Editorials - Strange Horizons https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress A Magazine of Speculative Fiction Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:22:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 A Magazine of Speculative Fiction Editorials - Strange Horizons false Editorials - Strange Horizons webmaster@strangehorizons.com podcast A Magazine of Speculative Fiction Editorials - Strange Horizons https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/powerpress/rss_default.jpg https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/editorials/ 118787414 Statement on ICE Operations in the USA https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/statement-on-ice-operations-in-the-usa/ Strange Horizons staff]]> Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:09:59 +0000 https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58513 In the United States, immigrants and their loved ones and communities have been reckoning with intensified anti-immigrant operations for months. Every day, people are abducted, and many of those being targeted live in hiding, supported by their neighbors.

Strange Horizons stands with immigrants in the US facing these conditions. At this time, we have the opportunity to lend our strength as a global community to a strategy that organizers in impacted areas have been using: putting pressure on hotels not to provide rooms for the agents, making their operations that much more difficult to enact.

This year, Worldcon will be hosted in Los Angeles, California, and the hotels they have partnered with are two major providers of accommodations for anti-immigrant operations: Hilton and Marriott. We all can help by contacting the hotels with our concerns, and/or by contacting Worldcon 2026 organizers about their choice of hotel partners. The risk of losing the revenue from convention attendees has the potential to sway the hotel chains' decision makers at the top.


]]> 58513 Who Is It For? https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/who-is-it-for/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:59:40 +0000 https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58420 “As readers and critics,” Sally Parlier writes in her review for us this week of Payton McCarty-Simas’s work of criticism, That Very Witch, “we all naturally bring ourselves to the experience of a text.” This is profoundly true, perhaps also obviously true—and in possessing both these qualities it can often go unsaid. But the reality, of course, is that, in writing about a text, critics are also rather often writing about themselves. This isn’t just about autocriticism—that recent form of nonfiction, championed for example by Lara Feigel, in which a critic writes explicitly from within their own life. It’s about all criticism, all writing. As Seamus Heaney put it for poets: “I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

But this places criticism in danger of accusations of solipsism. We have often written in this space—that is, in the editorial for our annual Criticism Special—about what criticism is, or what it is for. But who is it for?

There’s a telling moment in this issue’s edition of the podcast Critical Friends—a takeover by Tristan Beiter’s Ursula K. Le Guin book club—in which Tymek Chrzanowski suggests that “a big difference between the book club and an academic environment is … you’re in a class  … You are engaging with it for reasons beyond merely your interest and passion. Whereas in the book club, this is a fully voluntary thing we’re doing with friends.” So perhaps part of what shapes how useful criticism is to a given person is the context in which it is made. Are you an academic or a lay reader, an autodidact or a professionalised scholar? And what kind of work are you presenting to an audience as a consequence?

In this issue, we have tried to showcase accessible criticism from multiple settings. Alexander Dickow, professor of French at Virginia Tech, provides us a careful overview of recent trends in francophone SFF; Roseanna Pendlebury writes as a fan attempting to define the genre; O. F. Cieri writes politically about some of its oldest verities. In their own essay, Ruthanna Emrys, Lila Garrott, and Alexis Shotwell align a range of perspectives—the fiction-writer’s, the editor’s, the philosopher’s—to obtain a bird’s-eye view of how SFF does and might yet imagine new modes of being and doing. Our poets in this issue do similarly, offering an analysis of their own work in a really striking bit of self-reflexive criticism. There are, we hope, multiple vectors.

In another of this issue’s essays (we try to treat you at this time of year), Zach Gillan argues that “the best weird fiction leaves us with this uncertainty, this impossibility of knowing for sure.” Maybe the best criticism does, too. But it can only do so in toto, as a gestalt, as … dread word, this … a conversation. Good criticism is accumulated over time, from multiple perspectives and for multiple purposes.

For instance, to review one novel by Ben Alderson, Hana Carolina finds the need to read many. What emerges is a review that is unusually alive to its chosen text’s many resonances, and indeed its contexts. Bill Capossere performs a similar trick in his review of Steven Erikson’s latest Malazan novel. Both these reviews are particularly worth your time—they are longer than our usual reviews, but they offer a lot as a result.

And this is probably the point: good criticism is useful. For writers— Amritesh Mukherjee helps us think about the tricks and traps of adaptation; for activists—Phoenix Scholz unpicks, again at productive length, the ways in which Hiron Ennes achieves their particular kind of queering; and, most importantly, readers—you will find a welter of fantastic recommendations for your next book in our roundtable on influence. In that last piece, Yvette Lisa Ndluvu defines influence, incisively, as “giving permission … to play, to experiment, to be weird.” Our goal here has been to provide an issue capacious enough to offer a range of permissions to as many kinds of readers as possible.

It can feel—again—solipsistic to harp on about the importance of talking about books (and other texts) at this particular parlous moment in history. Perhaps it always has done. But thinking about and with each other might in fact be an answer as well as a way of asking a question. As for the question with which this editorial opened, its answer might be: Criticism is, or at least needs to be (in this moment and all the others), for everyone.

At least, that’s one point of view.


]]> 58420 For Your Consideration: Strange Horizons 2025 Award Eligibility https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/for-your-consideration-strange-horizons-2025-award-eligibility/ Strange Horizons staff]]> Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:15:57 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=57774&preview=true&preview_id=57774 The year is drawing to a close, and we can't help but get wistful. Our 25th year in print—and what a year it's been! We had two nominees in the inaugural Best Poem Hugo, and one of them won. We had stories and poems nominated for the Ignyte, Rhysling, and Hugo awards. We raised a historic amount during our 25th Fund Drive, getting us ready for another spectacular year of stories, poems, reviews, essays, podcasts, and art, with some fantastic special issues in the works as well. And to top it all off, our 25th anniversary podcast, Strange Horizons at 25, was on the longlist for the Best Fancast Hugo Award.

So to everyone who reads us, or listens to the podcasts, or who donated to our Fund Drive or is a member of our Patreon—thank you for celebrating our birthday with us. Onward to year 26! And if you are catching up with your 2025 reading and listening, and would like a refresher on what Strange Horizons works are eligible for various awards, read on.

Jump to section:

Magazine Eligibility • Editors • Fiction (Novelettes • Short Stories) • Poetry • Podcasts • Non-Fiction (Articles • Columns) • Reviews • Art

(This list will be updated with more stories and other content due for publication in December.)

Magazine Eligibility

Strange Horizons in its entirety is eligible for the Locus Award for Best Magazine, British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

Editors

All of our Editors in Fiction, Poetry, Reviews, and Non-Fiction are eligible individually for the Best Editor - Short Form Hugo Award, and the Best Editor category in the Locus Awards, Nebula Awards, and elsewhere.

The 2025 team was:

  • Fiction: Hebe Stanton, Aigner Loren Wilson, Dante Luiz, Kathryn Weaver, Joyce Ch'ng
  • Poetry: Romie Stott, Vanessa Jae, Lisa M Bradley, AJ Odasso
  • Non-Fiction: Gautam Bhatia, Joyce Ch'ng, Anneke Schwob
  • Reviews: Dan Hartland, Aishwarya Subramanian

Fiction

Everything in our 2025 archives is eligible for a variety of SFF short fiction awards. For your convenience, we've categorised them by length, as well as by Special Issue where applicable.

  • As many of the stories below constitute the author's professional debut in the genre, this may make them eligible for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. If a particular work has inspired you and you would like to nominate the author, please seek out their eligibility post on social media or their website, and, if unsure, reach out to them to confirm that they can be nominated. We're sure they'd be delighted to hear from you.

Novelettes - Over 7,500 words

Short Stories - Under 7,500 words

Stop Copaganda Special Issue:

The Afrosurrealist Special Issue, funded by our 2024 Kickstarter:

Poetry

All poems below are eligible for the Rhysling Award, and shorter poems under 10 lines are eligible for the Dwarf Stars Award. If any of the poets listed below have had a chapbook or book of poetry published in the last year, it would be eligible for the Elgin Award.

LAcon V has announced that a Best Poem Hugo Award will be their special category this year, following on from a successful first-stage campaign to enshrine the award in the WSFS rules after its inaugural appearance at Seattle Worldcon—and therefore we'd love it if you checked out the wonderful work we got to publish in 2025 and nominate your favorites when the time comes.

* Part of the Afrosurrealist Special Issue.

Podcasts

Did you know we have four different podcasts as part of the Strange Horizons podcast feed? If you didn't, there is so much you can discover!

Whether you like our audio fiction, which curates narrations of stories previously published in print on the magazine, or our non-fiction content—from our Strange Horizons at 25 celebration interviews, to our Critical Friends discussions on SFF criticism, or the Writing While Disabled podcast format column—there is something here for everyone, always in service of championing diverse and impactful speculative fiction, as well as interesting perspectives and conversations on it.

Fiction Podcast

All fiction stories that were podcasted in 2025 are individually eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work, the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form, and the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, while the Fiction Podcast as a whole is eligible for the Ignyte Award for Best Fiction Podcast.

Here are all our 2025 Episodes:

Strange Horizons At 25

Our 25th anniversary celebration limited podcast series hit its stride in 2025, with 11 interviews and one special episode on our anniversary issue available for your enjoyment. The podcast as a whole, helmed by Editors Kat Kourbeti and Michael Ireland, is eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo Award, while individual episodes are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work.

Critical Friends

The SFF criticism podcast from Review Editors Dan Hartland and Aisha Subramanian is eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo Award, while individual episodes are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work.

The episodes published in 2025 are:

Writing While Disabled

The column on wrangling a writing career and disability from authors Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston is now in podcast format, and therefore eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo Award, while individual episodes are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work.

The episodes published in 2025 are:

Non-Fiction

Our robust non-fiction offering covers the whole range from short reviews to in-depth essays, with a smattering of unique formats. All the pieces below are a joy to read, and add a little something to the greater speculative fiction conversation.

The individual essays and reviews are eligible for the BSFA Shorter Non-Fiction Award, Ignyte Award for Outstanding Creative Non-Fiction, and Best Related Work Hugo Award, and every author listed below is also eligible for the Ignyte Critics Award and Best Fan Writer Hugo Award (alongside their other work from this year - please seek it out and support them if you enjoy their work here).

The editors who commissioned and edited the pieces—credited at the bottom of each article—are eligible for Best Editor - Short Form in the Hugos, and Best Editor in the Locus Awards and elsewhere.

Columns

Articles

* Part of our Annual Criticism Special Issue.

Reviews

* Part of our Annual Criticism Special Issue
** Part of our SFF in Translation Week.

Art

Last but not least, the original art accompanying our fiction pages this year is eligible for awards as well. The art itself is eligible for the BSFA Award for Best Artwork, and the artists are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist and the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award.

“The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon” © 2025 by Duds Saldanha

“Because I Held His Name Like a Key” © 2025 by Catarina João

Thank you for considering us and the work we published for your ballots this year; especially for the democratically-awarded ones, where your vote in either the longlist or shortlist stages means the world.

We hope you'll enjoy next year's output just as much, and as we say on the Strange Horizons Podcast... until next time, stay strange!


]]> 57774 Speculative Poetry and the Hugos https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/speculative-poetry-and-the-hugos/ Mon, 21 Jul 2025 05:39:32 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=56694 Speculative poetry has always been a part of my DNA. The very first poem I ever wrote was as part of a book report response to Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza City of Masks—a YA portal fantasy. When I think of my favourite poems growing up, I think of Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry, the walking songs in Tolkien, Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” and others in a similar speculative vein. When I took a course in University on the history of Fantasy literature, over half the course was comprised of poetry: Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare. Poetry and the speculative are fundamentally intertwined.

I began publishing poetry in 2017 and was floored to receive my first Aurora Award nomination in 2018. For a Canadian, the Auroras are the biggest spec award out there, and I had often heard about the greatest trifecta a Canadian speculative writer could achieve: an Aurora, a Hugo, and a Nebula, the so-called “Big Three.” I was devastated to find out that of these, only the Auroras recognized poetry. Despite this lock-out, the speculative community, and especially the speculative poetry community welcomed me with open arms. While the majority of folks in the SFF space are friendly, poetry folks in my experience are especially kind and encouraging, because we are used to tempting individuals down what people generally view as the scary rabbit hole of poetry.

Poetry is often daunting to those unused to dabbling in its mystic waters for the first time because it is often less familiar to readers—in part because it is not elevated and publicized through awards like the Hugos. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association is there to support speculative poets more broadly, and gives out important awards in the field, but the SFPA’s specific focus on poetry silos poets apart from other writers. In general, the exclusion of poetry from the Hugos and the Nebulas is a deep wound which prevents the speculative community from properly supporting and including poets, and has at times pushed poets and would-be poets away from celebrating genre elements in the form of poetry.

A novel cannot be a short story cannot be a flash story cannot be a poem, and vice versa. These are all different ways of telling stories, and particular stories are best expressed at certain lengths and in certain styles. Some genre work simply wants to be poetry. It flourishes in poetry. Refusing to acknowledge poetry as a style worthy of a Hugo award diminishes its status within the genre, and disincentivizes the writing and publication of poetry.

According to Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos, the Hugo Award continues to be the most influential speculative award globally, in terms of book sales. For good reasons or bad ones, the Hugos also tend to be the most widely covered genre award in big newspapers like The New York Times, The Guardian, and NPR. A high profile for speculative poetry, especially if that profile is to transcend the in-group of dedicated genre readers and writers, requires the inclusion of poetry in the Hugo Awards.

Poetry, too, is a perfect point at which to expand the borders of the genre community—after all, just as many folks read Tennyson as fantasy, many also read him simply as a poetry great. Poetry is in a unique position as a style to transcend the boundaries of literary and of genre categories, inviting new audiences to see the value in the trappings and subject matter of SF/F.

Hugo Award winning writer Amal El-Mohtar has often written about how poetry was a fundamental scaffold for her writing, and how that scaffold was inspired by Tolkien himself. She writes in an interview, “Tolkien began writing poetry, then moved into short stories, then novels. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s how you become a writer,’ and set about doing the same thing.” Similarly, Hugo Award winner Seanan McGuire notes in her bio and in several articles and interviews the importance of learning to write sonnets (first at the age of six, and later as an extended practice inspired by Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin) as an essential part of her writing journey.

Hugo Award winner Catherynne Valente has a similar story, expressing even more strongly that originally she had “no interest in writing fiction at all … Everything I ever learned about writing until after my first novel was published was in the realm of poetry.” Sadly, she’s also shared that as she gained recognition for her prose, she stopped writing poetry because poetry does not pay as well as prose, and because “fantasy poetry folks still struggle for respect and attention.” Having a speculative poem category on the Hugo ballot is the chance to give speculative poetry the respect and attention it deserves, and will incentivize great writers to continue writing poetry.

For those who enjoy poetry and the speculative but are not so enmired in the bureaucracy and community activism that supports a speculative poetry ecosystem, I found it often came as a shock that there is no Hugo for poetry. Even editors I approached to support this initiative were surprised to have forgotten this oversight in the genre. R. Graeme Cameron, publisher of the magazines Polar Borealis and Polar Starlight, had this to say in response to my email asking for his support: “I had forgotten there is no poetry category in the Hugos. I find this shocking. If the primary function of the Hugos is to celebrate science fiction literature, this failure to include poetry needs to be corrected. It is such a vital part of the genre.”

It is a strange dualism to straddle—the idea that poetry can be so essential to the speculative genre, and also so much the maligned and redheaded stepchild when it comes to accolades and the ability to build a career off of the back of poetry alone. Poetry is the foundation upon which many of the SF/F greats built their craft; it’s the foundation upon which the genre is built going back as far as the ancient epics; and yet genre writers are now driven away from poetry because it lacks the opportunity for prestige that other styles have—and because it simply cannot pay the bills.

The tide is turning, though. The tireless activism of speculative poets like Brandon O’Brien and Holly Lyn Walrath, among others, have meant that we do have a speculative poetry award at this year’s Hugos, and that poetry can now confer eligibility to join SFWA—the closest thing genre writers have to a union. My asks for support of the Poetry Hugo initiative were met with unanimous support from magazine paragons of the genre including Asimov’s, Analog, and Strange Horizons, and individual editors themselves. The tension of poetry’s role in the speculative genre is surmountable.

Accepting contradictory things and holding warring ideas both in conflict and in harmony is one of the things poetry excels at. Poetry is always crossing worlds, always living in multiplicity, quantum entanglement, in the realm of dreams and hope. It’s time to let this medium of the speculative shine, and include it in the broader conversation of genre in a time where there are myriad disruptions to the field.

If you are interested in ensuring that poetry can get the speculative spotlight it deserves, and preserving this important aspect of SF/F’s past and future, you can support the speculative poetry initiative by learning more at https://www.poetryhugo.com/, and  you can sign up for email updates. If you are a member of WorldCon 2025, you can also join in the business meetings and vote in support of making poetry a permanent fixture on the Hugo ballot. If science fiction and fantasy are the genres of the future, and the genres of inclusiveness—expanding our circles of care to those in other worlds and far-flung futures—it simply must also include poetry. As a matter of preservation of the foundation the genre rests on, and as a matter of futurity in ensuring the genre remains open to the widest possible imaginings, poetry must be a part of the Hugos. It’s time.


]]> 56694 Dream Logic, Hauntings, and Joy: An Introduction to the AfroSurreal Special Issue https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/editorials/dream-logic-hauntings-and-joy-an-introduction-to-the-afrosurreal-special-issue/ Strange Horizons staff]]> Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:00:31 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=56535 “AfroSurrealism presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”

— D. Scott Miller, the “Afrosurreal Manifesto.”

Storytelling is how we uncover what’s been buried, that invisible world striving to manifest. It is with deep gratitude that we present the Strange Horizons AfroSurreal Special Issue. We want to begin by thanking the Strange Horizons team for their belief in this vision, and for providing the platform and trust to bring it to life. Special thanks to the speculative fiction and poetry community for uplifting the call, and to every reader, writer, and artist who continues to make space for the strange, the dreamlike, the in-between.

The AfroSurreal issue was born from a desire to gather work that plays with perception and memory, that bends time and subverts logic, that centers the lived and imagined experiences of Black people in their full, kaleidoscopic complexity. We received submissions from across the diaspora, from worlds haunted by the spectres of colonialism and slavery and shaped by collective resistance, where the veil between the real and the surreal has always been thin. Thank you to everyone who shared their work with us. Reading your stories and poems was a gift, and we hope to see your names echo loudly in issues and books to come.

AfroSurrealism is not just a genre: it’s an inheritance. A praxis. A refusal. It emerges from an artistic lineage that includes the paintings of Wangechi Mutu and Harmonia Rosales, the fiction of Toni Morrison and Kojo Laing, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and M. NourbeSe Philip. It’s in the myths whispered by grandmothers and in the speculative architecture of Black urban futures. AfroSurrealism dares to say: the fantastical is already here. The rupture is not a break from reality, it is reality.

In fiction, our table of contents features three stories that highlight a range of voices, tones, and styles. “Till Earth and Heaven Ring” by K. S. Walker draws on critical fabulation to tell a story of two lovers self-emanacipating, and a hole in one’s chest that whispers freedom. “The Black Refinery” by Nadia Amatullah King invokes sand trolls in an allegory about exploitation, resistance, and what it means to be human in a world that treats certain bodies as expendable resources. Rutendo Chidzodzo’s “Let Sleeping Hyenas Lie” situates us in a land dispute between an indigenous African community and a gentrifying international corporation.

In poetry, language turns fluid to melt, recode, and re-member. NOVA CYPRESS BLACK’s “SET IT OFF (1996) – FANS’ CUT” uses the Golden Shovel form to reimagine the ending of the Black classic film Set it Off.  “parallels” by Praise Osawaru resists linearity, and the past, present, and future collide. Adebe DeRango-Adem’s “luminaries” is a calligram of a light bulb to meditate on Black invention and erasure, and to honor those ancestors and inventors whose light has been dimmed.

In nonfiction, “A Conjuror’s Manifesto: Notes on the Afrosurreal” by Shyheim Williams reflects on the surrealities of Black life, where joy is hard-won, where history distorts the present, and where the very act of imagining otherwise becomes a radical gesture.

This issue is a chorus of Black voices committed to wonder, mystery, myth, and magic. It is a celebration of the speculative traditions that have always existed within our communities. It is also a call to readers, editors, and publishers to broaden their definitions of genre and form, to welcome the nonlinear, the unsettling, the uncanny.

It has been an immense honor to curate and care for this body of work. We hope this issue opens something inside you—an ache, a portal, a question. Black writers are conjurers and cartographers, reshaping the world word by word.

Without further ado, we invite you to step inside.

 

Warmly,

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu and Shingai Njeri Kagunda

Guest Editors, AfroSurreal Special Issue

Strange Horizons


]]> 56535 Call for Volunteers: Webmaster https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/call-for-volunteers-webmaster/ Mon, 05 May 2025 11:34:40 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=55565 Strange Horizons is looking for a new webmaster to handle the Strange Horizons website. Strange Horizons runs on WordPress. While the website is more or less self-running, from time to time - as with any website - problems and issues arise. As the Webmaster, thus, the following skills will be desirable:
  • PHP and MySQL, with an understanding of WordPress
  • WordPress theme design (HTML/CSS, but with a specific focus on WordPress)
  • An ability to troubleshoot and wrangle a mixture of technical and non-technical requests
This role is ideal for someone with a Computer Science and engineering background, who has the time to dedicate to aiding Strange Horizons. As the Webmaster, you will work closely with the management team, including the co-ordinating editor (Gautam) and administrative editor (Romie), as well as be in touch with the various editorial departments.The time commitment is flexible, as it depends on as and when bugs arise, but we do not anticipate it to go beyond 1-2 hours a week, on an average. You will be assisted with onboarding by our present webmaster, Will Elwood.
--
Please send in your applications to gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com, briefly indicating your interest and background for this role.

]]> 55565 Special Issue: Ageing and SFF https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/special-issue-ageing-and-sff/ Mon, 31 Mar 2025 19:00:52 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=55177 We are delighted to present to you our second special issue of the year. This one is devoted to ageing and SFF, a theme that is ever-present (including in its absence) in the genre. We hope you will enjoy our offering of stories, poetry, essays, and reviews, all commissioned and curated by the Strange Horizons editorial collective.

In Jennifer Hudak's story, “The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon,” a werewolf battles to come to terms with her own ageing. Purbasha Roy's poem, “Everyone Dies,” reflects on, and contemplates the acceptance of death. But if ageing is not simply about an inevitable journey towards death, but also about the transformations on that path, then R.B. Lemberg's “The blanket, the secret, the dark” illumines those transformations through the vivid life-cycle of a butterfly; and Devan Barlow's “A Tree, At Peace” explores a rather different type of bodily transmogrification! And rounding off the poetry, M. Frost's “view” speaks of the mirror to ageing: memory.

We carry this theme forward in our non-fiction. Isabel Black's essay, “Grannies Against Oppression” explores the role of elders in resistance to totalitarianism and oppression by examining the last three books of The Expanse. And while our three reviews of the week are connected by the theme of the International Booker Prize, the thread of ageing also runs through them. In On the Calculation of Volume, we see the reliving of a single day over time; Under the Eye of the Big Words tackles the ageing of the planet, and of species; and finally, the pivotal character in The Book of Disappearance is a grandmother.

We at Strange Horizons hope that this special issue—in the way of all of our special issues—will contribute to a conversation, and to reflections about how the genre engages with ageing, and all that comes in its wake.

 


]]> 55177 Call for Volunteers: Patreon Manager https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/call-for-volunteers-patreon-manager/ Strange Horizons staff]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:35:43 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=54724 Strange Horizons is on the hunt for a new volunteer Patreon Manager to join our team.

Our Patreon Manager will work with our social media team and fundraising team to ensure that Strange Horizons is engaged with our Patreon patrons. The Patreon Manager will also assist with the Strange Horizons annual fundraiser. Responsibilities will include: preparing and updating the Kickstarter page for the annual fundraiser, contacting writers for reward donations, and posting regular updates to the Kickstarter page.

We highly encourage Black, queer, disabled, and/or neurodiverse candidates to apply.

Responsibilities

  • Post weekly updates to Patreon corresponding to each new issue posted on Strange Horizons.
  • Communicate with patrons who send messages through Patreon.
  • Assisting with creating the Kickstarter page for the annual fundraiser, and posting regularly to the Kickstarter page throughout the fund drive.

Requirements

  • Ability to work well with others in an online setting.
  • Excellent communication and writing skills.

Time commitment

You will need to write a post for Patreon to go with each of our weekly issues. This will require reviewing the material in each issue and writing a paragraph or two to present it to patrons. The expected time commitment for this is 1-2 hours per week. During the annual fundraiser and for the month prior, an additional 1-2 hours a week would be needed.

How to apply

If you’re interested, send an email to management@strangehorizons.com with the following subject line: PATREON MANAGER CANDIDATE: your name here (with “your name here” replaced by your actual name, of course).

In the email, introduce yourself, tell us about your relevant experience (if any), let us know a little about why you’d like to join us. You don’t have to have previous experience with Patreon—we want to hear from anyone interested in the position.


]]> 54724 Afrosurrealism Special Issue: Submissions Call https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/afrosurrealism-special-issue-submissions-call/ Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:00:09 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=54507 [Editor's Note: This is the submissions call for Strange Horizons' special issue on AfroSurrealist SF, which was one of our stretch goals in last year's fund-drive, and will be published on June 30. The submissions window for the special issue is April 15 to April 30. Please read this post carefully if you are intending to submit.]

“AfroSurrealism presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”

— D. Scott Miller, the AfroSurreal Manifesto.

Imagine the Sunken Place of Get Out, where reality slips like a trapdoor beneath your feet. Imagine the demon hunters of Ring Shout, fighting horrors that lurk beneath history’s skin. Imagine the surreal logic of Atlanta, the strange landscapes of I Am Not a Witch, the absurdity of Sorry to Bother You and the gothic terror of His House.

Welcome to the Afrosurrealist Special Issue, where the boundaries between the real and the unreal blur, where reality bends, time fractures, and the living and the dead exist side by side. Afrosurrealism has long given shape to our struggles, our power, and our dreams. This special issue seeks to bring those visions to life through stories that cut deep—tales that unsettle, haunt, and liberate.

Many of us have become enchanted by Afrosurrealism through the works of pioneers like D. Scot Miller, Ishmael Reed, and Ralph Ellison. Others found their way here through films like Get Out, Atlanta, and The Burial of Kojo. From the speculative beats of Sun Ra to the haunting visions of Octavia Butler, Afrosurrealism has always existed at the intersection of resistance, reimagination, and the radical transformation of the mundane into the magical.

For this special issue, we are looking for:

  • Worlds that slip between the mundane and the uncanny, the ghostly and the futuristic.
  • Worlds rich with history and spirit striving to manifest—whether set in the past, present, or futures unknown.
  • Tales of hauntings, doppelgängers, liminal spaces, memories, and places that don’t stay put.
  • Give us your tales of portals that lead to nowhere, of cities that rearrange themselves overnight, of people becoming someone—or something—else.
  • Narratives that challenge traditional structures and defy linear storytelling.
  • Works that experiment with or reimagine genres like sword & soul, jujuism, cyberfunk, or Black gothic horror.
  • Visions of power, freedom, and transformation shaped by the Black experience where Blackness itself is a force that bends time, space, and destiny.

Send us your myths. Your nightmares. Your dreams wrapped in ancestral magics and spirit.

The editors for the AfroSurrealism Special invite you to submit fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

We welcome writers who are new and experienced. The submissions call is open to writers of African descent ONLY, whether based in the diaspora or in Africa.  We ask writers to be mindful of cultural appropriation. Rachel Dolezals are not allowed.

Submission Period: April 15 to 30. Fiction, poetry, and non-fiction will be submitted through Strange Horizons' Moksha portal, here:

Submissions Portal:

https://strangehorizons.moksha.io/publication/strange-horizons/afrosurrealism-special-issue/submit

Note this submission category is specifically for this special issue. If you submit something for this issue through, say, the poetry portal, it will go to the wrong editors! Make sure you submit in the Afrosurrealism Special category.

Editorial Team:

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu (she/her) and Shingai Njeri Kagunda (she/they) for Fiction (2,000 – 7,000 words); Poetry (of any length or complexity); Non-Fiction (2,000 – 3,000 words).

Fiction

Yvette and Shingai are looking for the bizarre, otherworldly, dream-like and uncanny realities that are staples of Afrosurrealism, they can be historical or contemporary, or set elsewhere.

Poetry

Yvette and Shingai are looking for speculative poetry. We encourage submissions that play with form, language, and genre.

Nonfiction

Yvette and Shingai want new perspectives on Afrosurrealism, especially by voices underrepresented in the genre like women, queer voices etc (for example essays on queer and feminist interventions of the genre are most welcome).


]]> 54507 On Claims and Criticism https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/on-claims-and-criticism/ Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:14:15 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=54401 Strange Horizons logoOne of the recurring themes of Strange Horizons Criticism Specials has been that we try to avoid grand claims. It is all too easy when one is an enthusiast for a thing to argue that the thing is also important. This is doubly true for a thing that has such a history of self-aggrandisement as Literary Criticism. Only recently, for example, we had one literary scholar being sorry-not-sorry to opine:

It is no coincidence that the decline of reading has coincided with the plummeting cultural authority of literary criticism. If we want to save reading, we must restore literary critics to their former rockstar status.

We must save reading! Literary critics, assemble. But wait! There are even greater, even graver, problems that our method can—and must!—solve. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton argued that “[c]ulture in our time has become nothing less than a full-blooded ideology,” and showed in his working how—in his view—good criticism might be used to arrest this rot. Even those, such as Merve Emre in the New Yorker, who believe all is not well in the critical field seem invested in the idea that it should be, since good criticism—if we could only ensure the good kind was ascendant, or be sure what the good kind is—may serve the common good.

But we’re reminded here of Annette Kolodny: “our purpose is not and should not be the formulation of any single reading method or potentially procrustean set of critical procedures nor, even less, the generation of prescriptive categories for some dreamed-of nonexistent literary canon.” We should not trust criticism as a method—its primary goal is not to be or even to do good, but to question. Sometimes it struggles even with that.

We might hope that criticism has made great strides in achieving a mindful self-knowledge since Kolodny wrote in 1980—that it is now better placed to ask questions without insisting on particular answers. But—as Elizabeth Anker has argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books, or as Simon During has written in the Chronicle of Higher Education—there might be a “reactionary turn” underway in particularly academic criticism. This seems to aim not towards continual regeneration but a return to the methods of I. A. Richards.

All of which is by means of saying: We wouldn’t want to tell you that literary criticism can save the world; we wouldn’t even want to say it aims to.

And yet. This year’s special arrives at a time of rude health for specifically science fiction and fantasy criticism. From Nerds of a Feather to the Ancillary Review of Books, BlueSky’s burgeoning critical community to whole new publications such as Typebar and Speculative Insight, there appears to be not just a desire on the part of some to write SFF criticism, but on the part of others to read it. A recent special issue of the longstanding critical journal Foundation focused on the fiftieth anniversary of Brian Aldiss’s foundational history of SF, Billion Year Spree (1974); that so many critics are still in this field, and still have readers to speak to, might after all that time be achievement enough.

One of the contributors to that special issue of Foundation is also present in this edition of Strange Horizons. In “Who Is In Danger?”, Paul Kincaid writes for us on the complex history of one of science fiction’s most infamous anthology series, Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions sequence. In particular, he focuses on the “final” volume published last year, taking a tour through the history of science fiction to look at the ways in which “this is not the book that was promised.” In other words, he employs the tools of criticism to construct a context in which a work might properly be understood.

On the topic of understanding texts, it’s always such a pleasure to work with our Poetry Editors to include verse in these specials—since they help animate and dramatize the abstractions of criticism. In “The Egg,” River shows with constructive creativity how many ways we might read a text; in “The Resolution of N,” Lillian Tsay provides an alternative ending to another; and in “Frankenstein’s Tongue”—a poem that draws on a novel which rears its head a few times in this special—Liam Campbell posits the sort of death of culture against which one hopes (though it is not always clearly so) criticism is set.

What these poems inevitably do is turn us back to interpretation, and how to do it. Paul’s essay for us is a marvellous example of how to “do” genre history as one form of practice. (It’s also a demonstration of why his forthcoming Colourfields, to be published later this year by Briardene Books, will be essential reading.) Historical context proves important to some of the special’s other critics, too. In her essay on ectogenesis, for example, Zoe Tongue spends considerable time on the 1997 movie Gattaca; and in a piece on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001-3), Tansy Gardam looks back on the details of that storied production, seeking to understand the impact of the films through the circumstances of their production.

But of course criticism is also forward-facing, bridging from a reading of the past to an assessment of our present: in Tansy’s case, her assessment of what are now canonical works of cinema leads to conclusions about the malaise of contemporary Hollywood; and in Zoe’s we come to learn a great deal about the visions and values that now inform the US’s newly minted billionaire ruling class, from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen. It's a sign of our times, in fact, that Andreessen also appears in Jacqueline Nyathi’s essay, which focuses not on the past or the present but on how we might imagine our futures: in “Collective Dreaming,” Jacqueline argues that SFF—and culture more widely—must complete the work of shifting, expanding, reorienting its points of reference and view in order to construct more productive possibilities for ourselves, our species, our planet.

The answer to most of our contemporary questions, Jacqueline suggests, lies not in narrowing our focus but in expanding it radically. In an interview for our SH@25 podcast series that appears in this issue, Bogi Takács notes that reviewers can serve as curators of recommendations, helping to widen an individual reader's pool of choices—and maybe steering the collective gaze to under-appreciated or unacknowledged works or authors. Nat Harrington’s essay on “Celtic” and Celtic fantasy argues similarly, proceeding from analysis of eighteenth-century romances towards twenty-first-century novels in Gaelic—and concluding that fantasy has yet truly to reckon with the cultures it has plundered to create itself. This postcolonial theme—shared across multiple pieces in this issue—is echoed, too, in our reviews from Eugen Bacon and Prashanth Gopalan … and the week ends with M. L. Clark’s look at a book-length work of criticism, We Are All Monsters, which—again through historical as well as literary analysis—brings us back to the start: Who, when we write speculative fiction in a time of monsters, is in danger? And who should be?

What of material effect will all this criticism have achieved? Reader, we can’t say. Maybe none. But maybe some. Who knows? What is clear is that there are many questions to ask—and to answer—in the speculative field, and that the community asking them feels more cohesive, and more productive, than in some years. Even in our first of these editorials, in 2022, we worried with our late friend Maureen Kincaid Speller that reviewing was devolving into an adjunct of marketing. Perhaps in some quarters this is still the case—the wailing and gnashing of publishers’ teeth around BookTok’s recent near-death experience in the USA is a case in point. But there is also a sense that perhaps those of us who hold differently haven’t yet surrendered. These special issues are, if nothing else, one record of texts worth thinking with—and the thinking we might do with them. Barbara Christian once wrote that, for her, “literary criticism is promotion as well as understanding.” For the moment, maybe that’s claim enough.


]]> 54401 Delays! But We're Ok. https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/delays-but-were-ok/ Mon, 11 Nov 2024 12:16:25 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=53392 Needless to say, it's been a bit of a week. A number of us (editors, writers, readers) have been scatterbrained or have cocooned, or have simply been tired. The result is that our current issue is currently... one poem. And reviews. (Props to the impeccable reviews department.)

More is coming. By the end of the week, we intend to have our second poem ready (maybe by the time you read this message it's already up), and new fiction. I can't tell you exactly when. But we're still here, still working. A bit slowly. A bit tossed around. But here.

On that note, we're getting pretty close to the end of 2024, and we still haven't published the Japanese SFF special issue we promised. That's still coming too! But it will come out some time in 2025.

Thank you for reading; for writing; for funding; for dreaming. If you keep coming back, we'll keep coming back too.


]]> 53392 A Hugo Award - And More! https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/a-hugo-award-and-more/ Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:47:39 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=52593 At the Glasgow WorldCon earlier this month, the 80+ members of our editorial collective, scattered around the world, experienced a novel sensation: at the Hugo Awards ceremony, after the nominees for the best semiprozine were announced, the sealed envelope opened, and the dramatic moment’s pause accomplished, the name that was read out was … Strange Horizons. 

Until this year, Strange Horizons had been a losing finalist at the Hugos every year since 2013. As you can probably guess, our fate at the Hugos has been the subject of long-running in-jokes and gags within the magazine, on our internal Slack group. But an albatross around the neck is still an albatross, even though it might have a sunny disposition and crack witty jokes; and it is always a relief to unburden oneself of the said avian. 

With that said, we want to take this opportunity to reaffirm a few things.

The first is our gratitude to the SF community, to the voters, and to our readers, without whom we would not exist. Awards are, of course, subjective, but they tell us that the work we do is seen and appreciated by the community that we are a part of. They are an important reminder that a space such as this holds meaning and value. So, thank you.

The second is our gratitude to all our writers - without you too, we (literally!) would not exist: thank you for trusting us with your work, and we hope you’ll continue to trust us in the future.  

The third is our gratitude and appreciation to all the other zines that together make this space what it is. Some were companions on the Hugo ballot, others were companions on the longlist released after the Awards, but neither the shortlist nor the longlist reflects the breadth, diversity, and richness of the SF magazine space. Awards, by their very nature, are competitive; but the space that we exist in is defined by its camaraderie, cooperation, and collaboration: from something as basic as coordinating our fund-drive periods so that they don’t overlap, to sharing staff members and, of course, writers. Please support your SF zines: it’s a difficult time; and we hope that award ballots reflect the incredible range of SF magazines active today. 

The fourth is our gratitude to all the members of the Strange Horizons collective, past and present. In a few months, Strange Horizons will turn 25 years old (we began in 2000!). And if there is one thing that has defined its internal structure, it has been ceaseless motion. We do not have a fixed editorial board—we do not even have an editor-in-chief! What we do have is an editorial collective that is made up of different autonomous departments; and this is a collective whose membership is fluid (think of us as a mycelial network, perhaps!). So, when you’re thinking of Strange Horizons, you’re thinking not of one individual or ten, or even of our current masthead, but every person over the last twenty-five years that has made this magazine what it is. Thank you! 

Our membership is fluid, and it is also international: our staff comes from nine different countries on multiple continents, spanning almost the entire globe in terms of time zones. We hope that this reflects in our editorial choices, in the fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art that we select. One thing that we have always prided itself on is the diversity both of our editorial collective and of the work that we publish (go check out our geographically-focused special issues!). We love how many writers count us as their “first,” and we hope that many more will do that in the years to come. We also hope to continue being a magazine that gives equal space to all forms of SF: the short story, the novelette, the poem, the prose poem, the article, the column, the review, the critical essay, and much else. 

At Strange Horizons, we have always understood SF - like all other forms of art - to be intensely political. We have tried to centre our collective politics around the ideas of liberation and equality. To this end, and in light of what is going on around us, we read out a brief statement on Palestine at the Hugo Awards ceremony. This statement was first prepared in 2021, in consultation with Palestinian artists, and we reiterate that. 

And finally, a reminder: soon we will be celebrating our twenty-fifth birthday. In human terms, this is about the time when the prefrontal cortex becomes fully developed. In magazine terms, we don’t know what that might mean, but we do have a lot of stuff planned for our silver jubilee year—watch this space!


]]> 52593 Call for Editors: Articles Editor https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/call-for-editors-articles-editor/ Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:46:17 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=52404 Strange Horizons is looking to add an additional articles editor to work with our editorial collective.

The Articles Department publishes non-fiction on the fourth Monday of the month, nine times a year. Pieces include essays, interviews, round-tables, and conversations. Articles editors also edit and publish columns by our regular columnists.

As an articles editor, you will be working alongside current editors Joyce Chng and Gautam Bhatia, but you will have complete autonomy to commission, edit, and publish non-fiction pieces independently. Our articles editors have a diverse range of interests within genre, and you’re encouraged to follow your own in commissioning pieces (as long as it is within the broader Strange Horizons mandate).

For a sense of the kind of non-fiction we’ve published recently, please take a look at the archives.

Like all other editorial positions at Strange Horizons, this is a volunteer role. We anticipate the time commitment to not exceed a couple of hours a week, on an average.

If you are interested in applying, please email gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com with a brief paragraph about your interest in the position, your broad areas of interest within SFF, and any prior relevant editorial experience.


]]> 52404 The Strange Horizons Fund Drive https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/the-strange-horizons-fund-drive-2/ Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:13:51 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=51858 The Strange Horizons fund drive is upon us!

As most of you know, SH is entirely funded by our family of supporters, either through volunteer work or through financial contributions. We have stood as a community magazine since 2000, with a commitment to speculative fiction from around the world, to new authors and wide representation.

Our proudest achievement is how many writers count us as their first sale.

To help Strange Horizons move into 2024, we need to raise a base amount of $13,500. If you'd like to help us meet those goals, please go to our Kickstarter page and donate.

As the Strange Horizons rocket gains funding fuel, we’ll release bonus content as a reward to all and sundry:

At $1,000: An interview of WFA winner Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay by Will Shaw, on SF in translation.

At $2,500: A poem by Devan Barlow.

At $4000: An essay on Blade Runner by E.E. Murray.

At $5,000: A review by Dan Hartland.

At $6,500: A poem by Angel Leal.

At $8,000: A review by Kit Eginton.

At $9,500: A poem by Bree Wernicke.

At $10,000: A (surprise!) story by Premee Mohamed.

At $11,000: A secret essay on the phonetics of dragon languages.

At $12,500: A special issue of the Critical Friends podcast feat. Dan Hartland and Aisha Subramanian.

At $13,500: A poem by Milo K. Szyszka.

Let’s talk stretch goals. Last year, your funding helped us bring you a special issue on SFF and neurodiversity, and forthcoming special issues on Japanese SFF, among others.

This year:

At $15,000, we will publish a special issue on Afro-Surrealist SF, guest-edited by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu!

At $16,500, we will publish a special issue on Ageing and SFF!

At $18,000, we will raise our artist pay to $300 (more money for artists)!

At $20,000 our fiction department will publish a novelette as part of our 2025 fiction calendar!

At $24,000 we'll host a virtual panel with Strange Horizons editors and contributors. All backers will be invited to attend and submit questions for the Q&A!

At $30,000 we will commission additional pieces of artwork in 2024.

For twenty-three years, Strange Horizons has brought you challenging, beautiful work from new and diverse voices. It is the community’s zine, and always will be. Let’s shine together for another year. Help us by donating today.


]]> 51858 Call for Editors: Social Media Editor and Accessibility Editor https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/call-for-editors-social-media-editor-and-accessibility-editor/ Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:32:23 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=50534 Strange Horizons is looking to add an additional social media editor and accessibility editor to our editorial collective. These roles will entail working in tandem with our existing social media and accessibility editors. 

Social Media Editor

Our social media editors’ brief is bifurcated into two (overlapping) roles: managing the Strange Horizons newsletter, and managing and expanding the zine’s social media presence. At present, we are looking for an editor interested in the first role (the newsletter). beyond this, our editorial collective is flat and anarchic, and beyond this basic brief, you will be free to define and understand your role as you see fit. If you love Strange Horizons, genre magazines, and getting SFF out to a broader audience, then you're who we are looking for!

We anticipate the time commitment to be a couple of hours a week, which will rise slightly during our annual fund-drive, in the month of June. The position, like the rest of our editorial positions, is volunteer.

To apply, please email gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com with a brief paragraph about your interest in the position, what you envisage doing as Strange Horizons' social media editor, and any prior experience that you might have.

Accessibility Editor

Our accessibility editor is responsible for reading fiction and poetry (and, occasionally, non-fiction), and applying content warnings in accordance with the Strange Horizons’ policy. Prior experience in sensitivity reading, and work with/around content warnings, is a bonus.

We anticipate the time commitment to be a couple of hours a week, in rotation with our existing accessibility editor. 

To apply, please email gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com with a brief paragraph about your interest in the position, and prior relevant experience, as mentioned above.


]]> 50534 On The Coming-Together Of Things https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/on-the-coming-together-of-things/ Mon, 29 Jan 2024 13:00:43 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=50522 This is the third of our annual criticism specials, which makes it officially a habit (or enemy action). This makes an editorial a little difficult to write; if in the 2022 Criticism Special we set out a broad set of principles that we adhere to as critics and editors, then the 2023 Special was a recommitment to those in memory of former senior reviews editor, Maureen Kincaid Speller. In 2024, introducing this special issue, is it enough just to say, “We still believe this”? Do we need to reaffirm Why Criticism Is Important (the sort of thing that not only risks being pompous, but given the horrors around us can also feel unbearably glib)? Do we need to join the predictably constant chorus of critics sounding the alarm? Why did we make this thing?

One reason the issue exists is, simply, because people wanted it to: the first pitch for this year’s special issue came in before we’d even decided whether we were going to do it. People were enthusiastic. One of our predecessors, Abigail Nussbaum, even suggested that the SH Specials are part of a “moment” that SFF criticism might be having. We might pause here perhaps ungratefully to place a question mark against all this: it’s possible we’re all finding comfort in their being criticism to read while ignoring the question of whether people are engaging with it. If we are to produce this stuff, what responsibility—if any—is placed on us to try also to make it vibrant?

Perhaps partly in response to this question, one trend that continues in this Special from previous issues is that we think some of the best thinking is done in conversation. That idea is represented here in a roundtable, in which four of our reviewers discuss Maureen’s A Traveller in Time, and in Electra Pritchett and Martin Petto’s conversation about Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché’s “genre-blending” novel, Prophet (itself a product of two authors working together). In both these cases, the books under discussion are making an argument—or several—about SFF and its forms. Dialogue is surely the best way to unpick and test these kinds of texts.

But even beyond this, criticism is inherently a coming-together of things—the individual critic responding to the individual text (as in this week’s five reviews and three poems), the connections made when texts are placed in relation to one another (as in Niall Harrison’s Depth of Field column), and in relation to the wider world that produces them (Will Shaw’s article does all of these things). In the most recent episode of our criticism podcast, also included in this issue, we discuss the genre’s material impact on the world, but also end up returning to that question of the impact of SF criticism (or any criticism) on that world, and the ways in which comfort and complacency can undermine attempts to think and act critically.

Perhaps, then, part of the reason it’s difficult to write an editorial lionising criticism is that lionising is inherently uncritical. As critics we owe the text our attention: we are to read closely and carefully, take responsibility for coming to conclusions, be “confidently tentative” (a phrase from our afterword to A Traveller in Time which also contains the suggestion that we remain open to being wrong, picked up by Shinjini Dey in this issue’s roundtable on the book). No grand statements about the importance of the work; no complacency about our place, if we have one, in science fiction’s ecosystem. Just the hope that we can keep trying to arrive at some sort of truth and that you will read (and write, and think) along with, or indeed against, us. We continue to hope for conversation and exchange.


]]> 50522 2023: What They Loved https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/2023-what-they-loved/ Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:07:51 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=50281 Words cannot end occupations, stop bombs, or liberate a people. But words can, sometimes, create a space for freedom, if only for a moment. As 2023 draws to a close, we at Strange Horizons cast a look back at some of the words from this year that specially resonated with you, and with us.

In poetry, Sarah Gray's Biophilia, Deborah L. Davitt's Blå Jungfrun, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan's Gosh, It's Too Beautiful To Exist Briefly In A Parallel Planet, and Dyani Sabin's Mother Wicked received nominations for the Rhysling Award for short poetry. In the long poem category, Tristan Beiter's The Birds Singing in the Rocks, Deborah L. Davitt's Drowning in this Sunken City, Max Pasakorn's Fields Notes from an Investigation into the Self, G.E. Woods's How to Skin Your Wolf, and Elisheva Fox's Tzedek: The Wild Hunt were nominated.

Omodero David Oghenekaro's Questions For The Fallen received a Dwarf Star award nomination, while Alyssa Lo's Excerpt from a Proposal for a New City was a runner-up for the same award.

Our poetry editorial team has also curated some of their own favourites from 2023, in their own words:

No Stones by Bob Hicok: Without exaggeration, Bob Hicok is a titan of American poetry, and this stands out as an example of how he can use something concrete and everyday and spin it into a delicate philosophical tissue, the world floating around you. You read this poem and immediately want to share it with someone else in physical space, not just on a screen.

The Thing (1982) As A Silent Film by Connor Yeck: Poems and movies are natural companions, the way both montage images and fleeting moments to build a sense of space or disorientation. The simultaneous absorption and analysis built into this piece is wonderful.

Idemili by Somto Ihezue: This poem about the slaying of an Igbo goddess who is a river and a snake captures the mix of grief, guilt, loss, confusion, pride, and power that I see in a lot of reactions to the climate crisis.

The Witches Are Without Work by Angela Liu: This has kind of been the year of Angela Liu for the Strange Horizons poetry department. All of her poems have been so good it's hard to pick a favorite. This one is perfect urban fantasy.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon is your Father by Brandon O'Brien: I'd put this poem on the level of Dostoyevsky. Instead of retelling a familiar story from the point of view of the antagonist, it delves profoundly into the psychology and history of a narrator who feels he might sometimes be monstrous and have the potential to be more monstrous - but who knows that he has unfairly judged himself (and been judged) in the past.

Steve Irwin and the Unicorn by Theo Nicole Lorenz: It's a kind, funny poem, and it also makes me tremble inside. I appreciate the invitation to pause and appreciate innocence and gentleness, see how special they are, how worthwhile to stop and notice.

From our Articles Department, Emma Johanna Puranen's The Ethics of Extractivism in Science Fiction (from our Extractivism in SF special issue) and Sarena Ulibarri's Horror and Hope in Climate Fiction were nominated for the Utopia Awards. "Horror and Hope in Climate Fiction" won in the Utopian non-fiction category.

Our Articles Department recommends Feminising Culture in the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Harley Wu, A Not-So Tilting Planet by Ng Yi-Sheng, and The Conundrum of Indigenous Writing by Golda Mowe; and from the Wuxia Special Issue: Jin Yong's Protagonist That Wasn't: Dongfang Bubai by Johnny Liu and Reimagining The Syonan Jianghu: Reflections on Wuxia in Da Xia by Tan Shao Han. Our co-ordinating editor also recommends Shinjini Dey's Making, Breaking, and Extraction: An Exploration of Bodies and Time in SFF, a continuation of our extractivism series into 2023.

From our fiction archives, our editors have the following recommendations for you, in their own words:

Cassia de Claire's Revolving Cabinet Cards by Sarah McGill: We really liked this story's dark-fairytale take on queer embodiment.

A Name is a Plea and a Prophecy by Gabrielle Emem Harry: We loved this story's taut fabulistic prose and its sly flashes of wit.

Locavore by Kim Harbridge: We liked how sleek and little this story is, and how it accomplishes so much in so few words.

Speak No Evil by Edidiong Essien: We wanted to highlight this as a piece of small fantasy writing that touches on the powerlessness and weight of being a child.

In the Reviews Department, we continued to aim for a breadth and depth of critical work that we consider important – even fundamental - to the health of the genre. From the year’s earliest reviews - such as William Shaw’s forensic, careful reading of Nisi Shawl – to the year’s final months – in which Stephanie Burt showed how the work of another critic, John Plotz, illuminated not just Ursula Le Guin but Burt’s own life – we reviewed as wide a selection of SFF as we could, in an engaged away as possible. Christina Ladd dived deep on vampires; Archita Mittra got into the thick weeds of House of the Dragon, a show from which no one had expected very much at all; Shinjini Dey queried the hyped reception of R. F. Kuang’s Babel; Mikko Toivanen brought us Japanese cinema, and Kit Eginton utopian anti-capitalism. We had new reviewers – Nick Gloaming debuted with an excellent meditation on Jen Calleja’s Vehicle – and trusted voices – M. L. Clark, for instance, offered us a case study in when criticism goes wrong. And from Tristan Beiter on poetry to Dean Leetal on YA,  we cast our net as wide as we could, while in pieces such as our roundtable on Goliath, or Phoenix Scholz’s mammoth tour through HellSans, we tried not to scrimp on detail, either.

We were particularly honoured this year that Maureen Kincaid Speller’s last essay for us before her death, The Critic and the Clue, was nominated for a BSFA Non-fiction award. It appeared in our very first Criticism Special, a project Maureen spearheaded. Next year we’ll deliver our third such special. The work continues.

We also want to take a moment to showcase our special issues from the year gone by. Our special issues—which we run on the fifth Monday of the months that have them—reflect our ongoing commitment to geographic and thematic diversity. Special issues that spotlight a specific geographic region are guest-edited by editors who belong to that region, while thematic special issues are edited in-house.

In 2023, we had two geographic and two thematic special issues. In January, we ran our usual annual special issue on criticism in SFF. This issue was particularly poignant for us, as it was a tribute to our beloved reviews editor, Maureen Kincaid Speller, who passed in 2022. The special issue showcased the kind of critical practice that Maureen perfected over the years, and loved more than anything else.

In May, we devoted a special issue to Wuxia and Xianxia, edited by Yilin Wang, Mia Tsai, and our own Joyce Chng. Wuxia has been a cultural phenomenon in the West ever since the success of The Untamed, and we felt that a special issue approaching the genre from a critical lens, as well as celebrating it through short fiction and poetry was long overdue. We hope you enjoy the offerings in this issue.

In July we had a special issue focused on Childbearing in SFF, a topic picked by our editorial collective. As our editor, Romie Stott, noted in her introduction to the special issue, this one is about "agency, luck, vegetables, gods, bodies, and aliens." You'll find all that, and more, when you begin exploring it.

We rounded off our specials with an issue dedicated to Caribbean SFF, edited by Suzan Palumbo and Marika Bailey. We loved being able to showcase the breathtaking richness and diversity of SFF from the Caribbean, bringing to you five stories, four poems, and an essay. We're sure you'll love them too.

Our special issues for 2024 are already in the works: look out, in particular, for our Japanese SFF special, scheduled for mid-2024!

We wish all our readers a 2024 that brings justice and peace a little bit closer, and look forward to our shared task of finding the words that are meet for that task.

- With inputs from the Strange Horizons editorial collective 


]]> 50281 Storytelling is Part of the Heart of the Caribbean Soul https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/editorials/storytelling-is-part-of-the-heart-of-the-caribbean-soul/ Mon, 30 Oct 2023 05:43:35 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=49567 It is with gratitude that Marika Bailey and I present the Strange Horizons Caribbean Special Issue. I want to begin by thanking the Strange Horizons team for helping us make this project a reality. I also want to acknowledge the SFFH community for their support in funding and boosting this call. Your unwavering enthusiasm for our project has been heartwarming.

We received submissions from authors from fifteen different countries in response to our call. Writers who live in the Caribbean or are part of the diaspora showed up and waved their flags in the best way. Thank you to all who submitted. It was a privilege to read your work. We wish we could have published each and every one of you, and we hope to see your names and words published in the coming months and years.

 

 

Caribbean speculative fiction is not new. This special issue furthers a path forged by brilliant editors and authors who came before us and oral traditions stretching back hundreds and even thousands of years. Stories have always been the vital connection to our pasts and heritages. They have brought us joy even in violent colonial times and have given us hope. They are how we have envisioned our self-determined futures. Indeed, storytelling is at the heart of the Caribbean soul. And though we have never been a monolith—each country has its own unique people, languages, dialects, histories, and cultures—it is that devotion to storytelling that has made the region a narrative, academic, and poetic powerhouse. This issue demonstrates that prowess.

In fiction, our table of contents features five stories that highlight a range of voices, tones, genres, and styles. “On Fallow Fields Where Flames Once Bloomed,” by N.A. Blair, draws on folklore to tell a story about learning to love oneself while falling in love. Ben Francisco’s “Brincando Charcos (Jumping Puddles)” invokes portals and the personal complications inherent in escaping persecution and generational trauma. Michael Roch’s “The Gates of Lanvil,” translated by Karine Saint Jacques, situates us in the realm of science fiction with a story about a doctor and his “son” afloat on the ocean, and their conflicting visions of their destinies. Malena Salazar Maciá’s “The Fate of Despair,” translated from Spanish, transports us to a future planet we may not fully comprehend, but where we absolutely belong. Finally, written in dialect, Sarah Ramdawar’s “I Attack the Queen” captures the voice and humor of a family gathering where tall tales are told and good food and drink are shared.

In poetry, Brandon O’Brien’s “The Creature from the Black Lagoon Is your Father” explores parent-child relationships and how they shape our self concepts. “Railroad Del Mar” by Lysz Flo unfolds on an epic timeline underwater where vengeance simmers before surfacing. “Manman ak Pitit” by Rachelle Saint Louis locates the reader on land and considers what an island can experience and remember. Nadine Tomlinson’s “Sonnet for Birds” plucks us from the air and asks us to listen to the sound of that rupture.

In nonfiction, we have an essay written by Akilah White which examines Yard Consciousness as a facet of the Caribbean imagination and its manifestation in P. Djèlí Clark’s longform work.

Again, the range of these works, their breadth and depth should be noted. We are multitudes, beyond the bounds of any imposed definition of who we should be or the stories we should tell. It is a fierce and glorious legacy we uphold.

It has been an honor and a pleasure to facilitate this special issue, and I hope it encourages readers, editors, and publishers to seek out more work by these phenomenal authors and other writers who live in or have roots in the Caribbean region. Caribbean writers have so many more stories to share—incredible, moving, thoughtful, intelligent stories, full of heart, hope, pain, joy, love, and courage. Buy them. Read them. Support them whenever you can.

Without further ado, I will leave you to enjoy the work we have published here.


]]> 49567 A Few Notes on Paradise https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/editorials/a-few-notes-on-paradise/ Mon, 30 Oct 2023 05:07:32 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=49564 Beautiful things, beautiful places, are not supposed to be complicated. They exist to be dreamt of, and no one wants to have annotations and footnotes on their fantasies. When beautiful places are allowed stories they are simple ones. Paradise is lost or paradise is found, perhaps the world begins in it but certainly does not stay in it. It is a garden, which is not something one lives in; it is a place to visit. Paradise is an idea.

You may have heard that the Caribbean is a paradise. (We will take that compliment, as we are sure it is meant.) It is many paradises spread across a transatlantic current, curled along the jeweled throat of lands facing the Caribbean sea.

Paradise is perfect when it has only what is wanted and nothing that is not. All gardens require enthusiastic and regular weeding; or the garden becomes wilderness, which is the enemy of civilization and certainly not a restful place of beauty. Much like a drawer, it must be emptied so that order can be imposed upon it from above. It must be chopped and burned, the languages rooted out and replaced so that it is a pleasant place to visit and own. Paradise must be made to hate itself in order to make the garden self-sustaining. It must be kept simple.

It is always sunny in Paradise. It must be for when it is visited. And for the rest of the time, when hurricanes eat at the shore, or genocides are waged against entire forests, or the rivers shrivel up into ravines, or the mountains disgorge millennia of wrath—that also has a certain kind of appeal for a certain kind of visitor. Watching lava flow can be great fun, if it is not anywhere near your house.

Paradise holds great wealth—to be taken away. What is the purpose of leaving the treasure in the garden? There is wealth in beauty, there to be preserved or not, to be experienced by those with the time and leisure and power to experience it. There is wealth in people, carried over by boat and steamship and plane, there to serve as Paradise is meant to serve, as well as the people who do live there. However, as the wealth is merely transient (as soon as it is made, it is flying over water to colder climates to be stored in banks, palaces, and social safety nets held behind thick layers of anti-immigration glass), Paradise cannot possibly feed all of its children. They must leave and serve elsewhere.

Paradise is a place where stories can happen but it is not a place where stories come from. What does a garden have to say for itself that has not already been written in its design? What can those who live in perfect eternal sunshine possibly have to say?

Paradise is an idea but here is another. (Said the serpent in the garden, who presumably was there from the very beginning.) There are stories in the ground, in the air, in the lines of mitochondria spread from Ivory Coast to Kingstown, to Carolinas and Colombia. Anything that can be survived, can be transformed. Revolution can begin in a garden, when people take back the humanity that was stolen for a profitable lie.

You may not want to hear these stories. We may be punished—have been punished—for telling them. But as you will see, we are not going to stop telling them. We are a complicated beautiful idea of our own.


]]> 49564 An Introduction to the Strange Horizons Childbearing Special Issue https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/an-introduction-to-the-strange-horizons-childbearing-special-issue/ Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:24:14 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=48618

Content warning:


Welcome to the Strange Horizons Childbearing Special Issue, brought to you by donors to last year’s Kickstarter. At the time of that Kickstarter, the Supreme Court of the United States had newly voted to overturn many decades of U.S. caselaw supporting a right to bodily autonomy, in a case about whether pregnant people have a right to decide whether to remain pregnant.

It’s hard to speak for the Strange Horizons staff as a whole; we’ve been up front about the fact that we don’t have an editor in chief and operate as an anarchist collective. We don’t necessarily agree about what makes a good story or poem, or whether we’re excited about a piece of technology, or how we feel about various governments around the world—although we’re held together by a mutual respect for each other. We have very different bodies and operate in very different contexts.

However, I think I can safely say that all of us believe in a right to bodily autonomy. Sometimes that means support of trans rights or abortion rights. Other times, that means support of fertility treatments, or advocating for policies that make it easier to care for children, or that recognize non-nuclear family structures. We may not always have the same idea of how to get there; we live in different countries and societies with different laws, customs, and challenges.

Speaking for myself, outside the context of Strange Horizons, I hope to walk a line between respecting and supporting the varied challenges and sometimes amazing capabilities of biology—because different bodies color a person’s experience of the world, and of society—and ensuring that biology is not destiny. I hope I can draw on and add to a coalition, without getting too stuck in the limits of stereotype.

Within the context of Strange Horizons, many members of the editorial staff have worked autonomously, as is our way, to select or commission pieces which approach the subject of childbearing from many different angles, recognizing its complexity and centrality—not to mention the many metaphors woven through SF.

In Suzanne Boswell’s essay “The Curious Case of Abortion in Science Fiction,” Boswell provides an overview of how rarely abortion happens in SF, even in stories you may remember as being about that very subject—and in contrast, how often stories revolve around forced birth.

The lack of abortion in science fiction signals a failure to think about the future beyond the confines of heterosexual reproduction and the nuclear family. For a genre that should be concerned with the many, multitudinous, branching pathways of the future, it is a limited vision.

Our fiction leans into body horror and vegetation—the physical realities of incubating and growing something from seed. Kaitlin Tremblay’s “Of Heirlooms and Teeth” (illustrated by Daniela Viçoso) tells the story of a posthuman moss god who uses her body to turn baby teeth into rare plants, partly by vocation and partly for financial reasons. In “Sprouting God,” by Ezra Pilar Rodriguez, a young child incubates a powerful but parasitic being, in a situation he did not choose but must bear. And in Karlo Yeager Rodriguez’s story “Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground,” a woman who has been involuntarily sterilized withdraws into fantasies of pregnancy and fertility which seem increasingly real.

Our poetry considers different ways agency and luck can impact the choice to bear a child, or not. Laura Cranehill’s “To the still daughter” is about the way a stillbirth feels like a ghostly third sibling alongside the narrator’s living children. Kristina Erny’s “Abduction” is about aliens who are fascinated by Earth’s mothers and children and want to bear some of them away. Jonathan Chibuike Ukah’s “A Woman with a Stomach Full of Stars” sympathizes with a god-landscape of a mother and all her realized and unrealized potentials. And Jordan Hirsch’s “Janeway Was Absolutely Right to Kill Tuvix” provides a full-throated defense of a starship captain’s abortion-linked choices in a memorable episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

The issue also includes three un-themed book reviews: Everything is Ori by Paul Serge Forest, translated by David Warriner, reviewed by Rachel Cordasco; The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin, reviewed by Divyansha Sehgal, and Imagining the Celtic Past in Modern Fantasy edited by Dimitra Fimi and Alexander J.P. Sims, reviewed by Debbie Gascoyne.

It’s a challenging issue, intentionally. But we hope you enjoy it, or find something useful in our engagement.


]]> 48618 The Strange Horizons Fund Drive https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/the-strange-horizons-fund-drive/ Sat, 10 Jun 2023 17:36:57 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=47939 The Strange Horizons fund drive is upon us!

As most of you know, SH is entirely funded by our family of supporters, either through volunteer work or through financial contributions. We have stood as a community magazine since 2000, with a commitment to speculative fiction from around the world, to new authors and wide representation.

Our proudest achievement is how many writers count us as their first sale.

To help Strange Horizons move into 2024, we need to raise a base amount of $10,000. This will bring you more wonderful and wonderfully irreverent fiction such as R.S.A. Garcia's "12 Things A Trini Should Know Before Travelling To A Back In Times Fete™," vivid poetry such as Sharang Biswas' "What is a Monster?," thoughtful reviews such as S. Qiouyi Lu on "Everything Everywhere All At Once," in-depth articles such as Ng Yi-Sheng's "A Spicepunk Manifesto," and art all the year round!

If you'd like to help us meet those goals, please go to our Kickstarter page and donate.

As the Strange Horizons rocket gains funding fuel, we’ll release bonus content as a reward to all and sundry:

At $1,000: A story by Aimee Ogden.

At $2,500: A poem by G.E. Woods.

At $5,000: An essay by Kai Wilson.

At $6,500: A review by Paul Kincaid.

At $8,000: A poem by Mary Soon Lee.

At $9,500: A review by Phoenix Scholz.

At $10,000: A (surprise!) story by A.T. Greenblatt.

At $11,000: A poem by J.L. Jones.

At $12,500: A special round-table on Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath

At $14,000: A poem by Theo Nicole Lorenz.

Let’s talk stretch goals. Last year, your funding helped us bring you our just-released special issue on Wuxia and Xianxia, and our forthcoming special issue on Caribbean SFF, among others!

This year:

At $12,500, we will publish a special issue on Japanese Speculative Fiction, guest-edited by Terrie Hashimoto, the managing editor of Rikka Zine.

At $15,000, we will raise our column rates to $75 per column.

At $17,000, we will publish a special issue on SFF and Neurodiversity.

At $18,500, we will publish a special issue themed on Body Horror.

At $20,000 we will raise rates for reviews to $60 per review.

At $24,000 we'll host a virtual panel with Strange Horizons editors and contributors. All backers will be invited to attend and submit questions for the Q&A!

At $30,000 we will commission additional pieces of artwork in 2024.

For twenty-three years, Strange Horizons has brought you challenging, beautiful work from new and diverse voices. It is the community’s zine, and always will be. Let’s shine together for another year. Help us by donating today.


]]> 47939 Editorial: A Letter To The Jiānghú https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/editorial-a-letter-to-the-jianghu/ Mon, 29 May 2023 20:52:28 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=47492 We are touched and encouraged to see an overwhelming response from writers from the Sino diaspora as well as BIPOC creators in various parts of the world. And such diverse and daring takes of wuxia and xianxia, from contemporary to the far reaches of space! We regret that even though there are many amazing stories, we have to make difficult choices. To us, all who have submitted are heroes of the jiānghú.

In fiction, we feature three stories, each expanding upon long-beloved tropes in wuxia and xianxia. L Chan’s “The Ocean Remembers the Wave” brings wuxia into space, where a celestial poet-warrior in search of his beloved traverses the galaxy, following a trail of bones. “One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth” by Tina S. Zhu takes us to the golden hills of Northern California during the time of the Wild West, telling the tale of a kung-fu master for hire whose latest job brings her face-to-face with her past and the brother she long ago abandoned, and whose steps are chased by living shadows. Finally, Megan Chee offers a lighthearted, humorous take on xianxia with “The God of Minor Troubles,” where an immortal oversleeps, is late to the meeting of the celestials, and is dubbed God of Minor Troubles for his transgression.

In poetry, we present three poems by poets of the diaspora, all of which build on a long tradition of wuxia and xianxia poetry. Written with a lyricism that may remind readers of Shījīng and Classical Chinese romantic poetry, Laura Ma’s “Cradling Fish” takes us on a journey through the jiānghú, in search of a 知音 - a kindred spirit. Next, Tania Chen’s “To a Dear Immortal in a Foreign Land” follows travellers who were forced to leave their sect to escape the troubles of the past and must learn to survive in a distant, unfamiliar world. Similarly, Judy I. Lin’s “a poet of the diaspora reflects upon the codes of jiānghú” spans across generations and space on the page to explore the parallels between the journey of immigration and the values that the warriors of jiānghú live by.

Finally, in nonfiction, we have writers examining Jin Yong’s seminal work The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and reimagining wuxia for modern times. Johnny Liu’s essay focuses on the “antagonist” who should have been a protagonist, Dongfang Bubai, and looks at how society (as reflected in the characters) treats trans people and marginalised groups. Tan Shao Han uses wuxia as a way of confronting historical atrocities such as the Japanese Occupation in Singapore, weaving the values of the xia ke into his tabletop role-playing game, Da Xia. How do protagonists react in a time of moral ambiguities where survival during a hostile military occupation and genocide is of upmost importance? How do they navigate perilous seas in the Syonan Jiānghú? Is compromise against the values of xia?

Shao Han, once more, pens his thoughts on S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws, a reimagining and “genderspun” retelling of Water Margin by Shi Nai’an. The novel examines the norms of gender and sexuality, and how the characters (a warrior, a poet, and a monk) cope with the expectations imposed by a patriarchal society. Very much like the Syonan Jiānghú of Da Xia, the protagonist has to navigate, negotiate and adapt to the demands of the male-dominated world of politics and war.


]]> 47492 Criticism In Tribute https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/criticism-in-tribute/ Mon, 30 Jan 2023 12:59:27 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=46305 In January 2022, the reviews department at Strange Horizons, led at the time by Maureen Kincaid Speller, published our first special issue with a focus on SF criticism. We were incredibly proud of this issue, and heartened by how many people seemed to feel, with us, that criticism of the kind we publish was important; that it was creative, transformative, worthwhile. We’d been editing the reviews section for a few years at this point, and the process of putting together this special, and the reception it got, felt like a kind of renewal—a reminder of why we cared so much. In the couple of months that followed, we made grand plans for future projects, and even started a podcast.

The criticism special was also the last major project the three of us worked on together, before Maureen’s cancer diagnosis. We lost her in September.

We’d already been toying with the idea of doing another criticism special in 2023; when the subject of a tribute issue to Maureen was broached, the only way we could envision it was through the critical work that she loved. The personal and the critical bleed into one another throughout this issue; in the foreword, Paul Kincaid, Maureen’s husband, writes about what it meant to think with her and be edited by her. Many of the other personal tributes—including Catherine Rockwood’s poem and Paul March-Russell’s overview of her work—are also glimpses of her critical vision. Likewise, the critical is underpinned by the personal, most notably in Clark Seanor’s essay, which also tells the story of its own development over years through conversations with Maureen. Other pieces—Niall Harrison’s on the structures of a subgenre and Zhui Ning Chang on postcolonial SFF—are included here simply because they embody the sort of analysis that she, and we, love; essays and reviews (double our usual number) that enrich the text, the reader, and the cultures in which they are read.

Last January, we wrote with Maureen a sort of mission statement for criticism at Strange Horizons. “None of us believes,” we suggested, “that a critic’s job is, as Maureen says in her article on Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker, to serve up quotable nuggets to go on the back cover of the paperback edition; but it’s clear from things we see online that some people do genuinely believe that the reviewer’s job is to promote the novel, and if the reviewer says something adverse then they’re not doing their job properly. As reviewers and critics, we see ourselves more as ‘critical friends,’ talking about what works, and what doesn’t work, while setting all of that in a broader context.”

Anyone who knew Maureen and her work can hear her voice in the above. There are many tributes to that voice in this special issue. Our own was published last September: “we will miss her because she was our friend—was the friend of all readers, and all authors, and all books. She showed us this every time she attended to a text and asked not just why she liked it, but why she—or why we—might not. Friends make us better, and they often do so via the unvarnished truth.”

That’s what criticism should do. It’s what Maureen did. And it’s what we will—we hope—continue to do in this special issue, in tribute to our great friend and the literature she loved.

Editors: Reviews Department

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department


]]> 46305 Foreword: A Way of Seeing https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/foreword-a-way-of-seeing/ Mon, 26 Sep 2022 17:59:44 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=44305 In his famous analysis of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Edward Said uncovers the relationship between the English country manor of Mansfield Park, and the plantation in Antigua that helps support it. At a superficial level, the story is about Mansfield Park. The Antiguan plantation appears only in the shadows, in throwaway lines and casual references. But, as Said points out, Sir Thomas Bertram's overseas possessions "give him his wealth, occasion his absences, fix his social status at at home and abroad, and make possible his values, to which Fanny Price (and Austen herself) finally subscribes." (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 73) Said's analysis gives us a "way of seeing" literary texts, a method of excavation that reveals (in the words of Raymond Williams) a "structure of attitude and reference" that would otherwise remain hidden.

It is perhaps fitting that Said is writing about Empire, a political formation that has long been central to science fictional imaginations. Empire brings with it questions of State formation and violence, centre and periphery, borders and hybridity—all of which have been explored, to varying degrees, by writers in and of the genre. But there is something else that plays a role in science fiction that is perhaps similar to the role that the Antiguan plantation plays in Mansfield Park: unobtrusive but necessary, incidental but crucial, and revealed in the works through "an odd combination of casualness and stress" (Said, 106): extractivism, or extraction.

Put simply, extractivism is defined as “the intensive and extensive exploitation of natural resources; little or no industrialization; export as the principal destination; exploitation that impedes natural renovation ... the economic form of the ‘enclave.’” In our 21st-century world, extractivism is embedded in the global political economy, capitalism, and in worldwide supply chains. In Planetary Mine, Martin Arboleda paints us a vivid picture:

If we put together all the phases that comprise the transnational circulatory system of primary-commodity production and trace the journey of copper from its point of extraction in the Andean plateaus of Chile to its point of destination in the spaces of advanced manufacturing in China, a bewildering panorama emerges: Autonomous trucks and shovels working at nearly 4,000 metres above sea level to put the metal into a semi-automated train, which then takes it to a smelting and electrorefining facility, where computerized ovens transform it into copper cathodes. The cathodes are put into containers and sent to one of the megaports of the mining industry in the Atacama Desert, where gantry cranes load the cargo into a container ship. After crossing the Pacific, our container is unloaded by the swiftness of the vast mechanical systems of the capital-intensive Chinese ports. Finally, the copper cathodes end up in one of the infamous “dark factories” of the Pearl River Delta. Here, robots and computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools operate in the dark, turning copper into the wires that hundreds of thousands of human laborers in electronics assembling facilities will later etch into the electronic gadgets we carry in our pockets. (Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine, 16)

As Riofrancos points out, the term is a capacious one, including "extractive activities, the policies and ideologies that promote them, their socio-environmental effects, and the forms of resistance that they provoke."

From the above, it should be evident how extractivism is both "incidental but crucial" to science fiction. Consider Season Three of Star Trek: Discovery (2020-21), one of the more recent iterations of the franchise. A major driver of the plot of Season Three is an event called The Burn, when refined dilithium reserves across the Galaxy go suddenly and unexpectedly inert. As dilithium is an integral component of the warp drive, which enables interstellar travel, the result is catastrophic: the Federation breaks apart, and is brought to the brink of collapse. In a moment of crisis, we see that Star Trek's post-scarcity, spacefaring civilisation would not exist without the literal extraction of a mineral from source planets. However, if we look back over almost six decades of Star Trek universe-building, across media, we find that dilithium extraction (with all the Planetary Mine-esque consequences that Arboleda lists out) is the Antiguan plantation of Star Trek: it exists, finds mention, is an occasional terrain of struggle and conflict (it even acts as currency), but its full imbrication within the political economy of Star Trek is rarely explored.

Star Trek is a particularly interesting example, because the utopia of a post-scarcity society clashes so starkly with everything we know about the material consequences of extractivism in our world. Arboleda tells us about Chile's "zonas de sacrificio" ("sacrifice zones"):

... built environments that have come to support the modalities of commodification of labor-power corresponding to the organs of the collective laborer that act as the appendage of heavy infrastructures and systems of machinery. (Arboleda, 94)

At a spacefaring level, would sacrifice zones turn into sacrifice planets? Would the inhabitants of those planets be asked to make necessary sacrifices for galactic welfare, as indigenous nations are asked to do so today? Would there be movements for planets' rights, pushes for galactic treaties along the lines of how the Bolivian and Ecuadorean Constitutions guarantee rights to nature? Would these then become terrains of contestation, as Riofrancos documents in her book, Resource Radicals? Would a Teixcalaanli aristocrat look up at the sky, think of Lsel Station, and wonder—with Auden—"what doubtful act allows/ Our freedom in this English house/ our picnics in the sun"?

It is these—and other—questions that our writers, essayists, and poets explore in this Strange Horizons special issue on extractivism in SFF. There are many entry points into this special issue, but let us begin with a piece of popular culture that is likely to be familiar to quite a few of our readers: The Expanse. The Expanse—both the books and the TV series—is one of the contemporary works of science fiction where extractivism is present in the foreground, through the figure of the Belter. It is therefore unsurprising that two of our three essays devote space to careful analyses of extractivism in The Expanse. In "The Ethics of Extractivism in Science Fiction," Emma Johanna Puranen points out that while The Expanse raises important questions about the plight of the Belters, the protagonists of the extractivist economy, so to say—their living conditions, the exploitation of their labour, and their political persecution—extractivism itself is treated as normalised, and even necessary, for development and expansion into the solar system and beyond. Indeed, as the discovery of Laconia demonstrates, there is a clear distinction between how the Belters are treated (ethically salient) and extractivism (ethically not salient). Puranen points out that this is of a piece with contemporary SF's general treatment around the ethics of extractivism: either it is normalised, or—in works such as Becky Chambers' To Be Taught, If Fortunate—already resolved.

In "On Belters, Beijingers, and Rat-Catchers," Mason Wong develops this argument further. Other than the normalisation of extractivism, what The Expanse also does is to present to us a creolization of extractivism. Pointing to the Belters' unique language (a work of significant technical accomplishment), their physical features, their spacial segregation, and how all this is embedded within the political economy of The Expanse, Wong argues that The Expanse demonstrates how "new iterations of extractivism, colonialism, and capitalism will be accompanied by novel developments in labor exploitation and the biopolitical control of workers ... the Belters are stuck in a type of arrangement without any historical precedent, one that is, notably, fundamentally dependent on an exploited class’ skilled use of extractive, pharmaceutical, and aerospace technologies which do not yet exist (and may never)." For Wong, this "creolization" is found not just in The Expanse, but also in contemporary Chinese SF. Hao Jingfang's Folding Beijing and Chen Qiufan's "The Year of the Rat" are two examples of how Chinese SF imagines futures characterised by "slow violence" visited by "a sort of non-utopian economic hybridity situated within broader circumstances of slow violence, environmental destruction, and labor exploitation." For Wong, then, these works of science fiction serve as a counterpoint to Ursula K. Le Guin's more optimistic exhortation of "imagining alternatives to the way we live." They illustrate how "that world-systems of extraction may transcend physical worlds; that planetary mines may become interplanetary ones; that creolization may often simply mean worse and novel forms of exploitation; that opportunities for humankind are also just as easily opportunities for capital."

Interestingly, Chen Qiufan himself—one of the subjects of Wong's essay—aligns himself with a more optimistic outlook than this reading of his own work. In his interview with this writer in this issue, Qiufan notes that "with every future we wish to create, we must first learn to imagine it. To me, that’s the true value of science fiction." In conversation about his novel, Waste Tide—one of the most powerful contemporary SF explorations of e-waste, and what it does to physical and social infrastructure—Qiufan (pace Arboleda) talks about the global character of supply chains and the extractivist economies they necessitate, and why, therefore, any response must also be collective and global. Through his fiction, and through his reflections upon it, Qiufan reinforces Riofrancos' acute observation in Resource Radicals that:

If extractivism is a total, ideologically closed system with a variety of internal mechanisms ensuring its reproduction and expansion, it would appear to foreclose the possibility of transformation, short of an exogenous shock. Whence the problem of envisioning how a post-extractive society could be built starting from the extractive society that currently exists. Relatedly, there are challenges of anti-extractivism as political strategy. Namely, who is the imagined collective subject leading this transformative process? How is this subject composed, and by what means could it dismantle extractivism and assemble a post-extractive society in its place? [We must attend to] ... these sets of difficult tasks: post-extractivism as positive vision and anti-extractivism as political strategy. (Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals, 176)

Indeed, this sense of totalisation pervades Carina Brand's essay, "The Extractive Unconscious in Science Fiction: A Saga of Concrete and Gas." "The Extractive Unconscious" is a tour de force that takes us through a range of SF novels written through the second half of the 20th century (some famous, such as Ballard's High Rise, others relatively unknown), and in the backdrop of concrete and gas extraction. Classically Saidian in its approach, Brand's essay moves through layers of interpretation, reading text and context to uncover the extractivist premises and assumptions that shape these novels. What Said—quoting Williams—referred to as the "structure of attitude and reference" that pervaded novels such as Austen's, Brand calls "petro-totality": "all cultural production during this period, in some latent way," she notes, "has a relationship with fossil energy, and becomes part of what I describe as petro-totality. A childhood spent in petro-totality impacts on the way the collective psyche develops, and subsequently will impact cultural production." The rest of the essay is devoted to excavating the relationship between petro-totality and SF.

There are fascinating overlaps between the essays of Puranen, Wong, and Brand, and the interview with Qiufan, which reward reading them together, and in conversation with each other. Puranen and Wong both examine The Expanse, albeit from different lenses. In addition, they both note how the label of "hard" science fiction sometimes serves as an (unwitting) ideological smokescreen to normalise extractivism as part of any "plausible" SF-nal future. Wong and Brand both use—and critique—the idea of "slow violence" to characterise extractivism's role in the world, and in SF's representations of extractivism. Wong anlyses Qiufan's work, and Qiufan gets a chance to speak for himself within the same pages: ambivalence meets caveated hope, within an overall framing that acknowledges the totalising force of extractivism, the possibilities of resistance to it, and pushes us to think deeper about how SF might be a terrain on which that resistance and contestation could play out.

These essays are complemented by critical analyses devoted to three contemporary pieces of work where extractivism and extraction do feature prominently. Amy Nagopaleen reviews Sim Kern's Seeds for the Swarm, where "at the philosophical heart of the book is the question of how humans might protect the planet most effectively: by abandoning or employing technology?" Puranen's call for SF to consider the ethical question head on is answered in Seeds for the Swarm, where "the ethics of applying science to the real world" feature prominently. ML Kejera then considers the French graphic novel Negalyod: The God Network, set in "a post-apocalyptic world that is desertified as a result of the over-extraction of water for some unknown end," and its visual depictions of "a dry ... soundless, and ... thirsty for life" world. Finally, Seamus Sullivan takes a look at Hiron Ennes' Leech, where the main character is "a parasitic hivemind masquerading as a collective of human doctors," the primary location is a mining town and a mining community, and an important plot point is body-snatching (the parallels with extractivism are clear). Amidst all this, for Sullivan, one of the fundamental features of the book is the lesson that "the cruelties of the past and present continue to shape us, but they are not us": a better analogy for the "structure of attitude and reference" that is petro-totality, and the reality that we inhabit—but need not always be in thrall to—can hardly be imagined.

The contributions of this special issue are not limited to prose. "Others' Apocalyptic Love Stories" (Vicky MacDonald Harris), "Blå Jungfrun" (Deborah L. Davitt), "Epistolary Poem" (Umang Kalra), and "I do not wish to carry so much burden" (Chukwuma-Eke Pacella) expand our imaginations—in the way that only poetry can—about extractivism in SFF imaginations. In these poems, you will find explicit references to oil "slurping up" in "black puddles", but also the sense of loss that hangs over extraction like a shroud ("Do not take a stone from my shores" and "the bleeding hamlet"), and the more abstract - almost unnameable - feeling of futures slipping away in the sludge of Brand's petro-totality ("we are gifted this planet with all of its lemon trees & we are wasting it..."). Through these poems, readers get a deeper and vaster sense of all that extractivism is, but also, of all that it might not be.

This special issue seeks to participate and perhaps help shape an ongoing conversation about extractivism in SFF that only promises to grow in importance as the world moves further and deeper into petro-totality. Just two weeks from now, the London Science Fiction Research Community is organising a conference titled "Extraction + SFF." In an interview with this writer in this issue, the conference's organisers explain how they seek to bring together themes around "climate, energy, non-human life, emotional and reproductive labour," and the importance of having these discussions today. Nor will Strange Horizons' engagement with extractivism and extraction end with this special issue: in the coming months, we will bring you more essays and interviews that will seek to keep the conversations going—almost a "totality" of a special issue, if you will! Our aim, with Arboleda, remains to be able to "grasp ... the essential unity of what appear as distinct or disaggregated spheres of social reality ... [and which] demands a theory ... that starts from the actual conditions in which the human life process asserts itself." (Arboleda, 121)

Edward Said ends his analysis of Mansfield Park by exhorting us, as readers, "to take seriously our intellectual and interpretive vocation to make connections, to deal with as much of the evidence as possible, fully and actually, to read what is there or not there at all, above all, to see complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of human history." (Said, 115) In engaging with this special issue—and the conversations beyond—we invite our readers to do just that.*

 

 

*  This essay has been shaped by innumerable conversations with Madhubala P. To her, I owe my understanding of extractivism and of how it is embedded within the political economy, the books that have informed the argument, and the insight that extractivism often constitutes the hidden plumbing of some of our most canonical science fiction texts: a torchlit procession of one, illumining the recesses of our planetary mine.  

 

 

 


]]> 44305 A Song to SEA: an editorial https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/a-song-to-sea-an-editorial/ Mon, 29 Aug 2022 18:06:40 +0000 http://strangehorizons.com/?p=44080 Southeast Asia is an immense region with diverse cultures, traditions, and mythologies. It has witnessed trade, migration, wars, and occupation. Right from the very beginning, Southeast Asia was known as a destination for trade in ancient Greek sources, right up to the detailed texts by Chinese writers. With trade came the exchange and cross-fertilisation of ideas and belief systems. There is so much beauty and joy as well as stark horror. The glorious architecture of Angkor Wat, the outpouring of religious stories and texts like the Ramayana, the intermarriages of ethnicity and culture. The horrors of the Japanese Occupation in World War II and the Khmer Rouge, the terror of the Vietnam War have left an indelible imprint in the collective psyche and memory of Southeast Asian people.

Indeed, Southeast Asia is a diverse region with diverse cultures, traditions, mythologies, and stories. Hantu, preta, wandering wild spirits, monsters, nagas, Barong—all the stories that keep generations of children and adults awake at night.

And with its diversity comes the amazing (and delicious range of) food. Most of Southeast Asian cuisine—no doubt, deeply influenced by trade—are spicy or packed full of spice. In fact, the Portuguese, Dutch, and English fought bitterly over spice and their actions irrevocably changed Southeast Asian history forever.

We are pleased to present to you the Southeast Asian special. We are amazed, awed, delighted, and have wept (in a good way) at the sheer talent represented in the stories, poems, and essays. In fact, we are saddened that we couldn’t represent all of Southeast Asia. We have so much talent. 

For fiction, we have a range of comedy and tragedy, fresh takes on known tropes, and a confirmation that if there is one thing Southeast Asia is full of (besides talent), it’s ghosts, food, and the cooperation we find in the knowledge that we share this world together. We have JV Choong’s Kuan-Yin story, “Her Merciful Components,” in which a cantankerous inventor explores the concept of the Goddess of Mercy with the Thousand Arms through engineering, artificial intelligence, and some visionary architecture. EK Gonzales continues the exploration of artificial intelligence, this time with a parental theme, as a woman raises a humanoid robot and heartbreakingly releases him at his request to participate in anti-colonial efforts. A similar recognition of the right to autonomy threads through Nadine Aurora Tabing’s “Obsolesce,” a cyberpunk future where even the wealthy can get trapped in machinations of others, domestic workers must still tend to their needs, and compassion can still be found. 

We take a quick comic break into the streets of Kuala Lumpur with Guan Un’s little heist for a wok that may or may not be magic in “Wok Hei St.” Wok hei, for those unfamiliar, literally translates into “the breath of the wok,” and is a certain flavour captured by cooking in a wok. This takes us into the food half of the fiction. If “Wok Hei St” is about cooking, then our next two stories are about different forms of consumption, and the revelations to be had in the process. Cat T. takes on the penglipur lara figure and infuses it with the gravitas of telepathy, the hunger of vampirism, and the bardic duty towards soothing the soul of their audience in “The Soother of Sorrows.” In contrast, the manananggal of Wen-yi Lee’s “Lay My Stomach On Your Scales” practises restraint, struggling with a weight disorder and a tenuous friendship with a seemingly perfect schoolmate, leading to a surprising revelation of bodily value. 

Our poets also bring with them a feast of flavourful verse, dealing with loss, love, and survival. A note of steel rings through Natalie Wang’s tense and deliciously threatening "Red", Rachelle Cruz’s strange yet tender "Aswang Paces Outside of Kaiser Permanente Hospital", and Votey Cheav’s "when a kingdom falls/shakti’s kisses". Southeast Asia’s softer side is evident in Yee Heng Yeh’s dreamy "Song" and the terse, dense imagery of Call out my name by Jeff William Acosta. That same sense of density is also a part of Max Pasakorn’s "field notes from an investigation into the self", carrying the reader along in a monsoon of words. Cheng Him’s "Declaration", the last of the cohort, delivers boisterous energy and playfulness through every stanza.

The nonfiction continues with food and food imagery. Stephani Soejono writes passionately about food in space, specifically in shows like Star Trek. How do the Southeast Asian-coded characters express their Southeast Asianness? Or have they, at all? It is a wasted opportunity for science fiction shows not to showcase or have actual Southeast Asian food representation. If Picard is known for his Earl Grey, Sisko his jambalaya and Janeway her coffee, how about Georgio? I would like to see Philippa Georgio enjoying Peranakan Nonya or Indonesian food! Or Portuguese Kristang/Eurasian, even!

Ni Yi-Sheng’s essay rounds up the SEA special by asking vital questions. What is spicepunk? How do we, Southeast Asians, write spicepunk? Yi-Sheng unpacks the tensions in the word itself and how we have to decolonise our minds. How can we write with our own biases and prejudices? It is a difficult challenge which Southeast Asian writers and readers have to address. 

So, grab a cup of tea, chai, and kopi. Savour the words and have them change your mind of what Southeast Asia is.  It’s a diverse region to many people. Our experiences might differ and converge, but ultimately, for many of us it’s simply home. 

 


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