Vector [BSFA] Blog

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.

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

1. R. Watson and O. Freeman, Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040. Scribe Publications, 2012.
2. A. Sun, Futures to Live By. United Kingdom: Newcon Press, 2025.
3. M. Frankel and M. Warren. “The weird way language affects our sense of time and space.” BBC Future, Nov. 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
4. S. Blackmore. Consciousness: A very Short Introduction (2nd Ed.) United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017. 
5. D. Kahnemann. “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory.” TED 2010. https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory 
6. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever. Melbourne, Australia: Longman, 1991. 
7. M. Bertoli, M. De Cesaris, S. Bonventre, and M. Brunetti. “Cognition in Climate Change: Is It Just a Matter of Time?” WIREs Cognitive Science: Vol. 16, Issue 5, September/October 2025, Oct. 2025, (accessed May 11, 2026) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12489530/ 
8. D. Carrington. “Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds.” The Guardian, Aug. 2025,  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse-critical-atlantic-current-amoc-no-longer-low-likelihood-study (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
9. Planetary Health Check. https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
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11. J. Rockström. “Official Planetary Health Check 2025 with Johan Rockström.” Planetary Boundaries Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndPVcg6uSZc (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
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13. T. M. Lenton, et al. “Key Concepts.” Global Tipping Points Report 2023. https://report-2023.global-tipping-points.org/introduction/key-concepts/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
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15. T. M. Lenton. “Why some tipping points may be positive for the planet.” Chatham House, Sep. 2025, https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2025-09/why-some-tipping-points-may-be-positive-planet (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
16. W. Zuckerman et al. “Have We Crossed the Climate Tipping Point?” Science Vs. (podcast), Sep. 2024, https://uk-podcasts.co.uk/podcast/science-vs/have-we-crossed-the-climate-tipping-point (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
17. S.A. Kulp, B.H. Strauss. “New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” Nature Communications 10, 4844 (2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z (accessed May 19, 2026)
18. J. L. Walton and P. Levontin. “Vector editors at COP26”, Vector Magazine, Nov 2021, https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/11/02/vector-editors-at-cop26/ (accessed May 19, 2026)
19. U. K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. Great Britain: Gollanz, 2017. (UK SF Masterworks Edition.)
20. I. Csicsery-Ronay, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, U.S.A. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
21. S. McNeil. “Nobody Wants to Buy The Future: Why Science Fiction Literature is Vanishing.” Typebar Magazine, March 2024, http://typebarmagazine.com/2024/03/24/nobody-wants-to-buy-the-future-why-science-fiction-literature-is-vanishing/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
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24. R. Luckhurst. “Science Fiction as Mode of Action: On MIT Press’s ‘Uneven Futures.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2023. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/article-science-fiction-as-mode-of-action-on-mit-presss-uneven-futures/ (accessed May 17, 2026).
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34. R. Solnit,. Hope in the Dark. Great Britain: Canongate Books, 2016.
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36. R. Hopkins, How to Fall in Love with the Future. White River Junction, VT, U.S.A. : Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025.
37. C. Merck, M. N. Topcu and W. Hirst. “Collective mental time travel: Creating a shared future through our shared past,” Memory Studies, vol. 9(3) 284­ –294, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698016645236 

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

1. R. Watson and O. Freeman, Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040. Scribe Publications, 2012.
2. A. Sun, Futures to Live By. United Kingdom: Newcon Press, 2025.
3. M. Frankel and M. Warren. “The weird way language affects our sense of time and space.” BBC Future, Nov. 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
4. S. Blackmore. Consciousness: A very Short Introduction (2nd Ed.) United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017. 
5. D. Kahnemann. “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory.” TED 2010. https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory 
6. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever. Melbourne, Australia: Longman, 1991. 
7. M. Bertoli, M. De Cesaris, S. Bonventre, and M. Brunetti. “Cognition in Climate Change: Is It Just a Matter of Time?” WIREs Cognitive Science: Vol. 16, Issue 5, September/October 2025, Oct. 2025, (accessed May 11, 2026) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12489530/ 
8. D. Carrington. “Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds.” The Guardian, Aug. 2025,  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse-critical-atlantic-current-amoc-no-longer-low-likelihood-study (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
9. Planetary Health Check. https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
10. W. Ejaz, M. Mukherjee, R. Fletcher and R. K. Nielsen. “Climate change and news audiences report 2022: Analysis of news use and attitudes in eight countries.” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Dec. 2022, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/climate-change-and-news-audiences-report-2022-analysis-news-use-and-attitudes-eight-countries (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
11. J. Rockström. “Official Planetary Health Check 2025 with Johan Rockström.” Planetary Boundaries Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndPVcg6uSZc (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
12. S. Wang. “There Is No Climate Tipping Point.” The Breakthrough Institute Journal, Apr. 2023, https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/climate-change-banned-words/climate-tipping-point-real
13. T. M. Lenton, et al. “Key Concepts.” Global Tipping Points Report 2023. https://report-2023.global-tipping-points.org/introduction/key-concepts/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
14. D. I. Armstrong McKay and S. Loriani. “Key Messages.” Global Tipping Points Report 2023. https://report-2023.global-tipping-points.org/section1/1-earth-system-tipping-points/1-7-earth-system-tipping-points-synthesis/1-7-1-key-messages/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
15. T. M. Lenton. “Why some tipping points may be positive for the planet.” Chatham House, Sep. 2025, https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2025-09/why-some-tipping-points-may-be-positive-planet (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
16. W. Zuckerman et al. “Have We Crossed the Climate Tipping Point?” Science Vs. (podcast), Sep. 2024, https://uk-podcasts.co.uk/podcast/science-vs/have-we-crossed-the-climate-tipping-point (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
17. S.A. Kulp, B.H. Strauss. “New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” Nature Communications 10, 4844 (2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z (accessed May 19, 2026)
18. J. L. Walton and P. Levontin. “Vector editors at COP26”, Vector Magazine, Nov 2021, https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/11/02/vector-editors-at-cop26/ (accessed May 19, 2026)
19. U. K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. Great Britain: Gollanz, 2017. (UK SF Masterworks Edition.)
20. I. Csicsery-Ronay, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, U.S.A. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
21. S. McNeil. “Nobody Wants to Buy The Future: Why Science Fiction Literature is Vanishing.” Typebar Magazine, March 2024, http://typebarmagazine.com/2024/03/24/nobody-wants-to-buy-the-future-why-science-fiction-literature-is-vanishing/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
22. E. Kupernmintz. “The Men Who Sold The Moon.” https://www.notthesky.com/posts/essays/the-men-who-sold-the-moon/ (accessed Sep. 29, 2025).
23. N. Hagens, T. Murphy and DJ White. “The Fantasy of Space Colonization: The Spaceship We’re Already On.” Feb 24, 2026, https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/reality-roundtable-24 (accessed May 22, 2026).
24. R. Luckhurst. “Science Fiction as Mode of Action: On MIT Press’s ‘Uneven Futures.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2023. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/article-science-fiction-as-mode-of-action-on-mit-presss-uneven-futures/ (accessed May 17, 2026).
25. B. Quinn. “UK Ministry of Defence enlists sci-fi writers to prepare for dystopian futures.” The Guardian, January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/19/ministry-of-defence-enlists-sci-fi-writers-to-prepare-for-dystopian-futures (accessed May 17, 2026).
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27. M. A. Conway and C. Loveday. “Remembering, imagining, false memories & personal meanings,” Consciousness and Cognition, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.12.002 
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31. R. Bryant and D. M. Knight, Anthropology of the Future. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
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36. R. Hopkins, How to Fall in Love with the Future. White River Junction, VT, U.S.A. : Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025.
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By Goblin Futures.

Station to Station is a fishpunk game of building a better world. It is a hybrid card/tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) in the vein of works such as Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman’s The Deep Forest, a favourite of ours. While fishpunk is its truest descriptor, categories like solarpunk and weirdhope shed some light on its nature.

“Sometimes when you lose, you win” (Sun Ra, Space Is the Place)

“Whatever you win, you’ve lost” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

We designed Station to Station in response to the themes of The Lost Bay discord server’s Build a Better World TTRPG jam and Vector’s Zoefuturism call. Our mechanical starting points were that the game would require tarot cards as physical components, include dynamic use of oracles to bridge rules and storytelling, and its endgame would give meaning to anything players ‘lost’ as they played. Our worlding starting point was that the game would take place in an archipelago, a landscape type that has fascinated us since childhoods spent reading Ursula K. Le Guin and messing around with computer game map editors. As places where land and sea flow across each other, archipelagos are sites of life and relationality, where attempts at imposing rigid boundaries will always fail. Our next realisation was that the game would revolve around travel aboard sentient bio-trains that are huge and ancient, and may only be travelled on if they willingly agree. In our playthroughs, both in testing and following release, we have noticed that players are drawn to explore the nature of their kinship with their group’s train, with these strange entities playing prominent roles in storytelling as agents unto themselves.

The game builds on our longstanding interest in oracular game design. The use of aleatory resolution methods such as dice, cards, or coins in games echoes divinatory practices; tarot historically was used for gameplay before it became a cartomantic tool. Equally, the use of tables of outcomes as storytelling procedures in TTRPGs resonates with manuals for fortune-telling, with indie game designers such as Perplexing Ruins and Alfred Valley foregrounding oracle tables in their work. Station to Station pushes things just a little further, whereby its Coral Oracle blends variance with player choice, at times creating productive tensions between storytelling and mechanically optimal gameplay. A second oracle, The Lost and Found Oracle, gives life to the sacrifices made along the way to building a better world. The game’s rooting in oracularity grounds players in a sense that they are influencing and responding to an ongoing stream of strange encounters, losses, and becomings.

“Heaven and earth aren’t humane” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

Underlying the game’s use of oracles and incorporation of tarot are a set of Attitudes – confrontation, manipulation, scarcity, abundance – that pertain equally to the game’s world and its player characters. These Attitudes are not rendered in terms of anthropocentric moralising, which seeks to divide the world into forced binaries, but as neutral approaches that become specific and grounded through context. Story prompts cover a range of possibilities of flourishing and struggle, and repeatedly centre on symbiosis, life, and transformation. This carries over to the endgame, with playthroughs culminating at heterotopian destinations whose communities have their own unresolved contradictions. Player characters will both adjust to these tensions and help change them, with the distinction between group and destination ultimately melting away. As this happens, some of what was lost along the way will come back, be healed, or come to be seen in a more hopeful light. And for groups who do not get to the endgame, all is not lost. The sea gives and takes, and you can always play again.

“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.” (Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)

We hope you enjoy Station to Station! Stay fishpunk.

– GOBLIN FUTURES

By Goblin Futures.

Station to Station is a fishpunk game of building a better world. It is a hybrid card/tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) in the vein of works such as Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman’s The Deep Forest, a favourite of ours. While fishpunk is its truest descriptor, categories like solarpunk and weirdhope shed some light on its nature.

“Sometimes when you lose, you win” (Sun Ra, Space Is the Place)

“Whatever you win, you’ve lost” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

We designed Station to Station in response to the themes of The Lost Bay discord server’s Build a Better World TTRPG jam and Vector’s Zoefuturism call. Our mechanical starting points were that the game would require tarot cards as physical components, include dynamic use of oracles to bridge rules and storytelling, and its endgame would give meaning to anything players ‘lost’ as they played. Our worlding starting point was that the game would take place in an archipelago, a landscape type that has fascinated us since childhoods spent reading Ursula K. Le Guin and messing around with computer game map editors. As places where land and sea flow across each other, archipelagos are sites of life and relationality, where attempts at imposing rigid boundaries will always fail. Our next realisation was that the game would revolve around travel aboard sentient bio-trains that are huge and ancient, and may only be travelled on if they willingly agree. In our playthroughs, both in testing and following release, we have noticed that players are drawn to explore the nature of their kinship with their group’s train, with these strange entities playing prominent roles in storytelling as agents unto themselves.

The game builds on our longstanding interest in oracular game design. The use of aleatory resolution methods such as dice, cards, or coins in games echoes divinatory practices; tarot historically was used for gameplay before it became a cartomantic tool. Equally, the use of tables of outcomes as storytelling procedures in TTRPGs resonates with manuals for fortune-telling, with indie game designers such as Perplexing Ruins and Alfred Valley foregrounding oracle tables in their work. Station to Station pushes things just a little further, whereby its Coral Oracle blends variance with player choice, at times creating productive tensions between storytelling and mechanically optimal gameplay. A second oracle, The Lost and Found Oracle, gives life to the sacrifices made along the way to building a better world. The game’s rooting in oracularity grounds players in a sense that they are influencing and responding to an ongoing stream of strange encounters, losses, and becomings.

“Heaven and earth aren’t humane” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

Underlying the game’s use of oracles and incorporation of tarot are a set of Attitudes – confrontation, manipulation, scarcity, abundance – that pertain equally to the game’s world and its player characters. These Attitudes are not rendered in terms of anthropocentric moralising, which seeks to divide the world into forced binaries, but as neutral approaches that become specific and grounded through context. Story prompts cover a range of possibilities of flourishing and struggle, and repeatedly centre on symbiosis, life, and transformation. This carries over to the endgame, with playthroughs culminating at heterotopian destinations whose communities have their own unresolved contradictions. Player characters will both adjust to these tensions and help change them, with the distinction between group and destination ultimately melting away. As this happens, some of what was lost along the way will come back, be healed, or come to be seen in a more hopeful light. And for groups who do not get to the endgame, all is not lost. The sea gives and takes, and you can always play again.

“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.” (Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)

We hope you enjoy Station to Station! Stay fishpunk.

– GOBLIN FUTURES

The Afterlives of Greek Drama in Science Fiction Theatre: A Review on the Occasion of the 10-Year Anniversary of TALOS V

By Yichun Zhang

You are not just watching the fifth Talos Science Fiction Theatre Festival—you are in it. One moment you are a sailor aboard Odysseus’s ship, another you are playing an interactive survival game in a retrofuturistic city. Next, diaries are read alongside ancient Greek monstresses in the midst of a cabaret. With its immersive method, Talos V brings together Greek mythology, speculative futures, and urgent contemporary politics. The festival reaches into many dimensions to present an international group of works that are as evocative as they are unpredictable.

Organised by Artistic Director Christos Callow Jr (of the Greek theatre company Cyborphic & University of Derby) and Associate Producer Colleen Bowes (Central School of Speech & Drama), Talos V took place from 11–13 December 2025 at The Bread & Roses Theatre. 

A total of five productions were selected for the 2025 festival: Odysseus, Not Your Hero, Assigned Earth at Birth, Babel Beast, The Failure of the Century (WIP), and Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: PALESTINE BENEFIT EDITION. Each piece creatively incorporates sci-fi elements or engages with speculative ideas. To varying degrees, each piece also reflects on, deconstructs, or subverts established traditions, from ancient Greek myth, to patriarchal cultural structures, to the notion of the classic or Western canon itself. 

The Failure of the Century, a play by Nick Mamatas

The festival opens with Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr, directed by Emma Kopf, and with tech/production assistance from Colleen Bowes. Set after the Trojan War, the story follows Odysseus (played by Yiannis Sykovaris) after he almost drowned on his journey home. Upon waking, the God of the Sea, Poseidon (played by Stephanie Christodoulidou), who later transforms into the forms of the Sirens and Cyclops, puts him to three trials to decide whether he deserves the title of a “hero” and is worthy of returning home. 

This Odysseus, however, surely does not conform to the stereotype of an ancient Greek hero at all. Apart from a heavy beard that may loosely signal the image, he appears in a black-and-white vest printed with a six-pack and a pair of tapered tracksuit bottoms. One could easily feel the unseriousness as he occasionally nibbles at stage props. The trials set by the god also add to the comic effect: in the ‘cooking contest’, he is forced to turn a crew (audience) member into steamed meat; in the encounter with the siren monsters, he sacrifices half his crew through a ‘democratic,’ audience participation process. The play reaches its climax with the final question: will he choose to return home and become a nobody, or will he become a “hero”?

One of the pleasures of watching Odysseus is its live, on-stage soundscape. The performers make sound in real time with everyday objects such as delivery boxes, sauce jars, crisp packets, to mimic the sounds of storms, seagulls, monsters and waves on the spot with sound software. While the sound-making on stage had some challenges, its low-budget execution adds to the piece’s playful deconstruction, making the limitations feel deliberate and conceptually engaging. 

Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr

The play is full of playful jabs at the British habit of adapting ancient Greek drama—like the way so many versions of Odysseus end up with English accents. It looks back on the epic tradition,twisting it in unexpected ways, and re-examines the complex relationship between the appropriation of classics and their global circulation.

The second show, Assigned Earth at Birth, takes a very different route. It explores the question of how individuals, within the context of the Anthropocene, confront fatalistic imaginaries and nihilistic tendencies. It follows a queer woman—assigned to Earth by an alien anthropologist for fieldwork—who becomes increasingly disheartened by humanity through Zoom discussions on patriarchy, queer identity, and climate change. 

Directed by Zoyander Street and with D. Squinkifer as lead developer, the production revolves around their custom theatrical software, Intrapology. With this software, the script could show up in real time for the actors, while the audience contributes by writing dialogue or voting on the next course of action. Although the video call format is visually somewhat restrained for an in-person performance, the work is strikingly queer-futurist with a lot of potential in its interactive form. It invites the audience to embrace the fluidity of queer identity and actively think about imagining an inclusive and sustainable future.

Babel Beast was written and performed by Sofia Natoli, an Italian theatre artist who grew up in France and London. The show brings the audience into the monstrous, glittering world of ancient Greece’s Mount Olympus. The show moves with a fluid, cross-genre energy, sliding effortlessly between performance styles that range from striptease to burlesque. Along the way, it explores ideas of multiculturalism, identity, and exoticism, and questions what defines monstrosity. 

The most compelling aspect of the show is the visual and symbolic tension created by the use of props. Sofia draws on the familiar cabaret vocabulary of corsets, stockings, and angel wings, but also disrupts it with the jarring inclusion of boxing gloves and a beaked mask. These humorous intrusions work to shatter the sexualised fantasies projected onto the bodies of foreign women within patriarchal narratives.

The show is delivered largely in monologue form, but this does not prevent its multilingual strategy from inviting English-speaking audiences to experience the disorienting vulnerability of being in-between cultural spaces. This is already evident in the earlier sonic collage: an overwhelming blend of French, Italian, and British pop music. It is echoed again in the performance’s later moments, where Sofia guides and corrects the audience’s pronunciation as they are asked to read non-English texts aloud with discomfort.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe. As researchers and creative practitioners in game writing, they bring a philosophical and poetic texture to their work. The show opens with a satirical, viscerally grotesque depiction of Blenheim Palace, which takes an immediately absurd turn when Mr. Blobby appears on stage. There is surely a poetics of displacement that emerges through the musical language of two people reading poems out loud in a creative performance. This creates a chant-like repetition and a collective voice that breaks through the system. 

One of the recurring themes is the class struggle and the inequality and precariousness of subaltern life in a hyper-technological society: a theme familiar in many apocalyptic narratives. Everything continues in a degraded, hyper-capitalist form, and the audience is invited to take part in an urban survival game in this retrofuturistic city. This stands in stark contrast to the show’s evocation of futuristic space travel and the ideological promise of a “beautiful new world” to come.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe.

The last show, The Failure of the Century, is a play by writer Nick Mamatas and director Kira E. Wiggins and made its debut as a work-in-progress performance at the festival. Inspired by A Christmas Carol, the performance is structured by a sequence of absurd ghostly visitations to Lovecraft’s study. It is simply structured by encounters between H. P. Lovecraft (played by Kazuo Salazar) and figures drawn from both his life and his fiction, Frank Belknap Long, Sonia Greene, and Nyarlathotep (all played by Lou Belser).  

The play is full of sharp, intelligent references to both Dickens and Lovecraft, and the dialogues are layered and thought-provoking. What I like about it is how the writer links Lovecraft’s thoughts on cosmic horror to the idea of failure, and that grants his ideas new resonance when set against the anxieties of wartime and post-war crises. The title “The Failure of the Century” is smart and works on many levels. Lovecraft is exhausted, financially strained, and creatively blocked. His personal struggles echo the wider chaos of a world on the brink of war. Beneath the weariness that permeates the performance, the comic moments stand out, particularly the ideological “contamination” suggested by the physical presence of Hitler’s book in Lovecraft’s study.

The lighting and sound design is simple but effective. They both help to shift dynamics and bridge dialogue. Without going into too much detail, the image of Lovecraft alone in a dim studio typing quickly establishes a mood of isolation, which is unsettled by the spectral arrivals of these figures. The play also cleverly intertwines the past, present and future. This is especially evident when Nyarlathotep urges Lovecraft to continue writing, insisting that the twentieth century demands it.

Overall, Talos V is a lively platform for young theatre artists to explore the boundaries of sci-fi on stage. What I really love about the festival is that, even on limited budgets, it provides a platform for these  inventive and playful small productions to successfully   combine the science fictional, the classical, and Greek theatre organically rather than forcing the blend. While it could benefit from more funding, the most important thing is that it remains the UK’s first and only festival devoted to sci-fi theatre. With these enthusiastic young writers and theatre artists dedicated to this unusual genre, I look forward to seeing more new productions in the years to come. 

The Afterlives of Greek Drama in Science Fiction Theatre: A Review on the Occasion of the 10-Year Anniversary of TALOS V

By Yichun Zhang

You are not just watching the fifth Talos Science Fiction Theatre Festival—you are in it. One moment you are a sailor aboard Odysseus’s ship, another you are playing an interactive survival game in a retrofuturistic city. Next, diaries are read alongside ancient Greek monstresses in the midst of a cabaret. With its immersive method, Talos V brings together Greek mythology, speculative futures, and urgent contemporary politics. The festival reaches into many dimensions to present an international group of works that are as evocative as they are unpredictable.

Organised by Artistic Director Christos Callow Jr (of the Greek theatre company Cyborphic & University of Derby) and Associate Producer Colleen Bowes (Central School of Speech & Drama), Talos V took place from 11–13 December 2025 at The Bread & Roses Theatre. 

A total of five productions were selected for the 2025 festival: Odysseus, Not Your Hero, Assigned Earth at Birth, Babel Beast, The Failure of the Century (WIP), and Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: PALESTINE BENEFIT EDITION. Each piece creatively incorporates sci-fi elements or engages with speculative ideas. To varying degrees, each piece also reflects on, deconstructs, or subverts established traditions, from ancient Greek myth, to patriarchal cultural structures, to the notion of the classic or Western canon itself. 

The Failure of the Century, a play by Nick Mamatas

The festival opens with Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr, directed by Emma Kopf, and with tech/production assistance from Colleen Bowes. Set after the Trojan War, the story follows Odysseus (played by Yiannis Sykovaris) after he almost drowned on his journey home. Upon waking, the God of the Sea, Poseidon (played by Stephanie Christodoulidou), who later transforms into the forms of the Sirens and Cyclops, puts him to three trials to decide whether he deserves the title of a “hero” and is worthy of returning home. 

This Odysseus, however, surely does not conform to the stereotype of an ancient Greek hero at all. Apart from a heavy beard that may loosely signal the image, he appears in a black-and-white vest printed with a six-pack and a pair of tapered tracksuit bottoms. One could easily feel the unseriousness as he occasionally nibbles at stage props. The trials set by the god also add to the comic effect: in the ‘cooking contest’, he is forced to turn a crew (audience) member into steamed meat; in the encounter with the siren monsters, he sacrifices half his crew through a ‘democratic,’ audience participation process. The play reaches its climax with the final question: will he choose to return home and become a nobody, or will he become a “hero”?

One of the pleasures of watching Odysseus is its live, on-stage soundscape. The performers make sound in real time with everyday objects such as delivery boxes, sauce jars, crisp packets, to mimic the sounds of storms, seagulls, monsters and waves on the spot with sound software. While the sound-making on stage had some challenges, its low-budget execution adds to the piece’s playful deconstruction, making the limitations feel deliberate and conceptually engaging. 

Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr

The play is full of playful jabs at the British habit of adapting ancient Greek drama—like the way so many versions of Odysseus end up with English accents. It looks back on the epic tradition,twisting it in unexpected ways, and re-examines the complex relationship between the appropriation of classics and their global circulation.

The second show, Assigned Earth at Birth, takes a very different route. It explores the question of how individuals, within the context of the Anthropocene, confront fatalistic imaginaries and nihilistic tendencies. It follows a queer woman—assigned to Earth by an alien anthropologist for fieldwork—who becomes increasingly disheartened by humanity through Zoom discussions on patriarchy, queer identity, and climate change. 

Directed by Zoyander Street and with D. Squinkifer as lead developer, the production revolves around their custom theatrical software, Intrapology. With this software, the script could show up in real time for the actors, while the audience contributes by writing dialogue or voting on the next course of action. Although the video call format is visually somewhat restrained for an in-person performance, the work is strikingly queer-futurist with a lot of potential in its interactive form. It invites the audience to embrace the fluidity of queer identity and actively think about imagining an inclusive and sustainable future.

Babel Beast was written and performed by Sofia Natoli, an Italian theatre artist who grew up in France and London. The show brings the audience into the monstrous, glittering world of ancient Greece’s Mount Olympus. The show moves with a fluid, cross-genre energy, sliding effortlessly between performance styles that range from striptease to burlesque. Along the way, it explores ideas of multiculturalism, identity, and exoticism, and questions what defines monstrosity. 

The most compelling aspect of the show is the visual and symbolic tension created by the use of props. Sofia draws on the familiar cabaret vocabulary of corsets, stockings, and angel wings, but also disrupts it with the jarring inclusion of boxing gloves and a beaked mask. These humorous intrusions work to shatter the sexualised fantasies projected onto the bodies of foreign women within patriarchal narratives.

The show is delivered largely in monologue form, but this does not prevent its multilingual strategy from inviting English-speaking audiences to experience the disorienting vulnerability of being in-between cultural spaces. This is already evident in the earlier sonic collage: an overwhelming blend of French, Italian, and British pop music. It is echoed again in the performance’s later moments, where Sofia guides and corrects the audience’s pronunciation as they are asked to read non-English texts aloud with discomfort.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe. As researchers and creative practitioners in game writing, they bring a philosophical and poetic texture to their work. The show opens with a satirical, viscerally grotesque depiction of Blenheim Palace, which takes an immediately absurd turn when Mr. Blobby appears on stage. There is surely a poetics of displacement that emerges through the musical language of two people reading poems out loud in a creative performance. This creates a chant-like repetition and a collective voice that breaks through the system. 

One of the recurring themes is the class struggle and the inequality and precariousness of subaltern life in a hyper-technological society: a theme familiar in many apocalyptic narratives. Everything continues in a degraded, hyper-capitalist form, and the audience is invited to take part in an urban survival game in this retrofuturistic city. This stands in stark contrast to the show’s evocation of futuristic space travel and the ideological promise of a “beautiful new world” to come.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe.

The last show, The Failure of the Century, is a play by writer Nick Mamatas and director Kira E. Wiggins and made its debut as a work-in-progress performance at the festival. Inspired by A Christmas Carol, the performance is structured by a sequence of absurd ghostly visitations to Lovecraft’s study. It is simply structured by encounters between H. P. Lovecraft (played by Kazuo Salazar) and figures drawn from both his life and his fiction, Frank Belknap Long, Sonia Greene, and Nyarlathotep (all played by Lou Belser).  

The play is full of sharp, intelligent references to both Dickens and Lovecraft, and the dialogues are layered and thought-provoking. What I like about it is how the writer links Lovecraft’s thoughts on cosmic horror to the idea of failure, and that grants his ideas new resonance when set against the anxieties of wartime and post-war crises. The title “The Failure of the Century” is smart and works on many levels. Lovecraft is exhausted, financially strained, and creatively blocked. His personal struggles echo the wider chaos of a world on the brink of war. Beneath the weariness that permeates the performance, the comic moments stand out, particularly the ideological “contamination” suggested by the physical presence of Hitler’s book in Lovecraft’s study.

The lighting and sound design is simple but effective. They both help to shift dynamics and bridge dialogue. Without going into too much detail, the image of Lovecraft alone in a dim studio typing quickly establishes a mood of isolation, which is unsettled by the spectral arrivals of these figures. The play also cleverly intertwines the past, present and future. This is especially evident when Nyarlathotep urges Lovecraft to continue writing, insisting that the twentieth century demands it.

Overall, Talos V is a lively platform for young theatre artists to explore the boundaries of sci-fi on stage. What I really love about the festival is that, even on limited budgets, it provides a platform for these  inventive and playful small productions to successfully   combine the science fictional, the classical, and Greek theatre organically rather than forcing the blend. While it could benefit from more funding, the most important thing is that it remains the UK’s first and only festival devoted to sci-fi theatre. With these enthusiastic young writers and theatre artists dedicated to this unusual genre, I look forward to seeing more new productions in the years to come. 

Reviewed by Chisom Umeh The MIT Press, 2026

Is there a better time to talk about a less-warring, more prosperous, empathetic, and humane world than the present moment, where the militaries of powerful countries have taken up arms against each other, dropping bombs on civilians and tearing down cultural heritage that took decades to build?

Sadly, living in such a moment rarely engenders the appetite for dreams and imaginings of a better future. Rather, it makes us envision periods where the worst that could happen to humanity has happened: nuclear bombs have detonated, floods have sunk major cities, or an asteroid has lodged itself in the Earth’s crust. We see the presidents of powerful countries threatening or actually invading less powerful ones and that prompts us to take up pens and weave the most authoritarian panopticons we can imagine. We watch anti-science rhetoric spread in the media about climate change and we’re tempted to paint pictures of doomed, environmentally degraded futures.

The current happenings rarely inspire utopian stories in us. Instead, they often steer us toward the catastrophic.

In Joe P. L. Davidson’s Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (The MIT Press), we learn that this way of thinking hasn’t always been the case. There has never been a time when there wasn’t some form of global turmoil. However, many writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries  were inclined to look beyond the specific troubles that plagued their era and envisioned possible futures where the problems had been solved. This period saw a blossoming of utopian fiction, coloring the literature of the time with visions of better and hopeful lives. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi (1983), and many more, are amongst the books Davidson touches on, in showing how writers of the past treated the situations around them.

Davidson shows us in this book that, even amidst the current horrors and seeming pessimism about the future, utopian stories can still be told and told well. He helps us see that, amidst the seeming dearth of utopian fiction, some writers are still standing up for the genre and putting in the work.

I particularly loved how the modern texts like Claire G Colman’s Enclave (2022), River Solomon’s The Deep (2019), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), were juxtaposed with older books like Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890). This juxtaposition helps readers understand how utopian thinkers of the past viewed the concept, how they related it to their particular society and preoccupations, and how recent writers have engaged with the subject, noting the differences between both modes of approach.

While the older writers wrote utopian futures only as they could envision them, fashioning worlds imbued with whatever politics they liked, more recent authors take a different approach when crafting utopian stories. In Kathleen Hughes’ PhD thesis, Imagining the Future of Work (2024), she mentions that in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, “The past and the present, just as much as the future, are presented by Morris as temporary and transient.” But the more contemporary writers, according to Davidson, employ a method that he has come to call “postdystopian utopia.” This is a mode of writing utopias that doesn’t overlook the horrors of the present or the past, to weave into existence future worlds of abundance and peace. It acknowledges existing injustices and, rather than dismissing them in favor of an imaginary time, incorporates them into the story and uses them to make a point:

“What I call postdystopian utopia,” Davidson writes, “is a precarious balance between liberation and horror, in which the possibility of better worlds becomes apparent only by acknowledging worse worlds. The postdystopian utopia addresses the bad feelings that prevail in contemporary culture.”

The concept of postdystopian utopia is Davidson’s idea of how the genre of utopian fiction can be jump-started and reintroduced into global discourse meaningfully, as exemplified by recent books like Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), and Claire North’s Notes From A Burning Age (2021). It is not hungry to leap to a time when every problem of the day has been magically resolved. Rather, it approaches genre with the hope of “confronting and overcoming the skepticisms about the possibility of alternative worlds.”

A close reading of Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022) in the book shows us exactly what a postdystopian utopia may look like in writing. Christine, the protagonist in the novel, is exiled from a community called Safetown where she has lived all her life and has been made to believe is the only safe place left in the world. True to her conviction, the outside world is indeed a hellscape. But, by chance, she gets a ticket to a train that takes her to a part of the country that has become a utopia in all practical sense. She is shocked beyond belief that such a place exists and yet she had lived in Safetown all the while with its segregation, discrimination, and 24-hour surveillance. Davidson uses this story to show us what a postdystopian utopian narrative is like, and how this category is distinct from both classic utopias or dystopias. In the novel, dystopian worlds are touched upon within the pages of utopia. Dystopian societies aren’t done away with, but are made to exist side by side with the utopian ones, though the latter is the more dominant force, persisting amidst other negative societies.

In Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Davidson shows the same genre convention in how a seemingly utopian underwater society exists even though the world above is anything but perfect. “They are undisturbed by the outside world; their watery society is protected from the forces of white supremacy on the land. In fact, such is the happiness of the wajinru that they can almost forget the Middle Passage.”

Davidson succeeds at drawing parallels between the past and alternate futures, connecting one with the other through discussing nostalgia, apocalypse, and trauma. With a scholarly lens and strong research, the book, through the concept of postdystopian utopia, advocates for a  way of approaching utopian fiction that could once again breathe life into the genre and, perhaps, give it its day in the sun once again. He shines a light on texts that have used this method in different ways, and shows that it is quite effective in our present time. 

At the end of this book, I came away somewhat hopeful for new forms of utopian fiction. Before now, I had rarely encountered it in recent books amidst (relative to utopian fiction) the large numbers of dystopian works in the markets like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2008) and its many spawns, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021), and many more. I simply thought it was something people just didn’t engage with anymore. But Davidson’s clear-eyed writing in Saving Utopia has shown me that sometimes, we only need to change our sitting positions to see what has always been there in a new light.

Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

Reviewed by Chisom Umeh The MIT Press, 2026

Is there a better time to talk about a less-warring, more prosperous, empathetic, and humane world than the present moment, where the militaries of powerful countries have taken up arms against each other, dropping bombs on civilians and tearing down cultural heritage that took decades to build?

Sadly, living in such a moment rarely engenders the appetite for dreams and imaginings of a better future. Rather, it makes us envision periods where the worst that could happen to humanity has happened: nuclear bombs have detonated, floods have sunk major cities, or an asteroid has lodged itself in the Earth’s crust. We see the presidents of powerful countries threatening or actually invading less powerful ones and that prompts us to take up pens and weave the most authoritarian panopticons we can imagine. We watch anti-science rhetoric spread in the media about climate change and we’re tempted to paint pictures of doomed, environmentally degraded futures.

The current happenings rarely inspire utopian stories in us. Instead, they often steer us toward the catastrophic.

In Joe P. L. Davidson’s Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (The MIT Press), we learn that this way of thinking hasn’t always been the case. There has never been a time when there wasn’t some form of global turmoil. However, many writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries  were inclined to look beyond the specific troubles that plagued their era and envisioned possible futures where the problems had been solved. This period saw a blossoming of utopian fiction, coloring the literature of the time with visions of better and hopeful lives. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi (1983), and many more, are amongst the books Davidson touches on, in showing how writers of the past treated the situations around them.

Davidson shows us in this book that, even amidst the current horrors and seeming pessimism about the future, utopian stories can still be told and told well. He helps us see that, amidst the seeming dearth of utopian fiction, some writers are still standing up for the genre and putting in the work.

I particularly loved how the modern texts like Claire G Colman’s Enclave (2022), River Solomon’s The Deep (2019), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), were juxtaposed with older books like Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890). This juxtaposition helps readers understand how utopian thinkers of the past viewed the concept, how they related it to their particular society and preoccupations, and how recent writers have engaged with the subject, noting the differences between both modes of approach.

While the older writers wrote utopian futures only as they could envision them, fashioning worlds imbued with whatever politics they liked, more recent authors take a different approach when crafting utopian stories. In Kathleen Hughes’ PhD thesis, Imagining the Future of Work (2024), she mentions that in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, “The past and the present, just as much as the future, are presented by Morris as temporary and transient.” But the more contemporary writers, according to Davidson, employ a method that he has come to call “postdystopian utopia.” This is a mode of writing utopias that doesn’t overlook the horrors of the present or the past, to weave into existence future worlds of abundance and peace. It acknowledges existing injustices and, rather than dismissing them in favor of an imaginary time, incorporates them into the story and uses them to make a point:

“What I call postdystopian utopia,” Davidson writes, “is a precarious balance between liberation and horror, in which the possibility of better worlds becomes apparent only by acknowledging worse worlds. The postdystopian utopia addresses the bad feelings that prevail in contemporary culture.”

The concept of postdystopian utopia is Davidson’s idea of how the genre of utopian fiction can be jump-started and reintroduced into global discourse meaningfully, as exemplified by recent books like Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), and Claire North’s Notes From A Burning Age (2021). It is not hungry to leap to a time when every problem of the day has been magically resolved. Rather, it approaches genre with the hope of “confronting and overcoming the skepticisms about the possibility of alternative worlds.”

A close reading of Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022) in the book shows us exactly what a postdystopian utopia may look like in writing. Christine, the protagonist in the novel, is exiled from a community called Safetown where she has lived all her life and has been made to believe is the only safe place left in the world. True to her conviction, the outside world is indeed a hellscape. But, by chance, she gets a ticket to a train that takes her to a part of the country that has become a utopia in all practical sense. She is shocked beyond belief that such a place exists and yet she had lived in Safetown all the while with its segregation, discrimination, and 24-hour surveillance. Davidson uses this story to show us what a postdystopian utopian narrative is like, and how this category is distinct from both classic utopias or dystopias. In the novel, dystopian worlds are touched upon within the pages of utopia. Dystopian societies aren’t done away with, but are made to exist side by side with the utopian ones, though the latter is the more dominant force, persisting amidst other negative societies.

In Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Davidson shows the same genre convention in how a seemingly utopian underwater society exists even though the world above is anything but perfect. “They are undisturbed by the outside world; their watery society is protected from the forces of white supremacy on the land. In fact, such is the happiness of the wajinru that they can almost forget the Middle Passage.”

Davidson succeeds at drawing parallels between the past and alternate futures, connecting one with the other through discussing nostalgia, apocalypse, and trauma. With a scholarly lens and strong research, the book, through the concept of postdystopian utopia, advocates for a  way of approaching utopian fiction that could once again breathe life into the genre and, perhaps, give it its day in the sun once again. He shines a light on texts that have used this method in different ways, and shows that it is quite effective in our present time. 

At the end of this book, I came away somewhat hopeful for new forms of utopian fiction. Before now, I had rarely encountered it in recent books amidst (relative to utopian fiction) the large numbers of dystopian works in the markets like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2008) and its many spawns, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021), and many more. I simply thought it was something people just didn’t engage with anymore. But Davidson’s clear-eyed writing in Saving Utopia has shown me that sometimes, we only need to change our sitting positions to see what has always been there in a new light.

Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

Interview with Tristan Evarts

Tristan Evarts is the editor of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and since 2019 he has overseen the publication of optimistic prose, poetry, non-fiction, and art. The magazine operates with a reverence for the classics of the SF canon while pushing to explore new ways of living, technology as a friend rather than enemy, and humanity adapting to present crossroads. Themes push writers to examine the different manifestations of utopia, ranging from language to disability to weird SF. Contributors include Beth Cato, Jean-Paul L. Garnier, and Bogi Takács. Cover artists range from Donato Giancola to Stephen Youll to Alyssa Winans. Every December, Utopia SF publishes an art special, showcasing a broad range of talent, with a portion of the profits donated to charity.  

Tristan gave me my start as an SF interviewer when he took me on as outreach manager in 2023, so it’s a real pleasure to be sharing this interview with him now.  

James Machell

JM: What do you think makes a really great utopian story?

TE: I think a great utopian story realizes that a utopian world isn’t the end game in and of itself, and that it’s really just a launching pad for truly discovering the universe and examining the more subtle but powerful aspects of what makes us human. It doesn’t accomplish this the way most people seem to want, by tearing down the utopia and setting us back to the apocalyptic and imperfect world we live in today, but by saying “Okay, we’ve gotten past our worst, childlike instincts. Not suppressed or ignored them, but actually learned to deal with them in a healthy way. What next?” We can still find conflict, but we get to solving it the right way in the end. We learn, we grow, we discover new mysteries, and when conflict arises, we show how to navigate it in a healthy way, even if it might take a while to get there. I’d point to many classic Star Trek episodes, or James White’s Sector General novels, as some good examples.

JM: Can you take us through how Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has developed since it was founded in 2019?

TE: It’s developed quite a lot. It went from a single-person, token-paying small operation in 2019 to what it is today: a globally staffed, pro-paying magazine. It’s been quite a journey and I owe an awful lot to all the staff and volunteer readers who have joined us over the years to help progress us to where we are today. And we’re not done yet! Our hope, as always, is to increase readership and subscribers, which helps drive up the amount we can pay authors and artists. We’ve come a mighty long way and there’s further still to go!

JM: What drew you to publishing utopian writing?

TE: Chiefly a desire to move away from the (at the time) crushing amount of dystopian fiction out there. You know the phrase: “You are what you eat.” The same is true that “you are what you read.” If all you read is dark, gritty, disparaging, cynical things about the world then that’s how you start to view it and, at least at an unconscious level, how you begin to shape the world around you. It’s a cyclical pattern—people who see the world as apocalyptic are more likely to see the darker things and when those get more attention, they take over our worldview. For a real-life example, just look at the news cycle and see how that affects people’s worldview and mental health. We need to see the good, the hopeful, especially when things are at their darkest. We need to know that we can (and will) overcome this and this is what it’s going to look like at the end. And seeing Utopia as a beginning and not an end is important too. I think, with the arrival of all the cozy books coming out, more people are starting to realize this. I think in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, we’re mentioned as part of the solarpunk movement and hearing that is quite an honor.

JM: In addition to publishing science fiction stories, poetry, non-fiction, and art, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine also offers a critique service, helping budding writers to find their feet. You’ve also recently taught an Apex creative writing class. Can you describe your approach to assessing a piece of writing,  and some of the suggestions you’re most likely to make?

TE: Let’s start off with assessment. When I look at a story there are a few things I’m really hoping to see before I go on to accept it. The first is: does the story grip me from the first paragraph? If I make it to the end of the first page and am not thoroughly engrossed with a story or character, I’ll usually pass on it. Second is pacing and momentum. If a story starts off strong, does it carry through the rest of the piece? Sometimes, for short pieces, I’ll read through it entirely, but for longer pieces, there’s a trick to use. In the well-written, well-structured story, you can read the first and last sentences in each paragraph without reading anything in the middle and still walk away with all the essential information you need for plot and story. If you do that and stumble or get confused, it means the story has pacing issues and depending on how far from the mark that goes, I may decide it requires more editing than any of us have time to do before the next issue and pass on it. Third is the ending. The last line a person writes is the single most important line they will write. It’s going to decide if the story stays in my memory, awakens that feeling of wonder, or simply fizzles into the frustrating silence of unfinished or underdeveloped potential. So, if it’s got a strong start and consistent pacing, but the ending is flat or leaves us in a rather dismal or dystopian way, I’m liable to pass on it.  If I accept it and decide to work with the author to edit it into shape, there are a lot of suggestions I might make depending on what the piece needs. My goal is always to elevate the writer – to get them to perfect their craft a bit more, to push harder and write better by cutting out extraneous words, adding complexity to the themes and ideas, and really project their message out into the world. 

JM: Roughly, what is the acceptance rate for stories submitted to Utopia Science Fiction Magazine?

TE: We receive hundreds upon hundreds of submissions in a given year and only publish a total of 15 to 20 stories in a given year. So, like all magazines, there’s a small acceptance rate based largely on limited space. We have to reject a lot of great stories just based on that alone. 

JM: Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has recently published its Weird Science Fiction issue. What themes can we be on the lookout for in the future?

TE: We have the cozy issue in June, and August is always an ‘anything goes’ field where we try to publish the best of the best. Every June/July the editors of Utopia meet up and discuss what we want the themes for the next volume to be. There are always a lot of good ideas passed around, but only a few issues we publish. So, what’s on the horizon for next volume’s themes? You’ll just have to stay tuned!

JM: What are some of the books and stories you wish you could travel back in time and publish yourself?

TE: That is a very good question and one I’m not sure I can answer. There are a lot of stories I love, but I’m glad they’ve been published elsewhere. It gives us a chance to read them, to learn from them and push the envelope farther in terms of ideas, technique, etc. We have a part of our magazine called The Vault where every issue I go back and find some amazing, public domain, stories to publish. So, in essence, if there are stories I really love I can go back in time and publish them in this manner  (after a very exhausting and extensive search for the public domain and copyright registrations). 

JM: When you’re not at the helm of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, you’re running Castle Books & Tea. Can you tell us a bit about your life as a bookseller and are you offering any good deals on rare books at the moment?

TE: Castle Books and Tea was born out of a bizarre moment when I realized I had free time, and it felt so unnatural I panicked and decided to launch a side project. I’m happy to say I no longer have anything remotely considered free time anymore. But it’s a real passion project— one of our specialities is vintage science fiction books. I’ve been to a lot of places to stock books and bought some amazing collections from people to resell. We’ve had books signed by Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Roger Zelazny, and a lot more. It’s fun to track down some of the harder to find books too, like Soviet Sci-Fi or the novels of Clifford D. Simak. We usually have a big sale in May to celebrate our anniversary (this year is the start of our 5th) and a lot of small sales throughout the year.

JM: What are some of the tropes and subjects that you’d prefer that authors avoid in submissions?

TE: I have read far more books about robots, AI, etc. than I ever hoped could have existed. While we find things about these books to like, it’s an exhausted topic and I find myself preferring more novel ideas. Otherwise, it’s a lot of what other sci-fi magazines hope to avoid seeing. We’re particular in that we really don’t need to see any dystopian, post-apocalyptic, shoot-em-dead stories. As our name suggests, these types of stories really aren’t for us.

JM: Any tips for budding writers who’d like to make Utopia Science Fiction Magazine their first place of publication? 

TE: Write every day and read every day. Read the stories you like and read them for technique, not just for story. Read what Utopia has published. A lot of them are available for free through our site, Medium, and Substack. Also don’t get discouraged. You will get rejected. A lot. But that’s all just practice for when you get accepted. And you will. Just keep improving your craft. 

Tristan Evarts

Tristan Evarts is the editor-in-chief of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and has been for the past seven years. He has a Bachelor’s in English and Philosophy with a specialization in creative writing and a Masters in Library and Information Science. When not editing, he is working at the library or at his bookshop, Castle Books and Tea, or growing his eclectic collection of books.

James Machell

James Machell is a British writer. He contributes to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and curates its Substack. He also serves as Outreach Manager for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and was the 2025 Contest Chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Find him on Bluesky @jamesmachell.bsky.social or YouTube @Fell-Purpose.

Interview with Tristan Evarts

Tristan Evarts is the editor of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and since 2019 he has overseen the publication of optimistic prose, poetry, non-fiction, and art. The magazine operates with a reverence for the classics of the SF canon while pushing to explore new ways of living, technology as a friend rather than enemy, and humanity adapting to present crossroads. Themes push writers to examine the different manifestations of utopia, ranging from language to disability to weird SF. Contributors include Beth Cato, Jean-Paul L. Garnier, and Bogi Takács. Cover artists range from Donato Giancola to Stephen Youll to Alyssa Winans. Every December, Utopia SF publishes an art special, showcasing a broad range of talent, with a portion of the profits donated to charity.  

Tristan gave me my start as an SF interviewer when he took me on as outreach manager in 2023, so it’s a real pleasure to be sharing this interview with him now.  

James Machell

JM: What do you think makes a really great utopian story?

TE: I think a great utopian story realizes that a utopian world isn’t the end game in and of itself, and that it’s really just a launching pad for truly discovering the universe and examining the more subtle but powerful aspects of what makes us human. It doesn’t accomplish this the way most people seem to want, by tearing down the utopia and setting us back to the apocalyptic and imperfect world we live in today, but by saying “Okay, we’ve gotten past our worst, childlike instincts. Not suppressed or ignored them, but actually learned to deal with them in a healthy way. What next?” We can still find conflict, but we get to solving it the right way in the end. We learn, we grow, we discover new mysteries, and when conflict arises, we show how to navigate it in a healthy way, even if it might take a while to get there. I’d point to many classic Star Trek episodes, or James White’s Sector General novels, as some good examples.

JM: Can you take us through how Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has developed since it was founded in 2019?

TE: It’s developed quite a lot. It went from a single-person, token-paying small operation in 2019 to what it is today: a globally staffed, pro-paying magazine. It’s been quite a journey and I owe an awful lot to all the staff and volunteer readers who have joined us over the years to help progress us to where we are today. And we’re not done yet! Our hope, as always, is to increase readership and subscribers, which helps drive up the amount we can pay authors and artists. We’ve come a mighty long way and there’s further still to go!

JM: What drew you to publishing utopian writing?

TE: Chiefly a desire to move away from the (at the time) crushing amount of dystopian fiction out there. You know the phrase: “You are what you eat.” The same is true that “you are what you read.” If all you read is dark, gritty, disparaging, cynical things about the world then that’s how you start to view it and, at least at an unconscious level, how you begin to shape the world around you. It’s a cyclical pattern—people who see the world as apocalyptic are more likely to see the darker things and when those get more attention, they take over our worldview. For a real-life example, just look at the news cycle and see how that affects people’s worldview and mental health. We need to see the good, the hopeful, especially when things are at their darkest. We need to know that we can (and will) overcome this and this is what it’s going to look like at the end. And seeing Utopia as a beginning and not an end is important too. I think, with the arrival of all the cozy books coming out, more people are starting to realize this. I think in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, we’re mentioned as part of the solarpunk movement and hearing that is quite an honor.

JM: In addition to publishing science fiction stories, poetry, non-fiction, and art, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine also offers a critique service, helping budding writers to find their feet. You’ve also recently taught an Apex creative writing class. Can you describe your approach to assessing a piece of writing,  and some of the suggestions you’re most likely to make?

TE: Let’s start off with assessment. When I look at a story there are a few things I’m really hoping to see before I go on to accept it. The first is: does the story grip me from the first paragraph? If I make it to the end of the first page and am not thoroughly engrossed with a story or character, I’ll usually pass on it. Second is pacing and momentum. If a story starts off strong, does it carry through the rest of the piece? Sometimes, for short pieces, I’ll read through it entirely, but for longer pieces, there’s a trick to use. In the well-written, well-structured story, you can read the first and last sentences in each paragraph without reading anything in the middle and still walk away with all the essential information you need for plot and story. If you do that and stumble or get confused, it means the story has pacing issues and depending on how far from the mark that goes, I may decide it requires more editing than any of us have time to do before the next issue and pass on it. Third is the ending. The last line a person writes is the single most important line they will write. It’s going to decide if the story stays in my memory, awakens that feeling of wonder, or simply fizzles into the frustrating silence of unfinished or underdeveloped potential. So, if it’s got a strong start and consistent pacing, but the ending is flat or leaves us in a rather dismal or dystopian way, I’m liable to pass on it.  If I accept it and decide to work with the author to edit it into shape, there are a lot of suggestions I might make depending on what the piece needs. My goal is always to elevate the writer – to get them to perfect their craft a bit more, to push harder and write better by cutting out extraneous words, adding complexity to the themes and ideas, and really project their message out into the world. 

JM: Roughly, what is the acceptance rate for stories submitted to Utopia Science Fiction Magazine?

TE: We receive hundreds upon hundreds of submissions in a given year and only publish a total of 15 to 20 stories in a given year. So, like all magazines, there’s a small acceptance rate based largely on limited space. We have to reject a lot of great stories just based on that alone. 

JM: Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has recently published its Weird Science Fiction issue. What themes can we be on the lookout for in the future?

TE: We have the cozy issue in June, and August is always an ‘anything goes’ field where we try to publish the best of the best. Every June/July the editors of Utopia meet up and discuss what we want the themes for the next volume to be. There are always a lot of good ideas passed around, but only a few issues we publish. So, what’s on the horizon for next volume’s themes? You’ll just have to stay tuned!

JM: What are some of the books and stories you wish you could travel back in time and publish yourself?

TE: That is a very good question and one I’m not sure I can answer. There are a lot of stories I love, but I’m glad they’ve been published elsewhere. It gives us a chance to read them, to learn from them and push the envelope farther in terms of ideas, technique, etc. We have a part of our magazine called The Vault where every issue I go back and find some amazing, public domain, stories to publish. So, in essence, if there are stories I really love I can go back in time and publish them in this manner  (after a very exhausting and extensive search for the public domain and copyright registrations). 

JM: When you’re not at the helm of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, you’re running Castle Books & Tea. Can you tell us a bit about your life as a bookseller and are you offering any good deals on rare books at the moment?

TE: Castle Books and Tea was born out of a bizarre moment when I realized I had free time, and it felt so unnatural I panicked and decided to launch a side project. I’m happy to say I no longer have anything remotely considered free time anymore. But it’s a real passion project— one of our specialities is vintage science fiction books. I’ve been to a lot of places to stock books and bought some amazing collections from people to resell. We’ve had books signed by Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Roger Zelazny, and a lot more. It’s fun to track down some of the harder to find books too, like Soviet Sci-Fi or the novels of Clifford D. Simak. We usually have a big sale in May to celebrate our anniversary (this year is the start of our 5th) and a lot of small sales throughout the year.

JM: What are some of the tropes and subjects that you’d prefer that authors avoid in submissions?

TE: I have read far more books about robots, AI, etc. than I ever hoped could have existed. While we find things about these books to like, it’s an exhausted topic and I find myself preferring more novel ideas. Otherwise, it’s a lot of what other sci-fi magazines hope to avoid seeing. We’re particular in that we really don’t need to see any dystopian, post-apocalyptic, shoot-em-dead stories. As our name suggests, these types of stories really aren’t for us.

JM: Any tips for budding writers who’d like to make Utopia Science Fiction Magazine their first place of publication? 

TE: Write every day and read every day. Read the stories you like and read them for technique, not just for story. Read what Utopia has published. A lot of them are available for free through our site, Medium, and Substack. Also don’t get discouraged. You will get rejected. A lot. But that’s all just practice for when you get accepted. And you will. Just keep improving your craft. 

Tristan Evarts

Tristan Evarts is the editor-in-chief of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and has been for the past seven years. He has a Bachelor’s in English and Philosophy with a specialization in creative writing and a Masters in Library and Information Science. When not editing, he is working at the library or at his bookshop, Castle Books and Tea, or growing his eclectic collection of books.

James Machell

James Machell is a British writer. He contributes to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and curates its Substack. He also serves as Outreach Manager for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and was the 2025 Contest Chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Find him on Bluesky @jamesmachell.bsky.social or YouTube @Fell-Purpose.

By Suzie Gray

As digital spaces increasingly mediate the way in which we interact with ourselves and each other, I argue that this dynamic flow of human becoming within digital spaces crystallises as events or spectacles. Attention quickly shifts from one topic or individual to the next; quickly observed, reacted to, and circulated. Content creators are encouraged to perform in a way that perpetuates this cycle with appeals to emotion and rapidly following trends. This is by design, enabled by practices of the online attention economy.

In this article, I’d like to highlight an alternative way of engaging in online spaces as a Zoefuturist practice: the act of creating and maintaining Digital Gardens. These online environments are sites that eschew homogeneity of design or corporate branding, showcasing the personal touches of their creators. Visitors are allowed to carve their own paths (within reason) through these lightly curated spaces that share knowledge and information.

Digital gardening is an act rather than a platform. Examples of these include repositories made on Obsidian, Quartz 4, and sites made on Neocities. The latter can be seen as a nod to website creators on Geocities during the early 2000s; as some might call a different time before the monetisation of online platforms. So how did we get here?

Yanis Varoufakis (2024) makes a distinction between what he calls Internet One and Internet Two; the former he describes as a “capitalism-free zone… a centrally designed, state-owned, non-commercial network.”[1] Emerging from the research project ARPANET (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, now DARPA) in 1969, this early internet relied on global co-operation by using common/open protocols that were freely available to all participants. What Varoufakis terms as Internet One was a distributed network that was maintained by academic collaboration and public institutions.

However, while the protocol layer remained open, firms within this ecosystem needed sustainable revenue models. With the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, the digital world had suffered a boom/bust and needed a way to maintain itself. Surviving firms had to prove durable profitability over hype to investors.  A pertinent example of this is Google, which over time managed to stay afloat with a model that would change the way we would experience digital and physical spaces. This marked the start of an economic structure focused on the commodification of behavioural prediction: Surveillance Capitalism.

Shoshana Zuboff (2019) states that this was both unprecedented and unbelievably powerful; under the guises of gamification and “free” onboard services, the rendition of our digital behaviour is cloaked in a veil of secrecy. Every click, scroll, and hover becomes the grammar to what she labels the “shadow text” of our characters, producing patterns of user behaviour to sell products back to these generated profiles. These structures, now normalised, begin to take on a more dramatic turn:

Surveillance capitalists’ interests have shifted from using automated machine processes to know about your behaviour to using machine processes to shape your behaviour according to their interests. In other words, this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automatic information flows about you to automating you.[2]

I theorize that the Ludopticon, a surveillance structure that I have coined as a portmanteau of Ludo, Latin for “I play” and Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon; a physical structure that would enforce strict social behaviour by means of its design. A central watchtower would be erected to make sure its inhabitants always felt that they were being surveilled; they, in turn, would self correct. Byung-Chul Han (2017) explains that unlike the physical panopticon, digital surveillance is aperspectival; lacking the blindspots from analogue optical systems.[3] Secret wishes, thoughts, and desires can be rendered from our subconscious scrollings, harvested from apps whose sole design is to keep you engaged and present. I argue that the Ludopticon has given us a share in compensation in the forms of public platforms and financial opportunities, as long as we keep feeding the machine. Our feelings, behaviours, and thoughts become converted into instrumental values; emotional hooks to drive engagement and value to shareholders.

The increased relevance of social metrics and its conversion to currency created a whole new market; a digital village square where we willingly opt-in to sell our personal selves for a public one. Not only do we play the casino of constant offerings, but we create the panels in the slot machine. This digital performance that thrives on consistency (not only of the act of posting but the topics involved) can reflect our daily lives on and offline. Similar to how a digital audio workstation (or DAW) can quantise raw notes to fit a digital tempo, our behaviours become more easily managed and predicted.

As the use of AI agents becomes more commonplace (bots that can predict our behaviours and make actions on our behalf), what is the end goal to this slow erosion of agency?

Zuboff explains that the goal could be the “right to the future tense” that is being taken from us. It is uncertainty that is incompatible with this model of capitalism:

Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for the freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the freedom collapses into an infinite present of mere behaviour, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.[4]

In many cases, certainty has its benefits in terms of safety and security; but this is in exchange for our freedoms to the benefit of the market. Surveillance capitalism creates a profile of its user through behavioural surplus who, by means of the Ludopticon, is optimized to be consistent in order to be favoured by the platform’s algorithm. The Ludopticon is therefore at odds with a person’s growth or becoming. They remain frozen within Zuboff’s “infinite present”; defensive and reactive. As patterns of behaviour online can translate into our ways of being offline, the sequence of render and predict can lead us into a world of divided apathy, constructing our own sense of algorithmic determinism or fate.

Inevitablism, Zuboff explains, is the act of relinquishing control in the midst of a manufactured determinism; a concept that “enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes.”[5] So what can be done to combat this, to what she calls the “right to the future tense?” How can we be in control of our timelines, our right to be a process rather than a product?

Enter Zoefuturism, inspired by Zoetology which was coined by Roger Ames. Taking its name from the Greek word Zoe for life (ζωή, zoí), Zoetology explores change as fundamental to nature and provides a world of “boundless becomings.” Inspired by Ancient East Asian philosophy, Ames explains that: “This cosmology is grounded in living (sheng 生 ) as the motive and existential force that enables change, where the ongoing transformation of things is driven by the very nature of life itself to optimize the available conditions for continuing growth.”[6] 

How can this apply to technology?

Yuk Hui (2024) explains that “We have to accept that there are a multiplicity of technological thinkings. The process of modernisation is a form of colonisation. Modernisation implies a homogenisation of knowledge and world views.”[7] As a stark contrast to Zuboff’s inevitablism, the link between technology and homogenisation/colonisation can be severed. Maybe our understanding of technology can exist outside of the binary between utopia/dystopia as showcased in many works of Science Fiction; falling somewhere in between, taking into account the multiplicities of minds and values. Han mentions how the canon of this literature has shaped our ideals about the future: “More and more people are trying to understand our future through science fiction. “I find this really disturbing. I’m a big fan of science fiction, but I find this problematic because it means that we fail to analyse our concrete situation.”[8]

One such space that resists the urge of engagement and the frozen present of the Ludopticon is the Digital Garden. Started decades ago in the era of the early internet, this topological space encourages the integrated and transformative present; each seedling of thought is evergreen as it expands and connects through links of information. Maggie Appleton (2020) explains that:

They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing. It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites “should be.” It’s an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.[9]

Appleton mentions that the first recorded mention of these digital structures was the 1997 essay on hypertext gardens; written during a period where non-linear navigation and hypertext links were being experimented with. Early web adopters and creators were imagining a balance between agency and mystery: people had the freedom to explore but with signposts in case they became overwhelmed.

I argue that these signposts of agency are being eroded in favour of algorithm–driven incentives. If information is curated for you based on your past behaviour, there is no need to actively seek out new creators or topics. When content is increasingly created and curated for the format of the infinite scroll (Tiktok, Youtube shorts, Instagram reels), there is no need to stop the slots rolling. However, either extreme can be detrimental. As Mark Bernstein mentions in the essay “Hypertext Gardens,” “Today’s Web designers are taught to avoid irregularity, but in a hypertext, as in a garden, it is the artful combination of regularity and irregularity that awakens interest and maintains attention.”[10]

Mike Caulfield (2015), considered the founder of the Digital Gardening movement,[11] described the two different modes of interacting online being the “stream” and the “garden.” Cauldfield explains that the garden exists as a topology of space; it doesn’t collapse into one set of meanings or fixed sequences. If you imagine walking in a physical garden, you choose your path through it; each visitor will have their own unique experience and viewpoint. As an example, he highlights the presence of a bridge in this imagined space and how, within the context of the garden, its meaning is created by the visitor and not just the architect:

The bridge is a bridge is a bridge — a defined thing with given boundaries and a stated purpose. But the multi-linear nature of the garden means that there is no one right view of the bridge, no one correct approach. The architect creates the bridge, but it is the visitors to the park who create the bridge’s meaning. A good bridge supports many approaches, many views, many seasons, maybe many uses, and the meaning of that bridge will even evolve for the architect over time.[12]

The garden, then, can be seen as an example of this Zoefuturist mindset; a fluidity and multiplicity in the act of becoming, allowing cross networks of growth. Repositories of information that resist the extractive structures of platform monopolies are curated in platforms such as TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, and Roam Research. The stream, however, is described as a force that collapses all context into a narrow timeline of events. He explains that:

In other words, the Stream replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.[13]

Caulfield refers to Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of the utterance when tracing the origin and narrative of the stream; in order to understand a statement in the stream, you have to turn to the chain of events that led to this result. Not only must you consider what was said but who is saying it; but in the world of the Ludopticon where people exist and perform as brand, where emotional engagement and outrage can be converted into an attention based currency, we can see how things can quickly go awry.

However, Caulfield is not calling for us to abandon the stream entirely, stating:  “I can’t stress this enough. I’m not here to bury the Stream, I love the Stream. But it’s an incomplete experience, and it’s time we fixed that.”[14] The solution may be then, to spend time cultivating as well as conversing; creating iterative content as well as material to be disposed of or reacted to.

Interestingly enough, it could be the choice between choosing and not choosing in the moment; the multiplicity of the online experience and becomings that may be the formula to reclaim our autonomy in the digital world. The balance between active and passive, between talking and listening should be paramount for community growth and, with a multiplicity of online tools at our disposal, maybe we can find the form that allows the organic flourishing of many voices and minds.

Digital gardens would, of course, be only one such example. Other avenues to access might range from peer-owned server co-ops, communities that own and govern their own internet infrastructure, to federated platforms like Mastodon, a decentralised social network that distributes control across multiple servers. If we consider these forms as viable alternatives, then these can be the soil from which organic structures can grow with less dependence on Big Tech. As Voltaire said in Candide, “we must cultivate our garden.”

Works Cited

Ames, Roger T. Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy. State University of New York Press, 2025.

Appleton, Maggie. “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.” Maggie Appleton, 2020, https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history. Accessed 26 July 2025.

Bernstein, Mark. “Hypertext Gardens.” Hypertext Gardens: Virtue of Irregularity, 1998, https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Virtue_of_Irregularity.html. Accessed 26 July 2025.

Caulfield, Mike. “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.” The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, 2015, https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/. Accessed 24 07 2025.

Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power.    Verso Books, 2017.

Hui, Yuk. “Yuk Hui: “We are living in a gigantic technological system.”” CCCB LAB, Interview by Victor G. García Castañeda, 16 April 2024, https://lab.cccb.org/en/yuk-hui-we-are-living-in-a-gigantic-technological-system/. Accessed 26 July 2025.

Varoufakis, Yannis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Vintage, 2024.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019.

[1] Yannis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Vintage, 2024), chap.3, Kobo.  

[2] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019), 339.

[3] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books, 2017), 56.

[4] Zuboff, 336.

[5] Zuboff, 226.

[6] Roger T. Ames, Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2025), 4.

[7] Yuk Hui, “Yuk Hui: “We are living in a gigantic technological system.”” CCCB LAB, Interview by Victor G. García Castañeda, 16 April 2024, https://lab.cccb.org/en/yuk-hui-we-are-living-in-a-gigantic-technological-system/.

[8] Hui.

[9] Maggie Appleton, “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.” Maggie Appleton, 2020, https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

[10] Mark Bernstein, “Hypertext Gardens.” Hypertext Gardens: Virtue of Irregularity, 1998, https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Virtue_of_Irregularity.html

[11] Mike Caulfield, “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.” The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, 2015, https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/

[12] Caulfield.

[13] Caulfield.

[14] Caulfield.

By Suzie Gray

As digital spaces increasingly mediate the way in which we interact with ourselves and each other, I argue that this dynamic flow of human becoming within digital spaces crystallises as events or spectacles. Attention quickly shifts from one topic or individual to the next; quickly observed, reacted to, and circulated. Content creators are encouraged to perform in a way that perpetuates this cycle with appeals to emotion and rapidly following trends. This is by design, enabled by practices of the online attention economy.

In this article, I’d like to highlight an alternative way of engaging in online spaces as a Zoefuturist practice: the act of creating and maintaining Digital Gardens. These online environments are sites that eschew homogeneity of design or corporate branding, showcasing the personal touches of their creators. Visitors are allowed to carve their own paths (within reason) through these lightly curated spaces that share knowledge and information.

Digital gardening is an act rather than a platform. Examples of these include repositories made on Obsidian, Quartz 4, and sites made on Neocities. The latter can be seen as a nod to website creators on Geocities during the early 2000s; as some might call a different time before the monetisation of online platforms. So how did we get here?

Yanis Varoufakis (2024) makes a distinction between what he calls Internet One and Internet Two; the former he describes as a “capitalism-free zone… a centrally designed, state-owned, non-commercial network.”[1] Emerging from the research project ARPANET (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, now DARPA) in 1969, this early internet relied on global co-operation by using common/open protocols that were freely available to all participants. What Varoufakis terms as Internet One was a distributed network that was maintained by academic collaboration and public institutions.

However, while the protocol layer remained open, firms within this ecosystem needed sustainable revenue models. With the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, the digital world had suffered a boom/bust and needed a way to maintain itself. Surviving firms had to prove durable profitability over hype to investors.  A pertinent example of this is Google, which over time managed to stay afloat with a model that would change the way we would experience digital and physical spaces. This marked the start of an economic structure focused on the commodification of behavioural prediction: Surveillance Capitalism.

Shoshana Zuboff (2019) states that this was both unprecedented and unbelievably powerful; under the guises of gamification and “free” onboard services, the rendition of our digital behaviour is cloaked in a veil of secrecy. Every click, scroll, and hover becomes the grammar to what she labels the “shadow text” of our characters, producing patterns of user behaviour to sell products back to these generated profiles. These structures, now normalised, begin to take on a more dramatic turn:

Surveillance capitalists’ interests have shifted from using automated machine processes to know about your behaviour to using machine processes to shape your behaviour according to their interests. In other words, this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automatic information flows about you to automating you.[2]

I theorize that the Ludopticon, a surveillance structure that I have coined as a portmanteau of Ludo, Latin for “I play” and Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon; a physical structure that would enforce strict social behaviour by means of its design. A central watchtower would be erected to make sure its inhabitants always felt that they were being surveilled; they, in turn, would self correct. Byung-Chul Han (2017) explains that unlike the physical panopticon, digital surveillance is aperspectival; lacking the blindspots from analogue optical systems.[3] Secret wishes, thoughts, and desires can be rendered from our subconscious scrollings, harvested from apps whose sole design is to keep you engaged and present. I argue that the Ludopticon has given us a share in compensation in the forms of public platforms and financial opportunities, as long as we keep feeding the machine. Our feelings, behaviours, and thoughts become converted into instrumental values; emotional hooks to drive engagement and value to shareholders.

The increased relevance of social metrics and its conversion to currency created a whole new market; a digital village square where we willingly opt-in to sell our personal selves for a public one. Not only do we play the casino of constant offerings, but we create the panels in the slot machine. This digital performance that thrives on consistency (not only of the act of posting but the topics involved) can reflect our daily lives on and offline. Similar to how a digital audio workstation (or DAW) can quantise raw notes to fit a digital tempo, our behaviours become more easily managed and predicted.

As the use of AI agents becomes more commonplace (bots that can predict our behaviours and make actions on our behalf), what is the end goal to this slow erosion of agency?

Zuboff explains that the goal could be the “right to the future tense” that is being taken from us. It is uncertainty that is incompatible with this model of capitalism:

Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for the freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the freedom collapses into an infinite present of mere behaviour, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.[4]

In many cases, certainty has its benefits in terms of safety and security; but this is in exchange for our freedoms to the benefit of the market. Surveillance capitalism creates a profile of its user through behavioural surplus who, by means of the Ludopticon, is optimized to be consistent in order to be favoured by the platform’s algorithm. The Ludopticon is therefore at odds with a person’s growth or becoming. They remain frozen within Zuboff’s “infinite present”; defensive and reactive. As patterns of behaviour online can translate into our ways of being offline, the sequence of render and predict can lead us into a world of divided apathy, constructing our own sense of algorithmic determinism or fate.

Inevitablism, Zuboff explains, is the act of relinquishing control in the midst of a manufactured determinism; a concept that “enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes.”[5] So what can be done to combat this, to what she calls the “right to the future tense?” How can we be in control of our timelines, our right to be a process rather than a product?

Enter Zoefuturism, inspired by Zoetology which was coined by Roger Ames. Taking its name from the Greek word Zoe for life (ζωή, zoí), Zoetology explores change as fundamental to nature and provides a world of “boundless becomings.” Inspired by Ancient East Asian philosophy, Ames explains that: “This cosmology is grounded in living (sheng 生 ) as the motive and existential force that enables change, where the ongoing transformation of things is driven by the very nature of life itself to optimize the available conditions for continuing growth.”[6] 

How can this apply to technology?

Yuk Hui (2024) explains that “We have to accept that there are a multiplicity of technological thinkings. The process of modernisation is a form of colonisation. Modernisation implies a homogenisation of knowledge and world views.”[7] As a stark contrast to Zuboff’s inevitablism, the link between technology and homogenisation/colonisation can be severed. Maybe our understanding of technology can exist outside of the binary between utopia/dystopia as showcased in many works of Science Fiction; falling somewhere in between, taking into account the multiplicities of minds and values. Han mentions how the canon of this literature has shaped our ideals about the future: “More and more people are trying to understand our future through science fiction. “I find this really disturbing. I’m a big fan of science fiction, but I find this problematic because it means that we fail to analyse our concrete situation.”[8]

One such space that resists the urge of engagement and the frozen present of the Ludopticon is the Digital Garden. Started decades ago in the era of the early internet, this topological space encourages the integrated and transformative present; each seedling of thought is evergreen as it expands and connects through links of information. Maggie Appleton (2020) explains that:

They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing. It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites “should be.” It’s an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.[9]

Appleton mentions that the first recorded mention of these digital structures was the 1997 essay on hypertext gardens; written during a period where non-linear navigation and hypertext links were being experimented with. Early web adopters and creators were imagining a balance between agency and mystery: people had the freedom to explore but with signposts in case they became overwhelmed.

I argue that these signposts of agency are being eroded in favour of algorithm–driven incentives. If information is curated for you based on your past behaviour, there is no need to actively seek out new creators or topics. When content is increasingly created and curated for the format of the infinite scroll (Tiktok, Youtube shorts, Instagram reels), there is no need to stop the slots rolling. However, either extreme can be detrimental. As Mark Bernstein mentions in the essay “Hypertext Gardens,” “Today’s Web designers are taught to avoid irregularity, but in a hypertext, as in a garden, it is the artful combination of regularity and irregularity that awakens interest and maintains attention.”[10]

Mike Caulfield (2015), considered the founder of the Digital Gardening movement,[11] described the two different modes of interacting online being the “stream” and the “garden.” Cauldfield explains that the garden exists as a topology of space; it doesn’t collapse into one set of meanings or fixed sequences. If you imagine walking in a physical garden, you choose your path through it; each visitor will have their own unique experience and viewpoint. As an example, he highlights the presence of a bridge in this imagined space and how, within the context of the garden, its meaning is created by the visitor and not just the architect:

The bridge is a bridge is a bridge — a defined thing with given boundaries and a stated purpose. But the multi-linear nature of the garden means that there is no one right view of the bridge, no one correct approach. The architect creates the bridge, but it is the visitors to the park who create the bridge’s meaning. A good bridge supports many approaches, many views, many seasons, maybe many uses, and the meaning of that bridge will even evolve for the architect over time.[12]

The garden, then, can be seen as an example of this Zoefuturist mindset; a fluidity and multiplicity in the act of becoming, allowing cross networks of growth. Repositories of information that resist the extractive structures of platform monopolies are curated in platforms such as TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, and Roam Research. The stream, however, is described as a force that collapses all context into a narrow timeline of events. He explains that:

In other words, the Stream replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.[13]

Caulfield refers to Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of the utterance when tracing the origin and narrative of the stream; in order to understand a statement in the stream, you have to turn to the chain of events that led to this result. Not only must you consider what was said but who is saying it; but in the world of the Ludopticon where people exist and perform as brand, where emotional engagement and outrage can be converted into an attention based currency, we can see how things can quickly go awry.

However, Caulfield is not calling for us to abandon the stream entirely, stating:  “I can’t stress this enough. I’m not here to bury the Stream, I love the Stream. But it’s an incomplete experience, and it’s time we fixed that.”[14] The solution may be then, to spend time cultivating as well as conversing; creating iterative content as well as material to be disposed of or reacted to.

Interestingly enough, it could be the choice between choosing and not choosing in the moment; the multiplicity of the online experience and becomings that may be the formula to reclaim our autonomy in the digital world. The balance between active and passive, between talking and listening should be paramount for community growth and, with a multiplicity of online tools at our disposal, maybe we can find the form that allows the organic flourishing of many voices and minds.

Digital gardens would, of course, be only one such example. Other avenues to access might range from peer-owned server co-ops, communities that own and govern their own internet infrastructure, to federated platforms like Mastodon, a decentralised social network that distributes control across multiple servers. If we consider these forms as viable alternatives, then these can be the soil from which organic structures can grow with less dependence on Big Tech. As Voltaire said in Candide, “we must cultivate our garden.”

Works Cited

Ames, Roger T. Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy. State University of New York Press, 2025.

Appleton, Maggie. “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.” Maggie Appleton, 2020, https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history. Accessed 26 July 2025.

Bernstein, Mark. “Hypertext Gardens.” Hypertext Gardens: Virtue of Irregularity, 1998, https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Virtue_of_Irregularity.html. Accessed 26 July 2025.

Caulfield, Mike. “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.” The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, 2015, https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/. Accessed 24 07 2025.

Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power.    Verso Books, 2017.

Hui, Yuk. “Yuk Hui: “We are living in a gigantic technological system.”” CCCB LAB, Interview by Victor G. García Castañeda, 16 April 2024, https://lab.cccb.org/en/yuk-hui-we-are-living-in-a-gigantic-technological-system/. Accessed 26 July 2025.

Varoufakis, Yannis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Vintage, 2024.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019.

[1] Yannis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Vintage, 2024), chap.3, Kobo.  

[2] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019), 339.

[3] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books, 2017), 56.

[4] Zuboff, 336.

[5] Zuboff, 226.

[6] Roger T. Ames, Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2025), 4.

[7] Yuk Hui, “Yuk Hui: “We are living in a gigantic technological system.”” CCCB LAB, Interview by Victor G. García Castañeda, 16 April 2024, https://lab.cccb.org/en/yuk-hui-we-are-living-in-a-gigantic-technological-system/.

[8] Hui.

[9] Maggie Appleton, “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.” Maggie Appleton, 2020, https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

[10] Mark Bernstein, “Hypertext Gardens.” Hypertext Gardens: Virtue of Irregularity, 1998, https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Virtue_of_Irregularity.html

[11] Mike Caulfield, “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.” The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, 2015, https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/

[12] Caulfield.

[13] Caulfield.

[14] Caulfield.

Reviewed by Kathleen Hughes

It came as no surprise to me to learn that Wole Talabi is an engineer by profession. Convergence Problems (2024), Talabi’s anthology of short stories, is filled with vivid tales of industrial failure, mechanical faults, and systemic entropy. In the future worlds depicted by Talabi – often set in Nigeria, where he is from – prosperity and investment have come and gone (‘Embers’), citizen dissidents are sentenced to death (‘An Arc of Electric Skin’), and dangerous interplanetary mining landscapes become the setting for just-in-time rescue missions (‘Blowout’). What struck me most about the collection as a whole is its recurring focus on the human side of systems and states: the legacy of industrial injury across generations, the bitterness of unfulfilled potential, and the pressure to succeed, conform, or escape. Talabi’s strength lies in his ability to highlight the profound human impact within hard-science themes such as environmental collapse, mining, or the oil industry. 

The longer stories stood out for me, such as ‘Saturday’s Song’ and ‘Ganger,’ both beautifully crafted, though in very different styles. ‘Saturday’s Song’ is the haunting sequel to an earlier short piece (‘Wednesday’s Story’) and tells the tale of Saura and Mobola, who fall in love at a financial management conference in Abuja, whose relationship ends in tragedy after Saura’s mother seeks the intervention of Shigidi, the Yoruba deity (Orisha) of nightmares. This Orisha also appears in Talabi’s 2023 novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and Talabi’s use of Yoruba figures, here,  is typical of his ability to weave traditional beliefs between harder science themes found through the collection. Told through the accounts of personified days of the week, the story is multi-layered, spanning the lives of humans and deities and the strange interactions among them and the anthropomorphised calendar. ‘Ganger’ is particularly striking and timely, portraying a segregated society overseen by a megalomaniac tech CEO who, after whisking the wealthy to safety in the wake of a climate catastrophe, creates an indentured class out of pity or necessity, whose lives are micromanaged and whose every action is pre-empted. As Adelaide, the central character, becomes trapped inside a robot built to manage her subservient class after a calamitous attempt to rebel, the reader is left wondering whether she has actually attained a peculiar type of freedom.

I also very much enjoyed ‘Performance Review,’ as a researcher of the future of work, in its portrayal of a meeting between an employee and her boss. As the story unfolds, he proposes she maximise her efficacy by taking an experimental performance-enhancing drug, Optimiline – no obligation, of course, but with the coercive persuasion of a threat of termination. The take brilliantly portrays the dehumanising and flattening effect of corporate performance metrics, shaping employee conduct to fit data points, as well as the creeping effect of encouraging behaviour modifications to achieve what a company perceives as value. I was then surprised to find out that ‘Performance Review’ was written as part of a workshop testing out an AI tool in development – Google’s Wordcraft – as a writing assistant. This makes the story even more fascinating, as an experimental product of emerging technology, the debates about which touch on some of the same themes of the story itself (standardisation, depersonalisation, corporate overreach). Talabi does not shy away from these points in the ‘Authors’ notes’ at the end of the collection, reflecting carefully on how he weighs his optimism for technology and its potential against serious concerns about AI’s impact on the creative industries. These reflections form part of a very informative set of authors’ notes overall, which chart the development of stories, their connections, and the cross-fertilisation of ideas, which provide insight into the writer’s craft. 

Talabi has also written on his writing process and source material elsewhere, for example, in the essay ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ (2026), included in this volume. That piece is an extremely valuable accompaniment to ‘Embers’, a short story in the collection that depicts the downfall of its protagonist, Uduak. Uduak is a once hopeful scholarship recipient in the Nigerian oil industry whose dreams – and life – unravel in the face of new renewable energy technologies (Kawashida cells) that render his career redundant. In the companion essay, Talabi explores the human cost of an industry that refuses to take responsibility for the impact of the dependence it fosters, providing a lifeline to communities through their resources and skills which risk becoming stranded assets. Talabi’s short story captures the nuances of the ‘just transition’ debate through the complexities of a personal story, embracing the fact that people make poor choices and react badly when faced with loss and wounded pride. As Talabi highlights, how can just transitions be truly just when the foundations they are built on are exploitative, extractive, and ‘take a page from the standard colonial playbook’?  

As a collection, broad themes emerge across stories. In no particular order, they are technological advances and industry at a large scale, and the impact of technology on societies or states; the human impact of both work and technology, especially as it echoes across generations; and family ties, including legacies, disappointments, and grief. These themes connect together, recurring and repeating like echoes across stories. In ‘Blowout,’ for example, Folake Adeyemi strives to rescue her brother Femi, part of the N-12 surface exploration crew, battling through both Martian conditions and the emotional turmoil of the circumstances that bear resemblance to their mother’s catastrophic injury decades before, at work on an offshore gas production site near Angola. Talabi portrays the depth and contradictions of traumatic response, as it is not only the impact of the risk her brother is in that is so disturbing to Folake, but also her own actions, as she contemplates how far she is blindly repeating her mother’s devastating heroism.

The familial impact of workplace injury is further portrayed in ‘Abeokuta52,’ partly written in the form of an opinion piece in The Guardian, by the child (Bidemi Akindele) of a researcher studying an alien impact site, after the researcher’s death from the subsequent illness. The opinion piece wraps the details of the events in Nigeria that led to Stella Akindele’s death, alongside Bidemi’s lament at the injustice of her death and concern that she does not suffer a ‘second death’ through her name passing outside of living memory. Thus, ontological questions of time and memory are woven eloquently with the personal and political circumstances described. Like several of the stories in the collection, the piece takes on an experimental form, including the somewhat mysterious online comments below the opinion piece, adding complexity to the portrayal of Government corruption and cover-up. 

The theme of inter-generational and familial trauma tied to industry, exploitation, and sacrifice is once again returned to in ‘A Dream of Electric Mothers,’ which also featured in Africa Risen, the 2022 anthology edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Sherée Renee Thomas, and Zelda Knight. In this story, it is the great-aunt of the protagonist who has given herself to the National Memory Data Server (NMDS), a national computational consciousness based on the recorded thoughts of every previous citizen. This is a profound re-imagining of AI that again brings in ontological dimensions through collectivism that I have also seen in academic work on Ubuntu and AI. Here, in literary form, the lived reality of grief, of having not properly said goodbye to one’s mother, is juxtaposed with ethical considerations of AI decision-making. AI adopts a maternal wisdom that could be fruitfully critically juxtaposed against, for example, the personification of contemporary AI chatbots (Siri, Alexa) as subservient females who aim to please (Sindoni, 2024; West, Kraut and Chew, 2019). It is here that the value of the speculative literary form in relation to knotty and abstract topics is particularly apparent, as through the building of a complete alternative world where a computer system is built on the idea of an ‘electric mother,’ with the wisdom to speak what we need to hear, the contours and limitations of our own technologies and imaginations become more apparent and stark. 

Collectively, the deep intertwining of parental grief, sibling rivalry, and the impacts of technology at an industrial and state scale leave the reader with a deep sense of missed opportunity and injustice. Together, they create a collection that would be valuable to anyone interested in the intersection between humans and technology. 

References:

Sindoni, M.G. (2024). The femininization of AI-powered voice assistants: Personification, anthropomorphism and discourse ideologies. Discourse Context & Media, 62, pp.100833–100833. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100833.

Talabi, W. (2026). ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ in Applied African SF (Ping Press, 2026).

West, M., Kraut, R. and Chew, H.E. (2019). I’d Blush If I could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills through Education. [online] Unesco.org. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.

Reviewed by Kathleen Hughes

It came as no surprise to me to learn that Wole Talabi is an engineer by profession. Convergence Problems (2024), Talabi’s anthology of short stories, is filled with vivid tales of industrial failure, mechanical faults, and systemic entropy. In the future worlds depicted by Talabi – often set in Nigeria, where he is from – prosperity and investment have come and gone (‘Embers’), citizen dissidents are sentenced to death (‘An Arc of Electric Skin’), and dangerous interplanetary mining landscapes become the setting for just-in-time rescue missions (‘Blowout’). What struck me most about the collection as a whole is its recurring focus on the human side of systems and states: the legacy of industrial injury across generations, the bitterness of unfulfilled potential, and the pressure to succeed, conform, or escape. Talabi’s strength lies in his ability to highlight the profound human impact within hard-science themes such as environmental collapse, mining, or the oil industry. 

The longer stories stood out for me, such as ‘Saturday’s Song’ and ‘Ganger,’ both beautifully crafted, though in very different styles. ‘Saturday’s Song’ is the haunting sequel to an earlier short piece (‘Wednesday’s Story’) and tells the tale of Saura and Mobola, who fall in love at a financial management conference in Abuja, whose relationship ends in tragedy after Saura’s mother seeks the intervention of Shigidi, the Yoruba deity (Orisha) of nightmares. This Orisha also appears in Talabi’s 2023 novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and Talabi’s use of Yoruba figures, here,  is typical of his ability to weave traditional beliefs between harder science themes found through the collection. Told through the accounts of personified days of the week, the story is multi-layered, spanning the lives of humans and deities and the strange interactions among them and the anthropomorphised calendar. ‘Ganger’ is particularly striking and timely, portraying a segregated society overseen by a megalomaniac tech CEO who, after whisking the wealthy to safety in the wake of a climate catastrophe, creates an indentured class out of pity or necessity, whose lives are micromanaged and whose every action is pre-empted. As Adelaide, the central character, becomes trapped inside a robot built to manage her subservient class after a calamitous attempt to rebel, the reader is left wondering whether she has actually attained a peculiar type of freedom.

I also very much enjoyed ‘Performance Review,’ as a researcher of the future of work, in its portrayal of a meeting between an employee and her boss. As the story unfolds, he proposes she maximise her efficacy by taking an experimental performance-enhancing drug, Optimiline – no obligation, of course, but with the coercive persuasion of a threat of termination. The take brilliantly portrays the dehumanising and flattening effect of corporate performance metrics, shaping employee conduct to fit data points, as well as the creeping effect of encouraging behaviour modifications to achieve what a company perceives as value. I was then surprised to find out that ‘Performance Review’ was written as part of a workshop testing out an AI tool in development – Google’s Wordcraft – as a writing assistant. This makes the story even more fascinating, as an experimental product of emerging technology, the debates about which touch on some of the same themes of the story itself (standardisation, depersonalisation, corporate overreach). Talabi does not shy away from these points in the ‘Authors’ notes’ at the end of the collection, reflecting carefully on how he weighs his optimism for technology and its potential against serious concerns about AI’s impact on the creative industries. These reflections form part of a very informative set of authors’ notes overall, which chart the development of stories, their connections, and the cross-fertilisation of ideas, which provide insight into the writer’s craft. 

Talabi has also written on his writing process and source material elsewhere, for example, in the essay ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ (2026), included in this volume. That piece is an extremely valuable accompaniment to ‘Embers’, a short story in the collection that depicts the downfall of its protagonist, Uduak. Uduak is a once hopeful scholarship recipient in the Nigerian oil industry whose dreams – and life – unravel in the face of new renewable energy technologies (Kawashida cells) that render his career redundant. In the companion essay, Talabi explores the human cost of an industry that refuses to take responsibility for the impact of the dependence it fosters, providing a lifeline to communities through their resources and skills which risk becoming stranded assets. Talabi’s short story captures the nuances of the ‘just transition’ debate through the complexities of a personal story, embracing the fact that people make poor choices and react badly when faced with loss and wounded pride. As Talabi highlights, how can just transitions be truly just when the foundations they are built on are exploitative, extractive, and ‘take a page from the standard colonial playbook’?  

As a collection, broad themes emerge across stories. In no particular order, they are technological advances and industry at a large scale, and the impact of technology on societies or states; the human impact of both work and technology, especially as it echoes across generations; and family ties, including legacies, disappointments, and grief. These themes connect together, recurring and repeating like echoes across stories. In ‘Blowout,’ for example, Folake Adeyemi strives to rescue her brother Femi, part of the N-12 surface exploration crew, battling through both Martian conditions and the emotional turmoil of the circumstances that bear resemblance to their mother’s catastrophic injury decades before, at work on an offshore gas production site near Angola. Talabi portrays the depth and contradictions of traumatic response, as it is not only the impact of the risk her brother is in that is so disturbing to Folake, but also her own actions, as she contemplates how far she is blindly repeating her mother’s devastating heroism.

The familial impact of workplace injury is further portrayed in ‘Abeokuta52,’ partly written in the form of an opinion piece in The Guardian, by the child (Bidemi Akindele) of a researcher studying an alien impact site, after the researcher’s death from the subsequent illness. The opinion piece wraps the details of the events in Nigeria that led to Stella Akindele’s death, alongside Bidemi’s lament at the injustice of her death and concern that she does not suffer a ‘second death’ through her name passing outside of living memory. Thus, ontological questions of time and memory are woven eloquently with the personal and political circumstances described. Like several of the stories in the collection, the piece takes on an experimental form, including the somewhat mysterious online comments below the opinion piece, adding complexity to the portrayal of Government corruption and cover-up. 

The theme of inter-generational and familial trauma tied to industry, exploitation, and sacrifice is once again returned to in ‘A Dream of Electric Mothers,’ which also featured in Africa Risen, the 2022 anthology edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Sherée Renee Thomas, and Zelda Knight. In this story, it is the great-aunt of the protagonist who has given herself to the National Memory Data Server (NMDS), a national computational consciousness based on the recorded thoughts of every previous citizen. This is a profound re-imagining of AI that again brings in ontological dimensions through collectivism that I have also seen in academic work on Ubuntu and AI. Here, in literary form, the lived reality of grief, of having not properly said goodbye to one’s mother, is juxtaposed with ethical considerations of AI decision-making. AI adopts a maternal wisdom that could be fruitfully critically juxtaposed against, for example, the personification of contemporary AI chatbots (Siri, Alexa) as subservient females who aim to please (Sindoni, 2024; West, Kraut and Chew, 2019). It is here that the value of the speculative literary form in relation to knotty and abstract topics is particularly apparent, as through the building of a complete alternative world where a computer system is built on the idea of an ‘electric mother,’ with the wisdom to speak what we need to hear, the contours and limitations of our own technologies and imaginations become more apparent and stark. 

Collectively, the deep intertwining of parental grief, sibling rivalry, and the impacts of technology at an industrial and state scale leave the reader with a deep sense of missed opportunity and injustice. Together, they create a collection that would be valuable to anyone interested in the intersection between humans and technology. 

References:

Sindoni, M.G. (2024). The femininization of AI-powered voice assistants: Personification, anthropomorphism and discourse ideologies. Discourse Context & Media, 62, pp.100833–100833. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100833.

Talabi, W. (2026). ‘Human and Energy Transitions’ in Applied African SF (Ping Press, 2026).

West, M., Kraut, R. and Chew, H.E. (2019). I’d Blush If I could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills through Education. [online] Unesco.org. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.

Reviewed by Nkereuwem Albert

They Made Us Blood and Fury is a nightmare brought to life, dripping with characters that will drive a dagger into your very being. An epic fantasy novel that does not shirk from its gritty bits and moral ambiguity, Ntumy’s world is relentless and well put together, with layers within layers to consider. 

One of the things I enjoy most in fantasy is worldbuilding that never feels like too much information; it is a difficult thing to execute, but in this novel, we’re given all we need to engage with the world without it ever feeling superfluous or inadequate, a line walked beautifully. Anyi is a beacon of glory to the Countless Clans, led by a council of elders and queens that provide lifeblood, a magical substance that can be moulded into anything, from medicine to weapons. Anyi has so much lifeblood that they give it away to the neighbouring kingdoms and cities, from Ka to Bediaku, Gbota and Xose.  From believable history, to enthralling magic, to commerce and social structure, the world presented feels full and ready for a great story to be told within.

As the novel opens, we are thrown into an Anyi on the edge. The queen is dying and none of her heirs, the Divewe, can produce it. Reservoirs run dry and gods stay silent, leaving the Anyi with too little of the substance they once gave away in excess. Across the continent, in the empire of Ka, we meet Aseye, an Anyi native working with lifeblood in the imperial armoury. Setting her sights on starting her own practice, her life is complicated by the death of the Anyi queen and the secrets it unearths. There’s also the issue of Kwame–beautiful Kwame–an imperial courtier with a hidden heritage and conflicting loyalties. 

Ntumy’s magic system is especially cool and inventive, with seers and blood-as-power done in ways that I’ve never seen. A culture where magic is embedded in the history, geography and economics of the world, we see the impact of lifeblood excesses and shortages play out both in the present and contextually. Spirit possessions and gods’ whisperings come at a terrible price. The creatures that manifest across the novel are beautiful, visceral and terrifying! 

For all its detailed worldbuilding, They Made Us Blood and Fury is also an education in heart-rending character development. Aseye and Kwame are very compelling protagonists. Aseye’s past is shrouded in mystery that unravels with massive implications for the countless clans, and with Kwame, a character with conflicting loyalties and motivations that are unclear, we have an intriguing pair, written with raw intensity and unyielding prose that is very compelling to read. 

The supporting cast—spread out across the Countless Clans—deliver, filling out the necessary points in this story beautifully and disturbingly as the novel progresses. In They Made Us Blood and Fury, you sense the threads that link the cast, but Ntumy still delivers excellent character arcs, in both positive and antagonistic directions. Fafa, Fia Kofi, and Mamiga are an excellent investigation into the choices we make to sustain life as we know it, even when we know better. The Divewe’s choices are driven by their need to survive and their thirst for the power they were destined for, now a destiny denied. The Kahene and the politics of his empire ask the necessary questions about imperialism and its swallowing of cultures and people alike. In the sandlands and the spaces between, the nomads offer Aseye philosophy that is antithetical to what is the norm in the countless clans, and the entirety of the supporting cast feel real and fleshed out, to the betterment of the novel. 

All these elements come together to make a world in which the truth is always lurking, and this novel captures that eerie feeling perfectly. With a story told in journeys through the Countless Clans,  there were many moments that shocked me and broke my heart, and pivots that grabbed my attention and made me perk up and hope, all ending with a flawless landing that leaves me wanting more of the Countless. Cheryl S. Ntumy delivers a very inventive fantasy novel on so many fronts, and I know this is not the end, so I will wait impatiently for the next book. 

Reviewed by Nkereuwem Albert

They Made Us Blood and Fury is a nightmare brought to life, dripping with characters that will drive a dagger into your very being. An epic fantasy novel that does not shirk from its gritty bits and moral ambiguity, Ntumy’s world is relentless and well put together, with layers within layers to consider. 

One of the things I enjoy most in fantasy is worldbuilding that never feels like too much information; it is a difficult thing to execute, but in this novel, we’re given all we need to engage with the world without it ever feeling superfluous or inadequate, a line walked beautifully. Anyi is a beacon of glory to the Countless Clans, led by a council of elders and queens that provide lifeblood, a magical substance that can be moulded into anything, from medicine to weapons. Anyi has so much lifeblood that they give it away to the neighbouring kingdoms and cities, from Ka to Bediaku, Gbota and Xose.  From believable history, to enthralling magic, to commerce and social structure, the world presented feels full and ready for a great story to be told within.

As the novel opens, we are thrown into an Anyi on the edge. The queen is dying and none of her heirs, the Divewe, can produce it. Reservoirs run dry and gods stay silent, leaving the Anyi with too little of the substance they once gave away in excess. Across the continent, in the empire of Ka, we meet Aseye, an Anyi native working with lifeblood in the imperial armoury. Setting her sights on starting her own practice, her life is complicated by the death of the Anyi queen and the secrets it unearths. There’s also the issue of Kwame–beautiful Kwame–an imperial courtier with a hidden heritage and conflicting loyalties. 

Ntumy’s magic system is especially cool and inventive, with seers and blood-as-power done in ways that I’ve never seen. A culture where magic is embedded in the history, geography and economics of the world, we see the impact of lifeblood excesses and shortages play out both in the present and contextually. Spirit possessions and gods’ whisperings come at a terrible price. The creatures that manifest across the novel are beautiful, visceral and terrifying! 

For all its detailed worldbuilding, They Made Us Blood and Fury is also an education in heart-rending character development. Aseye and Kwame are very compelling protagonists. Aseye’s past is shrouded in mystery that unravels with massive implications for the countless clans, and with Kwame, a character with conflicting loyalties and motivations that are unclear, we have an intriguing pair, written with raw intensity and unyielding prose that is very compelling to read. 

The supporting cast—spread out across the Countless Clans—deliver, filling out the necessary points in this story beautifully and disturbingly as the novel progresses. In They Made Us Blood and Fury, you sense the threads that link the cast, but Ntumy still delivers excellent character arcs, in both positive and antagonistic directions. Fafa, Fia Kofi, and Mamiga are an excellent investigation into the choices we make to sustain life as we know it, even when we know better. The Divewe’s choices are driven by their need to survive and their thirst for the power they were destined for, now a destiny denied. The Kahene and the politics of his empire ask the necessary questions about imperialism and its swallowing of cultures and people alike. In the sandlands and the spaces between, the nomads offer Aseye philosophy that is antithetical to what is the norm in the countless clans, and the entirety of the supporting cast feel real and fleshed out, to the betterment of the novel. 

All these elements come together to make a world in which the truth is always lurking, and this novel captures that eerie feeling perfectly. With a story told in journeys through the Countless Clans,  there were many moments that shocked me and broke my heart, and pivots that grabbed my attention and made me perk up and hope, all ending with a flawless landing that leaves me wanting more of the Countless. Cheryl S. Ntumy delivers a very inventive fantasy novel on so many fronts, and I know this is not the end, so I will wait impatiently for the next book. 

By Christine Aicardi

Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).

But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.

Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.

From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).

What was Beer’s goal? This work on biological computing was part and parcel of his thinking on management cybernetics and complex systems. All along, he aimed to improve industrial management, and through his cybernetic factory designs, to replace the factory’s human manager with a (better performing) ‘cybernetic brain.’ Would a pond be cleverer than a human? He thought that factories were embedded in economic environments that were exceedingly complex systems, posing problems beyond human representational cognitive abilities. In contrast, some biological systems had the performative ability to solve such problems as they could adapt to unexpected and unforeseeable changes (Pickering, 2010: 234-37). In biological computers, Beer’s hope was that “solutions to problems simply grow” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 237).

There is a strong whiff of zoefuturism to the idea of handing over the running of our industry and economy to pond life. Yet the conditions of its enrolment, or its abandonment when it does not do the job, should give us pause. What happened to Beer’s experiments with Euglena? Or, what happened to Euglena in Beer’s experiments? Beer was trying to exploit Euglena’s sensitivity to light for creating optical couplings to tanks full of the microalgae’s colonies. “However, the culturing difficulties proved enormous. Euglena showed a distressing tendency to lie doggo, and attempts to isolate a more motile strain failed” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234). Did Beer think that Euglena were trying to avoid detection, as implied by his use of ‘lying doggo’? Who knows. But he must have thrown away the content of the tanks, hopefully in a pond rather than in a sink. So, when Euglena refused to behave as expected, refused to play the role they were assigned in Beer’s game, they were discarded. The wonders of self-organization and autonomous behaviour had their limits: biological systems had to be useful to their human ‘carer.’ Beer’s ‘care’ for Euglena was predicated on their usefulness to his personal goals. It was not a dis-interested, open-ended, performative dance of agency. In Norris’ story, Euglena loved Beer’s, their captor’s, brain. But this could be interpreted as textbook Stockholm syndrome.

These reflections led me to revisit “Euglena”. But I read a different story this time. It is certainly an homage to Beer and British cybernetics. However, there is much more to it when read through a situated (feminist STS) filtering of zoefuturism. Above all, Norris gives Euglena, the lowly pond life, a new lease on life out of its (en)forced confinement in a tank. This could be read as liberation from detention and from a form of slavery, although Euglena does not complain much about it. Crucially, Euglena’s freeing brings with it a heightened capacity for self-respect, agency, autonomy, and altruism.

“Euglena” has been a thought-provoking (and affecting) object to think with about zoefuturism and its potentially problematic kinship to cybernetics. It has left me with unanswered questions for aspiring zoefuturist writers: where to place the cursor in the murky borderlands between freely consented multispecies collaboration and reciprocal care on the one side, and unidirectional exploitation through more or less forceful nudging on the other side? And for those who like me have been bathed from birth in Western culture, like the British cyberneticists – are we capable, or willing, to entirely avoid reproducing colonial and exploitative styles of thinking and acting in the world, which have been so tightly woven into the fabric of modernity since the Enlightenment?

References

Ames, R. T. (2023). ‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 93, 81-98. doi:10.1017/S1358246123000012

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Medina, E. (2006). Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(3), 571-606. doi:10.1017/S0022216X06001179

Norris, J. (2024). Euglena. In B. Greenaway & S. Oram (Eds.), All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions That Disrupt (pp. 265-271). London: CyberSalon Press.

Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press.

Rosenhead, J. (2006). IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer. International Transactions in Operational Research, 13(6), 577-581. doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3995.2006.00565.x

Christine Aicardi is a Senior Research Fellow working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Futures Studies, with special interest in theorising and developing the use of applied science fiction for participatory foresight. She has extensive experience in multidisciplinary collaborations to facilitate Responsible (Research and) Innovation for future technologies.

By Christine Aicardi

Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).

But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.

Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.

From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).

What was Beer’s goal? This work on biological computing was part and parcel of his thinking on management cybernetics and complex systems. All along, he aimed to improve industrial management, and through his cybernetic factory designs, to replace the factory’s human manager with a (better performing) ‘cybernetic brain.’ Would a pond be cleverer than a human? He thought that factories were embedded in economic environments that were exceedingly complex systems, posing problems beyond human representational cognitive abilities. In contrast, some biological systems had the performative ability to solve such problems as they could adapt to unexpected and unforeseeable changes (Pickering, 2010: 234-37). In biological computers, Beer’s hope was that “solutions to problems simply grow” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 237).

There is a strong whiff of zoefuturism to the idea of handing over the running of our industry and economy to pond life. Yet the conditions of its enrolment, or its abandonment when it does not do the job, should give us pause. What happened to Beer’s experiments with Euglena? Or, what happened to Euglena in Beer’s experiments? Beer was trying to exploit Euglena’s sensitivity to light for creating optical couplings to tanks full of the microalgae’s colonies. “However, the culturing difficulties proved enormous. Euglena showed a distressing tendency to lie doggo, and attempts to isolate a more motile strain failed” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234). Did Beer think that Euglena were trying to avoid detection, as implied by his use of ‘lying doggo’? Who knows. But he must have thrown away the content of the tanks, hopefully in a pond rather than in a sink. So, when Euglena refused to behave as expected, refused to play the role they were assigned in Beer’s game, they were discarded. The wonders of self-organization and autonomous behaviour had their limits: biological systems had to be useful to their human ‘carer.’ Beer’s ‘care’ for Euglena was predicated on their usefulness to his personal goals. It was not a dis-interested, open-ended, performative dance of agency. In Norris’ story, Euglena loved Beer’s, their captor’s, brain. But this could be interpreted as textbook Stockholm syndrome.

These reflections led me to revisit “Euglena”. But I read a different story this time. It is certainly an homage to Beer and British cybernetics. However, there is much more to it when read through a situated (feminist STS) filtering of zoefuturism. Above all, Norris gives Euglena, the lowly pond life, a new lease on life out of its (en)forced confinement in a tank. This could be read as liberation from detention and from a form of slavery, although Euglena does not complain much about it. Crucially, Euglena’s freeing brings with it a heightened capacity for self-respect, agency, autonomy, and altruism.

“Euglena” has been a thought-provoking (and affecting) object to think with about zoefuturism and its potentially problematic kinship to cybernetics. It has left me with unanswered questions for aspiring zoefuturist writers: where to place the cursor in the murky borderlands between freely consented multispecies collaboration and reciprocal care on the one side, and unidirectional exploitation through more or less forceful nudging on the other side? And for those who like me have been bathed from birth in Western culture, like the British cyberneticists – are we capable, or willing, to entirely avoid reproducing colonial and exploitative styles of thinking and acting in the world, which have been so tightly woven into the fabric of modernity since the Enlightenment?

References

Ames, R. T. (2023). ‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 93, 81-98. doi:10.1017/S1358246123000012

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Medina, E. (2006). Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(3), 571-606. doi:10.1017/S0022216X06001179

Norris, J. (2024). Euglena. In B. Greenaway & S. Oram (Eds.), All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions That Disrupt (pp. 265-271). London: CyberSalon Press.

Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press.

Rosenhead, J. (2006). IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer. International Transactions in Operational Research, 13(6), 577-581. doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3995.2006.00565.x

Christine Aicardi is a Senior Research Fellow working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Futures Studies, with special interest in theorising and developing the use of applied science fiction for participatory foresight. She has extensive experience in multidisciplinary collaborations to facilitate Responsible (Research and) Innovation for future technologies.

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix).  This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.  

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection.  This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way.  Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text. 

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.  

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.  

The content of this book follows a similar pattern as its writers explore what an inclusive future means, starting with the first story in the collection, “Three-World Cantata” by Vandana Singh. The story explores this theme and shows that futurism should not become mere progressivism, but should include both human and nonhuman elements and be led by ordinary citizens rather than corporations. The character Chingari (the story doesn’t mention their gender) and their team creates IntMRI, which allows them to take a person’s consciousness into a preexisting climatic scenario with the intention of convincing the person to adopt positive attitudes that will lead to climatic justice. Their initial targets are people in power who can influence climate policy. Manny, the CEO of UltraCorp, holds such power and is pimped into the project. Manny is exposed to different climate situations, including the importance of human interconnection with nonhumans such as elephants. Manny prefers managing the system rather than pursuing structural change.  So, what Chingari realises is that in a world charged by personal interest, to know what is good does not necessarily equate to doing what is right. Plato suggested otherwise in The Republic where he equates knowing good to doing good. However, sustainable change, Chingari discovered, starts with the collaboration of ordinary people: ‘If you looked closely at the time axis by yourself, it remained a long, thin line stretching from past through present and into the future— nothing changed. But look at it, engage with it along with other people, other beings, and you would see it thicken, acquire structure’ (Singh 2026:34). It is through community collaboration that real change emerges.

“Death is Not an Ornament” by Hannah Onoguwe echoes a similar sentiment and shows such societal change when there is a collaboration between human and nonhuman. In my book, “Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution,” I argue that recurring theme in Nigerian speculative fiction is the entanglement between human and nonhuman “which it draws from the indigenous Nigerian cosmology of co-existence between human and nonhuman in a symbiotic relationship” (2025:17). The protagonist in Onoguwe’s story is a hybrid of human and nonhuman who fights to eradicate dependence on the petro-economy by teaming with nonhuman whose inhabitant is the ocean. 

In “Robots & Insects & Languages & Other Living Things” by Libia Brenda, Brenda projects this interconnection to also include machines, through the process of language. The mediator here is the IA, known as mycorrhizae, whose encoding and decoding of various means of communication between humans and other nonhumans breaks down the barrier between humans and nonhumans. Once this is accomplished, the wall between nature and culture, is broken.

In “Mina’s Dream” by Vandana Singh, activism takes a different shape, not the usual workaday protest of placard carrying (Fisher, 2014, will argue that the capitalist system has already contained this method) but from the tiny ray of hope of the ethics of the protagonist Mina. Mina’s tenderness to her garden mirrors the tenderness of her heart to her community as the protagonist says “Remember that we are entangled, all of us, with each other and other life- forms (86).” It is that love that transforms not just her community’s ecology but also spreads into a political act, which is to say that what spurred political activism here is a change in the value system.  

  

In “Climate Action Dialogue: From Liner to Fractal”, a discussion among Nigel Topping, Farhana Yamin, and Ed Finn, among other things, carries on this discourse on ethical and societal values. It is this changing of value systems that Yamin argues is the key to unlocking a better climatic future: “I’m very excited about this shift to working at the level of values, whereas before we were just trying to tinker with a policy here, or a program there, or a bit of funding here, a few fiscal reforms here and there…. Changing values allows us to see things moving differently, and to reshape our relationships (235).” It is this stand of orientation transformation that Anna Pigott takes in “Flights of Fancy” by arguing that if over-tourism is scaled down, places like Corfu currently frequented by tourists, an activity that destroys its bioforms, will have a better, more diverse ecosystem. 

Where it can be argued that value/attitude change originates from the oil companies who pushed the concept of carbon footprint, attempting to shift the conversation about infrastructure and systems into the scale of travel, gardens, and personal actions, the diversity in the views in the anthology, gives room to varied perspectives towards climate action. For instance, in the dialogue between Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Kim Stanley Robinson, argues ‘that nation- states could force international finance to give up some of their ill- gotten or artificially gotten gains to pay for [climate] justice itself” (2026:300). Here, Robinson is foregrounding system change and not just individual attitudinal change.

Chinelo Onwualu shares a similar sentiment about the importance of value change in her essay, “The Case for Reckless Climate Optimism”. In a world marred with discrimination and racism, hope for the future is possible due to the value of openness and interconnectedness adopted by the younger generation born during the pandemic. Onwualu is optimistic that this new value adopted by the generation will lead to a better future because “working with hope is very different from working with fear. One leads upward, opening us up to innovations and experimentation (41).”

 It is this hopeful attitude shared by Claire Armitstead in “The Robin, The Wolves, and The Library” as she waits for Robin to appear in her garden during a summer whose heat led to the decline of the species. 

Pippa Goldschmidt feels a similar optimism with the city of Berlin in “A Walk in Berlin”. A city with a dark history of fascism, colonialism, and genocide, the community emerged from this “physical and moral abyss (203).” It is this resilience that gives hope.

In the “Introduction”,  Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich argue for a hopeful future but add that in the collection, the hopeful futures imagined are “inspired by practical, everyday writing about climate—weather forecasts, almanacs, rainfall indexes— to try to create a user’s guide to the real world, rather than a magic eight ball revealing all of the answers” (xv). Utility is foregrounded here to counter the fantasy argument levelled against utopian unconsciousness, as utopia is “thought to be a mere fantasy” (Kloeg 2016:451) which is why Immanuel Wallerstein calls utopian unconsciousness as, “breeders of illusions and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions” (quoted in Lancaster, 2000:109) This collection exposes the weakness in such a stand. For instance, in “Climate Action Dialogue: Becoming Better Humans”, a conversation between  Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Robinson suggests practical ways to mitigate the climate crisis, such as the: 

notion of slowing down the melting and sliding of the glaciers in Antarctica to preserve sea level, which is being pursued by glaciologists. It’s a minor expense compared to what we’ve been talking about so far, really a matter of just a few billion a year to drill through those glaciers and suck the water out from underneath them. You would need a navy like the US Navy. You would need people repurposed from the oil industry to aid the glacial slowdown project. It’s exactly the same expertise, and even the same equipment (294). 

Here, Robinson gives a scalable solution to mitigate the climate crisis. Similarly, in a different location, the essay by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, “The Unwalkable City” provides practical guides in which Sri Lankan architecture could be improved for climate sustainability. All these points show that the utopia in this collection aims for one whose foundation is built on an actionable framework.

While I found this book both informative and entertaining, the only weakness I see is its framing, which makes it look ahistorical by failing to situate itself explicitly in the utopian tradition, and tends to present itself as if it had emerged without precedent. Perhaps it is from the capitalist unconscious which currently governs the academic environment, where research is constantly forced to model itself in the language of newness. Capitalism seeks expansion and imbues an unconsciousness of seeking something new in perpetuity: new market, new brand, new technology (a company like Apple tweaks its phone every other year to announce its newness). To be relevant in a capitalist political economy, the notion of newness that signals its expansion is repetitive.  This criticism, notwithstanding, the book broadens my horizon about climate futures and it is a worthwhile read. 

Selected References

Bould, M. (2021). The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. London: Verso.

Ezeiyoke, C. (2025). Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution. London: Routledge

Fisher, F. (2014).  Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hampshire: Zero Books. 

Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London and New York: Verso.

Kloeg, J. (2016). ‘Utopianism and its discontents: A conceptual history’. Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 108(3). 451-468 

Marx, K. and F. Engels (2007). Manifesto of the Communist Party. New York: International Publishers Co.

Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Simon, M (2023). Why Deleting Carbon From the Atmosphere Is So Controversial. https://www.wired.com/story/why-deleting-carbon-from-the-atmosphere-is-so-controversial/

Taylor, T. J (2024). Introduction to Cofuturisms. The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturism. Edited by Taylor, T.J, Lavender III, I, Dillon, G.L and Chattopadhyay, B. London: Routledge 

Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke’s PhD is from Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the impact of postcolonial theory on the evolution of African SF. His recent publications include a monograph Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution and a collection of his short stories, Haunted Grave and Other Stories.