca’s idea of the “superbaby” and the ability to “design” one’s offspring. The movie has inspired Gattaca Genomics, a company specialising in “next generation genome screening” which is currently engaged in a study to enhance embryo selection for IVF through the use of AI timelapse imaging. There are numerous companies offering similar services—such as Genomic Prediction, a company that has previously claimed that their genetic scoring system can be used to select for intelligence and improved health. Elon Musk has already expressed the desire for more “smart people” to have children. Of course, only the wealthy can afford to use this technology: Genomic Prediction charge a fee of $1,000 and an additional $400 per embryo on top of the costs of IVF treatment; Orchid charges much more, at $2,500 per embryo. The inaccessibility of reproductive technologies for the majority of society is itself a part of the alt-right eugenicist future: They believe that only wealthy, intelligent super-humans belong there. As Carroll also highlights, this future is racialized; these super-humans will almost always be imagined as white (see Speculative Whiteness, pp. 57-58).

It’s Just Fiction… Isn’t It?

Ectogenesis is on our horizon. In 2017, researchers in Philadelphia created an artificial womb system called the “Biobag” which successfully supported the development of fetal lambs at the end of their gestational period (see Emily A. Partridge et al., “An Extra-Uterine System to Physiologically Support the Extreme Premature Lamb,” Nature Communications8 [2017]). Researchers in the Netherlands are now working on a prototype which they estimate could be ready for human trials within the next five years. The idea behind these prototypes is to support extremely premature infants by continuing their gestation artificially; this is a technology that could save many lives where infant mortality is caused by issues such as the underdevelopment of the lungs. It could revolutionise neonatal care. As artificial womb technology improves, allowing for the gestation of a fetus for longer and longer, it could one day be possible to have children entirely by ectogenesis. This could have significant benefits in terms of enabling biological parenthood for people who either cannot or do not want to become pregnant. Feminist scholars have written about the emancipatory potential of the artificial womb, as women would no longer be tied to their reproductive capacity (see, for example, Kathryn MacKay’s “The ‘Tyranny of Reproduction’: Could Ectogenesis Further Women’s Liberation?” in Bioethics 34(4) [2020], pp. 346-353; or Giulia Cavaliere’s “Gestation, Equality and Freedom: Ectogenesis as a Political Perspective” in Journal of Medical Ethics 46(2) [2020], pp. 76-82).

This is not the perspective on ectogenesis that we see in science fiction, and it is not the perspective on ectogenesis held by the tech billionaires likely to influence this technology. While the development of the artificial womb is being undertaken by medical research teams, we have already seen corporate influence over IVF and the fertility industry. Prominent figures in the tech industry such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel are investing in the development of artificial wombs in conjunction with genetic testing. These figures are highly pronatalist, believing that the future of humanity relies on “the trillions unborn” that will inhabit the future (again, see Speculative Whiteness, p. 57). Musk has pushed fears of population collapse in order to encourage women to have more babies, and he himself has used IVF and surrogacy to have children. Ectogenesis, then, is a means to mass produce the super-humans of the future—a future that does not need to inconveniently rely on pregnant people.

These tech billionaires, and the alt-right more generally, have adopted “longtermism”—the belief that the long-term future is more of a moral priority than the present. This is why those with the wealth and power to tackle pressing issues such as climate change are instead putting their resources into generative AI, space flight, and reproductive technologies: In this philosophy, a high-tech science fiction future, and its imagined master species, matter more than today’s citizens. The longtermists have written their own science fiction to this effect: venture capitalist Bryan Johnson has a self-published novel about children who have achieved “untold enhancement” of the mind and body (see Johnson’s We the People [2023]; you may know Johnson as the man who injected his seventeen-year-old son’s blood plasma into his own body as part of his quest for extended life expectancy). On the more overtly eugenicist front, the French alt-right politician Guillaume Faye wrote about the use of “incubators and ‘supersperm’ […] as means of increasing birth rates and especially improving the genetic performance of the ruling elite” (Faye’s Archeofuturism [1997, 2010], p. 245). The elite are the ones to benefit from ectogenesis. Ari Schulman asks us to “imagine the headlines if the first baby born from an artificial womb is not to a sympathetic middle-class couple unable to conceive after a hysterectomy but to a polycule of tech gurus with designs of populating a seasteading colony.”

The longtermist narrative is a part of mainstream science fiction, not just the writings of the alt-right and tech billionaires. Carroll points out that the alt-right are not merely interlopers into science fiction, as the genre has never been innocent of these ideas (Speculative Whiteness, p. 19). In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the Star Child represents the dawn of a new age for humanity. As Dave Bowman transcends his aged human form, he becomes a fetus in an orb of light floating above space—rebirth among the cosmos, exactly what the tech elites aspire to. In 2001, we see three monoliths appearing at key moments in the evolution of humans, the first appearing at the point where apes discover how to use tools and the last appearing just before Bowman is transformed. Cosmic transformation is, the movie tells us, a natural part of our evolution; an inevitability, even. Palmer Rampell has critiqued the movie for its “implicitly pro-life imagination of birth that does not include women”—but this is what the longtermists imagine (see Rampell’s “The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade” in English Literary History 85(1) [2018], pp. 221-252). They are not concerned with humanity’s current struggles, not to mention women and pregnant people’s reproductive rights.

Now my argument here is not that science fiction has directly shaped the development of reproductive technologies. However, as Jake Casella Brookins has argued in his “Anti-Defense of Science Fiction,” “it’s been part of it, been produced by those social and material conditions and fed back into them.” Science fiction (along with its writers, producers, and directors) is capable of shaping people’s attitudes towards technology, and of perpetuating harmful gendered, racialised, and ableist stereotypes. Casella Brookins therefore invites us to ask, “what conditions SF has averted, and what conditions it has, actually, inspired, what it tolerates and condones.” The science fiction I have discussed in this essay simultaneously condones the development of reproductive technologies which could have significant positive effects, whilst also encouraging pronatalist and eugenicist uses of the artificial womb.

This has real policy implications. When IVF was first developed, concerns were raised over “test tube babies” and the potential effects on those children, with Huxley’s Brave New World repeatedly referenced in policy and lawmaking contexts. Now, blog posts and articles on the potential development of the artificial womb almost always reference Gattaca to talk about the dystopia that could come with reproductive technology. (I write more about all this in “Reproductive Justice: The Final (Feminist) Frontier”—see Law, Technology and Humans 2(4) [2022], pp. 95-108). IVF is, of course, now very common worldwide—but as a profit-making and often pronatalist tool, encouraging biological parenthood and valuing the eggs and sperm of some people (based, often, on race and class) over others (see Donna J. Drucker, Fertility Technology [2023]). The fearmongering over ectogenesis sits alongside its neocapitalist promise, and this is likely to have real implications for how the artificial womb is regulated. When the Alabama Supreme Court classed embryos as children in 2024, it was met with as much opposition from the right-wing as from pro-choice movements, because of the impact the ruling would have on the fertility industry. As a result, Donald Trump—despite being open about his anti-abortion attitudes—has expressed support for the availability of IVF. Once artificial wombs are ready for human use, they may be restricted or they may be available for profit—but it seems like at no point will pregnant people (or those that would meaningfully benefit from the technology) be part of the conversation. Instead, this future technology will be shaped by wealthy tech entrepreneurs and the science fiction they look up to.

Reclaiming Our Reproductive Futures

Not all science fiction depicts ectogenesis in such problematic ways. Feminist science fiction, both utopian and dystopian, has introduced nuanced perspectives on future reproductive technologies. Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time gives us a glimpse of a utopian future where artificial wombs are part of a post-capitalist community. In this future, children are raised by three “mothers” of any gender and the biological family as we know it no longer exists. People are polyamorous and sexually liberated, and children, no longer tied to a set of parents, are encouraged to be independent. The novel mirrors the radical feminism of Shulamith Firestone, whose 1970 manifesto The Dialectic of Sex proposed a socialist gender-liberated future in which ectogenesis would free pregnant people from the “tyranny of reproduction.”

More recent speculative fiction that explores ectogenesis is more pessimistic about its potential. Helen Sedgewick’s The Growing Season (2017) imagines an alternative present with an artificial womb system called the “pouch” that is based within a patriarchal, capitalist background against in which a corporation is responsible for the creation of the technology. In Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City (2024), the infertile protagonist Nelah is able to have a baby using an artificial womb, the “Wombcubator.” The technology is expensive, however, and Nelah is warned that the fertility centre may switch off the device, or requisition the baby for another family, should they fail to keep up with the monthly payments. What makes these dystopias fundamentally different from those of Brave New World is that the horror does not stem from the technology itself, but from those that can control and influence it. These feminist novels act as a critique of the direction in which we are heading, of the current conditions for reproductive technologies, and how this would shape the use of artificial wombs. Most importantly, these novels explore the impact of this on those that experience pregnancy. The technology could be life-changing for many people, but this promise is hampered by patriarchal capitalism.

Critics of science fiction such as Carroll and Casella Brookins speak of reclaiming the genre, to imagine a future that belongs to us all. Feminist science fiction operates as a critique of current patriarchal structures, but also as a way of imagining new reproductive futures. For ectogenesis, this means reclaiming it in feminist thought—portraying the artificial womb as something other than horrific and repulsive, considering the impacts that it could have on people capable of becoming pregnant, and imagining a context where the technology could be emancipatory. To borrow a phrase from Firestone, this requires us to “seize the means of reproduction” from the tech billionaires and alt-right politicians, and dismantle the patriarchal norms that science fiction (re)produces. However, as N. K. Jemisin has argued in relation to the whiteness and racism of US science fiction, it “is not enough for the SF world to have an Octavia [Butler], or even three or four. It is not enough for the SF world to passively wait for PoCs, and women, and all the other groups that currently disdain SF—because SF has disdained them—to come to it.” The genre must (and as Jemisin argues, will eventually have no choice but to) evolve.