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Vector (ed. Polina Levontin): As a literary scholar, you have written both about motherhood in Frankenstein and theorised the gothic genre in Dracula, a book you edited. How does writing and ‘research as practice’ intersect in The Turn?

Rachel Feder: One of my mentors in graduate school, Yopie Prins, once described herself as “promiscuous” in her scholarly interests. This stuck with me, and I like to say that I’m a slut for genre. I’m interested in genre as a form of experiment, one that calls a certain imagined readership into being. I’m interested in how genre hopping might allow me to imagine and, hopefully, connect with different communities of readers.

The Gothic is a really interesting test case, here. A text I think about a lot is Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished Gothic novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, which is, in my opinion, her most radically proto-feminist work. When Wollstonecraft enters political-theoretical discussions—which it’s actually incredible that she was able to do so effectively, given both her gender and her class and family background—she writes to the readership that was already established for that discourse field. She offers almost chiropractic adjustments to patriarchy. But then we get this raw, unfinished Gothic novel (edited and mediated by Godwin, who burned her drafts, sure), and suddenly we’re talking directly about abuse, assault, abortion, and suicide, in highly political ways. The femme-coded nature of the Gothic—which has always been a trade, or even pulp, genre—lets Wollstonecraft imagine talking directly to the victims of patriarchy. One of the most invested readers of that text was Mary Shelley—it really haunts her work—so Wollstonecraft’s feminist intervention in the Gothic informs the history of science fiction, too.

Personally, I’m interested in how the Gothic reveals totalities. When I want to understand forces that feel invisible, totally oppressive, or inevitable in our world, playing with fiction lets me take a hard look at my subject. When someone runs out of a haunted house, you get to see the house, if only for a moment.

And the follow-up question is the converse: writing from experience rather than theory, about motherhood, academic life, academic life as a mother… To me, who is also both, The Turn spoke directly. Genre fiction is precisely the mode to talk about the politics of care, both childcare and care as a creator more generally. Was reaching for the Gothic motivated by the desire to convey the real problems in the most visceral way?

RF: Across genres, I would say that my writing mind and my parental mind are inseparable. I like to joke that I made my kids strange baby books—I began working in earnest on my monograph, Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood Under the Sign of Frankenstein, almost immediately postpartum with my older child, and started writing The Turn while home with a new baby during the pandemic. One argument I make in Harvester is that there is no such thing as writing from theory rather than experience. Our experiences—including our familial and embodied experiences, and our experiences of giving and receiving care—are always going to inform how we understand theory.

And then of course, there are external events. The pandemic. Did it really happen? Apparently, forgetting – a global amnesia – seems to be one of our responses. The memory gaps, of course, play a key part in the plot. Is this a random connection? When, in relation to the pandemic, did you begin writing this novella? Did you have to overcome forgetting?

RF: In the summer of 2020, my husband and kids and I were staying at my childhood home in Boulder. (The house in The Turn is not based on my childhood home, but rather on the home of my friend, the writer, scholar, and lawyer Natalie Brown.) I awoke one morning to a strange dream, the dream Baxter has at the beginning of the novella. In the dream, I walked out into my childhood living room and looked out the window to find the house was a ship floating on the sea. 

My first attempt at this project was a story serialized in the online literary journal Luna Luna Magazine. The editors there were so generously willing to take a chance on something I had yet to write, and very kind to me when, for various reasons, I was unable to keep going. But Baxter stayed with me, and, with some distance, I was finally able to come back to her story, and bring her home.

It’s interesting to me that you bring up forgetting. I’m a very inductive writer, so I didn’t imagine the memory gaps in the story as such when I was first drafting—I was just learning things at the same time Baxter did. But forgetting is such a crucial component of the way, for example, Mary Shelley imagines motherhood in relation to the Gothic. In terms of The Turn, I think the question for me has more to do with the fraught connection between cognitive and embodied knowledge.

One of the horror/realism aspects in The Turn is how gendered parental roles are. Fathers seem superfluous, while the biological bond between a mother and a child is rendered fantastical and supernatural. Is the gender of the child significant? In this way, we find a protagonist torn between two male figures with unnatural power over her body. 

RF: It’s really important to me, as a cis hetero person who often writes about parenthood—and who writes, inherently, from my own experience of the world, my own identity—not to ever imply that I think about biological motherhood as somehow better or “more than” any other type of parenthood. I feel the need to tread lightly to avoid spoilers here, so I will just mention that the monstrous forces at the margins of Baxter’s world are both paternal and maternal in nature—a hallmark of the Gothic.

Regardless of whether this pertains to gender, the fantastical, supernatural bonds in the book have to do with loving a child unconditionally and caring for that child no matter what. That’s the real magic, I think, that makes a parent. 

In terms of the kids, Thebes and Quinn just kind of came to me whole cloth. You’d need to ask them any questions you have about their genders.

Power is often narrativised as magic. The imagery of vampirism has been used in critiques of capitalism and deployed to represent sexual power. Situating consent within the ambivalent framing of the gothic genre seemed especially difficult. What were the parts that gave you the most trouble?

RF: When I teach the history of vampire literature, I invite students to consider how stories can be subversive, but not necessarily progressive. Monster stories often open up pockets of possibility—for queerness and polyamory in Dracula, for example—but then punish these desires and reassert the status quo.

One of the Gothic novellas that inspired this project is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. I’ll never forget reading that text in class for the first time. The professor, the great James scholar William Veeder, paid particular attention to the end of the book. I remember him saying something along the lines of, sometimes the Gothic opens Pandora’s box, and what comes out is too powerful. You can’t close the box. You can’t reassert the frame. You can’t put things back in their “proper” place. I’m committed to this Gothic potential. The greatest challenge of this project—and the most rewarding—was letting Baxter fully embrace her own power, even as the world around her continued to spin into disorder.

Will there be a sequence? What are you working on now?

RF: The form of the Gothic governess novella is an integral part of The Turn’s deep engagement with literary history. Someday I’d love to try my hand at some kind of serialized adaptation of the story to a different medium, extending past the current ending, maybe even in collaboration with other writers.

I’m working on a few projects now, in different genres: a literary horroromance novel; a libretto for a musical; a collaborative scholarly project. Like all my creative endeavors, these examine how literary history informs our shared cultural mythologies, and our sense of what we owe ourselves and each other.

Author Jane Yolen, 87, died peacefully in her home, surrounded by family, in Hatfield MA on June 11, 2026.

Jane Hyatt Yolen was born February 11, 1939 in New York City NY. She graduated Smith College with a BA in 1960, at which time she was already writing poetry and articles, and received a master's in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1978. Between degrees, in 1962, she married …Read More

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The British Fantasy Society, HWS, and Karen Fishwick have revealed preliminary plans for Fantasycon 2027. Fantasycon 2027 will include some aspects of World Fantasy Convention including the World Fantasy Awards. This is alongside all the usual Fantasycon content of panels, readings, books, art and social activities.

Fantasycon 2027 will run September 24-26, 2027 in Birmingham, England. For more information, see the official Facebook event page. …Read More

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The Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour has announced its eight-title shortlist for short fiction:

• A Song of Shir'ja , Harps Aujla
• Zonbi , Zarah Elouis-Ro
• Crooked Straits , Olivia Ho
• One Thousand and One Wishes , Rakan Khashman
• The Sun Wells , Aiden Ng
• A Blade Drawn from Envy , Ty Ogunade
• A Corruption of Death …Read More

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The finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction story have been announced by the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

• Six People to Revise You , J.R. Dawson (Uncanny 1-2/25)
• The Nine Crashes of Flight Lieutenant Hilla Quinn , Louise Hughes (Kaleidotrope 9/25)
• The Shadow on the Nest , Alaya Dawn Johnson (Uncanny 9-10/25)
• Wire Mother , …Read More

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by Rosemary Jones

Read by the author

The first movie tie-in novels date to the rise of silent movies as mass entertainment at the beginning of the 20th century. As with movie tie-in books today, these included both novelizations of screenplays and reissues of published novels illustrated with movie stills.

Newspapers Inspire Early Movie Tie-Ins

The novelization of The Adventures of Kathlyn is one of the earliest movie tie-in novels. This serial began on December 29, 1913, and was shown in movie theaters through 1914. One of the action heroines of silent movies, the film’s star, Kathlyn Williams, was famous for performing with big cats.  The movie took advantage of her talents and first name. Over the course of 13 episodes, the fictional Kathlyn rescues her explorer father and frees the enslaved population of a mythical kingdom. She traverses jungles, battles wild beasts, outwits the insidious Council of Three, and dodges a forced marriage to a foul prince. Each episode ended with a cliffhanger guaranteed to bring the audience back to enjoy the next installment until the story’s happy resolution.

(Bottom) Adventures of Kathlyn (1913) and (top) Perils of Pauline (1914). Photo by Rosemary Jones.

Harold McGrath, who supplied the original story for the screenplay, wrote the novel published by The Bobbs-Merrill Company. The text was illustrated with black-and-white photos from the film. The frontispiece opposite the title page shows Kathlyn clutching the hunter Bruce, who aids her quest to rescue her father and provides a romantic interest.

Newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times also featured stories illustrated with stills from The Adventures of Kathlyn. This was designed to boost sales of the newspapers, the serial, and the book, cashing in on every possible way to keep the public intrigued by Kathlyn’s trials and tribulations. It was all coordinated, with the Chicago Tribune helping to finance the movie production in hopes of boosting their circulation. The Motion Picture News noted film screenings ended with a reminder to read about Kathlyn in the Sunday newspaper, while the newspaper stories urged fans to go to the “picture theater” to watch the next episode.

Photoplays Become Bestsellers

The Adventures of Kathlyn launched the popular format of action serials with cliffhanger endings, most famously The Perils of Pauline (1914). Funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and written by playwright Charles Goddard, the serial put star Pearl White in dangerous situations, including being menaced by a gorilla (a costumed actor as opposed to the real big cats used in The Adventures of Kathlyn). Fifteen black-and-white photos of Pauline’s adventures accompanied Goddard’s novelization, which Hearst’s International Library Co. published. The title page proclaims it is “a motion picture novel.”

Perils of Pauline title page (1914). Photo by Rosemary Jones.

These early novels convinced other publishers that movies made great books. Novelizations of movies and books illustrated with film stills were quickly released. Hundreds of titles were in print by the 1920s.

In the United States, New York publishers A.L. Burt and Grosset & Dunlap were the most prolific publishers of movie tie-in novels. Both publishers specialized in issuing cheap hardcover reprints of popular fiction and classics. As silent movies adapted these stories to film, publishers found it easy to insert four to eight stills into their versions. Colorful dust jackets trumpeted that the book was the basis for the movie and named popular film stars as prominently as authors. Both publishers used the term photoplays to describe these books illustrated with movie stills. Grosset’s advertisements trumpeted that their books allowed the audience “the secret of enjoying the films over and over again in a comfortable armchair by your own fireside.”

Silent movies were a worldwide phenomenon, as were movie tie-in books. German scriptwriter Thea Von Harbou’s novel Metropolis appeared in multiple languages with illustrations from the 1927 silent movie directed by Fritz Lang. The Readers Library (UK) dust jacket art emphasizes the movie’s Art Deco design and robot. Von Harbou also wrote The Rocket to the Moon, which was the basis for Lang’s 1929 silent movie Frau in Mond (Woman in the Moon). The illustrated movie tie-in edition released by Readers Library used the title The Girl in the Moon.

Metropolis dust jacket, Readers Library edition, photo courtesy of Fantasy Illustrated ABAA. More Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Tie-Ins

Today, silent movie tie-in novels featuring science fiction, fantasy, and horror films attract the most interest from collectors. Some of these are still famous films, like Metropolis. Others are more obscure, like the 1916 version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Some films are lost, such as the 1922 edition of The Young Diana, inspired by Marie Corelli’s earlier novel. The movie tie-in version is the only way to see how Marion Davies portrayed its heroine, who is rejuvenated by a scientist. But all are testimony to the importance of science fiction and fantasy in the silent era.

A childhood favorite adapted to film early on was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Grosset published an oversized gift edition with photos from the 1915 silent movie. An account of how the picture was filmed before a live audience at the Savoy Theatre appears at the beginning of the book.

Alice in Wonderland colored frontispiece (1915). Photo by Rosemary Jones.

Douglas Fairbanks’s Thief of Baghdad (1924) was a stunt and special-effects fantasy extravaganza. The novelization was done by Achmed Abudallah, who listed himself as “the writer of many lands and many people.” As was common in the silent era, Abudallah’s biography sounded as romantic as his stories, claiming he was the son of a Persian princess and an exiled noble cousin of the last Russian czar. The A. L. Burt edition featured a wraparound dust jacket art by Willy Pogany with Fairbanks and his princess on the front and the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong in her breakout role as a villainess on the back.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with reproduction dust jacket. Photo by Rosemary Jones.

Lon Chaney’s groundbreaking, fantastic make-up in horror films is evident in the movie tie-in version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). The book features four stills from the movie, two double-page color plates from earlier editions of the novel, and a wraparound dust jacket where the dead body on the grand staircase is cleverly centered on the spine. So, whether face-out or spine-only, this book was sure to attract fans of the Phantom.

Phantom of the Opera (1925) with reproduction dust jacket. Photo by Rosemary Jones. Enduring Connection to Silent Films

While the Jazz Singer and other sound experiments ended the silent movie era by 1930, the movie tie-in novel remained strong. Every decade has brought new movie tie-in novels, novelizations, and spin-offs in ever-increasing numbers.

But these silent movie tie-in books make charming reminders of early science fiction, fantasy, and horror films. Sometimes they are the easiest versions to find. Only fragments of The Adventures of Kathlyn remain in existence (which can be watched on YouTube courtesy of the Eye Filmmuseum), but McGrath’s novel is widely available in the used-book market.

Explore more articles from THE HISTORY FILES

Rosemary Jones collects illustrated fiction, including Photoplays. She has authored seven novels based on games, including two for Forgotten Realms/Wizards of the Coast and five for Arkham Horror/Aconyte. Her latest AH novels, The Nightmare Quest of April May and The Arcane Gamble of Harvey Walters, feature books from her collection tucked on the characters’ bookshelves. More about her writing can be found at rosemaryjones.com. Pictures of her book collection are available at @lost_loves_books on Instagram.

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The Omega Sci-Fi Awards has revealed the winners of its Tomorrow Prize short story competition:

• FIRST PLACE: File: Anna Bishop , Abigail Lee
• SECOND PLACE: The Continuity States of America , Jadyn Manguera Shin
• THIRD PLACE: Bellwethers , Theodore Kinsella

Other finalists include:

• The Drought Code , Hanaa Belkacemi
• Mother , Yedsen Troy Dela Cruz

Honorable mentions were given to the following stories:

…Read More

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The five regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize have been announced. Works and authors of genre interest include Mehendi Nights by Sharon Aruparayil. The winning stories have been published online by Granta.

After a final round of judging, the overall winner will be announced in an online ceremony June 30, 2026. The winner receives £5,000, while the regional winners each receive £2,500.

The Prize has recently been the …Read More

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The Ignyte Awards Committee has announced the finalists for the 2026 Ignyte Awards, which seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.

Outstanding Novel: Adult

• A Song of Legends Lost, M.H. Ayinde (Saga) amazon/bookshop
• Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday) amazon / bookshop
• Motheater, …Read More

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After a long career of publishing gorgeous limited editions, collections, art books, and novellas, publisher Bill Schafer has shared the news that Subterranean Press will be permanently closing in the coming years. Subterranean intends to continue publishing work through the end of 2027, which may bleed into 2028 as we wrap things up. Schafer says,

We want to handle this in a structured, orderly fashion, which will include communicating with …Read More

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The shortlist for the 39th annual Arthur C. Clarke Award, celebrating the best science fiction novel published in the UK, has been announced.

• Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman (Dandy House US; Michael Joseph UK) amazon / bookshop
• The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami (Pantheon US; Bloomsbury Circus UK) amazon / bookshop
• Luminous, Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster US; Magpie UK) amazon / bookshop
• There Is No Antimemetics Division, QNTM …Read More

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The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the winners of the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards at an awards banquet during StokerCon 2026, held June 4-7, 2026 in Pittsburgh PA and streamed virtually.

Superior Achievement in a Novel

• WINNER:The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga) amazon / bookshop

• Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix (Berkley) amazon / bookshop
• King Sorrow, Joe Hill (William Morrow) amazon / bookshop

…Read More

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The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has released the winners of the 2025 Nebula Awards.

Novel

• WINNER:The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK) amazon / bookshop

• When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory (Saga) amazon / bookshop
• Katabasis, R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK) amazon / bookshop
• Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz) amazon / bookshop
• The Incandescent, Emily …Read More

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Introducing SFWA’s 61st Annual Nebula Award Winners

San Francisco, CA  – Saturday, June 6, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is proud to announce its latest Nebula Award winners for works published in 2025, as first presented during the Nebula Awards Ceremony on Saturday, June 6, at the organization’s 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare Hotel and Conference Center in Chicago, Illinois.

The Nebula Awards are voted on by SFWA Members in good standing, and they represent the views of professional SFF writers on the state of their industry and recent excellence within it.

Since 1965, SFWA has advocated for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. From that very first year, the Nebula Awards process has been one of SFWA’s foundational pathways to improving literary community for SFF writers.

This year, SFWA celebrated two inaugural awards: one for Poem, and one for Comic. Like the Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Nebula Award for Best Game Writing, these new awards celebrate writers at the heart of productions that also involve editors, artists, publishers, producers, and a wealth of other team members who make the magic happen. When voting opens later this year for work published in 2026, the second of these awards will be listed as Comics Writing.

The Nebula Awards Ceremony also celebrates excellence in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres through the issuance of special awards. This year, under the care and guiding words of Toastmaster Tananarive Due, the organization honored its 42nd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, N. K. Jemisin, the seasoned author of the Inheritance Trilogy, the Broken Earth Trilogy, and the Great Cities Duology, among others. SFWA also celebrated the excellent curatorial and community-building work of Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award Recipient David Langford, the tremendous genre commitment of Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Recipient Gay Haldeman, and the outstanding legacy of Infinity Award Recipient Roger Zelazny.

SFWA is delighted to announce that its next Nebula Awards Conference and Ceremony will be held in Seattle in June 2027. There is much to do to prepare for Nebula 62, but it all starts and ends with the power and purpose of good writing. Thank you to everyone who votes, writes, reads, and otherwise contributes to the betterment of this genre in all its brilliant forms.

The Nebula Award for Novel

When We Were Real, by Daryl Gregory (Saga)
★ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK) ★ 
Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz)
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (Tor; Orbit UK)
Sour Cherry, by Natalia Theodoridou (Tin House; Wildfire)
Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia)

The Nebula Award for Novella

Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle, by Renan Bernardo (Dark Matter INK)
★  The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia) ★ 
The Death of Mountains, by Jordan Kurella (Lethe)
Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
But Not Too Bold, by Hache Pueyo (Tordotcom)
“Descent”, by Wole Talabi (Clarkesworld 5/25)

The Nebula Award for Novelette

“Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh”, by Marie Croke (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 1/9/25)
★ “Uncertain Sons”, by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, Undertow Publications) ★
“We Begin Where Infinity Ends”, by Somto Ihezue (Clarkesworld 2/25)
The Name Ziya, by Wen-Yi Lee (Reactor; Tor Books)
“Never Eaten Vegetables”, by H.H. Pak (Clarkesworld 1/25)
“The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends”, by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 3-4/25)

The Nebula Award for Short Story

“Through the Machine”, by P.A. Cornell (Lightspeed 5/25)
“Six People to Revise You”, by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny 1-2/25)
“In My Country”, by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 4/25)
“The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead”, by E.M. Linden (PodCastle 2/18/25)
“Because I Held His Name Like a Key”, by Aimee Ogden (Strange Horizons 6/16/25)
★ “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything”, by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots 5/25) ★

The Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction

The Tower, by David Anaxagoras (Recorded Books)
Gemini Rising, by Jonathan Brazee (Semper Fi Press)
Wishing Well, Wishing Well, by Jubilee Cho (Atthis Arts)
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
★ Into the Wild Magic, by Michelle Knudsen (Candlewick) ★
Goblin Girl, by K.A. Mielke (self-published)

The Nebula Award for Game Writing

Spire, Surge, and Sea, by Stewart C. Baker (Choice of Games)
★ Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by Guillaume Broche & Jennifer Svedberg-Yen (Kepler Interactive), Developer: Sandfall Interactive, Sandfall S.A.S. ★
Hollow Knight: Silksong, by Ari Gibson & William Pellen (Team Cherry)*
Dispatch, by Mayanna Berrin, Ashley Jeffalone, Suzee Matson, Chris Rebbert, Chad Rhiness, & Pierre Shorette (AdHoc Studio)
Hades II, by Greg Kasavin (Supergiant Games)
Blue Prince, by Tonda Ros (Raw Fury, Developer: Dogubomb)

The Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

KPop Demon Hunters, by Danya Jimenez, Maggie Kang, & Hannah McMechan (Netflix)*
Sinners, by Ryan Coogler (Warner Bros Pictures)*
Severance: “Chikhai Bardo”, by Dan Erickson & Mark Friedman (Apple TV+)*
Pluribus: Season One, by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV+)*
Superman, by James Gunn (Warner Bros Pictures)*
★ Murderbot: Season One, by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz (Apple TV+) ★

The Nebula Award for Comic

Second Shift, by Kit Anderson (Avery Hill)
Carmilla Volume 3: The Eternal, by Amy Chu (Berger)
Helen of Wyndhorn, by Bilquis Evely and Tom King (Dark Horse)
Fishflies, by Jeff Lemire (Image)
★ Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters: The Killing Stone, by Jessica Maison (Wicked Tree) ★
Strange Bedfellows, by Ariel Slamet Ries (HarperAlley)
The Flip Side, by Jason Walz (Rocky Pond)
The Stoneshore Register, by G. Willow Wilson (Berger)

The Nebula Award for Poem

“Though You Always Are”, by Linda D. Addison & Jamal Hodge (Everything Endless, Raw Dog Screaming Press)
“They Said Robots Are”, by Casey Aimer (Penumbric 6/25)
★ “The World To Come”, by Jennifer Hudak (Strange Horizons 12/22/25) ★
“The Mourning Robot”, by Angela Liu (Uncanny 9-10/25)
“Care for Lightning”, by Mari Ness (Uncanny 1-2/25)
“To Be the Change”, by Nico Martinez Nocito (Strange Horizons 3/10/25)

*No statement on LLM-use received from finalist during final ballot.

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The longlist for the 2026 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic was announced May 25, 2026:

• The Drowned Man's Daughter, C.J. Lavigne (NeWest) amazon / bookshop
• The Works of Vermin, Hiron Ennes (Tor) amazon / bookshop
• Horsefly, Mireille Gagné, tr. Pablo Strauss (Coach House) amazon / bookshop
• Wild Life, Amanda Leduc (Random House Canada)
• The Hunger We Pass Down, Jen Sookfong Lee (McClelland & Stewart) …Read More

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By Ana Sun

Ever wonder why we tend to refer to the future in its singular form in everyday speech? Why ‘the future’, and not simply ‘futures’? Considering that we can probably agree that a myriad of futures is possible before one of them falls into the present, this seems to be a mundane but overlooked mystery. 

In Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040, Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman observed [1]:  

There is a problem with most books about the future – and indeed, there is a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. This is because of a simple point. The fact is, there is no single future, regardless of our deepest desire that it be so, and there is no heavenly salvation in sight.

As someone who often explores progressive, positive futures within the context of climate change and social justice through science fiction, in particular Solarpunk [2], I’m intrigued: does the common view of a singular future mean we are more likely to believe that climate collapse is inevitable? Do we therefore find it difficult to imagine – and enact – alternatives? Have we inadvertently accepted a destiny described by cyberpunk, a future rocket-boosted by uncaring technology, systems of oppression and power concentrated in the hands of a few? In Zoefuturistic terms, have we simply accepted the ‘being’ and forfeited the ‘becoming’?

There’s some evidence that language can influence how we perceive time and our relationship with the future… or, rather, futures [3]. Our bodies are limited in conscious capacity, our brains constrained by how our memories are formed [4] [5] [6].

Unlike futurists and futurologists, thinking about the long-term future in its simultaneous multiplicities, especially when it comes to a complex issue such as climate change, is not something that most of us are able to conceptualise easily [7]. Sure, we may deal well enough with the immediate future, such as considering different possible routes we might take between two locations, or how we might fill the hours between morning and night on a given day. Beyond a certain timeframe, the future can resemble a different place; this afternoon, tonight, or tomorrow can easily seem like disembodied worlds beyond our reach [27]. And yet, the next second appears on the near horizon in the shadow of the following minute, then the hour thereafter – all rapidly pouring into the now, one liquid moment flowing into the next.

Perhaps there are deeper reasons for why we struggle with notions of futures in our everyday lives, and that’s worth examining. 

Caught in destiny’s net

Sometime in the early summer of 2025, after an event on climate change resilience, a frustrated attendee next to me mumbled words to the effect, “So all of it is going to end, isn’t it?” 

At the time, her blunt nihilism shocked me into silence, but that feeling of impotence is all too familiar: what’s the use of fighting if all will be destroyed in the end? If we were to believe that an impending climate collapse is destiny, we’d have already been defeated before we even began. 

One winter morning, I asked a question to an audience of about two hundred people in the middle of a talk I was giving: how did they visualise critical environmental thresholds – what we commonly call ‘climate tipping points’? The majority believed these to be a cliff-edge for survival: once we topple over the side, it’s game over. No surprise; I certainly did too, once.

In August 2025, updated analysis showed an increased risk of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapsing when researchers examined data modelling that ran for a longer timeframe until 2300 and 2500 [8]. Separately, a seventh planetary boundary – out of the nine environmental limits that demarcate the planet’s health –  has been breached this year, according to the annual assessment by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as ocean acidification transgresses the critical safe threshold for marine ecosystems [9].

All these are alarming signals designed to induce a sense of urgency and a drive to action, but taken alone without accompanying solutions, these types of headlines incite panic and breed disempowerment [10], rendering us helpless and stripped of agency while an inevitable future barrels down upon us.

The AMOC tipping point is particularly worrying because the change to humanity as we know it would be drastic. If we don’t succeed in lowering our CO2 emissions in line with the Paris Agreement,  the current estimation is that we might pass this particular tipping point within a few decades. 

There still remains deep uncertainty whether the AMOC may weaken partially or result in a full collapse, and over what timeframe. Likely, we have at least a few decades at hand to act to avert the worst outcomes. Johan Rockström, Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said of the seventh planetary boundary breach [11]:

We’re not yet in the high-risk zone of irreversible, unmanageable change of the planet, which suggests that we can still turn this around. The window is still open even though it’s closing fast, and we have so much evidence of scalable solutions across all sectors from the food sector to the built environment to the energy transition that we can bend the curves and bring ourselves back within a safe operating space within the next decades.

Seaver Wang, the Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute wrote comprehensively about the misnomer of ‘tipping points’: 

First, the word ‘tipping’ implies the rapidity of an unbalanced cart toppling over. […] Second, the word ‘point,’ too, is bound to confuse. It implies a single, precise, known critical threshold beyond which Earth system components tip. [12]

The reality is that environmental tipping points are far more complex [13]. The Global Tipping Points Report 2023 emphasises that their assessment ‘does not suggest that crossing major tipping points could lead to runaway warming, with mitigation to prevent further tipping points being worthwhile even if some tipping points are reached. [14]’. 

We also spend so little time focusing on positive tipping points – such as those scalable solutions that Johan Rockström refers to [11] [15]. If my sample of two hundred or so attendees was anything to go by, solutions that have a positive impact aren’t something that typically crosses our minds. While our media coverage would have us imagine apocalyptic scenarios where the Earth drowns under several metres of seawater – a scenario that, in reality, is highly unlikely in the near future – the current estimates suggest that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would likely take hundreds to thousands of years to melt after their tipping points are breached [16]. The complexity in predicting circulation and heat transfers in the ocean means much is unknown; current projections, even in our worst case scenario, project sea level rise of up to 180mm by 2050 [17].

We shouldn’t be under the impression that all is well – but there’s time to act, to reverse the damage if we could collectively grasp our agency.

Unfortunately, few narrative tools exist to remind us we are not rolling downhill off the far side of Freytag’s Pyramid into fated tragedy. Just how well science fiction is placed to shift collective imagination is still a nascent experiment [18].

Science fiction: from imaginary prediction to unintended blueprint

It might sometimes look like cyberpunk has predicted our current trajectory: a world where AI is poised to displace us, where an elite, privileged few exploit political institutions to concentrate their power, preying on people and planet to enrich themselves. 

Ursula K. Le Guin famously declared [19], ‘Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.’ Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discusses this at length in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [20]: ‘SF is imaginary prediction, drawing on the same sort of historical-projective suspension of disbelief as the real thing, if only to explore, to problematize, and to play with it.’

In other words, science fiction originally took on the mantle of holding up a mirror to our present from a possible future. Until recently, SF has often been written in past tense, presenting narratives as if a particular future has already happened so we could project ourselves forward in time. But how did we get from those glorious imaginary predictions to what Simon McNeil recounts as the ‘future horrors Silicon Valley merchants of human misery are trying to produce’ [21]? How did we get from Star Trek to a world where technology is threatening humanity, at the very same time as our obsession with economic growth means the planet can no longer sustain all of us?

In his epic essay The Men Who Sold the Moon, Eden Kupernmintz explains how we our current situation might have transpired [22]:  

[..] if you want to read about militarism in Heinlein’s work, you can find countless articles online on the topic, as well as on the fascism of Campbell and the many, many awful passages of Vance’s career. But consider the supposedly more progressive works of authors like Simak, Asimov, Pohl Anderson, Blish, or Roddenberry. Most, if not all, of their ideas and values are realized through individualist, liberal lenses. They are mostly concerned with heroes who uphold values such as compassion, honor, duty, and virtue. They very rarely, if ever, engage with meaningful, systematic criticisms of society. Indeed, they are perfect examples of “suburban science fiction”, importing much of the underlying, and thus powerful, presuppositions of our own society into the future. Their heroes are almost invariably male, white, abled, and dripping with machismo and “charisma”. Solutions to problems revolve around rationalism and scientism at best and downright calls for technocracy at worst. The idea of the supremacy of science, without engaging in its colonial roots, without engaging with ideas and problems like eugenics, without any meaningful critiques of its role in serving capitalism, is one of the main motivating powers of much of the careers cited above.

Kupernmintz goes on to suggest that the heroes portrayed in the Golden Age of science fiction created the archetypes upon which powerful people such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel could comfortably model themselves. A challenging stance, certainly, to flatten such rich visions of the future. However, even the post-scarcity utopia depicted in Star Trek would have assumed that we continue extractive practices on Earth’s finite resources – such as precious metals and fossil fuels – for us to get there [23].

Science fiction as a genre has never set out to predict any specific future and yet here we are, witnessing what should have been cautionary tales become ingrained blueprints for the potential destruction of humanity and our living planet – adding to already debilitating helplessness, tempting us to give in to seemingly inescapable destiny. 

In recent years, we’ve seen a more significant shift of how we discuss science fiction as a mirror of our present to a vehicle for intentional imagination and activism. Roger Luckhurst in his review of Uneven Futures [24] calls it ‘a move from SF as noun to SF as verb, a set of actions, […] a move from static textual study to motivated activity that follows on from the reading of texts.’ Alongside genres such as Afrofuturism and Solarpunk, we can also observe increasing use of applied science fiction to anticipate policy risks and opportunities [25].

Even then, the question continues to plague me: might stories alone be enough? Would words on a page ultimately change how we behave, as individuals living within systems that are often out of our control? A question worth asking, considering our human physiology proves a disadvantage when it comes to thinking about the future – because of our struggle with the concept of time.

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey

In a book that’s equal parts science, philosophy and poetry, The Death of Forever, Darryl Reanney explains how time as we would commonly think of it – as a force external to us – is likely an illusion [6]:

Superficially, time is something we create when we measure it, dividing it into seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. […] Our experience of time is of something that moves, that sweeps upon its breast like a river forever moving at a constant rate from past to future.

Our sense of how time passes directly correlates to the number of instances our brains encode as new experiences; these are also how memories are formed. This is why sometimes a month can speed by, but a minute can feel eternal [26].

My favourite understanding of what happens to our sense of time – from moments to memories – comes from Daniel Kahnemann, who describes the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ [5]. The experiencing self is the part of us that lives in the continuous present and knows only of the now. However, these actual moments get discarded, filtered through the ‘remembering self’, which leaves us with a cohesive picture of who we are. Kahnemann says:

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories – it starts immediately. We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”

Suppose a collection of these stories is how we make sense of our past, but scientists have discovered the neural pathways we use to remember the past are identical to ones we use for imagining the future. 

Professors Martin A. Conway and Catherine Loveday articulated the remembering-imagining system as a window where we can access everyday memories of the recent past and the near future [27]. In their research, they found that events that lie further in the future are more abstract, just as memories in the remote past become more generic; they likened it to a ‘fish-eye lens’. Interesting challenges arise when we need to think beyond the visible future [28]: 

Just as in certain areas of physics, for example, quantum mechanics, it is not possible to precisely predict a future state of a system, so with people the future is only probable. However, once a future state has come into being, it may be possible, to at least some extent, to work back to previous states. […]

Nevertheless, retrospectively reversible or not, given that there are an infinite number of indeterminate possible futures, this poses a major adaptive problem for goal-driven organisms. This is particularly so as the end point of all unrealized goals lies somewhere in the future. Indeed, in order to have a goal a future state has to be anticipated and often consciously imagined.”

While their research refers specifically to individual memory forming and goal creation, I can’t help wondering what this would mean on a collective level. More on that later.

Firstly, our actual experiences are fleeting. The moment passes and our brains form a narrative about what we thought happened – and no, it’s not necessarily reliable. Secondly, cognitive science suggests that we can only look as far into the future clearly as we are able to recall the past; beyond a certain point, the future becomes less certain and more conjecture, just as the past becomes fuzzier in our memory. If we want to determine a goal that’s beyond the boundary of the remembering-imagining system, we need to consciously imagine what we want our futures to be. But that assumes we have free will and therein lies another pitfall, a conundrum possibly best summarised by S. Pahl and colleagues [29]: 

If evidence for climate change events is difficult to retrieve from memory, climate risks will be underestimated (or biased toward very salient information or images). Moreover, information about climate change faces stiff competition from the media barrage and other daily issues that are simply more salient, compelling and urgent in demanding our attention. […] In addition, research in cognitive psychology has indicated that individuals experience less emotive mental imagery with respect to generalized long-term goals (such as living more healthily or sustainably) compared to short-term goals (such as eating a doughnut or driving to the shop), because the former are less engaging and may lack specific cues in our daily environment that trigger appropriate action (whereas a doughnut might be displayed in a shop we walk past, with additional multi-sensory cues such as smell).

In her excellent book Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore discusses the famous Libet experiments – which imply an intention to act exists before the brain is conscious of the action, therefore potentially suggesting that ‘free will’ is an illusion [4]. The idea that we don’t have free will is so antithetical to our experience that the debate surrounding interpretation of these experiments endures. However, Libet discovered that what we do have is an overriding mechanism. In Blackmore’s words, “although we do not have free will, we do have ‘free won’t’.”

On an individual level, this means we have a severe cognitive disadvantage in connecting a climate-crisis-free future to our immediate present in a way that drives positive action. The question then: how might we exercise our ‘free won’t?’

In her final chapter, Blackmore gives us a potential clue:

Some people argue that the addition of language completely transforms minds, bringing about the essentials of consciousness, including the sense of self, theory of mind and the ability to think about past and future.

The power of language, the power of becoming

You might well call to mind Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or its film adaptation Arrival. I doubt we’d remember the future without some alien assistance in this world; however, evidence shows language can influence our perception of time, including how we might visualise time as directions. Some languages contain the sense of time in their grammar: past tense (“I went”), present tense (“I go”) and a future tense (“I will go”). English does not have conjugations, but Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese do. Other languages could be said to be ‘futureless’, where a qualifier (e.g. tomorrow, last night), when tagged onto a phrase, clarifies the sense of time; in languages such as Mandarin and German, we would say “I go tomorrow”, and it refers to a future time [3]. 

In a 2013 study, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at UCLA, concludes that speakers of ‘futureless languages’ such as German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages engaged more with the future in terms of financial savings and maintained better health, behaviours he attributes to how they don’t view the future as something separate from the present [30]. While we should be conscious that correlation never implies causation, the results are nonetheless fascinating.

We would have to make greater logical leaps to conclude if understanding our own linguistic biases would reframe our relationship to the perceived destiny of the climate crisis – and to conjure up viable alternatives. However, the field of futures anthropology might provide some useful vocabulary to unpack how we experience and envision the future, revealing how we might act in the present. Unlike Dr. Louise Banks, perhaps we don’t have to know the future to make our choices. 

From the outset of this essay, I raised the question of whether we might be treating environmental collapse as destiny, a deliberate word choice. ‘Destiny’ is one of the six orientations that Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight proposed in The Anthropology of the Future, enabling us to examine our relationship with the future – or futures – with richer nuance [31]. Other orientations include anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality and hope. 

I used the word destiny as we might do in common parlance, but also as an orientation: how a future would come to pass regardless of what happens in between, despite how we might get from here to there. The intention had been to provoke: have we simply accepted that an inequitable AI future coupled with the climate emergency would happen? Are we content to let it happen? 

The nuances of these words warrant a closer look. Expectation has a close but different nuance to anticipation: 

One may, for instance, expect rain and take an umbrella when going out ‘just in case.’ The expectation of rain, is, in this instance, still on the horizon and is tempered by, for example, weather reports that have failed in the past. […] Expectation may be viewed as a conservative teleology, one that gives thickness to the present through its reliance on the past. To anticipate rain, however, is to feel and smell it in the air, to close one’s windows and cover lawn furniture while imagining the future in the present. Anticipation slims the present, often breaking entirely with the past as it draws present and future into the same activity timespace [31].

Anticipation has a forward pull; expectation implies an action that often coincides with a notion of ‘ought’ or ‘should’. We expect that if we install solar panels, we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; we expect it because we’ve seen this happen before. To anticipate a world running on renewables has a forward-looking nuance, it may mean we focus on developing technologies across different types of energy generators to manage consistent power. Anticipating this kind of future gives me goosebumps. 

Speculation happens in the gap between what we expect and what we anticipate – when the end point is not clear, and when the information is partial or unavailable. For example, if the rollout of solar farms did not necessarily reduce reliance on fossil fuels, we might speculate that something has gone quite wrong with our energy governance. Or we might speculate whether we would have better success had we decided to prioritise, say, bladeless turbines. At the time of writing, the UK government is building policies on speculation: to ensure long-term energy resilience, we would need a combination of sources, including nuclear, geothermal, solar and wind [33]. The power of speculation could be that first step that creates hypotheses and assumptions against which we can create models or gather existing evidence – enabling us to make solutions real. 

Just the other day, while on a train to North Wales, I’d been struck by the number of solar farms en route; this is a new thing. Potentiality is rooted in the present, a sense that things have been set in motion, lending possibility to certain futures. Based on the view out my train window, and the offshore wind farms when I look out to the English Channel closer to home, a world running solely on a diverse range of renewables is a potentiality.

Finally, hope — a word used so often, we probably take its meaning for granted. Hope: a forward-driving force, fed by potentiality, resting on anticipation. Bryant and Knight describe hope as an orientation that ‘emerges in the gap between the potential and the actual, between matter and its not-yet form’. But my preferred definition comes the stirring words of Rebecca Solnit [34]:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and in that spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. […] Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. 

In order to evade undesirable destinies, of all the orientations available to us, I consider hope our primary vehicle. But individual hope is rarely enough – how might we bolster collective hope for collective action? 

Making future memories to remember

Summer had come early that day in May, rendering the communal meeting space warmer inside than out. As part of the cultural work around the Rights of River Charter for the Ouse, about twenty of us gathered and explored how we might strengthen our relationship to the river and channel its voice through conversation and collaborative art. In the centre of the room, an old metal bucket had been filled with river water earlier that morning; throughout the entire day, a part of the Ouse remained with us.

The inspiration and exhilaration from that one day gave birth to collective and individual memories that have since continued. Ideas flowed, creativity flourished, connections between humans and human-to-water rejuvenated. For me, the workshop sowed seeds of imagination, evoking emotions that would later make it into my writing, into the edits for my short story collection [2] that I’d been working on at the time. 

In this instance, collective memory has been instrumental in building a future-facing, positive relationship with a body of water that we have neglected for too long. Of course, collective memory could be traumatic too, as evidenced by the events around Covid-19 [35] – a global pandemic which had long been a potentiality most of us somehow ignored. To imagine desired futures, we would need to be intentional about creating collective memories so we can have rich pasts to carry forward into new futures. 

Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, wrote in his recent book How to Fall in Love with the Future [36]: 

Researchers use the term ‘mental time travel’ to describe our capacity to imagine the future – or the past – and how that capacity impacts our present-day experiences and decisions. While a lot of research has focused on individual future thought, more recently researchers have been expanding the focus of their attention to collective memory and collective future thought, or what they term ‘collective mental time travel’. 

[…] When we ‘time travel’ to the future, we dip into the cupboards of our memory, rummage around for snippets that might be useful, and then combine these snippets to create novel and unique ideas about the future. In other words, we assemble visions of the future from the resources of our past.’ 

Researchers have also found that social interaction with knowledge can shape outcomes: it could induce forgetfulness but also reinforce insights [37]. At the end of his book, Hopkins generously shares his ‘Time Machine Blueprint’ – tools to help a collective group of people mentally travel into the future. Science-fiction writers would recognise the worldbuilding; improv theatre types would recognise the set ups. 

We already have the skills and the tools to evade a destiny we don’t want. We already know how to form collective memories; we celebrate festivals, commune for conventions. As storytellers, we know what matters less is when the story is being told because our experiencing selves will forget it all. It’s about what happens after it ends – what our remembering selves will keep.

Participating in making collective memories – the conscious decision to take words off a page into our real world – charts a way forward to creating kindred futures: futures enabling us to reclaim our agency from the illusion of destiny, futures that care for people and planet.

References

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By Ana Sun

Ever wonder why we tend to refer to the future in its singular form in everyday speech? Why ‘the future’, and not simply ‘futures’? Considering that we can probably agree that a myriad of futures is possible before one of them falls into the present, this seems to be a mundane but overlooked mystery. 

In Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040, Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman observed [1]:  

There is a problem with most books about the future – and indeed, there is a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. This is because of a simple point. The fact is, there is no single future, regardless of our deepest desire that it be so, and there is no heavenly salvation in sight.

As someone who often explores progressive, positive futures within the context of climate change and social justice through science fiction, in particular Solarpunk [2], I’m intrigued: does the common view of a singular future mean we are more likely to believe that climate collapse is inevitable? Do we therefore find it difficult to imagine – and enact – alternatives? Have we inadvertently accepted a destiny described by cyberpunk, a future rocket-boosted by uncaring technology, systems of oppression and power concentrated in the hands of a few? In Zoefuturistic terms, have we simply accepted the ‘being’ and forfeited the ‘becoming’?

There’s some evidence that language can influence how we perceive time and our relationship with the future… or, rather, futures [3]. Our bodies are limited in conscious capacity, our brains constrained by how our memories are formed [4] [5] [6].

Unlike futurists and futurologists, thinking about the long-term future in its simultaneous multiplicities, especially when it comes to a complex issue such as climate change, is not something that most of us are able to conceptualise easily [7]. Sure, we may deal well enough with the immediate future, such as considering different possible routes we might take between two locations, or how we might fill the hours between morning and night on a given day. Beyond a certain timeframe, the future can resemble a different place; this afternoon, tonight, or tomorrow can easily seem like disembodied worlds beyond our reach [27]. And yet, the next second appears on the near horizon in the shadow of the following minute, then the hour thereafter – all rapidly pouring into the now, one liquid moment flowing into the next.

Perhaps there are deeper reasons for why we struggle with notions of futures in our everyday lives, and that’s worth examining. 

Caught in destiny’s net

Sometime in the early summer of 2025, after an event on climate change resilience, a frustrated attendee next to me mumbled words to the effect, “So all of it is going to end, isn’t it?” 

At the time, her blunt nihilism shocked me into silence, but that feeling of impotence is all too familiar: what’s the use of fighting if all will be destroyed in the end? If we were to believe that an impending climate collapse is destiny, we’d have already been defeated before we even began. 

One winter morning, I asked a question to an audience of about two hundred people in the middle of a talk I was giving: how did they visualise critical environmental thresholds – what we commonly call ‘climate tipping points’? The majority believed these to be a cliff-edge for survival: once we topple over the side, it’s game over. No surprise; I certainly did too, once.

In August 2025, updated analysis showed an increased risk of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapsing when researchers examined data modelling that ran for a longer timeframe until 2300 and 2500 [8]. Separately, a seventh planetary boundary – out of the nine environmental limits that demarcate the planet’s health –  has been breached this year, according to the annual assessment by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as ocean acidification transgresses the critical safe threshold for marine ecosystems [9].

All these are alarming signals designed to induce a sense of urgency and a drive to action, but taken alone without accompanying solutions, these types of headlines incite panic and breed disempowerment [10], rendering us helpless and stripped of agency while an inevitable future barrels down upon us.

The AMOC tipping point is particularly worrying because the change to humanity as we know it would be drastic. If we don’t succeed in lowering our CO2 emissions in line with the Paris Agreement,  the current estimation is that we might pass this particular tipping point within a few decades. 

There still remains deep uncertainty whether the AMOC may weaken partially or result in a full collapse, and over what timeframe. Likely, we have at least a few decades at hand to act to avert the worst outcomes. Johan Rockström, Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said of the seventh planetary boundary breach [11]:

We’re not yet in the high-risk zone of irreversible, unmanageable change of the planet, which suggests that we can still turn this around. The window is still open even though it’s closing fast, and we have so much evidence of scalable solutions across all sectors from the food sector to the built environment to the energy transition that we can bend the curves and bring ourselves back within a safe operating space within the next decades.

Seaver Wang, the Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute wrote comprehensively about the misnomer of ‘tipping points’: 

First, the word ‘tipping’ implies the rapidity of an unbalanced cart toppling over. […] Second, the word ‘point,’ too, is bound to confuse. It implies a single, precise, known critical threshold beyond which Earth system components tip. [12]

The reality is that environmental tipping points are far more complex [13]. The Global Tipping Points Report 2023 emphasises that their assessment ‘does not suggest that crossing major tipping points could lead to runaway warming, with mitigation to prevent further tipping points being worthwhile even if some tipping points are reached. [14]’. 

We also spend so little time focusing on positive tipping points – such as those scalable solutions that Johan Rockström refers to [11] [15]. If my sample of two hundred or so attendees was anything to go by, solutions that have a positive impact aren’t something that typically crosses our minds. While our media coverage would have us imagine apocalyptic scenarios where the Earth drowns under several metres of seawater – a scenario that, in reality, is highly unlikely in the near future – the current estimates suggest that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would likely take hundreds to thousands of years to melt after their tipping points are breached [16]. The complexity in predicting circulation and heat transfers in the ocean means much is unknown; current projections, even in our worst case scenario, project sea level rise of up to 180mm by 2050 [17].

We shouldn’t be under the impression that all is well – but there’s time to act, to reverse the damage if we could collectively grasp our agency.

Unfortunately, few narrative tools exist to remind us we are not rolling downhill off the far side of Freytag’s Pyramid into fated tragedy. Just how well science fiction is placed to shift collective imagination is still a nascent experiment [18].

Science fiction: from imaginary prediction to unintended blueprint

It might sometimes look like cyberpunk has predicted our current trajectory: a world where AI is poised to displace us, where an elite, privileged few exploit political institutions to concentrate their power, preying on people and planet to enrich themselves. 

Ursula K. Le Guin famously declared [19], ‘Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.’ Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discusses this at length in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [20]: ‘SF is imaginary prediction, drawing on the same sort of historical-projective suspension of disbelief as the real thing, if only to explore, to problematize, and to play with it.’

In other words, science fiction originally took on the mantle of holding up a mirror to our present from a possible future. Until recently, SF has often been written in past tense, presenting narratives as if a particular future has already happened so we could project ourselves forward in time. But how did we get from those glorious imaginary predictions to what Simon McNeil recounts as the ‘future horrors Silicon Valley merchants of human misery are trying to produce’ [21]? How did we get from Star Trek to a world where technology is threatening humanity, at the very same time as our obsession with economic growth means the planet can no longer sustain all of us?

In his epic essay The Men Who Sold the Moon, Eden Kupernmintz explains how we our current situation might have transpired [22]:  

[..] if you want to read about militarism in Heinlein’s work, you can find countless articles online on the topic, as well as on the fascism of Campbell and the many, many awful passages of Vance’s career. But consider the supposedly more progressive works of authors like Simak, Asimov, Pohl Anderson, Blish, or Roddenberry. Most, if not all, of their ideas and values are realized through individualist, liberal lenses. They are mostly concerned with heroes who uphold values such as compassion, honor, duty, and virtue. They very rarely, if ever, engage with meaningful, systematic criticisms of society. Indeed, they are perfect examples of “suburban science fiction”, importing much of the underlying, and thus powerful, presuppositions of our own society into the future. Their heroes are almost invariably male, white, abled, and dripping with machismo and “charisma”. Solutions to problems revolve around rationalism and scientism at best and downright calls for technocracy at worst. The idea of the supremacy of science, without engaging in its colonial roots, without engaging with ideas and problems like eugenics, without any meaningful critiques of its role in serving capitalism, is one of the main motivating powers of much of the careers cited above.

Kupernmintz goes on to suggest that the heroes portrayed in the Golden Age of science fiction created the archetypes upon which powerful people such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel could comfortably model themselves. A challenging stance, certainly, to flatten such rich visions of the future. However, even the post-scarcity utopia depicted in Star Trek would have assumed that we continue extractive practices on Earth’s finite resources – such as precious metals and fossil fuels – for us to get there [23].

Science fiction as a genre has never set out to predict any specific future and yet here we are, witnessing what should have been cautionary tales become ingrained blueprints for the potential destruction of humanity and our living planet – adding to already debilitating helplessness, tempting us to give in to seemingly inescapable destiny. 

In recent years, we’ve seen a more significant shift of how we discuss science fiction as a mirror of our present to a vehicle for intentional imagination and activism. Roger Luckhurst in his review of Uneven Futures [24] calls it ‘a move from SF as noun to SF as verb, a set of actions, […] a move from static textual study to motivated activity that follows on from the reading of texts.’ Alongside genres such as Afrofuturism and Solarpunk, we can also observe increasing use of applied science fiction to anticipate policy risks and opportunities [25].

Even then, the question continues to plague me: might stories alone be enough? Would words on a page ultimately change how we behave, as individuals living within systems that are often out of our control? A question worth asking, considering our human physiology proves a disadvantage when it comes to thinking about the future – because of our struggle with the concept of time.

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey

In a book that’s equal parts science, philosophy and poetry, The Death of Forever, Darryl Reanney explains how time as we would commonly think of it – as a force external to us – is likely an illusion [6]:

Superficially, time is something we create when we measure it, dividing it into seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. […] Our experience of time is of something that moves, that sweeps upon its breast like a river forever moving at a constant rate from past to future.

Our sense of how time passes directly correlates to the number of instances our brains encode as new experiences; these are also how memories are formed. This is why sometimes a month can speed by, but a minute can feel eternal [26].

My favourite understanding of what happens to our sense of time – from moments to memories – comes from Daniel Kahnemann, who describes the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ [5]. The experiencing self is the part of us that lives in the continuous present and knows only of the now. However, these actual moments get discarded, filtered through the ‘remembering self’, which leaves us with a cohesive picture of who we are. Kahnemann says:

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories – it starts immediately. We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”

Suppose a collection of these stories is how we make sense of our past, but scientists have discovered the neural pathways we use to remember the past are identical to ones we use for imagining the future. 

Professors Martin A. Conway and Catherine Loveday articulated the remembering-imagining system as a window where we can access everyday memories of the recent past and the near future [27]. In their research, they found that events that lie further in the future are more abstract, just as memories in the remote past become more generic; they likened it to a ‘fish-eye lens’. Interesting challenges arise when we need to think beyond the visible future [28]: 

Just as in certain areas of physics, for example, quantum mechanics, it is not possible to precisely predict a future state of a system, so with people the future is only probable. However, once a future state has come into being, it may be possible, to at least some extent, to work back to previous states. […]

Nevertheless, retrospectively reversible or not, given that there are an infinite number of indeterminate possible futures, this poses a major adaptive problem for goal-driven organisms. This is particularly so as the end point of all unrealized goals lies somewhere in the future. Indeed, in order to have a goal a future state has to be anticipated and often consciously imagined.”

While their research refers specifically to individual memory forming and goal creation, I can’t help wondering what this would mean on a collective level. More on that later.

Firstly, our actual experiences are fleeting. The moment passes and our brains form a narrative about what we thought happened – and no, it’s not necessarily reliable. Secondly, cognitive science suggests that we can only look as far into the future clearly as we are able to recall the past; beyond a certain point, the future becomes less certain and more conjecture, just as the past becomes fuzzier in our memory. If we want to determine a goal that’s beyond the boundary of the remembering-imagining system, we need to consciously imagine what we want our futures to be. But that assumes we have free will and therein lies another pitfall, a conundrum possibly best summarised by S. Pahl and colleagues [29]: 

If evidence for climate change events is difficult to retrieve from memory, climate risks will be underestimated (or biased toward very salient information or images). Moreover, information about climate change faces stiff competition from the media barrage and other daily issues that are simply more salient, compelling and urgent in demanding our attention. […] In addition, research in cognitive psychology has indicated that individuals experience less emotive mental imagery with respect to generalized long-term goals (such as living more healthily or sustainably) compared to short-term goals (such as eating a doughnut or driving to the shop), because the former are less engaging and may lack specific cues in our daily environment that trigger appropriate action (whereas a doughnut might be displayed in a shop we walk past, with additional multi-sensory cues such as smell).

In her excellent book Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore discusses the famous Libet experiments – which imply an intention to act exists before the brain is conscious of the action, therefore potentially suggesting that ‘free will’ is an illusion [4]. The idea that we don’t have free will is so antithetical to our experience that the debate surrounding interpretation of these experiments endures. However, Libet discovered that what we do have is an overriding mechanism. In Blackmore’s words, “although we do not have free will, we do have ‘free won’t’.”

On an individual level, this means we have a severe cognitive disadvantage in connecting a climate-crisis-free future to our immediate present in a way that drives positive action. The question then: how might we exercise our ‘free won’t?’

In her final chapter, Blackmore gives us a potential clue:

Some people argue that the addition of language completely transforms minds, bringing about the essentials of consciousness, including the sense of self, theory of mind and the ability to think about past and future.

The power of language, the power of becoming

You might well call to mind Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or its film adaptation Arrival. I doubt we’d remember the future without some alien assistance in this world; however, evidence shows language can influence our perception of time, including how we might visualise time as directions. Some languages contain the sense of time in their grammar: past tense (“I went”), present tense (“I go”) and a future tense (“I will go”). English does not have conjugations, but Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese do. Other languages could be said to be ‘futureless’, where a qualifier (e.g. tomorrow, last night), when tagged onto a phrase, clarifies the sense of time; in languages such as Mandarin and German, we would say “I go tomorrow”, and it refers to a future time [3]. 

In a 2013 study, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at UCLA, concludes that speakers of ‘futureless languages’ such as German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages engaged more with the future in terms of financial savings and maintained better health, behaviours he attributes to how they don’t view the future as something separate from the present [30]. While we should be conscious that correlation never implies causation, the results are nonetheless fascinating.

We would have to make greater logical leaps to conclude if understanding our own linguistic biases would reframe our relationship to the perceived destiny of the climate crisis – and to conjure up viable alternatives. However, the field of futures anthropology might provide some useful vocabulary to unpack how we experience and envision the future, revealing how we might act in the present. Unlike Dr. Louise Banks, perhaps we don’t have to know the future to make our choices. 

From the outset of this essay, I raised the question of whether we might be treating environmental collapse as destiny, a deliberate word choice. ‘Destiny’ is one of the six orientations that Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight proposed in The Anthropology of the Future, enabling us to examine our relationship with the future – or futures – with richer nuance [31]. Other orientations include anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality and hope. 

I used the word destiny as we might do in common parlance, but also as an orientation: how a future would come to pass regardless of what happens in between, despite how we might get from here to there. The intention had been to provoke: have we simply accepted that an inequitable AI future coupled with the climate emergency would happen? Are we content to let it happen? 

The nuances of these words warrant a closer look. Expectation has a close but different nuance to anticipation: 

One may, for instance, expect rain and take an umbrella when going out ‘just in case.’ The expectation of rain, is, in this instance, still on the horizon and is tempered by, for example, weather reports that have failed in the past. […] Expectation may be viewed as a conservative teleology, one that gives thickness to the present through its reliance on the past. To anticipate rain, however, is to feel and smell it in the air, to close one’s windows and cover lawn furniture while imagining the future in the present. Anticipation slims the present, often breaking entirely with the past as it draws present and future into the same activity timespace [31].

Anticipation has a forward pull; expectation implies an action that often coincides with a notion of ‘ought’ or ‘should’. We expect that if we install solar panels, we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; we expect it because we’ve seen this happen before. To anticipate a world running on renewables has a forward-looking nuance, it may mean we focus on developing technologies across different types of energy generators to manage consistent power. Anticipating this kind of future gives me goosebumps. 

Speculation happens in the gap between what we expect and what we anticipate – when the end point is not clear, and when the information is partial or unavailable. For example, if the rollout of solar farms did not necessarily reduce reliance on fossil fuels, we might speculate that something has gone quite wrong with our energy governance. Or we might speculate whether we would have better success had we decided to prioritise, say, bladeless turbines. At the time of writing, the UK government is building policies on speculation: to ensure long-term energy resilience, we would need a combination of sources, including nuclear, geothermal, solar and wind [33]. The power of speculation could be that first step that creates hypotheses and assumptions against which we can create models or gather existing evidence – enabling us to make solutions real. 

Just the other day, while on a train to North Wales, I’d been struck by the number of solar farms en route; this is a new thing. Potentiality is rooted in the present, a sense that things have been set in motion, lending possibility to certain futures. Based on the view out my train window, and the offshore wind farms when I look out to the English Channel closer to home, a world running solely on a diverse range of renewables is a potentiality.

Finally, hope — a word used so often, we probably take its meaning for granted. Hope: a forward-driving force, fed by potentiality, resting on anticipation. Bryant and Knight describe hope as an orientation that ‘emerges in the gap between the potential and the actual, between matter and its not-yet form’. But my preferred definition comes the stirring words of Rebecca Solnit [34]:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and in that spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. […] Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. 

In order to evade undesirable destinies, of all the orientations available to us, I consider hope our primary vehicle. But individual hope is rarely enough – how might we bolster collective hope for collective action? 

Making future memories to remember

Summer had come early that day in May, rendering the communal meeting space warmer inside than out. As part of the cultural work around the Rights of River Charter for the Ouse, about twenty of us gathered and explored how we might strengthen our relationship to the river and channel its voice through conversation and collaborative art. In the centre of the room, an old metal bucket had been filled with river water earlier that morning; throughout the entire day, a part of the Ouse remained with us.

The inspiration and exhilaration from that one day gave birth to collective and individual memories that have since continued. Ideas flowed, creativity flourished, connections between humans and human-to-water rejuvenated. For me, the workshop sowed seeds of imagination, evoking emotions that would later make it into my writing, into the edits for my short story collection [2] that I’d been working on at the time. 

In this instance, collective memory has been instrumental in building a future-facing, positive relationship with a body of water that we have neglected for too long. Of course, collective memory could be traumatic too, as evidenced by the events around Covid-19 [35] – a global pandemic which had long been a potentiality most of us somehow ignored. To imagine desired futures, we would need to be intentional about creating collective memories so we can have rich pasts to carry forward into new futures. 

Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, wrote in his recent book How to Fall in Love with the Future [36]: 

Researchers use the term ‘mental time travel’ to describe our capacity to imagine the future – or the past – and how that capacity impacts our present-day experiences and decisions. While a lot of research has focused on individual future thought, more recently researchers have been expanding the focus of their attention to collective memory and collective future thought, or what they term ‘collective mental time travel’. 

[…] When we ‘time travel’ to the future, we dip into the cupboards of our memory, rummage around for snippets that might be useful, and then combine these snippets to create novel and unique ideas about the future. In other words, we assemble visions of the future from the resources of our past.’ 

Researchers have also found that social interaction with knowledge can shape outcomes: it could induce forgetfulness but also reinforce insights [37]. At the end of his book, Hopkins generously shares his ‘Time Machine Blueprint’ – tools to help a collective group of people mentally travel into the future. Science-fiction writers would recognise the worldbuilding; improv theatre types would recognise the set ups. 

We already have the skills and the tools to evade a destiny we don’t want. We already know how to form collective memories; we celebrate festivals, commune for conventions. As storytellers, we know what matters less is when the story is being told because our experiencing selves will forget it all. It’s about what happens after it ends – what our remembering selves will keep.

Participating in making collective memories – the conscious decision to take words off a page into our real world – charts a way forward to creating kindred futures: futures enabling us to reclaim our agency from the illusion of destiny, futures that care for people and planet.

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Hellcon, the 64th Japan Science Fiction Convention, has announced the winners of the 2026 Seiun Awards (the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Awards), honoring the best original and translated works published last year in Japan.

Best Translated Novel

• WINNER: Eversion, Alastair Reynolds, tr. Naoya Nakahara (Tokyo Sogensha)
• WINNER:Babel, R.F. Kuang, tr. Yoshimichi Furusawa (Tokyo Sogensha)

• The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks, tr. Yasuko Kawano …Read More

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The winners have been announced for the 2026 Prix Imaginales, honoring the best works of fantasy published in France.

French Novel

• WINNER: Festin de larmes, Morgane Caussarieu & Vincent Tassy (ActuSF)

• La Nuit ravagée, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Gallimard)
• Aatea, Anouck Faure (Argyll)
• Le Solstice des ombres, Sœurs de haine, tome 1, Benjamin Lupu (Mnémos)
• La Fille du feu, Aurélie Wellenstein (Outre Fleuve)

Foreign Novel Translated …Read More

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by J.D. Henning

Read by the author

Look at your keyboard. If you’re on a phone, pull it up for a sec. You’re probably looking at a QWERTY layout. Even with the unlimited theoretical possibilities of a touchscreen, this is what the vast majority of English users see. 

But it’s crap. And we’ve known it’s crap for more than a century.

This all became painfully personal to me in the winter of 2021 when my hands went on strike. As a film editor and screenwriter, my life revolves around my computer. Samurai had their swords, and I have my keyboard. But my hands burned like fire, and my most trusted tool turned out to be the culprit. Repetitive stress injuries are no fun at all. And the horrible part is that a QWERTY keyboard is essentially made to encourage RSIs.

How We Got Here

At their advent in the 1870s, keyboards were ingeniously designed boxes of buttons and levers with actual physical bits of metal slamming against actual physical paper, imprinting ink every time a writer (for the sake of this example, you) hit a key. Problem was, if you really got on a roll—your Dracula/Moby-Dick mashup started to get really juicy—you might jam the typewriter. One lever would interrupt another, and Dracula could not look deeply into the White Whale’s eyes until your machine was serviced. 

Unacceptable.

The industrious designers at Remington & Sons—yes, the rootin’ tootin’ gunmakers—rearranged the keyboard to lessen the likelihood of a jam. This also slowed down your typing speed. So, they intentionally put letters in spots bad for you and good for the machine, because slowly sucking the blood of a whale is better than not sucking it at all. Mr. Remington’s keyboard layout quickly became the standard. And, because we, as humans, don’t like to learn new things, the QWERTY layout stayed in use even when all the mechanical reasons for the QWERTY format disappeared. Hence, your iPhone defaults to it even now, despite making no ergonomic sense at all. We have, by the way, known of its fatiguing nature since the 1910s.

I needed something else for my writing. Something that was made to give priority to the human doing the typing rather than the factory making the tool. Something that wouldn’t make my hands feel like burning charcoal briquettes. Enter stenography.

A specialized keyboard used by stenographers for shorthand. The stenotype keyboard has far fewer keys than a conventional alphanumeric keyboard. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Stenotype Fights Back

The stenotype machine came about not long after the typewriter, and was, itself, an evolution of shorthand. Heard of Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, or George Bernard Shaw? They all used shorthand. The invention of a machine further standardized the shorthand system, and the advent of electronic stenotype simplified the process even further. Hobbyists have since come along and created free programs to allow anyone to stenotype on their computers.

So, why doesn’t everyone use it?

Remember how I threw shade at the whole human race for not wanting to learn new things? Several paragraphs later, that’s still true. And it goes in spades for stenography.

How Stenography Works

Stenotype is fundamentally different from a typical keyboard. At its root, it’s phonetic. The 23 keys roughly correspond to the sounds in our English language. A word like ‘though’ only needs the phonetic sounds TH and the long O sound. Thus, “though” becomes “THOE.” Add in that these letters are all pressed at the same time and are ergonomically clustered together, and suddenly, my hands have stopped talking about unionizing.

Of course, the complexity of stenotype rises quickly, as there are plenty of homophones and other weird quirks of the English language. This is where another critical element of machine stenography comes in. It’s basically an enormous list of shortcuts, called outlines. The phonetic base exists for many words, but for all the many, many exceptions to these rules, you have outlines. 

Outlines work for phrases as well as words. If, for example, there is a phrase that comes up all the time in your current project, such as “Alucrad gazed at the white whale, trembling with delight,” you could add an outline for the whole thing. Maybe A*GD. If your hands are as finicky as mine, the ergonomic benefits pile up quite quickly: You’re hitting four rather than 56 keys, and the ones you are pressing don’t require your hands to contort to press them. It’s also much faster, both for this phrase and as a whole.

How fast? It varies based on experience, but to qualify as a stenotype court reporter, you need to get to 225 words per minute. And just think: Court reporters do this all day, every day. If ever there was a job serious about ergonomics, it would be this one.

A modern hobbyist level machine. Image courtesy of StenoKeyboards, maker of this and many other fine stenography machines. Is Stenography for You?

The process of learning steno is probably closest to learning to play a musical instrument. This is another way of saying that it is difficult, though how difficult will depend on the person. Is it worth it for the average writer? Probably not, especially if a good old QWERTY keyboard is working fine for you. Learning to stenotype would be like deciding to learn the guitar if you want to master music composition. Will it be helpful? Probably. Is it strictly necessary? No. 

It can, though, be a lifesaver for someone with RSI or other hand mobility issues.

The basics of learning stenography are the same as most skills: practice, persistence, and patience. I followed a free guide (available here) and worked my way through it over two years. That’s a long time, but my wife and I also had two children during that time. Unless you plan on popping out progeny at the same rate, your timeframe will likely differ from mine.

I can now steno quickly enough for day-to-day work (I’m stenotyping right now). For my next big writing project, I plan to mostly stenotype. I’m still slower at this than QWERTY, but I want to write for a lifetime. And an ergonomic, sustainable writing method is, like that great white whale, a goal certainly worth pursuing.

Editor’s note: To learn more about stenography, see How Steno Works At 200 WPM.

Explore more articles from Writing by Other Means

J.D. Henning is a writer and filmmaker. Best known for writing and executive producing Portal Runner, a New York Times recommended sci-fi film, J.D. also recently took home the prize at the 2025 Worldcon film festival for his short film Superior Subject. J.D. can’t escape an incessant need to write in genre, whether it be spies, spaceships, or zombies. He’s the father of two young children. He, his wife, kids, and cat can be found cross-country skiing in his home state of Montana (well…maybe not the cat). You can learn more about his work at henningworks.com.

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