Vector [BSFA] Blog

Kathleen Hughes interviews Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero, the authors behind Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence (Bloomsbury Academic)

KH: Tell us a little about how and why you came to write about the stories behind Artificial Intelligence – the background and aims of the project.

KV: There are already many, many books about AI, and it wasn’t our intention to add yet another book about AI to the vast collections that there are in the universe right now. Instead, what we wanted to do was add some clarity to the argument about artificial intelligence, and ask the question why or how did we get here, and what role culture has played in the collective imagination of human beings creating something like artificial intelligence. 

DB: It began with us trying to demystify and explore AI. We were talking a lot about it because “AI” seemed to be completely dominating headlines and, both positively and negatively, engaging people across social media. That was the starting point. “AI” (large language models and the like) were new and creeping into discourse everywhere, and we were talking about how it would affect our professions.

At the same time, we’re both lifelong fans of science fiction and fantasy! And we love storytelling in all its forms. We are readers and cinemagoers. Despite having long careers in the tech and entertainment sectors, we both have a background in the humanities: Kelly studied Classics, and Dave studied medieval language and literature. So, we couldn’t help but see AI through that lens.

Once we started talking regularly about what seemed to be going on in the world, we realised that humanity has been rehearsing this conversation for centuries. Ideas about not just artificial minds as a theoretical concept but also what they would mean in the workplace and at home, about fears of replacement and fears of conflict and the environment, constantly arise in our culture.

I remember that when ChatGPT was released, one of the first comments I saw on Twitter was somebody joking about Skynet coming online, a reference to the Terminator films; it made me think, “This is how we understand technology – through the lens of culture, memes and movies.”

It’s not just science fiction – ancient satire, myths, legends, and philosophy are full of machines, artificial life, and robots. Some of our favourite characters from literature and TV are artificial: machines, computers or robots. We really wanted to catalogue their journey and think about how people understand AI through their portrayal.

The book really was fun. It was an opportunity for Kelly and me to think a little bit deeper about the subtext of our favourite works of literature and art, and to unearth some hidden gems, as artificial intelligence and living machines have appeared as concepts since the dawn of fiction. We were also able to speculate a little on what it means for our identity today.

Fun fact: the working title while we were drafting it was “Ghosts in the Machine”! 

Kelly has already written several books and had an agent she could talk to about the idea; Dave is a journalist and magazine editor who’s contributed to several publications and websites about technology, games, AI and film. It was natural for us to capture and explain our thoughts in this way.

KH: Why do you think stories and myths about AI are important today?

KV: As with everything in human existence: Time’s Arrow travels, and as such, stories are left behind. Mementoes or fragments of everything, from cautionary tales to allegories, are discarded or replaced. When we were writing the book, we felt that we didn’t want  future generations to forget or remain ignorant of the stories of the past, and that’s possibly why there are so many ancient or at least antiquated stories in the book! The source materials were rich enough for us to be inspired. Perhaps some of the corporate AI conglomerates need to lean in and learn from the past, too! 

DB: It’s important because stories are how we air our problems and rehearse our solutions. They’re how we learn to empathise with others and imagine the possibilities around us.

As machine learning and AI hoover up investment and shape the way we interact with computers, it’s valuable to look at how we’ve explored these scenarios for generations. Maybe we’ll spot our own patterns – and predict how things will go tomorrow.

KH: In the book, you trace AI in culture far beyond its naming as a term in 1955 (by John McCarthy, as you cite in your introduction). Do you think we should re-name ‘artificial intelligence’ to something that acknowledges its deep roots? Has it always been with us?

DB: Human beings are manufacturers. We make things, we make tools and machines to do our work for us, and we automate processes by nature. Our imagination has always asked how far we could push that. The concept of animating the inanimate and giving it life, intelligence, character and autonomy is an old, old idea, going back to  myth and legend.

Even before John McCarthy coined the term for modern machine learning, or before Alan Turing came up with his famous test, literature and drama saw many examples of what we would now call artificial intelligence. And I’m not just talking about the depiction of robots across the 20th century, from Karel Čapek to Isaac Asimov and beyond. The term ‘android,’ for instance, goes back centuries. The idea of building artificial people to do our bidding has surfaced in stories in multiple languages and time periods.

I’d be more interested in being more precise about the terms we use today. Big tech and the media spray the term “AI” around now indiscriminately. There is a gulf between a web chatbot and the Nobel Prize-winning protein-folding processes, and yet the press will call both of them “AI” as if we’re meant to know what that means. Neither of those things is truly intelligent or conscious.

KV: If we want to understand artificial intelligence, we should look no further than ourselves as creators: we create artificial intelligence in a similar way to how any ancient civilisation has created its “mythos.” Except our resources are so much more vast than our ancestors’, and our social power structures are more complex. The premise of artificial intelligence today is that it has been created by a machine: which is the furthest from the truth that you can possibly imagine! We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams; that’s what Arthur O’Shaughnessy said, right? We – people – have created artificial intelligence, not only in an abstract sense but through the input of our thoughts, words and ideas to algorithms, and humankind is therefore artificial intelligence through questions and answers that we have created. So we can also stop this any time we want to!

Can you talk a little about the relationship between science fiction (cultural, humanities-based) and science/technology as you see it?

KV: We actually talk about this in the first episode, the “zeroth” episode of our podcast, because one of the coolest elements about researching a book like this is the understanding that quite a lot of the inventions or laws in AI today apply, from how we conduct ourselves to all the things that we have physically created. We can thank everyone from Hesiod and Swift to Clarke and Asimov. To put this into a sharper context, Star Trek’s shop’s computer is the architect of everything from the replicator (we might call this a 3D printer for now) to the oximeter. It was a no-brainer that we were able to find such obvious roots between science, technology, and culture; it was a very enjoyable part of the book’s creation.

DB: Science fiction naturally explores “what if” and tells stories in which ideas are pushed to their extreme. It enables us to work out our cultural anxieties and obsessions. That means that fiction can tell us a lot about what has been in the Zeitgeist in every age. 

Also, it’s worth noting that science fiction is very broad. It has sometimes had a tendency to get dismissed by the mainstream media as a niche genre for nerds, but let’s be honest: many of the Greek myths (Hephaestus and his golden robots spring to mind), Lucian the Roman philosopher, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four all contain elements that we would claim are science fiction. So, when we talk about the representation of AI in science fiction, in a lot of cases we’re talking about very well-known and popular stories generally, with a lot to say about society.

Stories influence how people see the world; they warn us and inspire us. And that’s true for the people who create the technology we use. Many surveys and reports over the years have shown that astronomers and engineers were inspired to pursue their careers because of science fiction. In our book, we observe that flip phones were influenced by Star Trek’s communicator. Elon Musk’s controversial AI platform Grok is named after a term invented by Robert Heinlein. Neal Stephenson gave us the terms ‘metaverse,’ and the computing-related meaning of ‘avatar.’ Can you have a conversation about AI assistants without people nodding to JARVIS? The influence of science fiction on our actual existence is clear, even in individual career choices and names for things. It would not surprise me at all if the first genuinely conscious machine was nicknamed Data, KITT or Metal Mickey – or, given how perverse people can be, HAL.

Your book is far-reaching, including the myth of the golem, al-Jazari’s Amazing Contraptions, Jonathan Swift, and Star Trek (to name just a few!). You also cover different mediums – literature, film, TV, etc. How did you choose what to write about and what to leave out? As such an overview can’t be comprehensive, it’d be interesting to understand your methodology/approach to materials.

DB: We could have written a book that was twice as long, in truth. The constraints of a work of academic literature for Bloomsbury meant that we could only include a fraction of the material. Some heavy editing was required, and even now we keep seeing things and saying, “That will have to go in book two!”

It is impossible to be entirely comprehensive. Our book becomes, therefore, quite an accessible survey. What we wanted to keep in are  the best examples of AI, computers, and robots in literature. We made sure that it’s a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar so that we can celebrate things that people already love (like Frankenstein, Asimov, and Star Wars) while surfacing important but rarely mentioned individuals like Lucian, Margaret Cavendish, and Samuel Butler.

It was important that we went back and did the whole run of history from Greek myth to video games, so our mission became about finding examples that had something to say about our relationship with machines.

KV: This was far and away the hardest part that we had to do in writing the book was to decide what goes in and what stays out, it took us a really long time to write this book because we kept changing the chronology or we were continuously searching sometimes for things that weren’t immediately obvious. Ultimately the obvious cultural parallels appeared as we were writing; but from the very beginning we simply trusted our gut in writing about the things that we knew were important to us as people that have grown up in both an analogue and a digital age. It allowed us to be able to understand the legacy that artificial intelligence leaves behind and continues to leave behind in our collective cultures. It was an incredible Herculean task, but one that was so very enjoyable, as it allowed us to revisit some of the things that we absolutely cherished and adored.

Who do you envision as the core readers of your book? 

KV: Can we say Sam Altman and Dario Amodei et al? They should be the core readers of our book, they could learn a lot from the cultural history of AI. We wrote it for people like us, who have a heightened interest beyond the hype of AI and want to be able to understand how AI has evolved. Readers who, like us, believe that science fiction and the culture that surrounds artificial intelligence is applicable to today. We’d love to be able to reach more of an academic reader, because we feel that some of the arguments raised in this book are integral to being able to develop a broader or even a refined understanding of artificial intelligence to enable them to make a better engine or a better machine. Simply, anybody who has any touch point with artificial intelligence in 2026 and beyond must read this book. 

DB: So far, we’ve had the most interest from people who work in the games and entertainment industries, because that’s where we operate professionally day-to-day.

But we imagine the core readers as culturally curious people who are interested in AI but don’t necessarily come to it from a technical background. They’re likely to be enthusiastic about TV, movies, books, games and science fiction, and interested in what those stories can tell us about the way we understand technology today.

Many will already encounter AI in their work or everyday lives and want a broader historical and cultural perspective on the current debate: where our hopes and fears about intelligent machines came from, how long we’ve been imagining them, and what those imagined machines ultimately reveal about us.

Overall, it’s for people who like to think a bit deeper around the stories they encounter every day and consider the subtext of familiar stories. Many may simply be looking for a few reading or film recommendations!

Out of all the cultural presentations of AI in stories and myths that you present, can you each choose your favourite (in terms of what it tells us about contemporary AI, or otherwise), and why? 

KV: I’m a game designer as well as being a writer and I’ve been lucky enough to work on video game properties such as Transformers and Halo in the past. I was particularly drawn to researching and then writing about the sentient aspect of AI: I really love the anthropomorphisation of machines, objects and anomalies. I’m that person that loves to see a shape on a wall and somehow find a face in it, so writing a chapter about Frankenstein, and the story behind how Frankenstein came to life, was a real exciting chapter for me. As a side note, I could have written an entire book about Frankenstein bringing his monster to life as “artificial intelligence.”  Frightening though it is, I just love the sentience of artificial intelligence so much. 

DB: I’ve made no secret of the fact that my favourite character in science fiction is R2-D2, the little droid who repeatedly saves the day.

But I’ve got to say that in putting this book together, I got weirdly obsessed with Samuel Butler’s Book of the Machines.

Years before The Terminator or The Matrix, way back in 1872, Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon dedicates a three-part section to exploring what happens when the creations of the Industrial Revolution evolve (Darwin’s ideas were fresh in everyone’s mind) and outgrow their creators. It leads to a huge civil war where, ultimately, human beings smash the machines. It’s no surprise that Frank Herbert in the Dune books gave the name the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ to the uprising that wiped thinking machines from his universe.

There is a lot of talk and speculation about the future of AI and its impact on society. Do the stories of the past give us any insight or wisdom into what is next for AI?

KV: We might argue that going back to the original concept of AI as a tool to be able to take us somewhere is the most relevant talking point about artificial intelligence today. Of course, there are myriad talking robots and machines in 2026; however, if we were to go back to Lucian’s concept of using computing for space travel, perhaps we would have walked on the moon before 1969. Perhaps if we’d listened to Samuel Butler, we might have nipped rogue AI in the bud? If we’d heeded Margaret Cavendish’s advice, we could have tested Singularity long before we tweeted it. And Jonathan Swift, if we’d understood him, could have taught us of the importance of the human as the beating heart of every machine. Unfortunately, we’ve become such surface creatures that we are very reactionary rather than reflective. What we learned from writing this book is that artificial intelligence is more a tool for the future than a tool for today.

DB: The stories of the past give us some insight into the fact that transformation is inevitable, that humans will keep trying to automate processes, and this will change the nature of work – and that we will struggle with this, just as our ancestors did, since the days of the plough, the printing press, or the loom.

I think that we need to realise that humans have been rehearsing these anxieties for centuries. The most common themes from literature and philosophy are very familiar to us today.

Replacement is a very real fear. You can see this anxiety in the way people talk about losing their jobs to AI. Humans being replaced by machines was already a topic of conversation when Blade Runner came to the cinema. It’s a theme of the very first play in which the term “robot” was coined when R.U.R. opened on stage in 1921. It was something Samuel Butler wrestled with following the Industrial Revolution.

But it also gives us some insight into what the future might bring. Science fiction also shows us our aspirations, our hopes, inspirations, and ideas. Our civilisation keeps resurfacing the idea of creating life, becoming god-like in our ability to create beings that we can converse with, command, or love – it shows up time and time again in legend, literature and film.

By Jesse Rowell

On its face, Brain Fruit is a simple tale of evolution through mutual symbiosis. Being a fan of symbiont sci-fi like Hal Clement’s classic 1950’s novel, Needle, and Peter Watts’s 2010 short story, “The Things,” I eagerly awaited Stephen Oram’s tale of artificial speciation in a hostile world of rock storms and extinction. Mechanical bee symbionts? Count me in. Faceless fungus droids? Even better.

Oram couches his novella in evolution with its first sentence, “The evolutionary crawl continues its upward curve…” (p.5), but the story is anything but a crawl with its cinematic scenes and wry cuts of humor, all standard characteristics of a good Oram story. “I take a dry look at the world and see the irony,”1 he tells me. In person, Oram shows soft-spoken grace with a patience for answering my questions, reminiscent of my secondary school science teacher right down to his casual t-shirt with its wrangled neckline. Meanwhile, Oram’s writing brims with quips like, “Let me fill you full of your heritage,” (p.10) and “This is a new experience, and we hate it,” (p.29).

The humor is sharp, the science is sound, so what more is there to say? Quite a bit, if we are to measure the book’s reviews in public and private forums. This is the type of book that needs to be read more than once. From contributions to zoefuturism (see issues 302 and 303 of BSFA’s Vector), to presenting dangerous ideas tinged with pathos, Brain Fruit contains multitudes.

Danger is delicious. Placing creatures in conflict within ethical predicaments is what science fiction does best. Oram tests the physical and ethical limits of his narrator, an artificial bee that connects with a fruit and insect to become a trioid with a tragically short life, much like the human organoids that haunt his imagination. Oram refers me to the brain-spinal cord models developed in recent studies as he grapples with the agency of organoids, and by extension, his fictional trioid. “How long ethically can they be kept alive? Do they have the same rights as a lab animal? At what point do they become human?”1

Make no mistake, like humans to organoids, the bee’s AI network imposes its design on both the fruit and insect. No consent is sought as the hyperintelligent bee covers them with resin and inserts its proboscis into the brain fruit. The insects and fruit-bearing trees would die off without the vast artificial intelligence network of the robot bees, so AI imposition on all life is beneficial, right? Ah, this is where my science teacher would have told me to conduct more research, clearing his throat as he pulled at his collar, an endearing affectation meant to put me at ease. Likewise, Oram dismisses the idea that his story promotes dangerous empathy for an oppressor over the oppressed.

“I wanted to write what it feels like to become symbiotic,”1 he tells me as we chuckle over the ignorance of oligarchs, like Peter Thiel’s mortality missteps in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings2,3 and Elon Musk’s ketamine hot takes of Iain Banks’s Culture series4,5. Would these sciolists grasp the relationality of a trioid to its various ecosystems, or how “every moment is creating legacy, affecting the flow of time”1? Only if they fed our words into their LLM data centers, generating a word soup to regurgitate back to us. No matter how precise the language of literature, unenlightened billionaires will impose their designs.

The words of symbiosis found in Brain Fruit, “collaboration,” “communal,” and “connect,” are the shared language of zoefuturism, quite the opposite of a hyper-individualistic ethos. As an expansive subgenre of science fiction, zoefuturism is grounded in the science of relationality. “It’s a whole ecosystem. Everything relying on everything else” (p.34), the trioid explains to the fungus-harvesting droids in an effort to get them to stop felling the forest, and, “We are becoming…” (p.44). Oram’s prose recalls the theories of Lynn Margulis, famed evolutionary biologist, whose revolutionary ideas on eukaryotic cell origins and endosymbiosis were rejected by the scientific community in the 80s, enthralled as they were by the language of neodarwinism: “combat, competition, and conflict.”6,7

Oram’s prose is precise, and his use of the word “becoming” is a central tenet of zoefuturism. Each species progresses in the story, not toward a definitive end, but through a becoming, whether it is speciation through symbiotic merger, or passing cultural inheritance to the next generation. The state of continually becoming, perhaps unsatisfying for those expecting a three-act play, is poetic. Life is becoming and becoming is life, a perpetual state of flux and fade. Dr. Yen Ooi, scholar of Sino science fiction, describes it as “a holistic view that never truly lands on a binary value, accepting instead that survival is the driver of life.”8 There is a beautiful sadness in Brain Fruit as it describes the transitory nature of life with “one last drink of sap” (p.43). It leaves me cold, this reckoning of time as I fade into gray like each generation of trioid.

The passage of time is measured by gradients of gray in Dawlish. It was here in this lonely seaside town that Oram composed Brain Fruit, a depressing place in November where “the bridge you walk under to get to the beach looked like it was about to collapse.”1 The perils presented in the book’s setting, with its rock storms and nature’s dissolution, parallel Dawlish and the short beach where he walked. Life seeps into books as much as life seeps out. It is here within the pages that he transforms sadness into striking imagery with waves crashing ashore and the fluid of the fruit, the conceptual metaphor of life is water. “The sea maintains its soothing effect, its pulsing rhythms matching those of our own” (p.14).

In the end it is the ingenuity of the trioid that endears it to the reader, its will for self-preservation and “the promise of strong children” (p.43), going as far as to inject nightshade into an AI entity, the faceless droid, as it shoves the protagonist into the hollow of its head. For me, the subtext is unmistakable. These life-becomings are a resounding rejection of generative-AI. Successive generations of artists interested in self-preservation must poison their passions and corrupt to disrupt the plagiarism machines that impose their designs upon us.9 We are not powerless. As delighted as I was with the inference, the imagery of the “obnoxious cave of a face” (p.37) dredged up some troubling memories of my own.

Mutual symbiosis had fascinated me as a teenager, memories of brushing my fingers through bearded lichen that hung from tree branches, pulling down clumps to breathe in their fresh, dry smell. It was a perfume that entranced me when I hiked through the valleys below the Rocky Mountains, smells that mingled with pine and earth. Shame the violence I decided to visit upon nature, wanting to blast the algae and fungi with radioactive isotopes as a science experiment. And why not? I was an impressionable young lad who had read far too much pulp sci-fi by the time I got around to conducting scientific experiments.

It was a flight of fancy that my science teacher patiently entertained as I hypothesized what impact radiation exposure would have on a cooperating species like lichen. Would sharing of nutrients and water be disrupted? Would one survive over the other? Break out the microscopes! My teacher procured the radioactive yellow and red discs, about the size of blazer buttons, and stored them safely in his office. Months passed as I flitted between dreams and ideas, imagination serving me more than science. Not long after, a classmate stole into his office, found the discs, and stuck one in her mouth.

“Candy,” she told our teacher after she spat it out. “I thought it was candy.” The radioactive candy, as it were, was promptly removed from the school and my experiment ended before it had begun. Happenstance interceded, as it always does, and I retreated back into books to bury my regret and shame. Anything to escape the nagging thought that I had failed my science teacher. My mentor.

My failures have seen better days, and like an ill-tempered family, I don’t like to visit them too often. So I lose myself in books. Good books. Brilliant books. A good book is a binding agent, collecting all the detritus in our lives and expelling them. Books are an ecosystem of symbiosis and catharsis. This is Brain Fruit for me. We should consider ourselves fortunate to participate in the lifespan of books, sharing time and fantastic visions with the hands that lovingly made them.

David Polfeldt is one of those sets of hands. The Swedish science fiction author and publisher at Li’l Factory published Brain Fruit, limited to 500 copies and screen printed on binder’s cloth. “No reprints. No digital print. No Kindle versions. No backups. If you don’t hold one in your hands, you will never read it…”10 Polfeldt’s persistence to deliver the book to me, a stranger on the other side of the world, bowled me over. If I had been vacationing on one of Saturn’s moons, I have no doubt that he would have found a way to get a copy into my hands.

The last word belongs to Dr. Ooi, whose theories on zoefuturism have inspired both the author and publisher. The three of them have created something completely unique in the science fiction community, and for that I am grateful. I have found my new mentors.

[The book] was created to ultimately embrace constant becoming – fighting against what is expected of books today, that need to last forever and never fade. I think this also forces us to consider our relationship with books, rather than taking objects for granted, as we generally do in our modern lives. It’s a gentle step towards asking us to look at the non-human creatures and objects around us and think about how we ‘use’ them, and in return, what we do for them, what that relationality means.8

END

Works Cited

1. Stephen Oram, “UK editor and author,” personal interviews, June 7th, 2026, and June 18th, 2026

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-thiel-2024-election-politics-investing-life-views/675946/

3. https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/peter-thiel-does-not-understand-the-lord-of-the-rings/

4. https://lithub.com/elon-musk-just-doesnt-understand-the-sci-fi-visions-of-iain-m-banks/

5. https://slate.com/culture/2026/03/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos-tech-silicon-valley-science-fiction-sci-fi-influences.html

6. Christopher Lloyd, What On Earth Evolved? 100 Species that Changed the World (Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2009), pp.44-45

7. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes, A Theory of the Origins of Species (Basic Books, 2002) p.32

8. Dr. Yen Ooi, “PhD, Author, Researcher, Narrative Designer,” personal interview, June 18th, 2026

9. https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

10. David Polfeldt, “This Art Will Die” (British Science Fiction Association, Vector #302: Zoefuturism) p.35

Author bio: Jesse Rowell writes and writes about science fiction. He can be found at www.jesserowell.com

Stephen Oram can be found at https://stephenoram.net/

L’il Factory (and Brain Fruit) can be found at https://lilfac.com/shop

By Matt Finch Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume – 1 (Faber, 2025)

What’s gone wrong with time? Once, we might tell ourselves, the lines of travel were straight, clean, and unambiguous, even if they diverged: Doc Brown might have been eccentric, but he was authoritative when he explained the idea of forking parallel universes to Marty McFly – and the cinema audience of 1989 – in Back To the Future II (Gale and Zemeckis).

In doing this, he was bringing a version of many-worlds theory (Gribbin, 2020) to popular audiences on a Hollywood scale, but also building upon prior notions of linear time travel which owed much to the Industrial Revolution, as Adam Roberts (2014) points out in a magisterial essay accompanying the British Film Institute’s season Days of Fear and Wonder. Considering the impact of Wells’ The Time Machine, Roberts notes that what

pre-Wells stories have in common is the arbitrariness of their temporal pretexts: magic, dreams, spirits. There’s no interest there in futurological speculation or historical research, and no sense that time travel could belong to the material world of science and technology […] One reason for this new focus on the machine part is that it makes dirigible something that had, hitherto, been imagined as beyond our capacity to control or steer. Dreams and magic happen to us, inflicting upon us a Scrooge-like passivity. Memory plagues us, or grants us wistful pleasure, but we can do nothing about the events that the memory recalls. A time machine, on the other hand, is something we can control. This, it turns out, is the specific dream that captures the imagination of the 20th century. (p.40)

Noting the arrival of a sophisticated time loop narrative in an episode of a My Little Pony TV show – where every attempt Twilight Sparkle makes to heed a warning from her future self seems to bring disaster closer – David Wittenberg addressed the evolution of Roberts’ dream in the 21st century, arguing that one can “reasonably surmise that the popular appreciation of time travel techniques has arrived at a certain denouement.” (2012, p.207)  On the far side of that denouement in the 2020s, temporal shenanigans are both messier and more familiar than ever before.

Perhaps these narratives have arisen, not just because speculative genres, temporal theorising, and the tropes of the fantastic have so fully permeated mainstream pop culture, but also because of wider experiences which have shaken received notions of time and how we experience it. Pandemic lockdowns at the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak rendered life restricted and repetitive for many, and forced us to confront the fact that during a pandemic, its end – defined only in retrospect – is not clearly in sight (Charters and Heitman, 2021). Digital technologies’ pace of development and spread is faster than any previous innovation in human history, and yet many remain cut off, with connectivity slowing or even reversing in some parts of the world (United Nations, 2020). Climate change and its attendant uncertainties also attack previous understandings of time on multiple fronts, from aspirational long-term Net Zero visions which may also generate opposition (Valenzuela and Lezaun, 2024) to shifting warnings of how much time remains to avoid the worst impacts — as one report put it (McGrath, 2019), “Do you remember the good old days when we had ’12 years to save the planet’?”.

All this happens even as increasingly extreme events make the headlines in the here-and-now, and New Yorkers experiencing smoke from Canadian wildfires describe it in cinematic, apocalyptic terms: 

“It felt like we were under attack, like if it was some other pandemic,” Ajche said of the smoke. The city, he added, “looked like a movie of what the future might look like.” (Chaffin, Lomeli, and Williams, 2023).

No wonder that more Americans now want to live in the distant past than the future (Hatfield, 2025), though the painful truth is, whichever direction in time they yearn to travel, the only moment one can ever live in is the present. The conditions of crisis set out by anthropologists of temporality Bryant and Knight – “moments when anticipation, and therefore the alleviation of anxiety, are not possible, and when as a result the present becomes uncanny to us in its present-ness” (2019, p.43) – seem ever more widespread, encouraging all kinds of idiosyncratic responses in our relationship to time.

How does this manifest in storytelling on the page and screen? The time machine of Bradley (2024)’s The Ministry of Time is plundered from Britain’s own future, its logic nonlinear and barely understood. Doctor Who‘s handwaving of paradoxes as “wibbly wobbly timey wimey” in 2007’s Blink (Moffat and Mcdonald) swiftly became a recurring catchphrase which has endured for almost two decades; in The Good Place, Doc Brown’s chalk lines gave way to a vision of time so arbitrarily tangled that it resembles a handwritten nonsense phrase:

MICHAEL: Happens to kind of look like the name “Jeremy Bearimy” in cursive English, so that’s what we call it.

ELEANOR: Sorry. I’m – my brain is melting. How can events happen before the ones that happened before?

MICHAEL: It’s just the way it works. It’s – it’s – Jeremy Bearimy. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the easiest way to describe it.

(Amram and O’Donnell, 2018)

The Good Place writers are having fun with us, of course, but are hardly the only ones toying with contemporary audiences’ increasing familiarity with time travel tropes and dynamics, to the point that a character in Palm Springs (Siara and Barbakow, 2020) can nonchalantly reference “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about”, the creators fairly confident that between Groundhog Day (Ramis and Rubin, 1993), Russian Doll (Lyonne et al., 2019-2022), Meet Cute (Pnueli and Lehmann, 2022), and other screen depictions of time going out of joint, viewers are going to get it.

Time going awry is not just the stuff of high-concept comedies. See You Yesterday (Bailey and Bristol, 2019) reminds us that black teen time-travellers might experience challenges rather less fun than those faced by Marty McFly. Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) sees causality inverted in an action thriller centred on a “temporal pincer movement” – though the po-faced Nolan dared not go as far as Philip K. Dick did in Counter-Clock World (1967) and suggest a mechanism for reversed excretion of bodily wastes. The final season of FX’s moody Legion (Hawley, 2017-2019) has its morally ambiguous, mentally ill lead use time loops as “do-overs” to thwart his opponents’ triumphs; he is, in turn, beset by “Time Demons” which thrive in the mess he has wrought, and, finally, accepts that the only hope for redemption lies in ending his personal timeline to relive his entire life afresh from birth.

Darker still, Nour Abi-Nakhoul’s disturbing novel Supplication (2024) uses a looped narrative to illustrate our enmeshment in patterns of gendered violence and abuse; its narrator awakens in a moment of absolute trauma, ventures on a phantasmagoric journey taking on roles of perpetrator and victim, only to return to the novel’s beginning in the concluding pages, leaving us unsure of whether she is trapped in some Sisyphean bind or merely hallucinating an escape in her final horrendous moments: “There, within the suddenness of the unending present, I was born – there I became I. That moment circled itself infinitely, spun on and on as though it would never end.” (p.1)

Speculative fictions, in and out of traditional genre settings, are helping artists, audiences, and societies to have a conversation about the uncertain and perilous era we inhabit – reflecting a shift in experiences of time and an increasing sense of crisis on Bryant and Knight’s terms.

Knight went on to gloss this condition as “vertiginous life”, “a transformative epoch where things feel different, lives take on strange and unexpected trajectories, folds and loops, and there is often the sense of stuckedness [sic] or hyperconsciousness.” (2023, p.26).

We are not merely seeing innovations in temporal theory being popularised in sitcoms, movies, dramas, books, and games, but also witnessing and participating in a wider and more profound cultural response to this vertiginous existence.

To focus this discussion, the present article examines Solvej Balle’s ongoing work On The Calculation of Volume (2020-2026; individual volumes referenced in this article with Roman numerals I-IV). This is an acclaimed multi-part novel about a bookseller who discovers during a business trip that she has become trapped in an endlessly repeating day. The work serves as a useful critical crux for explorations of genre tensions, popular philosophical storytelling, and contemporary anxieties over Western societies’ relationship to time in the Anthropocene.

Over the course of the four volumes translated into English at the time of writing, Tara Selter, a rare book dealer, discovers while visiting Paris that each day when she awakes, it is November 18th. Though that day’s events repeat identically for others in her world (except when she intervenes), she is able to travel, discovering that she begins each new November 18th wherever she finished the last. Some resources which she consumes, like food, are depleted and not restored in each reset; however, she finds she is able, unreliably, to arrange for objects to accompany her through the recurring days – most notably a Roman coin, a sestertius, which she acquired at the outset of her plight. The conceit of Balle’s tale is that we are reading the notebooks in which Tara has decided to keep a journal of her experiences.

In successive episodes, Tara explores the strange new existence which has been allotted to her. She returns to the rural home she shares with her husband Thomas; explains to him each day what has happened, finding him more or less accepting and empathetic; then reaches her limit of making such explanations and subsequently conceals herself within their family home, using her foreknowledge of his movements to avoid contact. 

She reflects on her experience as being like a “door opening onto a world in which everything can be subject to change”: 

Usually things close up again: it was a mistake. A simple explanation is found for the freak occurrence: our eyes deceived us, our memories were playing tricks on us, we had got things mixed up, got the days wrong. There is solid ground under our feet again, the incomprehensible makes sense after all, it was an optical illusion or a slip of the mind, it was a dream or a misunderstanding, the world is set to rights, the dizziness passes, we can breathe more easily.

But not this time. (pp.33-34)

Even so, beginning to find her way in the midst of repetition, Tara has “the feeling there’s something I should see, that something new will break through when the year is up […] I envisage a new eighteenth of November, but I don’t know how it will differ from the old one.” (I, p.147).

Significantly, she imagines not a nineteenth of November, but an altered eighteenth. It gives the sense that she is already adapting to her new existence; in the following volume, she will remark “I don’t know how one can grow used to a situation like this, but that’s what’s happening.” (II, p.35).

Tara’s situation exemplifies Knight’s description of

occasions when time becomes elastic, the world is spinning, there is an apparent shift in temporal rhythms, and material objects, sights and sounds become uncanny. There might be the sense, the feeling or atmosphere of epochal change, nothing will ever be the same…Out with the old and in with the something else. (2023, p.25).

Roaming ever more widely, riding trains and finding hotel rooms or empty houses to stay in, Tara crosses Europe, visits her family to hold an ersatz Christmas celebration, and, yearning for seasons, contrives voyages south to emulate a summer, and north for a winter. She discovers she is not alone in experiencing an endlessly repeating November 18th. Gradually a small community forms of people who are all trapped in the same day under the same conditions, arriving with their own stories and holding their own opinions on what is going on and what, if anything, must be done about it. Thus she finds belonging among those “joined together by the unpredictability of time” (IV, P.41) – a telling description, given that they are inhabiting indefinite repetitions of a single day.

As the fourth volume concludes, Tara leaves the community of repeaters, resolved to revisit her husband: “I feel uneasy when I think of Thomas, and mournful when I think of my friends in the eighteenth, because I do not know when I’ll see them again.” (IV, p.169).

Time gone wrong and the slipperiness of genre

Doris Lessing, The Sirian Experiments (Jonathan Cape, 1981)

What kind of story is this, anyway? Balle’s series has largely been treated as literary fiction rather than genre work, though its first volume was reviewed in Locus (Brookins, 2024). This positioning reminds us that fantastic fiction which deals with time sits in an odd place with regards to genre. Finney’s Time and Again (1970) and Grimwood’s Replay (1986) were republished as Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks, though the latter, especially, might equally be framed as science fiction. The previously mentioned Russian Doll and Supplication are no less difficult to categorise; Vonnegut’s Timequake (1997), in which humanity is forced to relive the years 1991-2001 without changing any of their actions, was referred to by its author himself as not even a novel but a “stew” incorporating autobiography and many tangents (Sayers, 1997).

One has no sense from Balle of the kind of genre snobbery expressed by Ian McEwan (Jordan, 2019; Ditum, 2019). Indeed, in an interview, Balle admits that Groundhog Day “felt as if someone had helped me with research by trying out some of the roads I did not want to take”, and goes on to say:

But it could also be nice if everybody read Doris Lessing’s The Sirian Experiments – or even better, her whole Canopus in Argos series.   

I can imagine a version of Planet Earth where everyone just sits down reading those books for as long as it takes, doing nothing else except whatever is needed to stay alive and keep others alive when doing it. (Booker Prizes, 2025).

Lessing used her five-novel sequence, with Earth seen from several perspectives as the sick planet Shikasta, as “a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities” (1994, p.11). Like On the Calculation of Volume, Lessing’s work is “a mainstream novel that uses SF ideas, because that is the best way for the author to tackle the themes she wants to tackle, rather than being a foray into SF style” (Hammersley, 2002).

Balle’s multi-volume tale has a similar diagnostic quality with regard to our present day, though it lies perhaps even farther from conventional science fiction than Lessing’s series; if anything, it resembles prior hard-to-categorise works such as Anna Kavan’s surreal Ice (1967), in which a shifting climate entangles with a dreamlike state of being which dissolves the protagonist’s identity, or – even more directly – Marlen Haushofer’s unusual and moving 1960s novel The Wall (translated in 1990).

This latter work sees its protagonist apparently separated from the rest of humanity by an invisible wall, beyond which the world seems to have entered a strange deathlike stasis; she is forced to draw on her own inner resources to find ways to survive, raiding cupboard supplies and figuring out how to keep animals and farm the land in the mountain landscape where she is now trapped. 

While she never finds community of the kind which Tara does, the protagonist’s plight – and the opportunity she takes to rethink who she is and how she relates to the world – strongly resonates with Balle’s books. Indeed, the opening lines frame her problem in terms which are tellingly familiar:

Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report. I shall set everything down as precisely as I can. But I don’t even know if today really is the fifth of November. Over the course of the past winter I’ve lost track of a few days. I can’t even say what day of the week it is. But I don’t think that’s very important. (Haushofer, 1963/1990, p.1).

Examining this precursor helps us to place On the Calculation of Volume among other speculative and fantastic literary works, and specifically locate it among what Wittenberg calls

non-science-fictional narrative experiments that might be called time travel either in their specific confrontation with the significance of temporal ordering or in their experimental construction of narrative viewpoint (2012, p.210).

Indeed, the slipperiness of categorisation when it comes to stories like Balle’s happens because of the way we understand temporality.

As Wittenberg notes,

since all narratives do something like “travel” through time or construct “alternate” worlds – one could arguably call narrative itself a “time machine,” which is to say, a mechanism for revising the arrangements of stories and histories. In this more expansive view, literature itself might be viewed as a subtype of time travel, rather than the other way around, and time travelling might be considered a fundamental condition of storytelling itself, even its very essence. (p.1).

The phenomenon of time passing is almost inextricable from our experience of consciousness and our capacity to narrate it; it’s hard to think about time the way we think about, say, spatial dimensions, because we constitute and experience ourselves, individually and collectively, as beings in time. If I’m weightless and adrift in space, I’m still evidently me; if I’m no longer anchored in time, that’s unnervingly not so certain – and even the possibility of telling a coherent story, let alone aligning to the conventions of a single genre, is under threat. 

As Greenhouse has it, time is cultural; it is “what makes acts relevant in relation to social experience, however conceived” (1996, 1). This is the raw nerve on which Balle seeks to press. She is happy to use conceits which arise in genre works – the repeating-day concept, of course, but also the sense of resources being irreversibly used up by time-displaced people in King’s “The Langoliers” (1990) – but she is less interested in having her characters unearth a fully articulated novum of the kind defined by Suvin (1979), which lays bare the premise behind what is happening. 

In the volumes published to date, Balle has proved unconcerned about revealing the exact speculative mechanics of the time loop; questions of how the loop has formed are mostly laid aside to explore, instead, what the loop does to those within it – and their relationships to those outside it. In this regard, Balle’s narrative harks back to an earlier time when “the scientific machinery of travel itself would more likely have remained incidental or subordinate to the writer’s presentation of an alternative sociopolitical milieu.” (Wittenberg, 2012, p. 15).

Indeed, the closest her tale gets to conventional science fiction is the dryly funny fourth volume, in which the community of repeaters analyse their situation to the point of inanity. 

Is this a “microburst in time” or a “localised time-tornado” (IV, p.20)? As the conventional calendar makes no sense any more, should a hundred repeated days be counted as a centium? The group hold meetings upon meetings: 

There are too many things for which we lack terminology, and it is difficult to come to an agreement. Apparently, before we can discuss the right words, we must discuss everything at great length, with everyone speaking all at once. (IV, p. 70). 

This culminates in the complex business of arranging a conference (no mean feat when one is trapped in a single repeating day) at which little of practical use emerges:

Along the way, many pointed out that our explorations lacked a theoretical foundation, that attempting to build hypotheses or explanations would be futile without a thorough understanding of past theories of time – from the Presocratic period to the twenty-first century […] Others, however, believed that it was precisely the temporal theories of the past that had fallen short, that the prevailing conception of time itself was fundamentally flawed [.] (IV, p.157)

Ill-informed temporal debates become the stuff of cringe comedy; it is as if the plucky, pragmatic survivors of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids had been recast with characters from The Office.

If Balle cares little for how the repetition began, she’s even less keen to spend time on the drama of whether people believe Tara’s claims to be trapped in a single day, or whether there is a didactic or redemptive aspect to her condition – although some of the repeaters wonder if they have been granted this opportunity in order to achieve some benevolent purpose, Tara, and her author, keep their distance from any such notions.

More notable is the close attention Balle pays to the details of everyday life, which become magnified and luminous through their repetition. Indeed, within the text itself, it is such attention which allows the time-lost to find one another, when they notice something that is not repeating, and realise that this signifies another potential member of their company close by.

By rejecting trite forms of time-loop drama, even as she trades in tropes we can recognise from genre fiction, Balle, who was previously known for philosophical literature, is creating a kind of homebrew anthropology of time. After all, time travel fiction has been argued to be the “philosophical literature par excellence” (Wittenberg, 2012, p. 2). 

Bryant and Knight argue that “expectation is the ground on which practices, orders, and hence the normative emerge”; Balle puts her characters, and the reader, in a distinctively weird position where the endlessly repeating day is packed with expectations – and yet all kinds of surprises, deviations, and interesting story developments may eventuate. If some researchers understand time in terms of a “thick present” (Sandford, 2023) incorporating anticipation and remembrance, then Tara and her fellow repeaters are trapped in the thickest present that ever there was.

Seen in this way, Balle’s series becomes a fictional construct, rooted in careful observation and description of contemporary life, within which we can explore questions of our agency, impact, and understanding. She imputes to the rhythm and routine of ordinary Western European life an alternative mode in which, as Bryant and Knight have it, “the present becomes uncanny to us in its present-ness” (p.43): 

[O]ur arrested day had left us in an unusual position where we no longer had to constantly think about how to keep moving, whether we were lacking momentum, whether someone was in our way, whether we could keep up (IV, p.120).

In this way, Balle’s conceit offers the ultimate form of Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble”: 

learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. (2016, p.1).

Balle invites us to surrender the anxieties which might arise from a sense that the future is unknowable, and to do without the various false comforts of utopian or anticipatory thinking, in favour of a more interrogative mode to existence in the here-and-now. This includes, for Tara, the pleasures of endless repetition as well as its terrors, burdens, laments, and frustrations. In its more idyllic moments, On the Calculation of Volume offers a beguiling quotidian solace. 

Revisiting November 18th over and over yields opportunities to appreciate the tiniest details and subtlest patterns at every turn. The observation of a single fruit tree forms a significant element of the second volume:

Leaves against twigs, leaves against leaves, a medlar falling to earth. It lands with a little thud and rolls a short distance across the ground before it stops. It sounds as if the world is saying danke when the tree drops its fruit. (II, p.136).

In its leisured aspect, Tara’s existence also allows for devotion to intellectual pursuits, untroubled by material demands and the usual exigencies of passing time; when she spends an intense season reading about the ancient world, inspired by the sestertius which has accompanied her, one is reminded of Annie Dillard’s comment: 

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by… Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading – that is a good life. (2016)

Ghosh, Balle, and the climate change novel

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

So where does Balle’s narrative take us, depicting a situation in which time seems to go nowhere? And what are we, as readers, getting from this, beyond watching people pore over history books and listen out for the sound of falling medlars?

A clue lies in the changing scope of each volume, moving from an individual plight through the dynamics of a marriage into a wider sense of community and then a concern, broader still, with what has happened to the world. Balle’s books serve as a response to Amitav Ghosh’s argument, in The Great Derangement (2016), that the bourgeois novel, configured for the rhythm and routine of imperial and then post-colonial globalised capitalism, is inadequate to the challenges of our century, especially when it comes to environmental shifts.

For Ghosh,

the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; […] they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth. (p.7).

He argues that a “cultural matrix […that is] intimately linked with the wider histories that have shaped the world” (p.10) has yielded literary forms and a literary culture incapable of apprehending a planetary ecosystem’s rebellion against the understandings, desires, and exploitations placed upon it, to the extent that it is “as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or time travel.” (p.7).

No wonder, then, that narratives of time misbehaving are proliferating across popular media on page and screen: time has gone out of joint and creators must reach for fantastic happenings to make sense of this world. If the era of climate crisis is too turbulent and uncertain to yield to technocratic tools like probabilistic forecasting (Scoblic, 2020), then perhaps it is also too much for the forms of storytelling which we have inherited:

Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience. Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. (Ghosh, p.16)

Balle’s protagonist Tara, having experienced a near-miss accident on one of her repeated days, dislikes the “false safety” of cars (IV, p.41); Balle similarly dislikes the false safety of a conventional narrative vehicle, even if she is willing to appropriate components that suit her. As the inhabitants of the repeating day become progressively more estranged from what they once considered normal, so Balle’s story in turn moves towards a profound defamiliarisation of the everyday world, and begins to approximate something which might pass muster with Ghosh.

In its first book, On the Calculation of Volume functions as a portrait of what cannot be shared even in a successful intimate relationship, as Tara wearies of repeatedly explaining her plight to her sympathetic husband Thomas and begins to hide from him even while still living in their home; later, she forms a strange community with others whom she discovers are also subject to the same loop.

Additionally, because some consumables such as foodstuffs are run down in Balle’s time-loops, and because Tara travels between colder and warmer climes in order to simulate the changing seasons, the series can be directly read as climate fiction, written for an era in which resources are being squandered and the climate is itself out of joint. 

Rather than offering speculative solutions to the problem of climate change, or proposing something like Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future” (2020), Balle’s tale operates in an exploratory and metaphorical, rather than didactic, mode, investigating how we might meaningfully inhabit a present moment of seemingly endless unsteadiness.

By the latest volume of the English-language translations, Balle’s small community of time-looped characters are hoarding food and resources in a shared house, unable to fully engage with the institutions and activities of mainstream society, living in a manner reminiscent of communities in crisis, with something of the quality of the “cosy catastrophe” which Brian Aldiss saw in John Wyndham (Aldiss and Wingrove, 1986).

In Balle’s tale, first the genuinely loving middle-class marriage can’t withstand the problems of time misbehaving; then broader and deeper frayings of the social fabric are revealed. 

At the outset, we see how deeply Tara savours the experience of a healthy couple; spending an evening with booksellers Marie and Philip, she enjoys their closeness: 

They had an air of peace about them […] which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas. The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other – the one person who makes everything simple – a feeling of being calmed and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time. Philip and Marie had clearly decided to spend the rest of their lives together, it was as simple as that, so what could they do but see what the future would bring. (I, p.19).

During one loop, after making love to Thomas on the living room floor, Tara reflects:

We have always had need of time together. We are not one of those couples that has to have time apart, to miss and rediscover one another, to go away then be reunited in a collision of love. Distance, leave-takings and reunions are not what bind us to one another. For us it has always been about the days together, day after day, night after night, again and again. (I, p.46).

In telling terms, given our reading through the prism of Ghosh, she sees their “strange bond” as “a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November saw no disasters.” (p.46).

When Thomas refuses to attempt to travel with Tara – “He didn’t want to be part of my plans. He didn’t think it would do any good” (I, p.136) – she makes the decision to leave: “He wanted to stay in his pattern. I knew it and he knew it and there was no reason to contradict him.” (I, p.138).

By doing so, she finds her way into a community that the rest of the world can’t understand. When they share their experiences, the repeaters create a “room full of movement: time rushed by in our retellings, streams of eighteenths of November, we sped through our days” (IV, p.8); the act of retelling diverse experiences that inhabitants of regular time cannot hope to understand gives a sense of time moving forward.

“It feels,” Tara remarks, “as though we had each been walking along our own path in the same forest […] We think it begins when we meet, but in fact our stories were already entwined.” (IV, p.12). 

Some repeaters have labelled this experience in a way which even removes the sense of plight:

An anastrophe, that’s what they had called the incident […] For it was no catastrophe, just an inversion, and that was what that meant: anastrophe. Their world had not ended, they had simply been sent back to the same day. Without tragedy, without any fallen or dead. (IV, p.20).

Thus hope is found even in the teeth of crisis, precisely because something is not fully understood, is unexpected. One repeater, Henry, refuses to believe that 19th November will ever come – yet Tara is able to point out that he had once believed he was alone as a repeater, so even within the confines of the endlessly recurring day, his assumptions have already been proved wrong, and things have gone better than expected.

That is not to say that Tara and the others are incapable of self-critique, particularly with regard to the way that they are irrevocably using up resources within the endless day:

I am a monster and I devour my world. There is no getting away from it. I can eat leftovers. I can go hungry all day, I can flit from place to place and leave the tiniest possible trace, I can spread my shopping […] but these are all simply attempts to conceal the truth, to make the monster smaller. I know. At some point it will be over. (II, p.140).

Seeing that she and those like her will eventually use up the world’s finite resources to sustain their existence, Tara invokes the trope of monstrosity time and again across the volumes, knowing that for all she may “try to get through the days without stepping too heavily”, she is a “monster playing at being a butterfly.” (II, p.140).

This predicament resonates with the condition of life in a wealthy nation during the era of climate change, apparently immunised from many of the direct impacts until a shortage, an inconvenience, or finally even an actual disaster arrives at your own door. Even if one shops ethically or subscribes to green principles like flight-shaming, one is still a “monster” imbricated in the systems of harm and profiting from their attendant inequalities.

Tara reports of Henry, who ventures out to source supplies:

He feels that we live in a sheltered world, and it’s only there – in front of the vegetable stand at the market, in the warehouses with unsold goods, in the small front offices of importers, in the cold storage rooms full of too much milk and yogurt – that you feel some slight connection to another world, he says. That’s where he accepts his losses. (IV, p.54).

This is an attempt to find a literary form worthy of Ghosh’s challenge, where it is not merely lip service to say, “Everyone knows that we are using up the world, that we must tread carefully if we are not to become monsters and ravaging locusts.” (IV, p.33).

But treading carefully does not mean avoiding all intervention. Two repeaters, Olga and Ralf, present alternative schemes as potential responses to the situation. 

Ralf’s is to build a computer system, BeDaZy (the “Better-Day-Zystem”), which will identify all the accidents and misfortunes which happen on November 18th, so that the repeaters may intercede and avert them – though, interestingly, this scheme depends on the assumption that linear time will eventually resume, and a November 19th will materialise within which people will be grateful for these efforts:

It may be possible, he said, to initiate a series of repairs that create and reshape without destroying. It’s about creating space within the societal organism. About activating a kind of self-generating systemic transformation through changes to surface-level minutiae. (III, p.136).

Self-serious, technocratic Ralf can be read as a satire of male systems thinkers; with his jargon and his slide decks, his well-meaning proposal takes on something of a TED talk quality, and depends on the idea that the status quo ante will eventually return:

Let’s assume that time were to suddenly shift and we leapt into progressive time, that it becomes the nineteenth of November, for instance, and that everything that happened on this particular eighteenth of November, now replaced by the nineteenth, becomes the ultimate version – the reality we must live with. If we wake up one day and there are no more eighteenths of November, isn’t it our responsibility to ensure that the day we leave behind is the best of all possible eighteenths of November? (III, pp.136-137).

Ralf has “run the numbers” and offers a vision resembling a do-gooder version of startup culture:

The full digital setup wasn’t finished yet, but we could begin with a smaller version. He’d soon have a proposal ready to pilot-test it. He had analysed several models, as the best approach was not immediately obvious. Should we expand our radius of actions step by step? Should we prioritise specific geographic areas? Should we start by focusing on the incidents that were easiest to prevent? Or should we, on the contrary, tackle the most difficult ones first? (IV, p.43).

Against this stands seventeen-year-old Olga, for whom 

Ralf was carrying around the world’s smallest sandbag, refusing to acknowledge that he was in the midst of a cataclysmic storm. He was patching tiny holes in the dyke […] Ralf wanted to correct details, Olga wanted to change the system, she insisted. She believed you had to find the root cause. Ralf thought Olga wanted to drain the sea of water. Olga asserted that Ralf wanted to correct commas. (III, p.124)

Yet Olga’s proposals are curiously airy and unspecific, though ultimately they nourish the design of BeDaZy. Tara feels “torn between [Ralf’s] urge to prevent very concrete incidents and Olga’s hope of changing something more fundamental: that it was about the structures and the future [.]” (IV, p.143).

Notably, when other repeaters admit to initially believing that perhaps some personal transgression had caused November 18th to recur, Olga

doesn’t understand how anyone could believe that the halting of time is their own fault. As if the world were a place that remained stable so long as you did the right thing. A fragile balance you mustn’t disturb. As if there were an instruction manual, and so long as you adhered to it, you could not be struck. (IV, p.105).

Debating these proposals, discussing what has happened to them, the repeaters draw on the tools of their milieu: what else is to be done by these Europeans but hold a conference? A great deal of effort goes into organising a gathering to discuss their situation, but a significant chunk of that gathering gets occupied with matters as trivial as the right names and even acronyms for what is going on:

[…S]omeone proposed we name the world we came from – the life we had lived before the eighteenth. TOL, for example, The Other Life. Gita suggested DAL, Das Andere Leben, but Henry didn’t like that.

One of the Val Benoît residents suggested that we call time before the eighteenth La Vie Avant and the time after La Vie Maintenant, that way we could talk about LaViA and LaViM. This led us back to the difference between acronyms and syllabic abbreviations, until Gita’s group pointed out that we also needed to address time after the eighteenth, La Vie Après, but that, too, would be LaViA, introducing unnecessary confusion – unless, of course, we expect these two to be the same: that the world we return to after our life in the eighteenth would be exactly as before. Then they could share a name (IV, p.77).

It is telling that Tara, habitually an observer of others and a marginal voice in the group, becomes a little more forceful when conversations head this way: “Maybe the issue wasn’t whether we understood or not, I said, but that it wasn’t something we could fix with agendas and scheduled meeting days ending in zero.” (IV, p.43) The conventional mechanisms for knowledge production in European societies prove inadequate in the face of the future’s unknowability, and attempts to intellectually codify what is going on stand in painfully funny contrast to the everyday experiences of those actually trapped in the endlessly repeating day.

The closest the conversation comes to something useful, to which Balle devotes a little more time, is when one repeater tells the group

about dadirri, a word she had learned of when visiting a friend in Darwin in Australia. It described a way of listening, she said: a peaceful attentiveness to one’s surroundings, to the forest or the water.

She had often listened in this way when travelling. Also to people’s voices. When the conversation becomes a form of music, she said. When you don’t interrupt or try to answer or contradict one another. When you don’t use language to agree or disagree or reach solutions and conclusions, but simply listen to what is being said. (IV, p.80).

It is as if Balle is telling the reader how to approach this section of her tale, with its shaggy-dog quality – but it also opens the door to a rare non-European reference in this exceedingly European narrative. Presenting dadirri at one remove, tentatively, she points to ways of thinking that might better apprehend what is going on for the repeaters – without succumbing to the common trope, sharply articulated by Okorafor (2004), where nonwhite figures serve as magical guides and redeemers for white characters.

Yet dadirri, whose mention creates a tiny ripple of potentially useful thought in this conference, only briefly captures the narrative, and the attention of its characters. After an instant of profound listening, the repeaters fall back into a pattern where “some listened and others offered more examples of words which did not readily translate between languages.” (IV, p.80).

In its own quiet and dryly funny way, Balle’s depiction of the conference can be understood as satirically capturing “the importance of the temporal imagination in understanding injustice in a warming world” (Facer, 2024) – and the inadequacy of institutional and community responses in developed countries to date.

Outside of the bloviating quasi-scholarly conference – which somehow renders an endlessly repeating day also irritatingly interminable – the repeaters’ time and efforts are organised by another structure beloved of the European middle class: the flatmate experience. 

Balle devotes significant time to the mundane yet vital matters of how food is obtained and prepared, and by whom; how chores are allocated; and how the spaces used by the repeaters, including for car-parking and cycle storage, are organised. While the repeaters survive and muddle through, both their practical and intellectual efforts seem comically insufficient to the cosmic situation they find themselves in.

Yet still they are both “a swarm of monsters” and “a bag full of hope” (IV, p.95); Balle’s account is not scathing but attentive and empathetic. She does not model solutions but illustrates the experience of one’s understanding being reframed by extraordinary happenings. Tara’s thoughtful narration and her preference for observation over intervention lead her to a dawning realisation which brings us back, at last, to the question of how this odd tale sits within the realms of speculative fiction:

It’s difficult to know whether we’re still human. It was Sarah who started having doubts. She laughed, but she meant it: she felt like something else. She didn’t know what exactly – just something else. Not a human being. Not an animal. Not a ghost or a monster or some mythical creature, and then people began suggesting all sorts of things we might be if we were not human: witches and trolls, fairies and nymphs, cherubs, gods and goddesses, devils and vile beasts, miscreations, freaks, homunculi. There was also talk of aliens, cyborgs, clones, androids, that sort of thing, but Sarah said those weren’t it either. (IV, p.118).

To become unstuck in time, we remember, is more challenging to our identity than merely coming unstuck in space – the experience may even suffice to sever us from belonging to the same species as those who trudge through consecutive days. (One is reminded of Priest (1974)’s Inverted World, in which human beings seeming to transform into stunted, fast-talking troll-like figures are merely experiencing a compression of perspective in the eye of the beholder).

Tara finds herself asking, “But were we human before time ground to a halt? Maybe we haven’t changed, maybe we were something else all along?” (IV, p. 121). Already, simply as privileged Europeans in an age of global turbulence and looming climate catastrophe, before November 18th ever repeated, these people were both a swarm of monsters and a bag of hope.

Conclusion

If Freedman was able to claim that critical theory and science fiction are each “a version of the other” (2000, p.xv), then perhaps On the Calculation of Volume is simply Balle’s disciplined creative-critical way of having a lover’s quarrel – not only with the world, as Robert Frost suggested poets should have, but also with time itself.

The title of Balle’s series refers to Archimedes’ discovery that volume can be calculated by displacement. In her work, we gradually see what is revealed when someone is taken out of the normal flow of time and unable to “displace” the world in the usual way. This strange perspective sheds uncomfortable light on her European characters, the literary milieu from which the book emerged…and, potentially, her readers too.

Nabokov – who himself danced at the edge of genre in books such as Ada or Ardor (1969), while claiming to “loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories” (Ditum, 2019) – once wrote of “an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground”, suggesting that “something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space” (Nabokov, 2012, 3065).

With Balle, we follow a character who is unable to consistently leave that constant shape, for whom the rain washes away any lasting imprint; a time-travelling hero for an age of deep uncertainty.

Nabokov’s words come at the conclusion of his 1947 novel Bend Sinister. This unexpectedly poignant metafiction heavily lampshades the fact that its story of an intellectual resisting an authoritarian regime is entirely make-believe, and completely abandons its conceit in its final moments – yet remains profoundly moving. Its last pages, with the narrator unable to face depicting the awful conclusion they had concocted for the protagonist, have something of the same slow-building sense of nocturnal horror which Balle captures when Tara and her husband try to stay awake through one of the November 18th resets:

We collected details. We stayed alert. We kept our eyes fixed on each other. On the table. On the empty pan between us. For ten minutes or more we simply sat there at the table. We talked about the objects around us. We speculated as to whether things disappeared in fits and starts or all at once. Thomas believed there would be things in other rooms in the house that had already returned to their places. We talked about going to check but didn’t get up. We talked about cameras which could record changes. We talked about love. About whether it could make things happen. About whether love could bring us in or out.

And then, from one moment to the next, the frying pan was gone. I froze for a second and glanced around the kitchen, but the pan was nowhere to be seen. I got up and as I did so I heard Thomas cry out. He wanted to know what had happened. He was troubled. He wasn’t drowsy or tired. He was simply troubled. He could not remember what he was doing in the kitchen. He had gone to bed on the night of the seventeenth, only hours after we had spoken on the phone. Now he was here in the kitchen. I was supposed to be in Paris. But here I was, looking for a frying pan.

I forgot about the frying pan and sat down again across from Thomas. I explained what had happened and saw anxiety course through him as I led him down the long road from my first eighteenth of November to the fried eggs we had just eaten. (I, p.75).

In this universe, as for Nabokov’s protagonist, our characters are at the mercy of forces beyond their control or anticipation. Something similar is true for those who choose to read On the Calculation of Volume, as Balle plays time-games directly with her reader as well as her characters, particularly in the form of cliff-hangers which are sometimes resumed, in the next book, with a significant flash forward that skips over their immediate resolution. (It is impressive to write a story set on a single calendar day and nonetheless leave the reader thinking, “When is this happening?”). As an author, Balle exploits the inevitable tension which resides in “the possibility that the expectations provided by experience must also contain the ‘perhaps,’ the ‘maybe’ that opens them to the possibility of surprise” (Bryant and Knight, p.55).

English-language readers experience further suspense via the temporalities of translation, with their editions gradually catching up to the Danish originals (at the time of writing, the fifth English volume is about to be released and the sixth Danish volume is already out in the world). This is given added significance by Balle’s own comment (Faber Books, 2025) that Tara, being of English and Belgian heritage, would likely tell her own story in English or French: 

The book is written in Danish originally but I haven’t written it in her original language. So in a way, the Danish version would probably be my translation of her story.

Such subtle sidesteps serve to position Balle’s tale, for all its accessibility and mainstream literary acclaim, in an oblique and challenging position: a non-definitive account, a translation from a prior original which can never be accessed, and to which the closest approximation may be a further translation again.

Ghosh’s argument regarding the novel in the age of climate change is that 

we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed – and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis. (p.8).

On the Calculation of Volume is a riposte: a novel at once fantastic and mundane, conventional and yet provocative, one which harks back to the serial origins of the form even as it grapples with the most contemporary sense of immanent crisis. Balle writes, as Lessing’s Anna wrote in The Golden Notebook, “to create a new way of looking at life” (1972, p.75); our present, awkward relationship to time is given back to us in the way that Joanna Russ saw science fiction at its most effective:

What is familiar is made strange – one disbelieves; however, it is rooted in the familiar – one believes (or rather stops disbelieving); yet it is absurd or comic – one begins to question the piece of actuality that has been used as a model[.] (1995, p.19).

An old joke about Samuel Beckett’s cryptic time-bending trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable has it that the last words of the final volume – “…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” – spoil the whole series, as an embittered reader tells an earnest newbie: “You needn’t bother wading through all that. Spoilers: in the end he decides to go on.”

Balle’s great achievement is to create a multi-volume series where the answer to “What’s next?” is always “November 18th, again” – and yet we still want to turn the next page, and when we do so, we still find something new to learn.

We can only hope that in an age of uncertainty and peril, we, too, can find that urge to turn the page, find something ever new, and go on.

Matt Finch

Matt Finch is an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School and a member of the Futures Council at Australian National University; he leads the Oxford University project “Death, dying and afterlife in the age of AI” and co-leads the “Intimate Futures” project at the New School for Social Research.

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By Matt Finch Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume – 1 (Faber, 2025)

What’s gone wrong with time? Once, we might tell ourselves, the lines of travel were straight, clean, and unambiguous, even if they diverged: Doc Brown might have been eccentric, but he was authoritative when he explained the idea of forking parallel universes to Marty McFly – and the cinema audience of 1989 – in Back To the Future II (Gale and Zemeckis).

In doing this, he was bringing a version of many-worlds theory (Gribbin, 2020) to popular audiences on a Hollywood scale, but also building upon prior notions of linear time travel which owed much to the Industrial Revolution, as Adam Roberts (2014) points out in a magisterial essay accompanying the British Film Institute’s season Days of Fear and Wonder. Considering the impact of Wells’ The Time Machine, Roberts notes that what

pre-Wells stories have in common is the arbitrariness of their temporal pretexts: magic, dreams, spirits. There’s no interest there in futurological speculation or historical research, and no sense that time travel could belong to the material world of science and technology […] One reason for this new focus on the machine part is that it makes dirigible something that had, hitherto, been imagined as beyond our capacity to control or steer. Dreams and magic happen to us, inflicting upon us a Scrooge-like passivity. Memory plagues us, or grants us wistful pleasure, but we can do nothing about the events that the memory recalls. A time machine, on the other hand, is something we can control. This, it turns out, is the specific dream that captures the imagination of the 20th century. (p.40)

Noting the arrival of a sophisticated time loop narrative in an episode of a My Little Pony TV show – where every attempt Twilight Sparkle makes to heed a warning from her future self seems to bring disaster closer – David Wittenberg addressed the evolution of Roberts’ dream in the 21st century, arguing that one can “reasonably surmise that the popular appreciation of time travel techniques has arrived at a certain denouement.” (2012, p.207)  On the far side of that denouement in the 2020s, temporal shenanigans are both messier and more familiar than ever before.

Perhaps these narratives have arisen, not just because speculative genres, temporal theorising, and the tropes of the fantastic have so fully permeated mainstream pop culture, but also because of wider experiences which have shaken received notions of time and how we experience it. Pandemic lockdowns at the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak rendered life restricted and repetitive for many, and forced us to confront the fact that during a pandemic, its end – defined only in retrospect – is not clearly in sight (Charters and Heitman, 2021). Digital technologies’ pace of development and spread is faster than any previous innovation in human history, and yet many remain cut off, with connectivity slowing or even reversing in some parts of the world (United Nations, 2020). Climate change and its attendant uncertainties also attack previous understandings of time on multiple fronts, from aspirational long-term Net Zero visions which may also generate opposition (Valenzuela and Lezaun, 2024) to shifting warnings of how much time remains to avoid the worst impacts — as one report put it (McGrath, 2019), “Do you remember the good old days when we had ’12 years to save the planet’?”.

All this happens even as increasingly extreme events make the headlines in the here-and-now, and New Yorkers experiencing smoke from Canadian wildfires describe it in cinematic, apocalyptic terms: 

“It felt like we were under attack, like if it was some other pandemic,” Ajche said of the smoke. The city, he added, “looked like a movie of what the future might look like.” (Chaffin, Lomeli, and Williams, 2023).

No wonder that more Americans now want to live in the distant past than the future (Hatfield, 2025), though the painful truth is, whichever direction in time they yearn to travel, the only moment one can ever live in is the present. The conditions of crisis set out by anthropologists of temporality Bryant and Knight – “moments when anticipation, and therefore the alleviation of anxiety, are not possible, and when as a result the present becomes uncanny to us in its present-ness” (2019, p.43) – seem ever more widespread, encouraging all kinds of idiosyncratic responses in our relationship to time.

How does this manifest in storytelling on the page and screen? The time machine of Bradley (2024)’s The Ministry of Time is plundered from Britain’s own future, its logic nonlinear and barely understood. Doctor Who‘s handwaving of paradoxes as “wibbly wobbly timey wimey” in 2007’s Blink (Moffat and Mcdonald) swiftly became a recurring catchphrase which has endured for almost two decades; in The Good Place, Doc Brown’s chalk lines gave way to a vision of time so arbitrarily tangled that it resembles a handwritten nonsense phrase:

MICHAEL: Happens to kind of look like the name “Jeremy Bearimy” in cursive English, so that’s what we call it.

ELEANOR: Sorry. I’m – my brain is melting. How can events happen before the ones that happened before?

MICHAEL: It’s just the way it works. It’s – it’s – Jeremy Bearimy. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the easiest way to describe it.

(Amram and O’Donnell, 2018)

The Good Place writers are having fun with us, of course, but are hardly the only ones toying with contemporary audiences’ increasing familiarity with time travel tropes and dynamics, to the point that a character in Palm Springs (Siara and Barbakow, 2020) can nonchalantly reference “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about”, the creators fairly confident that between Groundhog Day (Ramis and Rubin, 1993), Russian Doll (Lyonne et al., 2019-2022), Meet Cute (Pnueli and Lehmann, 2022), and other screen depictions of time going out of joint, viewers are going to get it.

Time going awry is not just the stuff of high-concept comedies. See You Yesterday (Bailey and Bristol, 2019) reminds us that black teen time-travellers might experience challenges rather less fun than those faced by Marty McFly. Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) sees causality inverted in an action thriller centred on a “temporal pincer movement” – though the po-faced Nolan dared not go as far as Philip K. Dick did in Counter-Clock World (1967) and suggest a mechanism for reversed excretion of bodily wastes. The final season of FX’s moody Legion (Hawley, 2017-2019) has its morally ambiguous, mentally ill lead use time loops as “do-overs” to thwart his opponents’ triumphs; he is, in turn, beset by “Time Demons” which thrive in the mess he has wrought, and, finally, accepts that the only hope for redemption lies in ending his personal timeline to relive his entire life afresh from birth.

Darker still, Nour Abi-Nakhoul’s disturbing novel Supplication (2024) uses a looped narrative to illustrate our enmeshment in patterns of gendered violence and abuse; its narrator awakens in a moment of absolute trauma, ventures on a phantasmagoric journey taking on roles of perpetrator and victim, only to return to the novel’s beginning in the concluding pages, leaving us unsure of whether she is trapped in some Sisyphean bind or merely hallucinating an escape in her final horrendous moments: “There, within the suddenness of the unending present, I was born – there I became I. That moment circled itself infinitely, spun on and on as though it would never end.” (p.1)

Speculative fictions, in and out of traditional genre settings, are helping artists, audiences, and societies to have a conversation about the uncertain and perilous era we inhabit – reflecting a shift in experiences of time and an increasing sense of crisis on Bryant and Knight’s terms.

Knight went on to gloss this condition as “vertiginous life”, “a transformative epoch where things feel different, lives take on strange and unexpected trajectories, folds and loops, and there is often the sense of stuckedness [sic] or hyperconsciousness.” (2023, p.26).

We are not merely seeing innovations in temporal theory being popularised in sitcoms, movies, dramas, books, and games, but also witnessing and participating in a wider and more profound cultural response to this vertiginous existence.

To focus this discussion, the present article examines Solvej Balle’s ongoing work On The Calculation of Volume (2020-2026; individual volumes referenced in this article with Roman numerals I-IV). This is an acclaimed multi-part novel about a bookseller who discovers during a business trip that she has become trapped in an endlessly repeating day. The work serves as a useful critical crux for explorations of genre tensions, popular philosophical storytelling, and contemporary anxieties over Western societies’ relationship to time in the Anthropocene.

Over the course of the four volumes translated into English at the time of writing, Tara Selter, a rare book dealer, discovers while visiting Paris that each day when she awakes, it is November 18th. Though that day’s events repeat identically for others in her world (except when she intervenes), she is able to travel, discovering that she begins each new November 18th wherever she finished the last. Some resources which she consumes, like food, are depleted and not restored in each reset; however, she finds she is able, unreliably, to arrange for objects to accompany her through the recurring days – most notably a Roman coin, a sestertius, which she acquired at the outset of her plight. The conceit of Balle’s tale is that we are reading the notebooks in which Tara has decided to keep a journal of her experiences.

In successive episodes, Tara explores the strange new existence which has been allotted to her. She returns to the rural home she shares with her husband Thomas; explains to him each day what has happened, finding him more or less accepting and empathetic; then reaches her limit of making such explanations and subsequently conceals herself within their family home, using her foreknowledge of his movements to avoid contact. 

She reflects on her experience as being like a “door opening onto a world in which everything can be subject to change”:

Usually things close up again: it was a mistake. A simple explanation is found for the freak occurrence: our eyes deceived us, our memories were playing tricks on us, we had got things mixed up, got the days wrong. There is solid ground under our feet again, the incomprehensible makes sense after all, it was an optical illusion or a slip of the mind, it was a dream or a misunderstanding, the world is set to rights, the dizziness passes, we can breathe more easily.

But not this time. (pp.33-34)

Even so, beginning to find her way in the midst of repetition, Tara has “the feeling there’s something I should see, that something new will break through when the year is up […] I envisage a new eighteenth of November, but I don’t know how it will differ from the old one.” (I, p.147).

Significantly, she imagines not a nineteenth of November, but an altered eighteenth. It gives the sense that she is already adapting to her new existence; in the following volume, she will remark “I don’t know how one can grow used to a situation like this, but that’s what’s happening.” (II, p.35).

Tara’s situation exemplifies Knight’s description of occasions when time becomes elastic, the world is spinning, there is an apparent shift in temporal rhythms, and material objects, sights and sounds become uncanny. There might be the sense, the feeling or atmosphere of epochal change, nothing will ever be the same…Out with the old and in with the something else. (2023, p.25).

Roaming ever more widely, riding trains and finding hotel rooms or empty houses to stay in, Tara crosses Europe, visits her family to hold an ersatz Christmas celebration, and, yearning for seasons, contrives voyages south to emulate a summer, and north for a winter. She discovers she is not alone in experiencing an endlessly repeating November 18th. Gradually a small community forms of people who are all trapped in the same day under the same conditions, arriving with their own stories and holding their own opinions on what is going on and what, if anything, must be done about it. Thus she finds belonging among those “joined together by the unpredictability of time” (IV, P.41) – a telling description, given that they are inhabiting indefinite repetitions of a single day.

As the fourth volume concludes, Tara leaves the community of repeaters, resolved to revisit her husband: “I feel uneasy when I think of Thomas, and mournful when I think of my friends in the eighteenth, because I do not know when I’ll see them again.” (IV, p.169).

Time gone wrong and the slipperiness of genre

Doris Lessing, The Sirian Experiments (Jonathan Cape, 1981)

What kind of story is this, anyway? Balle’s series has largely been treated as literary fiction rather than genre work, though its first volume was reviewed in Locus (Brookins, 2024). This positioning reminds us that fantastic fiction which deals with time sits in an odd place with regards to genre. Finney’s Time and Again (1970) and Grimwood’s Replay (1986) were republished as Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks, though the latter, especially, might equally be framed as science fiction. The previously mentioned Russian Doll and Supplication are no less difficult to categorise; Vonnegut’s Timequake (1997), in which humanity is forced to relive the years 1991-2001 without changing any of their actions, was referred to by its author himself as not even a novel but a “stew” incorporating autobiography and many tangents (Sayers, 1997).

One has no sense from Balle of the kind of genre snobbery expressed by Ian McEwan (Jordan, 2019; Ditum, 2019). Indeed, in an interview, Balle admits that Groundhog Day “felt as if someone had helped me with research by trying out some of the roads I did not want to take”, and goes on to say:

But it could also be nice if everybody read Doris Lessing’s The Sirian Experiments – or even better, her whole Canopus in Argos series.   

I can imagine a version of Planet Earth where everyone just sits down reading those books for as long as it takes, doing nothing else except whatever is needed to stay alive and keep others alive when doing it. (Booker Prizes, 2025).

Lessing used her five-novel sequence, with Earth seen from several perspectives as the sick planet Shikasta, as “a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities” (1994, p.11). Like On the Calculation of Volume, Lessing’s work is “a mainstream novel that uses SF ideas, because that is the best way for the author to tackle the themes she wants to tackle, rather than being a foray into SF style” (Hammersley, 2002).

Balle’s multi-volume tale has a similar diagnostic quality with regard to our present day, though it lies perhaps even farther from conventional science fiction than Lessing’s series; if anything, it resembles prior hard-to-categorise works such as Anna Kavan’s surreal Ice (1967), in which a shifting climate entangles with a dreamlike state of being which dissolves the protagonist’s identity, or – even more directly – Marlen Haushofer’s unusual and moving 1960s novel The Wall (translated in 1990).

This latter work sees its protagonist apparently separated from the rest of humanity by an invisible wall, beyond which the world seems to have entered a strange deathlike stasis; she is forced to draw on her own inner resources to find ways to survive, raiding cupboard supplies and figuring out how to keep animals and farm the land in the mountain landscape where she is now trapped. 

While she never finds community of the kind which Tara does, the protagonist’s plight – and the opportunity she takes to rethink who she is and how she relates to the world – strongly resonates with Balle’s books. Indeed, the opening lines frame her problem in terms which are tellingly familiar:

Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report. I shall set everything down as precisely as I can. But I don’t even know if today really is the fifth of November. Over the course of the past winter I’ve lost track of a few days. I can’t even say what day of the week it is. But I don’t think that’s very important. (Haushofer, 1963/1990, p.1).

Examining this precursor helps us to place On the Calculation of Volume among other speculative and fantastic literary works, and specifically locate it among what Wittenberg calls non-science-fictional narrative experiments that might be called time travel either in their specific confrontation with the significance of temporal ordering or in their experimental construction of narrative viewpoint (2012, p.210).

Indeed, the slipperiness of categorisation when it comes to stories like Balle’s happens because of the way we understand temporality.

As Wittenberg notes, since all narratives do something like “travel” through time or construct “alternate” worlds – one could arguably call narrative itself a “time machine,” which is to say, a mechanism for revising the arrangements of stories and histories. In this more expansive view, literature itself might be viewed as a subtype of time travel, rather than the other way around, and time travelling might be considered a fundamental condition of storytelling itself, even its very essence. (p.1).

The phenomenon of time passing is almost inextricable from our experience of consciousness and our capacity to narrate it; it’s hard to think about time the way we think about, say, spatial dimensions, because we constitute and experience ourselves, individually and collectively, as beings in time. If I’m weightless and adrift in space, I’m still evidently me; if I’m no longer anchored in time, that’s unnervingly not so certain – and even the possibility of telling a coherent story, let alone aligning to the conventions of a single genre, is under threat. 

As Greenhouse has it, time is cultural; it is “what makes acts relevant in relation to social experience, however conceived” (1996, 1). This is the raw nerve on which Balle seeks to press. She is happy to use conceits which arise in genre works – the repeating-day concept, of course, but also the sense of resources being irreversibly used up by time-displaced people in King’s “The Langoliers” (1990) – but she is less interested in having her characters unearth a fully articulated novum of the kind defined by Suvin (1979), which lays bare the premise behind what is happening. 

In the volumes published to date, Balle has proved unconcerned about revealing the exact speculative mechanics of the time loop; questions of how the loop has formed are mostly laid aside to explore, instead, what the loop does to those within it – and their relationships to those outside it. In this regard, Balle’s narrative harks back to an earlier time when “the scientific machinery of travel itself would more likely have remained incidental or subordinate to the writer’s presentation of an alternative sociopolitical milieu.” (Wittenberg, 2012, p. 15).

Indeed, the closest her tale gets to conventional science fiction is the dryly funny fourth volume, in which the community of repeaters analyse their situation to the point of inanity. 

Is this a “microburst in time” or a “localised time-tornado” (IV, p.20)? As the conventional calendar makes no sense any more, should a hundred repeated days be counted as a centium? The group hold meetings upon meetings: 

There are too many things for which we lack terminology, and it is difficult to come to an agreement. Apparently, before we can discuss the right words, we must discuss everything at great length, with everyone speaking all at once. (IV, p. 70).

This culminates in the complex business of arranging a conference (no mean feat when one is trapped in a single repeating day) at which little of practical use emerges:

Along the way, many pointed out that our explorations lacked a theoretical foundation, that attempting to build hypotheses or explanations would be futile without a thorough understanding of past theories of time – from the Presocratic period to the twenty-first century […] Others, however, believed that it was precisely the temporal theories of the past that had fallen short, that the prevailing conception of time itself was fundamentally flawed [.] (IV, p.157)

Ill-informed temporal debates become the stuff of cringe comedy; it is as if the plucky, pragmatic survivors of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids had been recast with characters from The Office.

If Balle cares little for how the repetition began, she’s even less keen to spend time on the drama of whether people believe Tara’s claims to be trapped in a single day, or whether there is a didactic or redemptive aspect to her condition – although some of the repeaters wonder if they have been granted this opportunity in order to achieve some benevolent purpose, Tara, and her author, keep their distance from any such notions.

More notable is the close attention Balle pays to the details of everyday life, which become magnified and luminous through their repetition. Indeed, within the text itself, it is such attention which allows the time-lost to find one another, when they notice something that is not repeating, and realise that this signifies another potential member of their company close by.

By rejecting trite forms of time-loop drama, even as she trades in tropes we can recognise from genre fiction, Balle, who was previously known for philosophical literature, is creating a kind of homebrew anthropology of time. After all, time travel fiction has been argued to be the “philosophical literature par excellence” (Wittenberg, 2012, p. 2). 

Bryant and Knight argue that “expectation is the ground on which practices, orders, and hence the normative emerge”; Balle puts her characters, and the reader, in a distinctively weird position where the endlessly repeating day is packed with expectations – and yet all kinds of surprises, deviations, and interesting story developments may eventuate. If some researchers understand time in terms of a “thick present” (Sandford, 2023) incorporating anticipation and remembrance, then Tara and her fellow repeaters are trapped in the thickest present that ever there was.

Seen in this way, Balle’s series becomes a fictional construct, rooted in careful observation and description of contemporary life, within which we can explore questions of our agency, impact, and understanding. She imputes to the rhythm and routine of ordinary Western European life an alternative mode in which, as Bryant and Knight have it, “the present becomes uncanny to us in its present-ness” (p.43): 

[O]ur arrested day had left us in an unusual position where we no longer had to constantly think about how to keep moving, whether we were lacking momentum, whether someone was in our way, whether we could keep up (IV, p.120).

In this way, Balle’s conceit offers the ultimate form of Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble”: 

learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. (2016, p.1).

Balle invites us to surrender the anxieties which might arise from a sense that the future is unknowable, and to do without the various false comforts of utopian or anticipatory thinking, in favour of a more interrogative mode to existence in the here-and-now. This includes, for Tara, the pleasures of endless repetition as well as its terrors, burdens, laments, and frustrations. In its more idyllic moments, On the Calculation of Volume offers a beguiling quotidian solace. 

Revisiting November 18th over and over yields opportunities to appreciate the tiniest details and subtlest patterns at every turn. The observation of a single fruit tree forms a significant element of the second volume:

Leaves against twigs, leaves against leaves, a medlar falling to earth. It lands with a little thud and rolls a short distance across the ground before it stops. It sounds as if the world is saying danke when the tree drops its fruit. (II, p.136).

In its leisured aspect, Tara’s existence also allows for devotion to intellectual pursuits, untroubled by material demands and the usual exigencies of passing time; when she spends an intense season reading about the ancient world, inspired by the sestertius which has accompanied her, one is reminded of Annie Dillard’s comment: 

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by… Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading – that is a good life. (2016)

Ghosh, Balle, and the climate change novel

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

So where does Balle’s narrative take us, depicting a situation in which time seems to go nowhere? And what are we, as readers, getting from this, beyond watching people pore over history books and listen out for the sound of falling medlars?

A clue lies in the changing scope of each volume, moving from an individual plight through the dynamics of a marriage into a wider sense of community and then a concern, broader still, with what has happened to the world. Balle’s books serve as a response to Amitav Ghosh’s argument, in The Great Derangement (2016), that the bourgeois novel, configured for the rhythm and routine of imperial and then post-colonial globalised capitalism, is inadequate to the challenges of our century, especially when it comes to environmental shifts.

For Ghosh, the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; […] they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth. (p.7).

He argues that a “cultural matrix […that is] intimately linked with the wider histories that have shaped the world” (p.10) has yielded literary forms and a literary culture incapable of apprehending a planetary ecosystem’s rebellion against the understandings, desires, and exploitations placed upon it, to the extent that it is “as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or time travel.” (p.7).

No wonder, then, that narratives of time misbehaving are proliferating across popular media on page and screen: time has gone out of joint and creators must reach for fantastic happenings to make sense of this world. If the era of climate crisis is too turbulent and uncertain to yield to technocratic tools like probabilistic forecasting (Scoblic, 2020), then perhaps it is also too much for the forms of storytelling which we have inherited:

Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience. Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. (Ghosh, p.16)

Balle’s protagonist Tara, having experienced a near-miss accident on one of her repeated days, dislikes the “false safety” of cars (IV, p.41); Balle similarly dislikes the false safety of a conventional narrative vehicle, even if she is willing to appropriate components that suit her. As the inhabitants of the repeating day become progressively more estranged from what they once considered normal, so Balle’s story in turn moves towards a profound defamiliarisation of the everyday world, and begins to approximate something which might pass muster with Ghosh.

In its first book, On the Calculation of Volume functions as a portrait of what cannot be shared even in a successful intimate relationship, as Tara wearies of repeatedly explaining her plight to her sympathetic husband Thomas and begins to hide from him even while still living in their home; later, she forms a strange community with others whom she discovers are also subject to the same loop.

Additionally, because some consumables such as foodstuffs are run down in Balle’s time-loops, and because Tara travels between colder and warmer climes in order to simulate the changing seasons, the series can be directly read as climate fiction, written for an era in which resources are being squandered and the climate is itself out of joint. 

Rather than offering speculative solutions to the problem of climate change, or proposing something like Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future” (2020), Balle’s tale operates in an exploratory and metaphorical, rather than didactic, mode, investigating how we might meaningfully inhabit a present moment of seemingly endless unsteadiness.

By the latest volume of the English-language translations, Balle’s small community of time-looped characters are hoarding food and resources in a shared house, unable to fully engage with the institutions and activities of mainstream society, living in a manner reminiscent of communities in crisis, with something of the quality of the “cosy catastrophe” which Brian Aldiss saw in John Wyndham (Aldiss and Wingrove, 1986).

In Balle’s tale, first the genuinely loving middle-class marriage can’t withstand the problems of time misbehaving; then broader and deeper frayings of the social fabric are revealed. 

At the outset, we see how deeply Tara savours the experience of a healthy couple; spending an evening with booksellers Marie and Philip, she enjoys their closeness: 

They had an air of peace about them […] which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas. The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other – the one person who makes everything simple – a feeling of being calmed and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time. Philip and Marie had clearly decided to spend the rest of their lives together, it was as simple as that, so what could they do but see what the future would bring. (I, p.19).

During one loop, after making love to Thomas on the living room floor, Tara reflects:

We have always had need of time together. We are not one of those couples that has to have time apart, to miss and rediscover one another, to go away then be reunited in a collision of love. Distance, leave-takings and reunions are not what bind us to one another. For us it has always been about the days together, day after day, night after night, again and again. (I, p.46).

In telling terms, given our reading through the prism of Ghosh, she sees their “strange bond” as “a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November saw no disasters.” (p.46).

When Thomas refuses to attempt to travel with Tara – “He didn’t want to be part of my plans. He didn’t think it would do any good” (I, p.136) – she makes the decision to leave: “He wanted to stay in his pattern. I knew it and he knew it and there was no reason to contradict him.” (I, p.138).

By doing so, she finds her way into a community that the rest of the world can’t understand. When they share their experiences, the repeaters create a “room full of movement: time rushed by in our retellings, streams of eighteenths of November, we sped through our days” (IV, p.8); the act of retelling diverse experiences that inhabitants of regular time cannot hope to understand gives a sense of time moving forward.

“It feels,” Tara remarks, “as though we had each been walking along our own path in the same forest […] We think it begins when we meet, but in fact our stories were already entwined.” (IV, p.12). 

Some repeaters have labelled this experience in a way which even removes the sense of plight:

An anastrophe, that’s what they had called the incident […] For it was no catastrophe, just an inversion, and that was what that meant: anastrophe. Their world had not ended, they had simply been sent back to the same day. Without tragedy, without any fallen or dead. (IV, p.20).

Thus hope is found even in the teeth of crisis, precisely because something is not fully understood, is unexpected. One repeater, Henry, refuses to believe that 19th November will ever come – yet Tara is able to point out that he had once believed he was alone as a repeater, so even within the confines of the endlessly recurring day, his assumptions have already been proved wrong, and things have gone better than expected.

That is not to say that Tara and the others are incapable of self-critique, particularly with regard to the way that they are irrevocably using up resources within the endless day:

I am a monster and I devour my world. There is no getting away from it. I can eat leftovers. I can go hungry all day, I can flit from place to place and leave the tiniest possible trace, I can spread my shopping […] but these are all simply attempts to conceal the truth, to make the monster smaller. I know. At some point it will be over. (II, p.140).

Seeing that she and those like her will eventually use up the world’s finite resources to sustain their existence, Tara invokes the trope of monstrosity time and again across the volumes, knowing that for all she may “try to get through the days without stepping too heavily”, she is a “monster playing at being a butterfly.” (II, p.140).

This predicament resonates with the condition of life in a wealthy nation during the era of climate change, apparently immunised from many of the direct impacts until a shortage, an inconvenience, or finally even an actual disaster arrives at your own door. Even if one shops ethically or subscribes to green principles like flight-shaming, one is still a “monster” imbricated in the systems of harm and profiting from their attendant inequalities.

Tara reports of Henry, who ventures out to source supplies:

He feels that we live in a sheltered world, and it’s only there – in front of the vegetable stand at the market, in the warehouses with unsold goods, in the small front offices of importers, in the cold storage rooms full of too much milk and yogurt – that you feel some slight connection to another world, he says. That’s where he accepts his losses. (IV, p.54).

This is an attempt to find a literary form worthy of Ghosh’s challenge, where it is not merely lip service to say, “Everyone knows that we are using up the world, that we must tread carefully if we are not to become monsters and ravaging locusts.” (IV, p.33).

But treading carefully does not mean avoiding all intervention. Two repeaters, Olga and Ralf, present alternative schemes as potential responses to the situation. 

Ralf’s is to build a computer system, BeDaZy (the “Better-Day-Zystem”), which will identify all the accidents and misfortunes which happen on November 18th, so that the repeaters may intercede and avert them – though, interestingly, this scheme depends on the assumption that linear time will eventually resume, and a November 19th will materialise within which people will be grateful for these efforts:

It may be possible, he said, to initiate a series of repairs that create and reshape without destroying. It’s about creating space within the societal organism. About activating a kind of self-generating systemic transformation through changes to surface-level minutiae. (III, p.136).

Self-serious, technocratic Ralf can be read as a satire of male systems thinkers; with his jargon and his slide decks, his well-meaning proposal takes on something of a TED talk quality, and depends on the idea that the status quo ante will eventually return:

Let’s assume that time were to suddenly shift and we leapt into progressive time, that it becomes the nineteenth of November, for instance, and that everything that happened on this particular eighteenth of November, now replaced by the nineteenth, becomes the ultimate version – the reality we must live with. If we wake up one day and there are no more eighteenths of November, isn’t it our responsibility to ensure that the day we leave behind is the best of all possible eighteenths of November? (III, pp.136-137).

Ralf has “run the numbers” and offers a vision resembling a do-gooder version of startup culture:

The full digital setup wasn’t finished yet, but we could begin with a smaller version. He’d soon have a proposal ready to pilot-test it. He had analysed several models, as the best approach was not immediately obvious. Should we expand our radius of actions step by step? Should we prioritise specific geographic areas? Should we start by focusing on the incidents that were easiest to prevent? Or should we, on the contrary, tackle the most difficult ones first? (IV, p.43).

Against this stands seventeen-year-old Olga, for whom Ralf was carrying around the world’s smallest sandbag, refusing to acknowledge that he was in the midst of a cataclysmic storm. He was patching tiny holes in the dyke […] Ralf wanted to correct details, Olga wanted to change the system, she insisted. She believed you had to find the root cause. Ralf thought Olga wanted to drain the sea of water. Olga asserted that Ralf wanted to correct commas. (III, p.124)

Yet Olga’s proposals are curiously airy and unspecific, though ultimately they nourish the design of BeDaZy. Tara feels “torn between [Ralf’s] urge to prevent very concrete incidents and Olga’s hope of changing something more fundamental: that it was about the structures and the future [.]” (IV, p.143).

Notably, when other repeaters admit to initially believing that perhaps some personal transgression had caused November 18th to recur, Olga doesn’t understand how anyone could believe that the halting of time is their own fault. As if the world were a place that remained stable so long as you did the right thing. A fragile balance you mustn’t disturb. As if there were an instruction manual, and so long as you adhered to it, you could not be struck. (IV, p.105).

Debating these proposals, discussing what has happened to them, the repeaters draw on the tools of their milieu: what else is to be done by these Europeans but hold a conference? A great deal of effort goes into organising a gathering to discuss their situation, but a significant chunk of that gathering gets occupied with matters as trivial as the right names and even acronyms for what is going on:

[…S]omeone proposed we name the world we came from – the life we had lived before the eighteenth. TOL, for example, The Other Life. Gita suggested DAL, Das Andere Leben, but Henry didn’t like that.

One of the Val Benoît residents suggested that we call time before the eighteenth La Vie Avant and the time after La Vie Maintenant, that way we could talk about LaViA and LaViM. This led us back to the difference between acronyms and syllabic abbreviations, until Gita’s group pointed out that we also needed to address time after the eighteenth, La Vie Après, but that, too, would be LaViA, introducing unnecessary confusion – unless, of course, we expect these two to be the same: that the world we return to after our life in the eighteenth would be exactly as before. Then they could share a name (IV, p.77).

It is telling that Tara, habitually an observer of others and a marginal voice in the group, becomes a little more forceful when conversations head this way: “Maybe the issue wasn’t whether we understood or not, I said, but that it wasn’t something we could fix with agendas and scheduled meeting days ending in zero.” (IV, p.43) The conventional mechanisms for knowledge production in European societies prove inadequate in the face of the future’s unknowability, and attempts to intellectually codify what is going on stand in painfully funny contrast to the everyday experiences of those actually trapped in the endlessly repeating day.

The closest the conversation comes to something useful, to which Balle devotes a little more time, is when one repeater tells the group about dadirri, a word she had learned of when visiting a friend in Darwin in Australia. It described a way of listening, she said: a peaceful attentiveness to one’s surroundings, to the forest or the water.

She had often listened in this way when travelling. Also to people’s voices. When the conversation becomes a form of music, she said. When you don’t interrupt or try to answer or contradict one another. When you don’t use language to agree or disagree or reach solutions and conclusions, but simply listen to what is being said. (IV, p.80).

It is as if Balle is telling the reader how to approach this section of her tale, with its shaggy-dog quality – but it also opens the door to a rare non-European reference in this exceedingly European narrative. Presenting dadirri at one remove, tentatively, she points to ways of thinking that might better apprehend what is going on for the repeaters – without succumbing to the common trope, sharply articulated by Okorafor (2004), where nonwhite figures serve as magical guides and redeemers for white characters.

Yet dadirri, whose mention creates a tiny ripple of potentially useful thought in this conference, only briefly captures the narrative, and the attention of its characters. After an instant of profound listening, the repeaters fall back into a pattern where “some listened and others offered more examples of words which did not readily translate between languages.” (IV, p.80).

In its own quiet and dryly funny way, Balle’s depiction of the conference can be understood as satirically capturing “the importance of the temporal imagination in understanding injustice in a warming world” (Facer, 2024) – and the inadequacy of institutional and community responses in developed countries to date.

Outside of the bloviating quasi-scholarly conference – which somehow renders an endlessly repeating day also irritatingly interminable – the repeaters’ time and efforts are organised by another structure beloved of the European middle class: the flatmate experience. 

Balle devotes significant time to the mundane yet vital matters of how food is obtained and prepared, and by whom; how chores are allocated; and how the spaces used by the repeaters, including for car-parking and cycle storage, are organised. While the repeaters survive and muddle through, both their practical and intellectual efforts seem comically insufficient to the cosmic situation they find themselves in.

Yet still they are both “a swarm of monsters” and “a bag full of hope” (IV, p.95); Balle’s account is not scathing but attentive and empathetic. She does not model solutions but illustrates the experience of one’s understanding being reframed by extraordinary happenings. Tara’s thoughtful narration and her preference for observation over intervention lead her to a dawning realisation which brings us back, at last, to the question of how this odd tale sits within the realms of speculative fiction:

It’s difficult to know whether we’re still human. It was Sarah who started having doubts. She laughed, but she meant it: she felt like something else. She didn’t know what exactly – just something else. Not a human being. Not an animal. Not a ghost or a monster or some mythical creature, and then people began suggesting all sorts of things we might be if we were not human: witches and trolls, fairies and nymphs, cherubs, gods and goddesses, devils and vile beasts, miscreations, freaks, homunculi. There was also talk of aliens, cyborgs, clones, androids, that sort of thing, but Sarah said those weren’t it either. (IV, p.118).

To become unstuck in time, we remember, is more challenging to our identity than merely coming unstuck in space – the experience may even suffice to sever us from belonging to the same species as those who trudge through consecutive days. (One is reminded of Priest (1974)’s Inverted World, in which human beings seeming to transform into stunted, fast-talking troll-like figures are merely experiencing a compression of perspective in the eye of the beholder).

Tara finds herself asking, “But were we human before time ground to a halt? Maybe we haven’t changed, maybe we were something else all along?” (IV, p. 121). Already, simply as privileged Europeans in an age of global turbulence and looming climate catastrophe, before November 18th ever repeated, these people were both a swarm of monsters and a bag of hope.

Conclusion

If Freedman was able to claim that critical theory and science fiction are each “a version of the other” (2000, p.xv), then perhaps On the Calculation of Volume is simply Balle’s disciplined creative-critical way of having a lover’s quarrel – not only with the world, as Robert Frost suggested poets should have, but also with time itself.

The title of Balle’s series refers to Archimedes’ discovery that volume can be calculated by displacement. In her work, we gradually see what is revealed when someone is taken out of the normal flow of time and unable to “displace” the world in the usual way. This strange perspective sheds uncomfortable light on her European characters, the literary milieu from which the book emerged…and, potentially, her readers too.

Nabokov – who himself danced at the edge of genre in books such as Ada or Ardor (1969), while claiming to “loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories” (Ditum, 2019) – once wrote of “an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground”, suggesting that “something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space” (Nabokov, 2012, 3065).

With Balle, we follow a character who is unable to consistently leave that constant shape, for whom the rain washes away any lasting imprint; a time-travelling hero for an age of deep uncertainty.

Nabokov’s words come at the conclusion of his 1947 novel Bend Sinister. This unexpectedly poignant metafiction heavily lampshades the fact that its story of an intellectual resisting an authoritarian regime is entirely make-believe, and completely abandons its conceit in its final moments – yet remains profoundly moving. Its last pages, with the narrator unable to face depicting the awful conclusion they had concocted for the protagonist, have something of the same slow-building sense of nocturnal horror which Balle captures when Tara and her husband try to stay awake through one of the November 18th resets:

We collected details. We stayed alert. We kept our eyes fixed on each other. On the table. On the empty pan between us. For ten minutes or more we simply sat there at the table. We talked about the objects around us. We speculated as to whether things disappeared in fits and starts or all at once. Thomas believed there would be things in other rooms in the house that had already returned to their places. We talked about going to check but didn’t get up. We talked about cameras which could record changes. We talked about love. About whether it could make things happen. About whether love could bring us in or out.

And then, from one moment to the next, the frying pan was gone. I froze for a second and glanced around the kitchen, but the pan was nowhere to be seen. I got up and as I did so I heard Thomas cry out. He wanted to know what had happened. He was troubled. He wasn’t drowsy or tired. He was simply troubled. He could not remember what he was doing in the kitchen. He had gone to bed on the night of the seventeenth, only hours after we had spoken on the phone. Now he was here in the kitchen. I was supposed to be in Paris. But here I was, looking for a frying pan.

I forgot about the frying pan and sat down again across from Thomas. I explained what had happened and saw anxiety course through him as I led him down the long road from my first eighteenth of November to the fried eggs we had just eaten. (I, p.75).

In this universe, as for Nabokov’s protagonist, our characters are at the mercy of forces beyond their control or anticipation. Something similar is true for those who choose to read On the Calculation of Volume, as Balle plays time-games directly with her reader as well as her characters, particularly in the form of cliff-hangers which are sometimes resumed, in the next book, with a significant flash forward that skips over their immediate resolution. (It is impressive to write a story set on a single calendar day and nonetheless leave the reader thinking, “When is this happening?”). As an author, Balle exploits the inevitable tension which resides in “the possibility that the expectations provided by experience must also contain the ‘perhaps,’ the ‘maybe’ that opens them to the possibility of surprise” (Bryant and Knight, p.55).

English-language readers experience further suspense via the temporalities of translation, with their editions gradually catching up to the Danish originals (at the time of writing, the fifth English volume is about to be released and the sixth Danish volume is already out in the world). This is given added significance by Balle’s own comment (Faber Books, 2025) that Tara, being of English and Belgian heritage, would likely tell her own story in English or French: 

The book is written in Danish originally but I haven’t written it in her original language. So in a way, the Danish version would probably be my translation of her story.

Such subtle sidesteps serve to position Balle’s tale, for all its accessibility and mainstream literary acclaim, in an oblique and challenging position: a non-definitive account, a translation from a prior original which can never be accessed, and to which the closest approximation may be a further translation again.

Ghosh’s argument regarding the novel in the age of climate change is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed – and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis. (p.8).

On the Calculation of Volume is a riposte: a novel at once fantastic and mundane, conventional and yet provocative, one which harks back to the serial origins of the form even as it grapples with the most contemporary sense of immanent crisis. Balle writes, as Lessing’s Anna wrote in The Golden Notebook, “to create a new way of looking at life” (1972, p.75); our present, awkward relationship to time is given back to us in the way that Joanna Russ saw science fiction at its most effective:

What is familiar is made strange – one disbelieves; however, it is rooted in the familiar – one believes (or rather stops disbelieving); yet it is absurd or comic – one begins to question the piece of actuality that has been used as a model[.] (1995, p.19).

An old joke about Samuel Beckett’s cryptic time-bending trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable has it that the last words of the final volume – “…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” – spoil the whole series, as an embittered reader tells an earnest newbie: “You needn’t bother wading through all that. Spoilers: in the end he decides to go on.”

Balle’s great achievement is to create a multi-volume series where the answer to “What’s next?” is always “November 18th, again” – and yet we still want to turn the next page, and when we do so, we still find something new to learn.

We can only hope that in an age of uncertainty and peril, we, too, can find that urge to turn the page, find something ever new, and go on.

Matt Finch

Matt Finch is an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School and a member of the Futures Council at Australian National University; he leads the Oxford University project “Death, dying and afterlife in the age of AI” and co-leads the “Intimate Futures” project at the New School for Social Research.

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The following is an edited transcript, abridged from the original conversation that closed the BSFA/SFF AGM on 14 June 2026. The event was held online on Zoom. 

Lisa Tuttle, My Death (Vintage Classics, 2026)

Paul March-Russell: I’m honoured to have Lisa Tuttle here to discuss her novella My Death, which was originally published by P.S. Publishing in 2004, reprinted by NYRB Classics, and is now available in a beautiful edition from Vintage. A number of Lisa’s other works are also being reprinted by Valancourt – A Nest of Nightmares and later this year Lost Futures, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1993. Lisa, it’s a delight to have you here. My Death is a wonderfully intricate work, so I’m going to be very careful to not give anything away. But what was it that first inspired you to write the novella? 

Lisa Tuttle: It was a few things that came together. One is that I’ve always been interested in women writers, women artists, particularly women who’ve been sort of forgotten. I can’t think who it was, someone like Gail Godwin, who was recently talking about when she was at college, she always felt slightly embarrassed being particularly interested in women writers. It didn’t seem right. You were supposed to look at the great writers, and they were all men. Well, I’m from a slightly younger generation, and I think that by the time I got to college, there were women – women’s writing, women’s work, women’s history. The courses were just starting. This was back in 1970. So, I didn’t feel this wasn’t proper. It was like, no, now is the time to find out about all these forgotten women or the women who haven’t been celebrated.

I also read a lot of biographies and autobiographies by women and about women. And at one point, years ago, I thought I might write a biography, but it all seemed a bit too daunting. What suited me better was to write an imaginary biography of an imaginary writer or artist or muse. That was another subject that interested me: women playing the role of muse to a male artist or writer. I’d recently read a memoir of Robert Graves, can’t remember by whom (we’ve just moved house so my books are everywhere!). But one of the things was that the author and his wife went to live in Mallorca, and he had a letter of introduction to Graves, who was at that time living with the American poet and critic, Laura Riding, and the stories that he told about her just fascinated me. I was interested in writing about someone who’d been connected to a more famous male, but had her own talents, more than just being a muse. So, I took elements of Laura Riding’s life for my imaginary writer, and I began in a kind of semi-autobiographical fashion to write about a woman writer, who would have been around my age at the time.

The writer was widowed which I was not, and am still not, I’m very happy to say. But she had some of my own characteristics. That was a kind of a tease, in a way, because some of the things were true. I made her be from Texas, going to college in New York, and then coming over to Britain, winding up in Scotland. And the writer that she is interested in is someone she first encountered as a painted female figure, a kind of mythical person. Because that was another element. I’ve recently been going through my old notebooks, and some of the same names were in there from this story I’ve never written. It was called ‘The Fountain’, and there was a Willie Logan and a Hermione, I think, or Hermine. It was a sort of Circe story with a magical fountain and men being turned into animals. But anyway, I never wrote that, but it was something I was thinking about at the same time. And then Pete Crowther invited me to write a novella, and so suddenly I had a reason to write this, because I couldn’t really see it as a novel and it was way too complicated for a short story. And, in fact, I didn’t even know how it was going to end. When I began writing it, it was really just a character a bit like me researching someone who turns out to still be alive, so she can actually go and interview her, and then finding these rather odd connections or echoes of her life.

PMR: That’s fascinating. When I was a recently graduated PhD student in the early Noughties, around about the time that you’d have been writing My Death, Laura Riding had really come back into focus in terms of modernist studies. And there’s lots of other allusions here. You start with an epigram from the poet H.D., and again, we’ve had more recent reclamations of people like Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun. I was wondering whether you saw the novella as part of a process of reclamation? Is it contributing, not just as a kind of fictional biography, to that process of reclaiming women writers and artists from the past? 

LT: For me, certainly. Leonora Carrington was very much on my radar, because when I was living in Austin, Texas, there was an exhibition of her work at the university. And I thought, whoa, she’s fantastic. And she was a writer as well, and I bought some of her books which were being reprinted by small presses back then in the 70s. So, Carrington was part of that. H.D., very much. I read two biographies of H.D, and I had her collected poems, and I was fascinated by her early life story, being picked up as a modernist writer, and her relationship with Ezra Pound, and her very much not traditional relationships and marriages and semi-marriages with both men and women. So, she was a fascinating character as well. But Ithell Colquhoun, I had not even heard of, but then I got an email from someone a couple of years ago. The strange thing is that there was something in The Guardian about her, I think, and I was reading about her, and thinking she sounds fascinating. Then I got this email from someone saying, was this one of the real women behind your idea? And I had to admit, no, I’d never heard of her until a week ago. It’s also quite exciting, I think, to find these writers and artists who have dropped out of sight, and are being constantly rediscovered. I love it. I love coming across an artist I haven’t heard of before, or a book by a writer, particularly when they’re women. 

PMR: Exactly. It does seem to me that the republication of My Death is feeding into this whole process of reclaiming the work of early 20th century women writers and artists, but also more recent ones. So again, we think about people like Ann Quin and Anna Kavan and Maureen Duffy. Which brings me to my next question, because the other thing I really love are all these period details about Virago Press. So, the narrator has a copy of Helen Ralston’s novel In Troy (more echoes of H.D. I suspect) published by Virago, and there’s even a little account of how they went about reprinting their books, and the damage done to the original text. Was there also a reclaiming of the history of women’s presses and a revisiting of your own early life as a writer?

LT: I didn’t think, I’m going to reclaim women’s publishing history, I was just looking into my own recent past. In the 80s, I lived in Harrow and I joined a group called Women in Publishing, because it was a way of meeting other women since I didn’t go out to work. And I didn’t want to just meet people – I already knew people in the science fiction field – I felt like I needed some new friends of my own. And so I joined Women in Publishing and we would do things like type up things in the Virago offices or have conferences where some of the more established women publishers and editors would be. I was mainly with people working in publishing, but one year Jeanette Winterson and I were on the same committee. I even briefly provided maternity cover for Sarah Lefanu at the Women’s Press. It was just for a few months, but I was working with Tanith Lee and Carol Emshwiller, possibly Josephine Saxton. These were books that Sarah had bought and I’d be on the phone to her every couple of days. I wrote the Encyclopedia of Feminism as well, and when that was about to be published by Longmans, I was actually invited to a sales conference. There were all of these eye-opening facts about the reality of publishing, and I subsequently married someone there who had signed the contract for A Nest of Nightmares. We were both divorced and we’d run into each other at parties and things like that, and I think it was on our first or second date where I referred to A Nest of Nightmares, and I said, oh, I don’t know if you know it. He said, of course I know it, I read it. I said, well, I wouldn’t assume that you would go out and read something by me. And he said, Lisa, I published that book, I’m the one who bought it. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, that was Nann du Sautoy. She’s the one who took me out to lunch and commissioned the book, and he said, look who signed the contract. And he had. I hadn’t even realized he had been there. So, meeting other publishers and writers, who always complain about publishers of course, it’s always been a thing. But yeah, it was fun to have this character just going back to how things had been. Of course, things had changed a lot by the early 2000s, but everything I knew about publishing was from the 80s.

PMR: It’s an absolutely fascinating history. Women in Publishing has also been celebrated by the British Library with a whole bunch of links on their website, including an interview with yourself. And Rosy Mack has got a forthcoming book about the Women’s Press.

LT: Yes, I spoke with her.

PMR: So, it’s not just that this book is chiming with that reclamation of women’s writing from the early part of the 20th century, it’s also feeding into this other reclamation of the post-war enterprises of Women in Publishing, Virago, Women’s Press. It’s full of these lovely period details but a sense also of continuity over the decades that adds to the pleasure and grounding of the whole story. 

You mentioned earlier that there were some biographical similarities between yourself and the narrator, and I wondered if you could say a little bit more about that, but also about the way in which there’s a doubling between the author, the narrator, and Helen Ralston. I don’t want to offer any plot spoilers, but would you say a little bit more about how that doubling emerged in the writing of the text?

LT: It’s very difficult to talk about because a lot of things that I write are sort of semi-conscious, or even unconscious, and quite often I draw on things from my own life without knowing it. I mean, I hadn’t realized that Ralston was a friend’s grandparent’s name. I don’t know if I knew it or if it was just a strange coincidence, but chances are I’d heard it, and it was connected with Scotland because that was where her grandparents were from. I often find that when critics are looking at things and talking about them, I just think, well, the way I work is I put something in because it just occurs to me when I’m writing. Only later do I think, that’s what it was about, there was a reason for that, it wasn’t just random. But at the time, it felt random – you know, where was her first job, who is this person, what name can I give them? And then it comes to seem more important or it has an echo with something. But I have to admit the doubling was not a conscious decision. It wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to do this, so that the reader will notice it or be happy about it or excited or question it. It’s just more happy accidents and coincidences, and I find that very often when I’m writing. Not just fiction writers but people doing research, I think, will probably recognize the way you stumble across so many serendipitous discoveries. You’re not even looking for it, you were looking for something else, and then you find the absolutely perfect detail. It’s just a kind of going with the flow, in a way.

PMR: And I’m assuming that the intricacy of the story must come through the drafting and redrafting as you incorporate those accidents and explore them further?

LT: Yes, I always think my first drafts are horrible. They’re very rough. Of course, the whole idea of a draft is not the same as when it used to be on a typewriter, and then you had to start retyping it. But I still do have a tendency to start over again rather than just trying to make little changes, because I feel it’s not good enough, you know? I will waste a lot of time just trying to rewrite something that I’ve just written. So, I think it’s often better, for me anyway, to just move on, and then when I go back to it, I can fix it. But I’ve just had this thought about something I’ve been working on for probably two years, which I haven’t been able to write because I’ve been busy with other things. The book opens going down a particular road that I’m describing, an imaginary road based on a real one, and I just started thinking, oh, I began in the wrong place, and I’ve just thought of a different opening for it.

PMR: Really?

LT: Yeah, completely different.

PMR: Wow, that also makes me think of something you said earlier, that you didn’t know what the ending was going to be for My Death…

LT: I know it seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

PMR: Again, no plot spoilers, but it’s not just the intricacy, it’s also about choosing whether this is going to be a short story, a novel or novella? Because the novella has a particular kind of form and structure to it, and critics will say, you need an epiphany or turning-point at the end, some kind of revelation, but if you’re working blind, the form becomes kind of interesting, doesn’t it? 

LT: Well, it’s the way I usually work. Actually, though, usually about halfway I will realize what I’m aiming at, you know? But the very final ending is different than I was originally thinking it would be halfway through.

PMR: Yeah, I won’t say anything more about the ending, but it literally goes, whoa! And it throws you out, and then you go, oh, hold on a minute, I’ve got to re-read this, so it’s that classic short story or novella form, the twice-told tale. You’ve got to go back and read it all again which is so, so pleasurable. The other thing I wanted to pick up on, apart from that dramatic twist, is the way the novella seems to resolve itself – because, you know, this is a slippery tale we’re talking about – but it seems to suggest the presence of parallel universes, alternate timelines, which we see also in Lost Futures and some of your earlier short stories like ‘No Regrets’, the opening story in A Spaceship Built of Stone. What significance do you see that notion playing in your work more broadly? What is it about that theme that draws you in over and over again?

LT: It does… it does interest me. It has for a long time, I guess. Reading other people’s takes on these things like R.A. Lafferty. Not just alternate histories, but the whole idea of time travel, the idea that you could actually change the past and then what does that mean? One of the things that has had an impact on my writing of time travel stories is the very notion of alternate time streams and the actual theory behind that, not some kind of fantasy, of going back and changing the past. Although if it was real, you’d never know it, for the rest of the world would just be carrying on in its usual path. There’s some people in Hollywood who have written a script of My Death which they’re hoping to sell. And I got a phone call from them once, asking me, when does this happen and how does that happen? And I said, well, there is no explanation. Because it isn’t something that happens every day. So yeah, there probably are echoes of ideas like alternate realities, but there’s no explanation.

PMR: Exactly. Instead, that’s the mysterious effect the novella has because as an author you pause the reader and say, no, I can’t explain it. But in that moment, the story pulls me back in again, because now I’ve now got to re-read it from the start, and that reiteration is like a time-travelling effect. I’ve been here before but it’s not the same place.  

LT: Yeah, it wasn’t like a conscious decision, like I’m going to play with time travel like that. It was because the story just evolved that way. And I didn’t worry too much about not explaining what happened. I didn’t have a clever magic trick or whatever, but that’s the thing about fantasy, right? It doesn’t always come with an explanation, unlike a magic trick, which can be unwound and explained.

PMR: And in that way, it’s such a wonderfully slippery tale. But that alternate timeline also seems to feed back into the reclaiming of women’s histories, an alternate way of looking at, in this case, the 20th century. So, it seems structurally connected to the whole point of the story. It’s not just a rabbit out of the hat, as it were.

LT: Oh yeah, definitely, it’s not meant to be. But you know, sometimes you read a book, and you really feel like this is my story, or it may not be your actual story, but there’s something in it that you then want to know about the writer. Like, how did you get to this, and where did this come from? And I suppose it’s why people then want to read biographies of writers or artists, because if their work speaks to you, then you sort of think the secret must be in them, and you may be horribly disappointed when they can’t explain the magic. Partly, then, My Death is a response to my feeling about certain books and certain authors, that you just feel this connection, even though the writers may have died before you were born. And you just wish you could have known them. 

PMR: Which is very much what the narrator feels towards Helen when she encounters the Circe painting. And which also seems to evoke the mesmeric power that Circe has in The Odyssey or Helen of Troy in The Iliad. The painting also reminded me of the ‘fatal book’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray that possesses Dorian’s mind. Maybe that weird fiction, Gothic-y trope of the artwork that takes over its audience, alongside the time-travelling trope, is another way of thinking about the relationship between the reader and the novel? 

John William Waterhouse, Circe offering the cup to Ulysses (1891)

LT: I don’t know what I can say, really, except whether it’s a story, a visual image or a work of art, or even something that isn’t particularly a work of art, if you encounter it at an early age, it just takes over your mind or your imagination, and you think about it all the time. If you’re a lover of books, and if you’re a writer and a reader, it’s just one of those basic feelings that there’s some kind of deep magic involved.

PMR: It’s a visceral feeling, isn’t it? I think of being a 12-year-old and reading A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time, and literally being completely gripped by that story.

LT: Because you wanted to live in it.

PMR: Yeah, exactly. We’ve talked a lot about reclamation, so how does it feel for you to see your work coming back into print like this beautiful edition here?

LT: Wonderful. Particularly with My Death, because I felt how well it came out. You know, some people read it, and they loved it, and then it just kind of vanished. And of course, it was from a small press, and there were lots of other things for people to read. And then for it to be picked up… I mean, I couldn’t even believe it! But the editor at the NYRB got in touch with me via Facebook and just mentioned, well, I have a very small press but I’d be interested. And I’m thinking, well, it was published by a small press. Then I’m going, what? The New York Review of Books? NYRB? And not only that, NYRB Classics! I’m a classic! How amazing! It’s just great. I love it. And I’ve just sold the Catalan rights. It’s already out in Spanish and Italian. So, yeah, it’s wonderful, actually.

PMR: It’s definitely wonderful, and all these works need to be back in print, and we need new works as well once you’ve settled into your new home. I think that’s definitely the case. Lisa, thank you so much, it’s been a huge pleasure talking to you.

LT: Thank you.

Lisa Tuttle has written over a dozen fantasy, science-fiction and horror adult and YA novels, and hundreds of award-winning short stories collected in several volumes, including A Nest of Nightmares and The Dead Hours of the Night. She is the author of The Encyclopaedia of Feminism and currently writes a monthly science-fiction review column for The Guardian. 

Paul March-Russell is the outgoing editor of Foundation and the co-commissioning editor for Gold SF (Goldsmiths Press). His Strange Horizons review of E.J. Swift’s When There are Wolves Again was shortlisted for the 2026 BSFA Awards. 

The following is an edited transcript, abridged from the original conversation that closed the BSFA/SFF AGM on 14 June 2026. The event was held online on Zoom. 

Lisa Tuttle, My Death (Vintage Classics, 2026)

Paul March-Russell: I’m honoured to have Lisa Tuttle here to discuss her novella My Death, which was originally published by P.S. Publishing in 2004, reprinted by NYRB Classics, and is now available in a beautiful edition from Vintage. A number of Lisa’s other works are also being reprinted by Valancourt – A Nest of Nightmares and later this year Lost Futures, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1993. Lisa, it’s a delight to have you here. My Death is a wonderfully intricate work, so I’m going to be very careful to not give anything away. But what was it that first inspired you to write the novella? 

Lisa Tuttle: It was a few things that came together. One is that I’ve always been interested in women writers, women artists, particularly women who’ve been sort of forgotten. I can’t think who it was, someone like Gail Godwin, who was recently talking about when she was at college, she always felt slightly embarrassed being particularly interested in women writers. It didn’t seem right. You were supposed to look at the great writers, and they were all men. Well, I’m from a slightly younger generation, and I think that by the time I got to college, there were women – women’s writing, women’s work, women’s history. The courses were just starting. This was back in 1970. So, I didn’t feel this wasn’t proper. It was like, no, now is the time to find out about all these forgotten women or the women who haven’t been celebrated.

I also read a lot of biographies and autobiographies by women and about women. And at one point, years ago, I thought I might write a biography, but it all seemed a bit too daunting. What suited me better was to write an imaginary biography of an imaginary writer or artist or muse. That was another subject that interested me: women playing the role of muse to a male artist or writer. I’d recently read a memoir of Robert Graves, can’t remember by whom (we’ve just moved house so my books are everywhere!). But one of the things was that the author and his wife went to live in Mallorca, and he had a letter of introduction to Graves, who was at that time living with the American poet and critic, Laura Riding, and the stories that he told about her just fascinated me. I was interested in writing about someone who’d been connected to a more famous male, but had her own talents, more than just being a muse. So, I took elements of Laura Riding’s life for my imaginary writer, and I began in a kind of semi-autobiographical fashion to write about a woman writer, who would have been around my age at the time.

The writer was widowed which I was not, and am still not, I’m very happy to say. But she had some of my own characteristics. That was a kind of a tease, in a way, because some of the things were true. I made her be from Texas, going to college in New York, and then coming over to Britain, winding up in Scotland. And the writer that she is interested in is someone she first encountered as a painted female figure, a kind of mythical person. Because that was another element. I’ve recently been going through my old notebooks, and some of the same names were in there from this story I’ve never written. It was called ‘The Fountain’, and there was a Willie Logan and a Hermione, I think, or Hermine. It was a sort of Circe story with a magical fountain and men being turned into animals. But anyway, I never wrote that, but it was something I was thinking about at the same time. And then Pete Crowther invited me to write a novella, and so suddenly I had a reason to write this, because I couldn’t really see it as a novel and it was way too complicated for a short story. And, in fact, I didn’t even know how it was going to end. When I began writing it, it was really just a character a bit like me researching someone who turns out to still be alive, so she can actually go and interview her, and then finding these rather odd connections or echoes of her life.

PMR: That’s fascinating. When I was a recently graduated PhD student in the early Noughties, around about the time that you’d have been writing My Death, Laura Riding had really come back into focus in terms of modernist studies. And there’s lots of other allusions here. You start with an epigram from the poet H.D., and again, we’ve had more recent reclamations of people like Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun. I was wondering whether you saw the novella as part of a process of reclamation? Is it contributing, not just as a kind of fictional biography, to that process of reclaiming women writers and artists from the past? 

LT: For me, certainly. Leonora Carrington was very much on my radar, because when I was living in Austin, Texas, there was an exhibition of her work at the university. And I thought, whoa, she’s fantastic. And she was a writer as well, and I bought some of her books which were being reprinted by small presses back then in the 70s. So, Carrington was part of that. H.D., very much. I read two biographies of H.D, and I had her collected poems, and I was fascinated by her early life story, being picked up as a modernist writer, and her relationship with Ezra Pound, and her very much not traditional relationships and marriages and semi-marriages with both men and women. So, she was a fascinating character as well. But Ithell Colquhoun, I had not even heard of, but then I got an email from someone a couple of years ago. The strange thing is that there was something in The Guardian about her, I think, and I was reading about her, and thinking she sounds fascinating. Then I got this email from someone saying, was this one of the real women behind your idea? And I had to admit, no, I’d never heard of her until a week ago. It’s also quite exciting, I think, to find these writers and artists who have dropped out of sight, and are being constantly rediscovered. I love it. I love coming across an artist I haven’t heard of before, or a book by a writer, particularly when they’re women. 

PMR: Exactly. It does seem to me that the republication of My Death is feeding into this whole process of reclaiming the work of early 20th century women writers and artists, but also more recent ones. So again, we think about people like Ann Quin and Anna Kavan and Maureen Duffy. Which brings me to my next question, because the other thing I really love are all these period details about Virago Press. So, the narrator has a copy of Helen Ralston’s novel In Troy (more echoes of H.D. I suspect) published by Virago, and there’s even a little account of how they went about reprinting their books, and the damage done to the original text. Was there also a reclaiming of the history of women’s presses and a revisiting of your own early life as a writer?

LT: I didn’t think, I’m going to reclaim women’s publishing history, I was just looking into my own recent past. In the 80s, I lived in Harrow and I joined a group called Women in Publishing, because it was a way of meeting other women since I didn’t go out to work. And I didn’t want to just meet people – I already knew people in the science fiction field – I felt like I needed some new friends of my own. And so I joined Women in Publishing and we would do things like type up things in the Virago offices or have conferences where some of the more established women publishers and editors would be. I was mainly with people working in publishing, but one year Jeanette Winterson and I were on the same committee. I even briefly provided maternity cover for Sarah Lefanu at the Women’s Press. It was just for a few months, but I was working with Tanith Lee and Carol Emshwiller, possibly Josephine Saxton. These were books that Sarah had bought and I’d be on the phone to her every couple of days. I wrote the Encyclopedia of Feminism as well, and when that was about to be published by Longmans, I was actually invited to a sales conference. There were all of these eye-opening facts about the reality of publishing, and I subsequently married someone there who had signed the contract for A Nest of Nightmares. We were both divorced and we’d run into each other at parties and things like that, and I think it was on our first or second date where I referred to A Nest of Nightmares, and I said, oh, I don’t know if you know it. He said, of course I know it, I read it. I said, well, I wouldn’t assume that you would go out and read something by me. And he said, Lisa, I published that book, I’m the one who bought it. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, that was Nann du Sautoy. She’s the one who took me out to lunch and commissioned the book, and he said, look who signed the contract. And he had. I hadn’t even realized he had been there. So, meeting other publishers and writers, who always complain about publishers of course, it’s always been a thing. But yeah, it was fun to have this character just going back to how things had been. Of course, things had changed a lot by the early 2000s, but everything I knew about publishing was from the 80s.

PMR: It’s an absolutely fascinating history. Women in Publishing has also been celebrated by the British Library with a whole bunch of links on their website, including an interview with yourself. And Rosy Mack has got a forthcoming book about the Women’s Press.

LT: Yes, I spoke with her.

PMR: So, it’s not just that this book is chiming with that reclamation of women’s writing from the early part of the 20th century, it’s also feeding into this other reclamation of the post-war enterprises of Women in Publishing, Virago, Women’s Press. It’s full of these lovely period details but a sense also of continuity over the decades that adds to the pleasure and grounding of the whole story. 

You mentioned earlier that there were some biographical similarities between yourself and the narrator, and I wondered if you could say a little bit more about that, but also about the way in which there’s a doubling between the author, the narrator, and Helen Ralston. I don’t want to offer any plot spoilers, but would you say a little bit more about how that doubling emerged in the writing of the text?

LT: It’s very difficult to talk about because a lot of things that I write are sort of semi-conscious, or even unconscious, and quite often I draw on things from my own life without knowing it. I mean, I hadn’t realized that Ralston was a friend’s grandparent’s name. I don’t know if I knew it or if it was just a strange coincidence, but chances are I’d heard it, and it was connected with Scotland because that was where her grandparents were from. I often find that when critics are looking at things and talking about them, I just think, well, the way I work is I put something in because it just occurs to me when I’m writing. Only later do I think, that’s what it was about, there was a reason for that, it wasn’t just random. But at the time, it felt random – you know, where was her first job, who is this person, what name can I give them? And then it comes to seem more important or it has an echo with something. But I have to admit the doubling was not a conscious decision. It wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to do this, so that the reader will notice it or be happy about it or excited or question it. It’s just more happy accidents and coincidences, and I find that very often when I’m writing. Not just fiction writers but people doing research, I think, will probably recognize the way you stumble across so many serendipitous discoveries. You’re not even looking for it, you were looking for something else, and then you find the absolutely perfect detail. It’s just a kind of going with the flow, in a way.

PMR: And I’m assuming that the intricacy of the story must come through the drafting and redrafting as you incorporate those accidents and explore them further?

LT: Yes, I always think my first drafts are horrible. They’re very rough. Of course, the whole idea of a draft is not the same as when it used to be on a typewriter, and then you had to start retyping it. But I still do have a tendency to start over again rather than just trying to make little changes, because I feel it’s not good enough, you know? I will waste a lot of time just trying to rewrite something that I’ve just written. So, I think it’s often better, for me anyway, to just move on, and then when I go back to it, I can fix it. But I’ve just had this thought about something I’ve been working on for probably two years, which I haven’t been able to write because I’ve been busy with other things. The book opens going down a particular road that I’m describing, an imaginary road based on a real one, and I just started thinking, oh, I began in the wrong place, and I’ve just thought of a different opening for it.

PMR: Really?

LT: Yeah, completely different.

PMR: Wow, that also makes me think of something you said earlier, that you didn’t know what the ending was going to be for My Death…

LT: I know it seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

PMR: Again, no plot spoilers, but it’s not just the intricacy, it’s also about choosing whether this is going to be a short story, a novel or novella? Because the novella has a particular kind of form and structure to it, and critics will say, you need an epiphany or turning-point at the end, some kind of revelation, but if you’re working blind, the form becomes kind of interesting, doesn’t it? 

LT: Well, it’s the way I usually work. Actually, though, usually about halfway I will realize what I’m aiming at, you know? But the very final ending is different than I was originally thinking it would be halfway through.

PMR: Yeah, I won’t say anything more about the ending, but it literally goes, whoa! And it throws you out, and then you go, oh, hold on a minute, I’ve got to re-read this, so it’s that classic short story or novella form, the twice-told tale. You’ve got to go back and read it all again which is so, so pleasurable. The other thing I wanted to pick up on, apart from that dramatic twist, is the way the novella seems to resolve itself – because, you know, this is a slippery tale we’re talking about – but it seems to suggest the presence of parallel universes, alternate timelines, which we see also in Lost Futures and some of your earlier short stories like ‘No Regrets’, the opening story in A Spaceship Built of Stone. What significance do you see that notion playing in your work more broadly? What is it about that theme that draws you in over and over again?

LT: It does… it does interest me. It has for a long time, I guess. Reading other people’s takes on these things like R.A. Lafferty. Not just alternate histories, but the whole idea of time travel, the idea that you could actually change the past and then what does that mean? One of the things that has had an impact on my writing of time travel stories is the very notion of alternate time streams and the actual theory behind that, not some kind of fantasy, of going back and changing the past. Although if it was real, you’d never know it, for the rest of the world would just be carrying on in its usual path. There’s some people in Hollywood who have written a script of My Death which they’re hoping to sell. And I got a phone call from them once, asking me, when does this happen and how does that happen? And I said, well, there is no explanation. Because it isn’t something that happens every day. So yeah, there probably are echoes of ideas like alternate realities, but there’s no explanation.

PMR: Exactly. Instead, that’s the mysterious effect the novella has because as an author you pause the reader and say, no, I can’t explain it. But in that moment, the story pulls me back in again, because now I’ve now got to re-read it from the start, and that reiteration is like a time-travelling effect. I’ve been here before but it’s not the same place.  

LT: Yeah, it wasn’t like a conscious decision, like I’m going to play with time travel like that. It was because the story just evolved that way. And I didn’t worry too much about not explaining what happened. I didn’t have a clever magic trick or whatever, but that’s the thing about fantasy, right? It doesn’t always come with an explanation, unlike a magic trick, which can be unwound and explained.

PMR: And in that way, it’s such a wonderfully slippery tale. But that alternate timeline also seems to feed back into the reclaiming of women’s histories, an alternate way of looking at, in this case, the 20th century. So, it seems structurally connected to the whole point of the story. It’s not just a rabbit out of the hat, as it were.

LT: Oh yeah, definitely, it’s not meant to be. But you know, sometimes you read a book, and you really feel like this is my story, or it may not be your actual story, but there’s something in it that you then want to know about the writer. Like, how did you get to this, and where did this come from? And I suppose it’s why people then want to read biographies of writers or artists, because if their work speaks to you, then you sort of think the secret must be in them, and you may be horribly disappointed when they can’t explain the magic. Partly, then, My Death is a response to my feeling about certain books and certain authors, that you just feel this connection, even though the writers may have died before you were born. And you just wish you could have known them. 

PMR: Which is very much what the narrator feels towards Helen when she encounters the Circe painting. And which also seems to evoke the mesmeric power that Circe has in The Odyssey or Helen of Troy in The Iliad. The painting also reminded me of the ‘fatal book’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray that possesses Dorian’s mind. Maybe that weird fiction, Gothic-y trope of the artwork that takes over its audience, alongside the time-travelling trope, is another way of thinking about the relationship between the reader and the novel? 

John William Waterhouse, Circe offering the cup to Ulysses (1891)

LT: I don’t know what I can say, really, except whether it’s a story, a visual image or a work of art, or even something that isn’t particularly a work of art, if you encounter it at an early age, it just takes over your mind or your imagination, and you think about it all the time. If you’re a lover of books, and if you’re a writer and a reader, it’s just one of those basic feelings that there’s some kind of deep magic involved.

PMR: It’s a visceral feeling, isn’t it? I think of being a 12-year-old and reading A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time, and literally being completely gripped by that story.

LT: Because you wanted to live in it.

PMR: Yeah, exactly. We’ve talked a lot about reclamation, so how does it feel for you to see your work coming back into print like this beautiful edition here?

LT: Wonderful. Particularly with My Death, because I felt how well it came out. You know, some people read it, and they loved it, and then it just kind of vanished. And of course, it was from a small press, and there were lots of other things for people to read. And then for it to be picked up… I mean, I couldn’t even believe it! But the editor at the NYRB got in touch with me via Facebook and just mentioned, well, I have a very small press but I’d be interested. And I’m thinking, well, it was published by a small press. Then I’m going, what? The New York Review of Books? NYRB? And not only that, NYRB Classics! I’m a classic! How amazing! It’s just great. I love it. And I’ve just sold the Catalan rights. It’s already out in Spanish and Italian. So, yeah, it’s wonderful, actually.

PMR: It’s definitely wonderful, and all these works need to be back in print, and we need new works as well once you’ve settled into your new home. I think that’s definitely the case. Lisa, thank you so much, it’s been a huge pleasure talking to you.

LT: Thank you.

Lisa Tuttle has written over a dozen fantasy, science-fiction and horror adult and YA novels, and hundreds of award-winning short stories collected in several volumes, including A Nest of Nightmares and The Dead Hours of the Night. She is the author of The Encyclopaedia of Feminism and currently writes a monthly science-fiction review column for The Guardian. 

Paul March-Russell is the outgoing editor of Foundation and the co-commissioning editor for Gold SF (Goldsmiths Press). His Strange Horizons review of E.J. Swift’s When There are Wolves Again was shortlisted for the 2026 BSFA Awards. 

Rachel S. Cordasco, Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium (University of Illinois Press, 2021)

Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What was your initial attraction to works of science fiction in translation, and what made you decide to start reviewing them?

Rachel Cordasco: I started reviewing Anglophone science fiction for John DeNardo’s SF Signal in the mid-2010s. One day, he asked if I’d like to review a work of Chinese science fiction in translation—The Three-Body Problem. I jumped at the chance and absolutely loved that book. But it was only when he then sent me Jacek Dukaj’s The Old Axolotl and Marek Huberath’s Nest of Worlds that I actually started thinking about what it meant that these texts were all translated. I had never thought about where science fiction was written, and I realized that, of course, it was written around the world. This led me to think about what other works of science fiction there were in English translation. I started a list on a personal blog, and before I knew it, I had found dozens of titles. Ten years later, I’ve catalogued thousands of short-form and long-form works of SF in translation. I’ve always loved learning other languages and I read a lot of classics in English translation when I was a teenager, so bringing together two of my favorite things—speculative fiction and translation—made so much sense. I started asking John to send me as much SFT (science fiction in translation) as he could, and then, when SF Signal shut down, I started my own site dedicated to SFT.

JPG: In the ten years since founding https://www.sfintranslation.com/ what are some of the most interesting things that you’ve learned, and some of the biggest gaps in the field that you’ve identified?

RC: One of the most surprising things I learned is that there is so much SFT out there. Early science fiction texts, especially from Western Europe in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, were being translated into English very quickly (though apparently not very accurately, in some cases, ahem ahem Jules Verne’s stories). When you start looking into the speculative novels, anthologies, and collections that were published in translation throughout the 20th century, you find that so many of these books just flew under the radar or went out of print quickly. This process of finding and cataloging as much SFT as I can is basically my way of excavating items that aren’t buried but just hidden in plain sight.

I’ve learned that Japanese science fiction developed at warp speed following the American occupation of the island following World War Two; I’ve learned that giants of American golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon wrote introductions to anthologies of Russian science fiction at the height of the Cold War; and I’ve learned that, despite the fact that so much speculative fiction has been translated into English, the Anglophone genre world has mostly (except for the 70s and 80s) ignored SFT…until recently. Hopefully, the tide is shifting once again toward SFT and more speculative fiction readers will learn about what people are writing and thinking about around the world.

JPG: You wrote the book on SF in Translation, Out of this World. What did this process look like for you, and why did you decide to go with University of Illinois Press as your publisher rather than an SF publisher? 

RC: I realized, after working on the site for several years, that it was time to write an annotated bibliography of SFT, à la Neil Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder books. I had just finished reading Dale Knickerbocker’s excellent edited anthology about global science fiction, Lingua Cosmica, and asked for his advice regarding my own book idea. He suggested the University of Illinois Press, which had published Lingua Cosmica, so I sent them a proposal, which they accepted. Instead of an annotated bibliography, though, Illinois wanted me to develop each source language chapter into a full-blown essay. Ultimately, this worked out well, because it gave me the opportunity to offer readers analysis and context for each chapter that might otherwise have been left out. Illinois was great to work with, and, as I mentioned in my previous answer, the speculative fiction world mostly ignores SFT, so I don’t really know if, back in 2019, any SF publisher would have even looked twice at my proposal.

JPG: What are your motivations behind starting Small Planet magazine, and what are your plans for its future?

RC: The idea for a magazine had been kicking around in my brain for a year, and one day earlier this year, while working on a review, I just couldn’t wait anymore. The magazine had to happen! I want to read and learn about so many aspects of SFT, but as one person, I simply don’t have the time or energy to take on more than one or two projects at a time. A magazine, I figured, would be my selfish way of enlisting all of the brilliant people out there, who I knew were already writing about SFT, to write about it…for me! I had all of these ideas about interviewing translators and finding people who would write essays on Polish fantasy or French horror or Japanese surrealism and enlisting people to review underappreciated SFT. All I had to do was put the word out that I wanted to start an SFT magazine and so many wonderful people jumped on board right away, offering to design, write, edit, interview, and help in any other way they could. I want this magazine to be the Locus of the SFT world, providing readers with a steady stream of interesting essays, interviews, reviews, stats, and more.

Rachel Cordasco, ed., Small Planet Issue 1 (May 2026)

JPG: What do you think are some of the most effective ways that readers and the public can motivate publishers to publish more works of SF in translation? 

RC: One major way to encourage publishers to bring us more SFT is for readers to buy more of it. And yet, an interesting thing I learned recently is that a lot of SFT doesn’t even come from speculative fiction publishers. In fact, New Directions, which focuses on international literature, published more SFT in the last few years than any genre publisher. To make matters even more interesting, the 90 works of long-form SFT last year came out from 60 different publishers/imprints. Ultimately, I’m waiting for SF publishers to start dedicating more of their resources to SFT and acknowledge that these stories, told all over the world and in many different languages, are all part of the same effort: humanity trying to understand itself and its place in the cosmos.

JPG: For you, what are some of the most important aspects of cross-cultural exchange through literature?

RC: One of the most exciting things I’ve discovered while reading SFT is that writers from all over the world will take up the same theme or event or technology and explore them in fascinatingly similar and different ways. I started tracking this on my site (under the tab “Subject Index”) and I’m going to delve deeper into this in the magazine with a special column in each issue called “Crossing Borders.” Cloning in Greek and Spanish SFT, vampires in Hungarian and Swahili SFT, monstrous mothers in Hebrew and Japanese SFT—I find this stuff thrilling! You’ll hear this discussed whenever two or more literary translators are together in one space—reading what others around the world have written is how we deepen and enrich human civilization. Anglophone culture and language is rejuvenated when it comes into contact with other cultures and languages. We learn from one another, celebrate our differences, and learn about our surprising similarities. After all, one would hope that, if aliens do swing by Earth for a tour one day, they’ll see that, on this one small planet, we actually have a working knowledge of one another. It would be pretty embarrassing otherwise, right?

JPG: What are the top 5 SF books that you’d like to see translated?

RC: As always, I’m keeping a list! In no particular order…

– the rest of Élisabeth Vonarburg’s Tyranaël series (1997) (Mon frère l’ombre, L’Autre Rivage, and La Mer allée avec le soleil)

– Cheon Seon-ran’s A Broken Bridge (2019)

– Harry Mulisch’s The Future of Yesterday (1972)

– Shimon Adaf’s Rose of Judea series (2010-2012)

– Gilda Musa’s Domesticated Jungle (1975)

JPG: What are some of the greatest challenges you face when working as a translator, and are any of these specific to SF?

RC: A professional translator would be better able to speak to this question, but as someone who has translated several short- and long-form works for various Italian authors, especially the brilliant Clelia Farris, I can say that trying to capture the author’s tone and style while trying to make my translation read well is always challenging. It’s the nature of translation—making choices about how a word or phrase gets brought over into English. Working with Clelia on my translations is always fun because we get to discuss, for instance, exactly how certain sayings would best translate across languages. In fact, in this most recent issue of Small Planet, Clelia has an essay in which she describes some of the choices we had to make when I was translating her story “Gabola,” like turning the literal translation “you don’t get out much” into the more emotionally accurate “you’re behind the times.”

In terms of translating SF specifically, working on Clelia’s novella Veg-humans was more difficult than anything else I’d translated before because this is a story that includes a wide variety of plant species and technologies the characters use to try and survive the punishing heat of a near-future world that is being swallowed up by drought. Finding the words in English to reflect Clelia’s terms for these things was challenging, but we worked patiently together to find what sounded best.

JPG: Can you tell us about the push to get works in translation as a category for the Hugo Awards, and your work with https://translatedhugo.org? 

RC: Jake Casella Brookins, the editor of Ancillary Review of Books, kickstarted the latest effort to push the Hugo Awards to include a translation category (Chris Barkley had tried this a few years before). Casella enlisted me and many other SFT critics and enthusiasts in the project, but the process is slow because the rules and requirements for adding a category to the Hugo Awards are apparently very stringent. Hopefully, this effort will, down the road, lead to a category that recognizes the wonderful work that translators do in bringing us SF from around the world.

JPG: What’s coming up next for you, and what are you currently working on?

RC: I’m excited to continue publishing Small Planet and roping in people from all over the world to write for it. I also have ideas for at least three more books, one of which will be about the history of SFT in the Anglophone world. Hopefully I can also translate much more of Clelia’s work because Anglophone readers really do need more of her stories—they are intriguing, unexpected, and beautiful.

Rachel Cordasco

Rachel Cordasco founded the website SFinTranslation.com in 2016 and regularly reviews SFT for Strange Horizons and World Literature Today. She also translates Italian speculative fiction, which has been published in Clarkesworld Magazine and Future Science Fiction Digest. Rachel’s book Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation From the Cold War to the New Millennium is out from the University of Illinois Press. Her second book, Speculative Fiction in Translation From Around the World, is forthcoming from the University of Wales Press.

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

Rachel S. Cordasco, Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium (University of Illinois Press, 2021)

Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What was your initial attraction to works of science fiction in translation, and what made you decide to start reviewing them?

Rachel Cordasco: I started reviewing Anglophone science fiction for John DeNardo’s SF Signal in the mid-2010s. One day, he asked if I’d like to review a work of Chinese science fiction in translation—The Three-Body Problem. I jumped at the chance and absolutely loved that book. But it was only when he then sent me Jacek Dukaj’s The Old Axolotl and Marek Huberath’s Nest of Worlds that I actually started thinking about what it meant that these texts were all translated. I had never thought about where science fiction was written, and I realized that, of course, it was written around the world. This led me to think about what other works of science fiction there were in English translation. I started a list on a personal blog, and before I knew it, I had found dozens of titles. Ten years later, I’ve catalogued thousands of short-form and long-form works of SF in translation. I’ve always loved learning other languages and I read a lot of classics in English translation when I was a teenager, so bringing together two of my favorite things—speculative fiction and translation—made so much sense. I started asking John to send me as much SFT (science fiction in translation) as he could, and then, when SF Signal shut down, I started my own site dedicated to SFT.

JPG: In the ten years since founding https://www.sfintranslation.com/ what are some of the most interesting things that you’ve learned, and some of the biggest gaps in the field that you’ve identified?

RC: One of the most surprising things I learned is that there is so much SFT out there. Early science fiction texts, especially from Western Europe in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, were being translated into English very quickly (though apparently not very accurately, in some cases, ahem ahem Jules Verne’s stories). When you start looking into the speculative novels, anthologies, and collections that were published in translation throughout the 20th century, you find that so many of these books just flew under the radar or went out of print quickly. This process of finding and cataloging as much SFT as I can is basically my way of excavating items that aren’t buried but just hidden in plain sight.

I’ve learned that Japanese science fiction developed at warp speed following the American occupation of the island following World War Two; I’ve learned that giants of American golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon wrote introductions to anthologies of Russian science fiction at the height of the Cold War; and I’ve learned that, despite the fact that so much speculative fiction has been translated into English, the Anglophone genre world has mostly (except for the 70s and 80s) ignored SFT…until recently. Hopefully, the tide is shifting once again toward SFT and more speculative fiction readers will learn about what people are writing and thinking about around the world.

JPG: You wrote the book on SF in Translation, Out of this World. What did this process look like for you, and why did you decide to go with University of Illinois Press as your publisher rather than an SF publisher? 

RC: I realized, after working on the site for several years, that it was time to write an annotated bibliography of SFT, à la Neil Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder books. I had just finished reading Dale Knickerbocker’s excellent edited anthology about global science fiction, Lingua Cosmica, and asked for his advice regarding my own book idea. He suggested the University of Illinois Press, which had published Lingua Cosmica, so I sent them a proposal, which they accepted. Instead of an annotated bibliography, though, Illinois wanted me to develop each source language chapter into a full-blown essay. Ultimately, this worked out well, because it gave me the opportunity to offer readers analysis and context for each chapter that might otherwise have been left out. Illinois was great to work with, and, as I mentioned in my previous answer, the speculative fiction world mostly ignores SFT, so I don’t really know if, back in 2019, any SF publisher would have even looked twice at my proposal.

JPG: What are your motivations behind starting Small Planet magazine, and what are your plans for its future?

RC: The idea for a magazine had been kicking around in my brain for a year, and one day earlier this year, while working on a review, I just couldn’t wait anymore. The magazine had to happen! I want to read and learn about so many aspects of SFT, but as one person, I simply don’t have the time or energy to take on more than one or two projects at a time. A magazine, I figured, would be my selfish way of enlisting all of the brilliant people out there, who I knew were already writing about SFT, to write about it…for me! I had all of these ideas about interviewing translators and finding people who would write essays on Polish fantasy or French horror or Japanese surrealism and enlisting people to review underappreciated SFT. All I had to do was put the word out that I wanted to start an SFT magazine and so many wonderful people jumped on board right away, offering to design, write, edit, interview, and help in any other way they could. I want this magazine to be the Locus of the SFT world, providing readers with a steady stream of interesting essays, interviews, reviews, stats, and more.

Rachel Cordasco, ed., Small Planet Issue 1 (May 2026)

JPG: What do you think are some of the most effective ways that readers and the public can motivate publishers to publish more works of SF in translation? 

RC: One major way to encourage publishers to bring us more SFT is for readers to buy more of it. And yet, an interesting thing I learned recently is that a lot of SFT doesn’t even come from speculative fiction publishers. In fact, New Directions, which focuses on international literature, published more SFT in the last few years than any genre publisher. To make matters even more interesting, the 90 works of long-form SFT last year came out from 60 different publishers/imprints. Ultimately, I’m waiting for SF publishers to start dedicating more of their resources to SFT and acknowledge that these stories, told all over the world and in many different languages, are all part of the same effort: humanity trying to understand itself and its place in the cosmos.

JPG: For you, what are some of the most important aspects of cross-cultural exchange through literature?

RC: One of the most exciting things I’ve discovered while reading SFT is that writers from all over the world will take up the same theme or event or technology and explore them in fascinatingly similar and different ways. I started tracking this on my site (under the tab “Subject Index”) and I’m going to delve deeper into this in the magazine with a special column in each issue called “Crossing Borders.” Cloning in Greek and Spanish SFT, vampires in Hungarian and Swahili SFT, monstrous mothers in Hebrew and Japanese SFT—I find this stuff thrilling! You’ll hear this discussed whenever two or more literary translators are together in one space—reading what others around the world have written is how we deepen and enrich human civilization. Anglophone culture and language is rejuvenated when it comes into contact with other cultures and languages. We learn from one another, celebrate our differences, and learn about our surprising similarities. After all, one would hope that, if aliens do swing by Earth for a tour one day, they’ll see that, on this one small planet, we actually have a working knowledge of one another. It would be pretty embarrassing otherwise, right?

JPG: What are the top 5 SF books that you’d like to see translated?

RC: As always, I’m keeping a list! In no particular order…

– the rest of Élisabeth Vonarburg’s Tyranaël series (1997) (Mon frère l’ombre, L’Autre Rivage, and La Mer allée avec le soleil)

– Cheon Seon-ran’s A Broken Bridge (2019)

– Harry Mulisch’s The Future of Yesterday (1972)

– Shimon Adaf’s Rose of Judea series (2010-2012)

– Gilda Musa’s Domesticated Jungle (1975)

JPG: What are some of the greatest challenges you face when working as a translator, and are any of these specific to SF?

RC: A professional translator would be better able to speak to this question, but as someone who has translated several short- and long-form works for various Italian authors, especially the brilliant Clelia Farris, I can say that trying to capture the author’s tone and style while trying to make my translation read well is always challenging. It’s the nature of translation—making choices about how a word or phrase gets brought over into English. Working with Clelia on my translations is always fun because we get to discuss, for instance, exactly how certain sayings would best translate across languages. In fact, in this most recent issue of Small Planet, Clelia has an essay in which she describes some of the choices we had to make when I was translating her story “Gabola,” like turning the literal translation “you don’t get out much” into the more emotionally accurate “you’re behind the times.”

In terms of translating SF specifically, working on Clelia’s novella Veg-humans was more difficult than anything else I’d translated before because this is a story that includes a wide variety of plant species and technologies the characters use to try and survive the punishing heat of a near-future world that is being swallowed up by drought. Finding the words in English to reflect Clelia’s terms for these things was challenging, but we worked patiently together to find what sounded best.

JPG: Can you tell us about the push to get works in translation as a category for the Hugo Awards, and your work with https://translatedhugo.org? 

RC: Jake Casella Brookins, the editor of Ancillary Review of Books, kickstarted the latest effort to push the Hugo Awards to include a translation category (Chris Barkley had tried this a few years before). Casella enlisted me and many other SFT critics and enthusiasts in the project, but the process is slow because the rules and requirements for adding a category to the Hugo Awards are apparently very stringent. Hopefully, this effort will, down the road, lead to a category that recognizes the wonderful work that translators do in bringing us SF from around the world.

JPG: What’s coming up next for you, and what are you currently working on?

RC: I’m excited to continue publishing Small Planet and roping in people from all over the world to write for it. I also have ideas for at least three more books, one of which will be about the history of SFT in the Anglophone world. Hopefully I can also translate much more of Clelia’s work because Anglophone readers really do need more of her stories—they are intriguing, unexpected, and beautiful.

Rachel Cordasco

Rachel Cordasco founded the website SFinTranslation.com in 2016 and regularly reviews SFT for Strange Horizons and World Literature Today. She also translates Italian speculative fiction, which has been published in Clarkesworld Magazine and Future Science Fiction Digest. Rachel’s book Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation From the Cold War to the New Millennium is out from the University of Illinois Press. Her second book, Speculative Fiction in Translation From Around the World, is forthcoming from the University of Wales Press.

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

Applied African SF book is out now! It is available to share and download at bit.ly/AppliedAfricanSF.

Produced in collaboration with Vector.

Applied African SF book is out now! It is available to share and download at bit.ly/AppliedAfricanSF.

Produced in collaboration with Vector.

Introduction by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram

When we started thinking about the call for articles last year, we wanted to approach it in a Zoefuturistic manner – by giving space and creating opportunities for the issue(s) and articles to ‘become.’ As a new topic, we were very aware that this is a process of exploration and discovery, more than a call to enforce and curate what we think Zoefuturism is. It needed to be reflective and malleable. 

In this article, we will look at three of these creative reflections of Zoefuturism through different lenses: 

• Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community Co-Directorate
• Station to Station by Goblin Futures
• “Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism” by Christopher Morrison

While all three pieces explore very different topics and perspectives, they are all reflections of Zoefuturism through practitioners’ creative action, and they form a Zoefuturistic response, as reactions to the introduction of Zoefuturism, playing with the ideas of our futures through relationality and constant becomings.

Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC). This creative-critical submission, in the form of a full zine, was made by the co-directorate of the LSFRC to explore questions around the relationships between humans with the other-than-human through the idea of “compost,” inspired by Zoefuturism. Follow the link to read and explore the articles and artworks, and to learn how co-authoring a zine with nature turned out.

Station to Station by Goblin Futures (https://goblin-futures.itch.io/station-to-station). 

A fishpunk game: Station to Station

*Fishpunk is something we made up, not a pre-existing genre. In other words, Station to Station is fishpunk, and anything else people want to consider fishpunk they can, just as long as it is Approved By Fish.

**Weirdhope is a term coined by COPY/PASTE CO-OP, which they describe as a form of eco-punk that is stylistically and thematically opposed to grimdark. For more, you can check out their game ECO MOFOS!! or the webpage for the Weird Hope Engines exhibition that ran in the Bonington Gallery in 2025.

Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism

By Christopher Morrison

In the West[1] there is one story structure primarily taught to readers and practitioners alike. The Aristotelean 3-Act Structure/The Hero’s Journey. I’m well aware that’s two structures, but they are so inter-linked now as to be extensions of one another. And, most importantly, they share a core philosophical purpose. That purpose: re-enforce Heroic Individualism. The Protagonist must be the one to solve the problem. They, and only THEY. Some assistance is rendered along the way, but in the climax, it is them and them alone (usually smashing) their way to the end. And that end as a teleological conclusion forgives (or ignores) all things that came before.

Anything else is considered a “subversion of” or “breaking the rules”. But, as Matthew Salsess  asks, “Who writes those rules?” (Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. New York: Catapult, 2021.) It is the dominant culture in the West. Patriarchal, white supremacist[2], heteronormative. Those values that hold up a human being… all at once illustrating the protagonist as special and the norm. The story’s purpose is to make them a static, fixed Hero.

So, if this structure serves to support the Culture of Being in the West, what structures could support a culture of Becoming from Asian Cultures not shackled to the mast of Individualism?[3] What structures could a writer creating in a Zoefuturist context rely on to illustrate Human Becoming and relieve their woes about what comes next in their story?

Taking a cue from the absolute basic root of Dr. Ames’ work and the language he is immersed in, let’s look at ShengSheng (生生) – Procreativity. This word Dr. Ames presents as a crucial part of the early Cosmology of Confucian thought[4] and gives us a perfect jumping-off point:  

Repetition.

We all understand one of the crushing features of humanity is the repetition of life. Buddhism tackles this issue with the simple mantra: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” The road to human becoming must run directly through repetition just as the word and pictogram in Chinese suggests in its very form.

However, the West abhors repetition[5] (except in cases of utter personal sacrifice to the destruction of oneself[6]) and worships at the feet of novelty.
New or perish! You are only as good as your last ____!

Yet repetition itself holds true meaning-making. True becoming. But in Western storytelling it’s relegated to a “callback” or some “comment” on one form or another and not the core engine to drive story and meaning.

Let’s explore a few structures where repetition is the heart and engine of its purpose.

Spirals: first brought to my attention through the work of Jane Alison.[7] Humans are pattern recognition machines, therefore to create a literary or dramatic spiral one repeats meaning by bringing back a panoply of artistic resources. Place, character(s), theme(s), color, etc. Most powerful in the resource kit is repeating events in your story. What one may lose in novelty one gains in grounding your audience – their pattern recognition (and their simple act of becoming themselves – living life) brings the repetition to awareness and, if done well, the question – Why? Why repeat this now? Here? Or the repetition simply becomes the Breath of the narrative. Inhaling on return – exhaling on leaving – or vice versa. It is a structure that is close to life itself.

While not a Zoefuturist film, let’s look at Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, dir. In the Mood for Love. Block 2 Pictures, 2000). A love story where its lovers are not allowed to consummate their love… or even say the word to each other. They are married to others while falling in love with each other. It is primarily a Spiral of place. Hallway, stairway, alleyway. All intermediate places – not defined. Not of themselves, but conduits to other locations. Perfect locations for a relationship that isn’t formed – isn’t one or the other. The characters are also suspended; neither really married nor free; not in love, but in love. Repetitions of their own conditions. The continuous use of smoke as a repeated image in the film is powerful. Sure, it looks damn cool, but it’s neither solid nor liquid. Neither here nor there… just slowly looping around itself and evaporating. Repeating. Spiraling.

Next, we’ll look at ‘nested’ structure.

Mainly known from the 1001 Arabian Nights and the film Rashomon. Nested stories are stories-within-stories without being anthology or connected episodic in nature. Story layers. Characters may re-appear, settings may re-appear[8] but what certainly repeats is theme and/or a central question or as Henry Lien likes to point out: culture[9].

Again, here’s a structure that reflects life’s journey. We are stories-within-stories. We hold our story, our family’s story, we are minor or major characters in everyone’s stories that surround us. And other’s stories can affect us directly or indirectly if we appear in them or not. As Dr. Ames points out through Zoetological philosophy we are “…interdependent human ‘becomings’ rather than discreet human beings… [through a relational understanding].[10]”

Nested structure allows writers to sift through the depth of our humanity all in one frame. The flow of this structure is the essence of interconnected ‘becoming’. Again, like life, the more we lift the lid and interact with the depths and layers underneath the more meaning and interconnectedness we experience.

In conclusion, ‘spiral’ and ‘nested’ narrative structures are available to writers of every form and genre, but are especially powerful in a Zoetological and/or Zoefuturist context. They allow for a direct reflection into the bones of the work and to elevate stories from a single individualist journey into the wider world-view of human becomings. By leaving behind the strictures of Western storytelling obsessions we can imagine and enact a more interconnected future.

[1] Excluding Indigenous cultures.

[2] Colonial, at best.

[3] This is where I’ll ask you to forgive me. I’m a practitioner and not a scholar, perhaps others have done this work – I look forward to hearing about them if so… Henry Lien’s work comes to mind.

[4] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.

[5] To the point: In an early screenwriting class the “wisdom” of never repeating a location was handed down to me. (This was the working philosophy of a high-powered producer and their thoughts on scriptwriting.)

[6] Puritan work ethic for example. Or (especially for women) the carer role taken to its extreme… it is lauded and pitied and ridiculed all at once.

[7] Alison, J. (2019). Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (p. 143). Catapult.

[8] Or remain the same as with Rashomon.

[9] Lien, H. (2025). Spring, summer, asteroid, bird: The art of Eastern storytelling (1st ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

[10] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.

Introduction by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram

When we started thinking about the call for articles last year, we wanted to approach it in a Zoefuturistic manner – by giving space and creating opportunities for the issue(s) and articles to ‘become.’ As a new topic, we were very aware that this is a process of exploration and discovery, more than a call to enforce and curate what we think Zoefuturism is. It needed to be reflective and malleable. 

In this article, we will look at three of these creative reflections of Zoefuturism through different lenses: 

• Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community Co-Directorate
• Station to Station by Goblin Futures
• “Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism” by Christopher Morrison

While all three pieces explore very different topics and perspectives, they are all reflections of Zoefuturism through practitioners’ creative action, and they form a Zoefuturistic response, as reactions to the introduction of Zoefuturism, playing with the ideas of our futures through relationality and constant becomings.

Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC). This creative-critical submission, in the form of a full zine, was made by the co-directorate of the LSFRC to explore questions around the relationships between humans with the other-than-human through the idea of “compost,” inspired by Zoefuturism. Follow the link to read and explore the articles and artworks, and to learn how co-authoring a zine with nature turned out.

Station to Station by Goblin Futures (https://goblin-futures.itch.io/station-to-station). 

A fishpunk game: Station to Station

*Fishpunk is something we made up, not a pre-existing genre. In other words, Station to Station is fishpunk, and anything else people want to consider fishpunk they can, just as long as it is Approved By Fish.

**Weirdhope is a term coined by COPY/PASTE CO-OP, which they describe as a form of eco-punk that is stylistically and thematically opposed to grimdark. For more, you can check out their game ECO MOFOS!! or the webpage for the Weird Hope Engines exhibition that ran in the Bonington Gallery in 2025.

Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism

By Christopher Morrison

In the West[1] there is one story structure primarily taught to readers and practitioners alike. The Aristotelean 3-Act Structure/The Hero’s Journey. I’m well aware that’s two structures, but they are so inter-linked now as to be extensions of one another. And, most importantly, they share a core philosophical purpose. That purpose: re-enforce Heroic Individualism. The Protagonist must be the one to solve the problem. They, and only THEY. Some assistance is rendered along the way, but in the climax, it is them and them alone (usually smashing) their way to the end. And that end as a teleological conclusion forgives (or ignores) all things that came before.

Anything else is considered a “subversion of” or “breaking the rules”. But, as Matthew Salsess  asks, “Who writes those rules?” (Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. New York: Catapult, 2021.) It is the dominant culture in the West. Patriarchal, white supremacist[2], heteronormative. Those values that hold up a human being… all at once illustrating the protagonist as special and the norm. The story’s purpose is to make them a static, fixed Hero.

So, if this structure serves to support the Culture of Being in the West, what structures could support a culture of Becoming from Asian Cultures not shackled to the mast of Individualism?[3] What structures could a writer creating in a Zoefuturist context rely on to illustrate Human Becoming and relieve their woes about what comes next in their story?

Taking a cue from the absolute basic root of Dr. Ames’ work and the language he is immersed in, let’s look at ShengSheng (生生) – Procreativity. This word Dr. Ames presents as a crucial part of the early Cosmology of Confucian thought[4] and gives us a perfect jumping-off point:  

Repetition.

We all understand one of the crushing features of humanity is the repetition of life. Buddhism tackles this issue with the simple mantra: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” The road to human becoming must run directly through repetition just as the word and pictogram in Chinese suggests in its very form.

However, the West abhors repetition[5] (except in cases of utter personal sacrifice to the destruction of oneself[6]) and worships at the feet of novelty.
New or perish! You are only as good as your last ____!

Yet repetition itself holds true meaning-making. True becoming. But in Western storytelling it’s relegated to a “callback” or some “comment” on one form or another and not the core engine to drive story and meaning.

Let’s explore a few structures where repetition is the heart and engine of its purpose.

Spirals: first brought to my attention through the work of Jane Alison.[7] Humans are pattern recognition machines, therefore to create a literary or dramatic spiral one repeats meaning by bringing back a panoply of artistic resources. Place, character(s), theme(s), color, etc. Most powerful in the resource kit is repeating events in your story. What one may lose in novelty one gains in grounding your audience – their pattern recognition (and their simple act of becoming themselves – living life) brings the repetition to awareness and, if done well, the question – Why? Why repeat this now? Here? Or the repetition simply becomes the Breath of the narrative. Inhaling on return – exhaling on leaving – or vice versa. It is a structure that is close to life itself.

While not a Zoefuturist film, let’s look at Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, dir. In the Mood for Love. Block 2 Pictures, 2000). A love story where its lovers are not allowed to consummate their love… or even say the word to each other. They are married to others while falling in love with each other. It is primarily a Spiral of place. Hallway, stairway, alleyway. All intermediate places – not defined. Not of themselves, but conduits to other locations. Perfect locations for a relationship that isn’t formed – isn’t one or the other. The characters are also suspended; neither really married nor free; not in love, but in love. Repetitions of their own conditions. The continuous use of smoke as a repeated image in the film is powerful. Sure, it looks damn cool, but it’s neither solid nor liquid. Neither here nor there… just slowly looping around itself and evaporating. Repeating. Spiraling.

Next, we’ll look at ‘nested’ structure.

Mainly known from the 1001 Arabian Nights and the film Rashomon. Nested stories are stories-within-stories without being anthology or connected episodic in nature. Story layers. Characters may re-appear, settings may re-appear[8] but what certainly repeats is theme and/or a central question or as Henry Lien likes to point out: culture[9].

Again, here’s a structure that reflects life’s journey. We are stories-within-stories. We hold our story, our family’s story, we are minor or major characters in everyone’s stories that surround us. And other’s stories can affect us directly or indirectly if we appear in them or not. As Dr. Ames points out through Zoetological philosophy we are “…interdependent human ‘becomings’ rather than discreet human beings… [through a relational understanding].[10]”

Nested structure allows writers to sift through the depth of our humanity all in one frame. The flow of this structure is the essence of interconnected ‘becoming’. Again, like life, the more we lift the lid and interact with the depths and layers underneath the more meaning and interconnectedness we experience.

In conclusion, ‘spiral’ and ‘nested’ narrative structures are available to writers of every form and genre, but are especially powerful in a Zoetological and/or Zoefuturist context. They allow for a direct reflection into the bones of the work and to elevate stories from a single individualist journey into the wider world-view of human becomings. By leaving behind the strictures of Western storytelling obsessions we can imagine and enact a more interconnected future.

[1] Excluding Indigenous cultures.

[2] Colonial, at best.

[3] This is where I’ll ask you to forgive me. I’m a practitioner and not a scholar, perhaps others have done this work – I look forward to hearing about them if so… Henry Lien’s work comes to mind.

[4] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.

[5] To the point: In an early screenwriting class the “wisdom” of never repeating a location was handed down to me. (This was the working philosophy of a high-powered producer and their thoughts on scriptwriting.)

[6] Puritan work ethic for example. Or (especially for women) the carer role taken to its extreme… it is lauded and pitied and ridiculed all at once.

[7] Alison, J. (2019). Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (p. 143). Catapult.

[8] Or remain the same as with Rashomon.

[9] Lien, H. (2025). Spring, summer, asteroid, bird: The art of Eastern storytelling (1st ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

[10] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.

By Kiti McGlashan

As meaning-seeking beings, we live in alternating cycles of embracing or fearing the natural world. Literature offers a good framework for observing this ancient and ongoing ‘battle’ for the human spirit between the manifestation of our reverence and stewardship of nature and our fear of something that could so easily kill us.  As industrialisation moved us further away from nature, and humans started living almost completely dis-attached from the natural world, we saw a resurgence of the need to find belonging in the greater order. The last two hundred years have presented a shift in our attitudes towards our surroundings and an influx of philosophies and literature that try to reconnect humans with nature.

Environmentalism has clearly entered the focus of modern worries, but it often presents shortsighted forms that ignore the bigger picture. By focusing on the more immediate and visible concerns, environmental campaigns often prioritise narrow objectives while overlooking the negative structural downside of some of the green politics (e.g. “green colonialism). The climate crisis and the development of the Anthropocene as a theoretical background for our concerns are lacking in a holistic outlook of reality and often showcase similar dangers as our previous attitudes towards the natural world. While there is a rising concern about the land, it is through an anthropocentric point of view. As long as we keep seeing ourselves as separate to the non-human lifeworld, we will live incomplete existences, and our solutions will be forever lacking. What is needed is “a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings’” (Ooi, n.d.). And this reflection on the need for interconnectedness has recently been championed by new subgenres of science fiction.

Storytelling has always been a mirror to the soul of humanity. It focuses the collective emotions and concerns in a metaphorical and philosophical format that offers more than simple escapism. Up until now, science fiction in particular has offered the best platform where the concerns of our present and future are laid out in the format of cautionary tales of how our environmental damage leads to post-apocalyptic scenarios. There are countless examples of stories focused on ecological collapse such as The First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon that explores humanity’s eventual extinction, the dystopian future of Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky where humanity is almost extinct and earth ravaged by radiation, The Road by Cormac McCarthy that is set in a post-apocalyptic setting following a cataclysmic event, the grimdark world of the Warhammer 40K universe where after the AI wars mankind is plummeted into a dark universe of chaos and death. These are just some examples out of a very vast body of literature which express the climate anxiety our society feels.

It is distressing to see that today we have a medically recognised definition for our dis-connection from nature. Solastagia “is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment” (Albrecht, et al, 2007). The powerlessness to prevent environmental change and the crisis of being cut out from nature is leading to a whole generation of young people thinking they won’t survive to old age. People are refusing to have children because they think they wouldn’t survive the impending environmental catastrophe (Carrington, 2020). This is reflected in most of the existing science fiction literature which provides a very gloomy outlook for humanity’s future, diminishing hope and increasing ‘dis-ease’. While the devastation inflicted on Earth is almost catastrophic, it isn’t irreparable as long as we take steps in the right direction. 

However, there is a shift in the current science fiction scene and the philosophical aspects surrounding it that reflect a discontent with the present pessimism by advocating for hope and optimism. Many genres have emerged that claim to break the connection of science fiction’s prevalent dystopian pessimism by advocating for a sustainable future where man and nature are connected. Solarpunk, Hopepunk, and other subgenres offer an outlook of how humanity can achieve a utopic existence connected to nature. Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, the Star Trek universe, the worlds of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, all present a better future: one in which environmental crisis isn’t inevitable. 

The main criticism of these genres is the fact that they generally still tend to be human-centric, and in a way they are another expression of post-apocalyptic literature. The change that rekindles our interconnectedness to nature cannot be achieved by placing man at the centre of reality, be it fictive or real. Even if European culture is acknowledging its spiritual and environmental challenges, the damage done by over two millennia of our thinking being moulded by Socratic, Platonic, and Christian philosophy has shaped our mindset in a way that is hard to come back from.

The most positive and holistic framework present today is seen in a recent philosophy that echoes the spirit of old nature belief systems like Animism or the modern philosophical outlooks that merges biology with a nature-oriented philosophy like the Biophilia Hypothesis (Keller, S. R., & Wilson, E. O.,1993). By offering an exploration in a way of thinking that is holistic and drives our intrinsic curiosity as a species towards a new frontier of interconnectedness, Zoefuturism, an outlook proposed by writer and researcher Yen Ooi which “explores the reality of human nature as human ‘becomings’ (instead of ‘beings’) where constant change rooted in all nature is acknowledged as fundamental to living”. Inspired by East Asian philosophy, “Zoefuturism doesn’t belong within one culture or philosophy.” In a way, it is the link between European Animism and ancient Chinese philosophy, as well as Japanese Shintoism. Zoefuturism presents a great framework for observing the similarities between different cultures. We all get lost in the elaboration of our faiths and philosophies but if you take away the embellishments underneath there is a shared connectivity between all of humanity.

At the core of the philosophy of the Chinese Book of Changes, also known as I Ching or Yijing, is constant change. Life is defined by its impermanence, and this concept is of key importance in Eastern spiritual traditions. By addressing human finitude, our difficulty of making sense of our surroundings without a set of symbols, the Book of Changes “aims to alleviate our self-inflicted anxiety and agony” (n.a., 2020) by reminding us of our limited ability to know our surroundings and offering a system of symbols to navigate the unknowable nature of our world.” Zoefuturism echoes the philosophy of harmony of the Book of Changes, which advocates the need for self-realisation and accepting one’s position within the flow of change of birth, life, and death. In these philosophies humans become part of nature rather than apart from it. Only by aligning ourselves with the natural order can we find peace.

This way of thinking is also the core of Shintoism which recognises “the destructive aspect of nature, deeming it necessary to keep the balance and control over its growth on earth.” The origin myths of societies all over the globe reflect the dual aspect of awe and fear that nature inspires. Disasters are accepted as part of reality. Volcanoes make the soil more fertile by imbuing it with minerals and metals. Aokigahara, the legendary forest at the base of Mt. Fuji, is a “lush and mysterious landscape [that] emerged following the last major eruption of the volcano in the 9th century” (Staughton 2023). Floods replenish the groundwater, enrich the soil, and create new habitats. Nothing in nature is black and white. Only by adopting a better understanding of the interconnectedness of reality—which the West has mostly forgotten but that is still alive in East Asian thinking — can we hope to achieve a living version of utopia.

As Ooi argues, “we are made through all the interactions we have with our world, conscious and unconscious, purposefully and not, intangible and tangible. These interactions constantly shape us and our world through changes and ‘life-becomings.” If we acknowledge our place in the natural world, our disenchantment will end. 

Even the most idyllic science fiction needs to rethink how it envisions our future. We need to break away from the centrality of humans in our thinking. Without finding balance between us and nature, without breaking from the human-centric mindset, even the most optimistic visions of imagined futures risk falling in the same pitfall of imbalance which has distanced and isolated us from nature. 

Our dreams should be the trailblazer to a future where we break our isolation from the natural world.

Sources

Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry: Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, 15 Suppl 1, S95-98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288

Abraham, D. (2017). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage Book.

Armstrong, K. (2014). Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Vintage.

Carrington, D., & editor, D. C. E. (2020, November 27). Climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children – study. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/climate-apocalypse-fears-stopping-people-having-children-study

Climate Anxiety | Harvard Medicine Magazine. (n.d.). Retrieved 30 July 2025, from https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/climate-anxiety

Harvard University Education. Gaia Hypothesis. https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Gaia/Gaia-hypothesis-wikipedia.pdf

Hon, T.-K. (2024). Chinese Philosophy of Change (Yijing). In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/chinese-change/

n.a. (2020). How Shinto Philosophy can Bring us Closer to Nature. The Orbital. https://theorbital.co.uk/how-shinto-philosophy-can-bring-us-closer-to-nature/

Kang Wolter, H. (n.d.). Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, and the ‘Environmental Message’. The Cambridge Language Collective. Retrieved 30 July 2025, from https://www.thecambridgelanguagecollective.com/asia/hayao-miyazaki-studio-ghibli-and-the-environmental-message

Keller, S. R., & Wilson, E. O. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis (1st ed.). Island Press.

Schmidt, C. (n.d.). Climate Anxiety | Harvard Medicine Magazine. Retrieved 30 July 2025, from https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/climate-anxiety

Staughton, J. (2019). Why Is Volcanic Soil So Fertile? ScienceABC. https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/why-is-volcanic-soil-so-fertile.html

Park, S.-H., & Mattson, R. H. (2009). Ornamental indoor plants in hospital rooms enhanced health outcomes of patients recovering from surgery. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (New York, N.Y.), 15(9), 975–980. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2009.0075

Ooi, Y. (n.d.). Zoefuturism. Retrieved 31 July 2025, from https://www.yenooi.com/zoefuturism

Tuppan, L. (2022, June 27). Animism. The Rune-Gild Europe. https://rune-gild-europe.org/magic/animism/

Wilson, O. R. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press.

By Kiti McGlashan

As meaning-seeking beings, we live in alternating cycles of embracing or fearing the natural world. Literature offers a good framework for observing this ancient and ongoing ‘battle’ for the human spirit between the manifestation of our reverence and stewardship of nature and our fear of something that could so easily kill us.  As industrialisation moved us further away from nature, and humans started living almost completely dis-attached from the natural world, we saw a resurgence of the need to find belonging in the greater order. The last two hundred years have presented a shift in our attitudes towards our surroundings and an influx of philosophies and literature that try to reconnect humans with nature.

Environmentalism has clearly entered the focus of modern worries, but it often presents shortsighted forms that ignore the bigger picture. By focusing on the more immediate and visible concerns, environmental campaigns often prioritise narrow objectives while overlooking the negative structural downside of some of the green politics (e.g. “green colonialism). The climate crisis and the development of the Anthropocene as a theoretical background for our concerns are lacking in a holistic outlook of reality and often showcase similar dangers as our previous attitudes towards the natural world. While there is a rising concern about the land, it is through an anthropocentric point of view. As long as we keep seeing ourselves as separate to the non-human lifeworld, we will live incomplete existences, and our solutions will be forever lacking. What is needed is “a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings’” (Ooi, n.d.). And this reflection on the need for interconnectedness has recently been championed by new subgenres of science fiction.

Storytelling has always been a mirror to the soul of humanity. It focuses the collective emotions and concerns in a metaphorical and philosophical format that offers more than simple escapism. Up until now, science fiction in particular has offered the best platform where the concerns of our present and future are laid out in the format of cautionary tales of how our environmental damage leads to post-apocalyptic scenarios. There are countless examples of stories focused on ecological collapse such as The First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon that explores humanity’s eventual extinction, the dystopian future of Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky where humanity is almost extinct and earth ravaged by radiation, The Road by Cormac McCarthy that is set in a post-apocalyptic setting following a cataclysmic event, the grimdark world of the Warhammer 40K universe where after the AI wars mankind is plummeted into a dark universe of chaos and death. These are just some examples out of a very vast body of literature which express the climate anxiety our society feels.

It is distressing to see that today we have a medically recognised definition for our dis-connection from nature. Solastagia “is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment” (Albrecht, et al, 2007). The powerlessness to prevent environmental change and the crisis of being cut out from nature is leading to a whole generation of young people thinking they won’t survive to old age. People are refusing to have children because they think they wouldn’t survive the impending environmental catastrophe (Carrington, 2020). This is reflected in most of the existing science fiction literature which provides a very gloomy outlook for humanity’s future, diminishing hope and increasing ‘dis-ease’. While the devastation inflicted on Earth is almost catastrophic, it isn’t irreparable as long as we take steps in the right direction. 

However, there is a shift in the current science fiction scene and the philosophical aspects surrounding it that reflect a discontent with the present pessimism by advocating for hope and optimism. Many genres have emerged that claim to break the connection of science fiction’s prevalent dystopian pessimism by advocating for a sustainable future where man and nature are connected. Solarpunk, Hopepunk, and other subgenres offer an outlook of how humanity can achieve a utopic existence connected to nature. Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, the Star Trek universe, the worlds of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, all present a better future: one in which environmental crisis isn’t inevitable. 

The main criticism of these genres is the fact that they generally still tend to be human-centric, and in a way they are another expression of post-apocalyptic literature. The change that rekindles our interconnectedness to nature cannot be achieved by placing man at the centre of reality, be it fictive or real. Even if European culture is acknowledging its spiritual and environmental challenges, the damage done by over two millennia of our thinking being moulded by Socratic, Platonic, and Christian philosophy has shaped our mindset in a way that is hard to come back from.

The most positive and holistic framework present today is seen in a recent philosophy that echoes the spirit of old nature belief systems like Animism or the modern philosophical outlooks that merges biology with a nature-oriented philosophy like the Biophilia Hypothesis (Keller, S. R., & Wilson, E. O.,1993). By offering an exploration in a way of thinking that is holistic and drives our intrinsic curiosity as a species towards a new frontier of interconnectedness, Zoefuturism, an outlook proposed by writer and researcher Yen Ooi which “explores the reality of human nature as human ‘becomings’ (instead of ‘beings’) where constant change rooted in all nature is acknowledged as fundamental to living”. Inspired by East Asian philosophy, “Zoefuturism doesn’t belong within one culture or philosophy.” In a way, it is the link between European Animism and ancient Chinese philosophy, as well as Japanese Shintoism. Zoefuturism presents a great framework for observing the similarities between different cultures. We all get lost in the elaboration of our faiths and philosophies but if you take away the embellishments underneath there is a shared connectivity between all of humanity.

At the core of the philosophy of the Chinese Book of Changes, also known as I Ching or Yijing, is constant change. Life is defined by its impermanence, and this concept is of key importance in Eastern spiritual traditions. By addressing human finitude, our difficulty of making sense of our surroundings without a set of symbols, the Book of Changes “aims to alleviate our self-inflicted anxiety and agony” (n.a., 2020) by reminding us of our limited ability to know our surroundings and offering a system of symbols to navigate the unknowable nature of our world.” Zoefuturism echoes the philosophy of harmony of the Book of Changes, which advocates the need for self-realisation and accepting one’s position within the flow of change of birth, life, and death. In these philosophies humans become part of nature rather than apart from it. Only by aligning ourselves with the natural order can we find peace.

This way of thinking is also the core of Shintoism which recognises “the destructive aspect of nature, deeming it necessary to keep the balance and control over its growth on earth.” The origin myths of societies all over the globe reflect the dual aspect of awe and fear that nature inspires. Disasters are accepted as part of reality. Volcanoes make the soil more fertile by imbuing it with minerals and metals. Aokigahara, the legendary forest at the base of Mt. Fuji, is a “lush and mysterious landscape [that] emerged following the last major eruption of the volcano in the 9th century” (Staughton 2023). Floods replenish the groundwater, enrich the soil, and create new habitats. Nothing in nature is black and white. Only by adopting a better understanding of the interconnectedness of reality—which the West has mostly forgotten but that is still alive in East Asian thinking — can we hope to achieve a living version of utopia.

As Ooi argues, “we are made through all the interactions we have with our world, conscious and unconscious, purposefully and not, intangible and tangible. These interactions constantly shape us and our world through changes and ‘life-becomings.” If we acknowledge our place in the natural world, our disenchantment will end. 

Even the most idyllic science fiction needs to rethink how it envisions our future. We need to break away from the centrality of humans in our thinking. Without finding balance between us and nature, without breaking from the human-centric mindset, even the most optimistic visions of imagined futures risk falling in the same pitfall of imbalance which has distanced and isolated us from nature. 

Our dreams should be the trailblazer to a future where we break our isolation from the natural world.

Sources

Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry: Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, 15 Suppl 1, S95-98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288

Abraham, D. (2017). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage Book.

Armstrong, K. (2014). Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Vintage.

Carrington, D., & editor, D. C. E. (2020, November 27). Climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children – study. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/climate-apocalypse-fears-stopping-people-having-children-study

Climate Anxiety | Harvard Medicine Magazine. (n.d.). Retrieved 30 July 2025, from https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/climate-anxiety

Harvard University Education. Gaia Hypothesis. https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Gaia/Gaia-hypothesis-wikipedia.pdf

Hon, T.-K. (2024). Chinese Philosophy of Change (Yijing). In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/chinese-change/

n.a. (2020). How Shinto Philosophy can Bring us Closer to Nature. The Orbital. https://theorbital.co.uk/how-shinto-philosophy-can-bring-us-closer-to-nature/

Kang Wolter, H. (n.d.). Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, and the ‘Environmental Message’. The Cambridge Language Collective. Retrieved 30 July 2025, from https://www.thecambridgelanguagecollective.com/asia/hayao-miyazaki-studio-ghibli-and-the-environmental-message

Keller, S. R., & Wilson, E. O. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis (1st ed.). Island Press.

Schmidt, C. (n.d.). Climate Anxiety | Harvard Medicine Magazine. Retrieved 30 July 2025, from https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/climate-anxiety

Staughton, J. (2019). Why Is Volcanic Soil So Fertile? ScienceABC. https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/why-is-volcanic-soil-so-fertile.html

Park, S.-H., & Mattson, R. H. (2009). Ornamental indoor plants in hospital rooms enhanced health outcomes of patients recovering from surgery. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (New York, N.Y.), 15(9), 975–980. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2009.0075

Ooi, Y. (n.d.). Zoefuturism. Retrieved 31 July 2025, from https://www.yenooi.com/zoefuturism

Tuppan, L. (2022, June 27). Animism. The Rune-Gild Europe. https://rune-gild-europe.org/magic/animism/

Wilson, O. R. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press.

CfP Vector 304 – Play  The Three-Body Problem (Netflix, 2024)

Enfolding world-building, community-making, and problem solving, the act of play is itself a powerful act of speculation. It can offer entertainment or education. It encourages, or sometimes sidesteps, empathy. It draws attention to the ways that stories are constructed and how we experience them. 

In the context of video games, the recent announcement by Sony that it will halt production of physical game discs by 2028—and the attendant backlash from the gaming community—encourages us to think about physical vs. digital media and legacy access, and how economics factors into how we play, and for how long. Some games, like That Dragon, Cancer and The Final Exam, may barely be said to be ‘played’ at all: more experienced, and learned from. Play can inspire joy, flow states, immersion—or desolation. 

This special issue of Vector invites contributors to engage with the act of ‘play’ in its most expansive definition, including but not limited to: 

• Tabletop RPGs 
• Collectibles 
• Video games 
• VR/AR 
• Physical media 
• AI and game creation (backlash, adopters) 
• Educational games
• Citizen science games
• Gamification of labour
• Games in speculative fiction
• Games as forms of art or activism
• Affect 
• Materialist/new historicist readings  

Please submit your proposal by September 30th to vector.submissions@gmail.com, including:

• a 150-500 word proposal, including estimated length;
• something about yourself, either a 50-100 word bio or a CV.

Articles should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words. Please let us know your estimated word count. We seek articles that are carefully grounded in scholarly research, while also being clear, engaging, and suitable for a broad audience (including non-academics). Articles will be due by November 30th

Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats. 

CfP Vector 304 – Play  The Three-Body Problem (Netflix, 2024)

Enfolding world-building, community-making, and problem solving, the act of play is itself a powerful act of speculation. It can offer entertainment or education. It encourages, or sometimes sidesteps, empathy. It draws attention to the ways that stories are constructed and how we experience them. 

In the context of video games, the recent announcement by Sony that it will halt production of physical game discs by 2028—and the attendant backlash from the gaming community—encourages us to think about physical vs. digital media and legacy access, and how economics factors into how we play, and for how long. Some games, like That Dragon, Cancer and The Final Exam, may barely be said to be ‘played’ at all: more experienced, and learned from. Play can inspire joy, flow states, immersion—or desolation. 

This special issue of Vector invites contributors to engage with the act of ‘play’ in its most expansive definition, including but not limited to: 

• Tabletop RPGs 
• Collectibles 
• Video games 
• VR/AR 
• Physical media 
• AI and game creation (backlash, adopters) 
• Educational games
• Citizen science games
• Gamification of labour
• Games in speculative fiction
• Games as forms of art or activism
• Affect 
• Materialist/new historicist readings  

Please submit your proposal by September 30th to vector.submissions@gmail.com, including:

• a 150-500 word proposal, including estimated length;
• something about yourself, either a 50-100 word bio or a CV.

Articles should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words. Please let us know your estimated word count. We seek articles that are carefully grounded in scholarly research, while also being clear, engaging, and suitable for a broad audience (including non-academics). Articles will be due by November 30th

Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats. 

Dr. Patrick Anthony Barbosa Brock
CoFutures

What do we do when we talk about Zoefuturism? This essay argues that Zoefuturism and CoFuturisms are not merely aesthetic or speculative categories, but infrastructural practices of collective world-making. I propose a framework for understanding how these movements intervene in social imaginaries through genre formation, manifestos, and boundary-making practices, while also examining their material implications for the communities and infrastructures from which they emerge. To that end, I draw on my previous theorization of the role genre mechanics play in the formation of collectivities.

Although they are envisioned here as operationally connected, speculative fiction, CoFuturisms, and Zoefuturism should not be treated as interchangeable categories. Speculative fiction is a broad narrative mode oriented toward hypothetical worlds, alternative temporalities, and estrangement from consensus reality. CoFuturisms, by contrast, designate culturally situated interventions that mobilize speculative methods to contest dominant imaginaries and produce alternative social horizons. Zoefuturism differs from both in that its central organizing principle is relationality itself: an ontological emphasis on “interconnected becoming” across human, nonhuman, ecological, and material forms of life. Where speculative fiction often asks what futures might exist, and CoFuturisms ask who gets to imagine and inhabit those futures, Zoefuturism asks how forms of life become entangled in the production of futurity.

CoFuturisms as a conceptual umbrella emerged with the publication of the Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms and its survey of speculative works from the world’s periphery, many of which blur the boundaries between art and activism. Like the imaginaries from which they emerge, CoFuturisms are collective constructions shaped by forces operating at both macro and micro levels. As digital media theorist, poet, and software designer Jason Edward Lewis writes, they “create a field of ‘future facts,’ a fully realized reality that exists somewhere down the timeline, waiting for us to catch up to it” (11). More broadly, CoFuturisms often emerge through science fiction (SF) and speculative practices, commonly appropriating their methods, to critique dominant imaginaries and intervene micropolitically in the present. As science fiction scholar Taryne Jade Taylor observes, “CoFuturisms is a movement that is found both within science fiction and fantasy and also reaches past the boundaries of speculative fiction” (2023).

In conversation with the editors of this special issue, I was provided with the following conceptualization of Zoefuturism: “Zoefuturism as a genre is founded upon the understanding that all things are relational—where descriptors, characteristics, or even a sense of ‘being’ depend upon everything around them—and that everything is constantly becoming, much like our DNA. As such, Zoefuturism is not political.”

I interpret Zoefuturism as an attempt to articulate a relational understanding of the world that moves beyond binary frameworks by foregrounding becoming, interdependence, and ecological entanglement. Unlike many futurisms organized around identity, technological acceleration, or emancipatory struggle, Zoefuturism situates relationality itself as the condition of futurity. Its emphasis falls less on representing marginalized futures than on rethinking the ontological assumptions through which futures are imagined in the first place. Yet Zoefuturism cannot escape political implications simply by rejecting explicit political identification. Like CoFuturisms, it shapes how reality is narratively and institutionally organized through language, cultural production, archives, and the social imaginaries that orient collective life. Its politics emerge less through ideological declaration than through interventions into the conceptual and affective infrastructures governing how relations between life forms are understood.

These interventions occur through genre itself. Genres are not merely aesthetic containers but social formations circulating among texts, communities, markets, and institutions. Because genres organize recognition, expectation, and participation, they function as technologies of collective becoming. Speculative fiction provides many of the formal tools that make such interventions narratively intelligible, while CoFuturisms mobilize those tools toward situated cultural and political projects. Zoefuturism, in turn, redirects speculative practice toward relational ontologies that destabilize distinctions between nature and culture, subject and environment, and human and nonhuman life. 

Manifesting Worlds

CoFuturisms are intersectional movements that combine narrative, ethical reflection, and speculative world-building across diverse epistemological traditions. If SF is commonly described as a genre that imagines the future, CoFuturisms seek instead to reshape the present. They assemble heterogeneous archives, practices, and modes of creation into new frameworks for collective life. Unlike speculative fiction broadly conceived, CoFuturisms are defined less by narrative conventions than by situated interventions into historical asymmetries of power, visibility, and futurity.

Observing how SF practitioners in Northeast Brazil sought to intervene in the genre as an emancipatory act, and how similar processes appeared elsewhere, I termed this phenomenon genre genesis (Brock 2022). Genre genesis describes how creators reshape the symbolic foundations of a genre to construct new collectivities and modes of belonging. Writers from Brazil’s Northeast, for instance, responded to their inferiorized position within the national imagination by coining sertãopunk, a form of science fiction rooted in the region’s ecological and political realities.

Comparable acts of conceptual creation appear across multiple CoFuturist contexts. Examples include Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturism, the Afropantheology developed by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga, Scott Russel Duncan’s Xicanxfuturism, and forms of Andean Futurism developed by Peruvian SF writers. These practices do more than produce new literary categories; they reshape the infrastructures through which speculative thinking circulates and acquires legitimacy. Zoefuturism operates through similar mechanisms, though with a distinctive emphasis on relationality as both method and ontology rather than primarily identity, territory, or historical exclusion. Fundamentally, they are creations that beget further creations, becoming self-replicating or generative through the interplay of individual agency and collective effort.

Furthermore, I believe that three interconnected processes help explain how these movements function: the pedagogical qualities of SF and speculative thinking; the interventionist tradition of manifestos; the mobilizing role of genres as boundary objects.

a) The pedagogical qualities of SF and speculative thinking

Speculative thinking includes counterfactual reasoning, prefactual thinking, the processing of spatial and temporal asymmetries, and the ability to distinguish between perceived reality and hypothetical scenarios (Lun et al. 2021). These capacities help individuals and communities to imagine alternative pasts and futures, and innovative solutions to problems. Emerging research suggests that speculative behaviors may also appear in nonhuman animals, including forms of play and curiosity observed among bees and zebrafish (Galpayage Dona et al. 2022; Franks et al. 2023).

SF amplifies speculative thinking by distributing it socially through narrative and mass culture. The genre combines recognizable conventions with remarkable flexibility, enabling continual reinvention (Wolfe 2011). Darko Suvin’s concept of the novum, for instance, describes the transformative innovation that estranges readers from familiar reality while opening new perspectives on it. SF thus enables writers to explore time, history, science, and social organization through speculative scenarios that cultivate both wonder and critical reflection.

As Seo-Young Chu argues, SF does not abandon realism but intensifies it through heightened complexity (2010). Because it is highly imaginative, SF often constructs worlds capable of revealing otherwise invisible structures of reality. Increasingly, SF also shapes political discourse rather than remaining confined to escapist entertainment (Taskale 2026). This helps explain why SF aligns so naturally with CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism alike. Speculative fiction supplies the formal and cognitive conditions through which alternative worlds become imaginable. CoFuturisms appropriate those capacities to intervene in disputes over culture, identity, historical memory, and futurity. Zoefuturism mobilizes them differently: not primarily to recover excluded identities or produce counter-histories, but to foreground relational interdependence as the basis for imagining collective existence across ecological and ontological scales.

b) Manifestos

If speculative fiction provides the imaginative conditions for collective world-building, manifestos provide its declarative form. Reading the call for papers for this special issue, I was struck by how closely it resembled a manifesto:  “Zoefuturism takes its name from the Greek word for life, zoe (ζωή, zoí). It is a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings.’” This statement situates Zoefuturism philosophically, identifies representative works, and proposes a framework through which they should be interpreted. It also intervenes by reorganizing a field of meaning around a new conceptual category.

Manifestos have historically functioned as instruments of political and cultural intervention. Originally associated with declarations of sovereign authority in the fifteenth century, they gradually evolved into vehicles for public participation. Earlier examples include the manifestos of the Levellers and Diggers in seventeenth-century England, which sought to establish new forms of public speech and political participation (Lamb 2022).

The manifesto form became especially influential within twentieth-century artistic movements. Although Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto carried deeply reactionary politics, its methodological influence in Latin America proved substantial (Schnapp and Rocha 1996; Sartor 2012; Aguirre et al. 2017). Writers and intellectuals appropriated the form to redefine national cultures and articulate alternative aesthetic programs. Brazilian and Peruvian modernists, for example, used manifestos to intervene directly in debates over cultural modernity (Montenegro 2017).

Manifestos therefore operate not simply as declarations but as interventions into public discourse. Entire literary works may function manifesto-like by reorganizing perception and political imagination. In the case of Zoefuturism, the intervention emerges through editorial framing itself: the decision to foreground Zoefuturism as a category for organizing a constellation of related works and ideas. Unlike many earlier futurist manifestos centered on rupture, acceleration, or technological conquest, Zoefuturism emphasizes interdependence, permeability, and becoming. 

c) Boundary Objects and Genre Infrastructure

If manifestos provide interventionist declarations, genres provide the infrastructures through which those interventions circulate and become socially durable. Humans are deeply oriented toward cooperation and cumulative cultural learning. Through language, ritual, performance, and material artifacts, societies transmit vast bodies of non-genetic information across generations (Henrich and Muthukrishna 2018).

Drawing on science and technology studies, John Rieder adopts the concept of boundary objects to explain the cultural power of SF (2017). In this framework, SF encompasses not only literary texts but also the broader network of social, commercial, and institutional relations through which meanings circulate. Genres function as boundary objects because they remain flexible enough to accommodate multiple interpretations while stable enough to sustain collective participation.

My concepts of genre genesis and genre infrastructure extend this framework (Brock 2022; 2024). Genre genesis refers to the reshaping of symbolic foundations through collective cultural intervention. Genre infrastructure describes the institutional systems through which these interventions are sustained: publishing networks, reading communities, archives, digital platforms, markets, and criticism.

Creators engaged in these processes demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of what Frelik calls “boundary discourse” (2011): the socially negotiated construction of meaning through genre conventions. Genres are therefore not merely aesthetic categories but cultural and economic systems. By proposing new genre labels or redefining existing ones, creators intervene directly in the symbolic economy of literature and cultural production.

This is why CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism possess unavoidable political dimensions. Yet they do so differently. CoFuturisms tend to organize around highly situated struggles over representation, historical memory, and cultural agency. Zoefuturism instead foregrounds the relational conditions through which forms of life become mutually constituted. If CoFuturisms frequently ask who is excluded from dominant futures, Zoefuturism asks how futurity itself might be reorganized through interdependence rather than separation. Genres thus function not only as aesthetic categories but as infrastructures for negotiating different ontologies of collective existence. 

Another Future, If You Can Keep It

The political significance of Zoefuturism and other CoFuturisms emerges not only from their explicit themes but from the infrastructures they construct and transform. By intervening in genres, archives, and systems of cultural circulation, these movements reshape the conditions under which futures become imaginable. Their micropolitics operate through negotiation, coalition-building, and symbolic intervention rather than singular revolutionary rupture.

Critics have argued that CoFuturisms risk absorption into the same capitalist systems they seek to challenge (Boyden 2024). Yet this tension does not invalidate their political significance. On the contrary, it reveals how struggles over futurity increasingly unfold through culture, narrative, and infrastructure. Across the political spectrum, movements are turning toward myth-making and storytelling as mechanisms for shaping public consciousness and social possibility.

CoFuturisms therefore should not be understood simply as expressions of modernity’s obsession with the future. Rather, they attempt to reconfigure that obsession by constructing alternative boundary objects through which communities negotiate meaning differently. Zoefuturism participates in this broader movement, but does so by emphasizing relational ontologies rather than primarily identity-based or civilizational alternatives. Its intervention lies in reframing futurity itself as an emergent property of entangled forms of life.

To recognize that CoFuturisms are constructing new archives is also to recognize that they intervene in the infrastructures through which ideas become realities. The movement from imagination to institutionalization unfolds unevenly across law, politics, economics, and culture. Some ideas remain marginal for decades; others become rapidly assimilated into dominant systems. Yet communities continue to act within this uncertain terrain, contesting the forces that seek to define the future on their behalf.

As anthropologist, anarchist, and social and political activist David Graeber observed, “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (2024). While the process is rarely easy, CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism emerge from this recognition that we can start changing the present through the exquisite pathways described here, starting by just talking about them.

Works cited

Abrahamsen, Rita, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita, and Alexandra Gheciu. 2024. “The Gramscian Right, or Turning Gramsci on His Head.” In World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: pp.  34–66.

Aguirre, Mariana, Rosa Sarabia, Renée M. Silverman, and Ricardo Vasconcelos, ed. 2017. “Futurism in Latin America.” Special Issue, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Volume 7, De Gruyter.

Boyden, Michael. 2025. “Heterotemporality and Posthumanism in Alternative Futurisms.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 50.1 (2024): 69-87. Airiti Library. Web. 1 Aug.

Brock, Patrick A. B. 2022. “Futurism and genre genesis in Brazilian science fiction.” Zanzalá-Revista Brasileira de Estudos sobre Gêneros Cinematográficos e Audiovisuais, número 8.1: 8-18.

Brock, Patrick A. B. 2023. “Brazilian Afrofuturism, Heuristic Function, and the Mass Cultural Genre System.” SFRA Review 53.3, Summer, pp. 18-27. 

Brock, Patrick A. B. 2024. “Genre Infrastructure as Speculative Method in Latin America.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 34.3: pp. 277-303.

Chu, Seo-Young. 2010. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation. Harvard University Press.

Finchelstein, Federico. 2022. Fascist Mythologies: The History and Politics of Unreason in Borges, Freud, and Schmitt. Columbia University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.7312/finc18320

Franks, Becca, Leigh P. Gaffney, Courtney Graham and Daniel M. Weary.  2023. Curiosity in zebrafish (Danio rerio)? Behavioral responses to 30 novel objects. Front. Vet. Sci. 9:1062420. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2022.1062420

Frelik, Paweł. 2011. “Of Slipstream and Others: SF and Genre Boundary Discourses.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 1: pp. 20–45. 

Galpayage Dona, Hiruni Samadi, Cwyn Solvi, Amelia Kowalewska, Kaarle Mäkelä, HaDi MaBouDi and Lars Chittka. 2022. “Do bumble bees play?” Animal Behaviour, Volume 194, Pages 239-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.08.013.

Ginway, M. Elizabeth, and J. Andrew Brown, editors. 2012. Latin American Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan US.

Graeber, David. 2024. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. Penguin Books, 2024.

Henrich, Joseph and Michael Muthukrishna. 2021. “The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.” Annual Review of Psychology 72:1: 207–240.

Jade Taylor, Taryne. 2023. “Introduction to CoFuturisms.” The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturisms. Taylor, T.J., Lavender III, I., Dillon, G.L., & Chattopadhyay, B. (Eds.) Routledge. 

Komporozos-Athanasiou, Aris. 2023. Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Lamb, Matthew. 2022. “So You Want to Write a Manifesto? (Part 1 of 2).” Public Things Newsletter, Substack, 3 April. publicthings.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-write-a-manifesto. 

Lewis, Jason Edward. 2023. “The Future Imaginary.” The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms. Edited By Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. Routledge: pp. 11-22.

Lun, Huang, Xie Yibo and Chen Xiaolin. 2021. “A Review of Functions of Speculative Thinking.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12: pp. 728946. 

Montenegro, Giovanna. 2017. “Indigenismo and Futurism in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui and the Peruvian Avant-Garde.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Special Issue: Futurism in Latin America. Volume 7, De Gruyter: pp. 29-59. 

Rieder, John. 2017. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Wesleyan University Press.

Sartor, Mario. 2012. “Italian Futurism and Its Latin American Echoes.” Seminário Internacional de Conservação de Escultura Moderna. MAC USP, 2012. Available in: http://www.mac.usp.br/mac/conteudo/academico/publicacoes/anais/modernidade/pdfs/MARIO_ESP.pdf.

Schnapp, J. T. and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. 1996. “Brazilian Velocities: On Marinetti’s 1926 Trip to South America.” South Central Review, 13(2/3): pp. 105–156.

Suvin, Darko. 2010. “Chapter 3: Science Fiction and the Novum (1977).” Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology. Ralahine Utopian Studies, v. 6:  pp.  67-92.

Taskale, Ali Riza. 2026. “Materialized Science Fiction: The Tech Oligarchy’s Blueprint for a New Global Order.” Global Studies Quarterly, Volume 6, Issue 1, January 2026.

Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Wesleyan University Press.

Dr. Patrick Anthony Barbosa Brock
CoFutures

What do we do when we talk about Zoefuturism? This essay argues that Zoefuturism and CoFuturisms are not merely aesthetic or speculative categories, but infrastructural practices of collective world-making. I propose a framework for understanding how these movements intervene in social imaginaries through genre formation, manifestos, and boundary-making practices, while also examining their material implications for the communities and infrastructures from which they emerge. To that end, I draw on my previous theorization of the role genre mechanics play in the formation of collectivities.

Although they are envisioned here as operationally connected, speculative fiction, CoFuturisms, and Zoefuturism should not be treated as interchangeable categories. Speculative fiction is a broad narrative mode oriented toward hypothetical worlds, alternative temporalities, and estrangement from consensus reality. CoFuturisms, by contrast, designate culturally situated interventions that mobilize speculative methods to contest dominant imaginaries and produce alternative social horizons. Zoefuturism differs from both in that its central organizing principle is relationality itself: an ontological emphasis on “interconnected becoming” across human, nonhuman, ecological, and material forms of life. Where speculative fiction often asks what futures might exist, and CoFuturisms ask who gets to imagine and inhabit those futures, Zoefuturism asks how forms of life become entangled in the production of futurity.

CoFuturisms as a conceptual umbrella emerged with the publication of the Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms and its survey of speculative works from the world’s periphery, many of which blur the boundaries between art and activism. Like the imaginaries from which they emerge, CoFuturisms are collective constructions shaped by forces operating at both macro and micro levels. As digital media theorist, poet, and software designer Jason Edward Lewis writes, they “create a field of ‘future facts,’ a fully realized reality that exists somewhere down the timeline, waiting for us to catch up to it” (11). More broadly, CoFuturisms often emerge through science fiction (SF) and speculative practices, commonly appropriating their methods, to critique dominant imaginaries and intervene micropolitically in the present. As science fiction scholar Taryne Jade Taylor observes, “CoFuturisms is a movement that is found both within science fiction and fantasy and also reaches past the boundaries of speculative fiction” (2023).

In conversation with the editors of this special issue, I was provided with the following conceptualization of Zoefuturism: “Zoefuturism as a genre is founded upon the understanding that all things are relational—where descriptors, characteristics, or even a sense of ‘being’ depend upon everything around them—and that everything is constantly becoming, much like our DNA. As such, Zoefuturism is not political.”

I interpret Zoefuturism as an attempt to articulate a relational understanding of the world that moves beyond binary frameworks by foregrounding becoming, interdependence, and ecological entanglement. Unlike many futurisms organized around identity, technological acceleration, or emancipatory struggle, Zoefuturism situates relationality itself as the condition of futurity. Its emphasis falls less on representing marginalized futures than on rethinking the ontological assumptions through which futures are imagined in the first place. Yet Zoefuturism cannot escape political implications simply by rejecting explicit political identification. Like CoFuturisms, it shapes how reality is narratively and institutionally organized through language, cultural production, archives, and the social imaginaries that orient collective life. Its politics emerge less through ideological declaration than through interventions into the conceptual and affective infrastructures governing how relations between life forms are understood.

These interventions occur through genre itself. Genres are not merely aesthetic containers but social formations circulating among texts, communities, markets, and institutions. Because genres organize recognition, expectation, and participation, they function as technologies of collective becoming. Speculative fiction provides many of the formal tools that make such interventions narratively intelligible, while CoFuturisms mobilize those tools toward situated cultural and political projects. Zoefuturism, in turn, redirects speculative practice toward relational ontologies that destabilize distinctions between nature and culture, subject and environment, and human and nonhuman life. 

Manifesting Worlds

CoFuturisms are intersectional movements that combine narrative, ethical reflection, and speculative world-building across diverse epistemological traditions. If SF is commonly described as a genre that imagines the future, CoFuturisms seek instead to reshape the present. They assemble heterogeneous archives, practices, and modes of creation into new frameworks for collective life. Unlike speculative fiction broadly conceived, CoFuturisms are defined less by narrative conventions than by situated interventions into historical asymmetries of power, visibility, and futurity.

Observing how SF practitioners in Northeast Brazil sought to intervene in the genre as an emancipatory act, and how similar processes appeared elsewhere, I termed this phenomenon genre genesis (Brock 2022). Genre genesis describes how creators reshape the symbolic foundations of a genre to construct new collectivities and modes of belonging. Writers from Brazil’s Northeast, for instance, responded to their inferiorized position within the national imagination by coining sertãopunk, a form of science fiction rooted in the region’s ecological and political realities.

Comparable acts of conceptual creation appear across multiple CoFuturist contexts. Examples include Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturism, the Afropantheology developed by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga, Scott Russel Duncan’s Xicanxfuturism, and forms of Andean Futurism developed by Peruvian SF writers. These practices do more than produce new literary categories; they reshape the infrastructures through which speculative thinking circulates and acquires legitimacy. Zoefuturism operates through similar mechanisms, though with a distinctive emphasis on relationality as both method and ontology rather than primarily identity, territory, or historical exclusion. Fundamentally, they are creations that beget further creations, becoming self-replicating or generative through the interplay of individual agency and collective effort.

Furthermore, I believe that three interconnected processes help explain how these movements function: the pedagogical qualities of SF and speculative thinking; the interventionist tradition of manifestos; the mobilizing role of genres as boundary objects.

a) The pedagogical qualities of SF and speculative thinking

Speculative thinking includes counterfactual reasoning, prefactual thinking, the processing of spatial and temporal asymmetries, and the ability to distinguish between perceived reality and hypothetical scenarios (Lun et al. 2021). These capacities help individuals and communities to imagine alternative pasts and futures, and innovative solutions to problems. Emerging research suggests that speculative behaviors may also appear in nonhuman animals, including forms of play and curiosity observed among bees and zebrafish (Galpayage Dona et al. 2022; Franks et al. 2023).

SF amplifies speculative thinking by distributing it socially through narrative and mass culture. The genre combines recognizable conventions with remarkable flexibility, enabling continual reinvention (Wolfe 2011). Darko Suvin’s concept of the novum, for instance, describes the transformative innovation that estranges readers from familiar reality while opening new perspectives on it. SF thus enables writers to explore time, history, science, and social organization through speculative scenarios that cultivate both wonder and critical reflection.

As Seo-Young Chu argues, SF does not abandon realism but intensifies it through heightened complexity (2010). Because it is highly imaginative, SF often constructs worlds capable of revealing otherwise invisible structures of reality. Increasingly, SF also shapes political discourse rather than remaining confined to escapist entertainment (Taskale 2026). This helps explain why SF aligns so naturally with CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism alike. Speculative fiction supplies the formal and cognitive conditions through which alternative worlds become imaginable. CoFuturisms appropriate those capacities to intervene in disputes over culture, identity, historical memory, and futurity. Zoefuturism mobilizes them differently: not primarily to recover excluded identities or produce counter-histories, but to foreground relational interdependence as the basis for imagining collective existence across ecological and ontological scales.

b) Manifestos

If speculative fiction provides the imaginative conditions for collective world-building, manifestos provide its declarative form. Reading the call for papers for this special issue, I was struck by how closely it resembled a manifesto:  “Zoefuturism takes its name from the Greek word for life, zoe (ζωή, zoí). It is a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings.’” This statement situates Zoefuturism philosophically, identifies representative works, and proposes a framework through which they should be interpreted. It also intervenes by reorganizing a field of meaning around a new conceptual category.

Manifestos have historically functioned as instruments of political and cultural intervention. Originally associated with declarations of sovereign authority in the fifteenth century, they gradually evolved into vehicles for public participation. Earlier examples include the manifestos of the Levellers and Diggers in seventeenth-century England, which sought to establish new forms of public speech and political participation (Lamb 2022).

The manifesto form became especially influential within twentieth-century artistic movements. Although Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto carried deeply reactionary politics, its methodological influence in Latin America proved substantial (Schnapp and Rocha 1996; Sartor 2012; Aguirre et al. 2017). Writers and intellectuals appropriated the form to redefine national cultures and articulate alternative aesthetic programs. Brazilian and Peruvian modernists, for example, used manifestos to intervene directly in debates over cultural modernity (Montenegro 2017).

Manifestos therefore operate not simply as declarations but as interventions into public discourse. Entire literary works may function manifesto-like by reorganizing perception and political imagination. In the case of Zoefuturism, the intervention emerges through editorial framing itself: the decision to foreground Zoefuturism as a category for organizing a constellation of related works and ideas. Unlike many earlier futurist manifestos centered on rupture, acceleration, or technological conquest, Zoefuturism emphasizes interdependence, permeability, and becoming. 

c) Boundary Objects and Genre Infrastructure

If manifestos provide interventionist declarations, genres provide the infrastructures through which those interventions circulate and become socially durable. Humans are deeply oriented toward cooperation and cumulative cultural learning. Through language, ritual, performance, and material artifacts, societies transmit vast bodies of non-genetic information across generations (Henrich and Muthukrishna 2018).

Drawing on science and technology studies, John Rieder adopts the concept of boundary objects to explain the cultural power of SF (2017). In this framework, SF encompasses not only literary texts but also the broader network of social, commercial, and institutional relations through which meanings circulate. Genres function as boundary objects because they remain flexible enough to accommodate multiple interpretations while stable enough to sustain collective participation.

My concepts of genre genesis and genre infrastructure extend this framework (Brock 2022; 2024). Genre genesis refers to the reshaping of symbolic foundations through collective cultural intervention. Genre infrastructure describes the institutional systems through which these interventions are sustained: publishing networks, reading communities, archives, digital platforms, markets, and criticism.

Creators engaged in these processes demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of what Frelik calls “boundary discourse” (2011): the socially negotiated construction of meaning through genre conventions. Genres are therefore not merely aesthetic categories but cultural and economic systems. By proposing new genre labels or redefining existing ones, creators intervene directly in the symbolic economy of literature and cultural production.

This is why CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism possess unavoidable political dimensions. Yet they do so differently. CoFuturisms tend to organize around highly situated struggles over representation, historical memory, and cultural agency. Zoefuturism instead foregrounds the relational conditions through which forms of life become mutually constituted. If CoFuturisms frequently ask who is excluded from dominant futures, Zoefuturism asks how futurity itself might be reorganized through interdependence rather than separation. Genres thus function not only as aesthetic categories but as infrastructures for negotiating different ontologies of collective existence. 

Another Future, If You Can Keep It

The political significance of Zoefuturism and other CoFuturisms emerges not only from their explicit themes but from the infrastructures they construct and transform. By intervening in genres, archives, and systems of cultural circulation, these movements reshape the conditions under which futures become imaginable. Their micropolitics operate through negotiation, coalition-building, and symbolic intervention rather than singular revolutionary rupture.

Critics have argued that CoFuturisms risk absorption into the same capitalist systems they seek to challenge (Boyden 2024). Yet this tension does not invalidate their political significance. On the contrary, it reveals how struggles over futurity increasingly unfold through culture, narrative, and infrastructure. Across the political spectrum, movements are turning toward myth-making and storytelling as mechanisms for shaping public consciousness and social possibility.

CoFuturisms therefore should not be understood simply as expressions of modernity’s obsession with the future. Rather, they attempt to reconfigure that obsession by constructing alternative boundary objects through which communities negotiate meaning differently. Zoefuturism participates in this broader movement, but does so by emphasizing relational ontologies rather than primarily identity-based or civilizational alternatives. Its intervention lies in reframing futurity itself as an emergent property of entangled forms of life.

To recognize that CoFuturisms are constructing new archives is also to recognize that they intervene in the infrastructures through which ideas become realities. The movement from imagination to institutionalization unfolds unevenly across law, politics, economics, and culture. Some ideas remain marginal for decades; others become rapidly assimilated into dominant systems. Yet communities continue to act within this uncertain terrain, contesting the forces that seek to define the future on their behalf.

As anthropologist, anarchist, and social and political activist David Graeber observed, “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (2024). While the process is rarely easy, CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism emerge from this recognition that we can start changing the present through the exquisite pathways described here, starting by just talking about them.

Works cited

Abrahamsen, Rita, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita, and Alexandra Gheciu. 2024. “The Gramscian Right, or Turning Gramsci on His Head.” In World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: pp.  34–66.

Aguirre, Mariana, Rosa Sarabia, Renée M. Silverman, and Ricardo Vasconcelos, ed. 2017. “Futurism in Latin America.” Special Issue, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Volume 7, De Gruyter.

Boyden, Michael. 2025. “Heterotemporality and Posthumanism in Alternative Futurisms.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 50.1 (2024): 69-87. Airiti Library. Web. 1 Aug.

Brock, Patrick A. B. 2022. “Futurism and genre genesis in Brazilian science fiction.” Zanzalá-Revista Brasileira de Estudos sobre Gêneros Cinematográficos e Audiovisuais, número 8.1: 8-18.

Brock, Patrick A. B. 2023. “Brazilian Afrofuturism, Heuristic Function, and the Mass Cultural Genre System.” SFRA Review 53.3, Summer, pp. 18-27. 

Brock, Patrick A. B. 2024. “Genre Infrastructure as Speculative Method in Latin America.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 34.3: pp. 277-303.

Chu, Seo-Young. 2010. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation. Harvard University Press.

Finchelstein, Federico. 2022. Fascist Mythologies: The History and Politics of Unreason in Borges, Freud, and Schmitt. Columbia University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.7312/finc18320

Franks, Becca, Leigh P. Gaffney, Courtney Graham and Daniel M. Weary.  2023. Curiosity in zebrafish (Danio rerio)? Behavioral responses to 30 novel objects. Front. Vet. Sci. 9:1062420. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2022.1062420

Frelik, Paweł. 2011. “Of Slipstream and Others: SF and Genre Boundary Discourses.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 1: pp. 20–45. 

Galpayage Dona, Hiruni Samadi, Cwyn Solvi, Amelia Kowalewska, Kaarle Mäkelä, HaDi MaBouDi and Lars Chittka. 2022. “Do bumble bees play?” Animal Behaviour, Volume 194, Pages 239-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.08.013.

Ginway, M. Elizabeth, and J. Andrew Brown, editors. 2012. Latin American Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan US.

Graeber, David. 2024. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. Penguin Books, 2024.

Henrich, Joseph and Michael Muthukrishna. 2021. “The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.” Annual Review of Psychology 72:1: 207–240.

Jade Taylor, Taryne. 2023. “Introduction to CoFuturisms.” The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturisms. Taylor, T.J., Lavender III, I., Dillon, G.L., & Chattopadhyay, B. (Eds.) Routledge. 

Komporozos-Athanasiou, Aris. 2023. Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Lamb, Matthew. 2022. “So You Want to Write a Manifesto? (Part 1 of 2).” Public Things Newsletter, Substack, 3 April. publicthings.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-write-a-manifesto. 

Lewis, Jason Edward. 2023. “The Future Imaginary.” The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms. Edited By Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. Routledge: pp. 11-22.

Lun, Huang, Xie Yibo and Chen Xiaolin. 2021. “A Review of Functions of Speculative Thinking.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12: pp. 728946. 

Montenegro, Giovanna. 2017. “Indigenismo and Futurism in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui and the Peruvian Avant-Garde.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Special Issue: Futurism in Latin America. Volume 7, De Gruyter: pp. 29-59. 

Rieder, John. 2017. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Wesleyan University Press.

Sartor, Mario. 2012. “Italian Futurism and Its Latin American Echoes.” Seminário Internacional de Conservação de Escultura Moderna. MAC USP, 2012. Available in: http://www.mac.usp.br/mac/conteudo/academico/publicacoes/anais/modernidade/pdfs/MARIO_ESP.pdf.

Schnapp, J. T. and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. 1996. “Brazilian Velocities: On Marinetti’s 1926 Trip to South America.” South Central Review, 13(2/3): pp. 105–156.

Suvin, Darko. 2010. “Chapter 3: Science Fiction and the Novum (1977).” Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology. Ralahine Utopian Studies, v. 6:  pp.  67-92.

Taskale, Ali Riza. 2026. “Materialized Science Fiction: The Tech Oligarchy’s Blueprint for a New Global Order.” Global Studies Quarterly, Volume 6, Issue 1, January 2026.

Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Wesleyan University Press.

By Cyril Simsa

Eva Hauserová promoting her non-fiction title Na koštěti se dá i lítat [Broomsticks can also be used for flying], 1995

Of the many contemporary subgenres of sf that can claim they originated as a reaction to the cyberpunk revolution of the 1980s, one of the oldest is certainly “biopunk”, especially if one counts the mini-genre of “ribofunk” – shouted into existence by the American writer Paul Di Filippo (1954-) in 1990, and just as quickly extinguished – as a legitimate precursor (Di Filippo 1990).  Probably only “steampunk”, coined by K.W. Jeter (1950-) in 1987, is older (Nicholls and Langford 2025). 

“Biopunk”, as it is used today, refers to a subgenre of sf that adopts many of the stylistic and narrative tropes of cyberpunk – a focus on stories built around an ensemble cast of petty criminals, (gene) hackers and chancers, urban subcultures, and a “revolt into style” (if the reader will pardon the throwback to the cultural criticism of an earlier era) (Melly 1970) – while sourcing its McGuffins from biotechnology, rather than cybernetics. In this contemporary sense, biopunk has its origins in the American genre writing of the 1990s, with the first documented use (from two different, and almost certainly unconnected sources) in 1992, and the subsequent attempt to identify precursors in earlier genre history.1

Di Filippo takes this as far back as H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); of more recent antecedents, Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) are frequently cited (Di Filippo 1990; Schmeink 2014b, 32).  From these American genre roots, biopunk has spread around the world and into other media, film and TV in particular. The hit TV show, Orphan Black (2013-2017), with its saga of a shadowy organisation trying to direct the future of human evolution through gene hacking and the complications that arise when some of its human clones escape, would be a good example. All of which makes a neat teleological narrative of exactly the kind that, in theory, every self-respecting punk of whatever persuasion is supposed to abhor; and none of which quite holds together when examined in a broader framework. 

Because there is a catch – of course, there is – and in a European context, this neat timeline is disrupted by the Czech writer Eva Hauserová (1954-2023), also known as Eva Hauser, who in 1988 independently came up with a literary intervention she called “biopunk,” and her coinage pre-dates the American one. This sits uncomfortably with the official chronicle, making her something later critics have had to explain away, though there are also those who have simply ignored her. (For the former, see Schmeink, who will be discussed below; for the latter, a simple Google search will reveal any number of biopunk, or biopunk-adjacent websites that have no idea of Eva’s existence.)  

Eva was living behind the Iron Curtain at the time she came up with the notion of “biopunk,” with limited access to American sources and no contact with her American contemporaries. However, like the American writers who later dreamt up their version of biopunk in the 1990s, her ideas were formed in reaction to cyberpunk – or rather, her vague impression of what she imagined cyberpunk to be, in the absence of any direct experience of the foundational texts – but with a change of focus to genetics and biology, rather than information technology and computer programming. (No doubt her educational background as a microbiologist played a role in that.)   There are, then, some parallels between Eva’s initial impulse towards biopunk and that of the writers who later adopted the same term in America, though there are also significant differences. 

In the 1980s, there was a common consensus in Czechoslovak fandom that cyberpunk was not really a viable literary genre in the conditions of latter-day Communism. As the Czech writer Ondřej Neff (1945-) argued in a classic lecture at Parcon, the Czechoslovak national sf convention, in June 1987: “It’s difficult to develop cyberpunk in a country, where one can’t even find a working telephone box.” (Neff 1987, cited from Hauser 1993, 15) 

In devising her concept of biopunk, Eva took this insight one step further, arguing that the differences between East and West in relation to cyberpunk were not just a question of technology, but also of social conditioning: 

The heroes of cyberpunk, in spite of all the novelty and colour of cyberpunk narrative, are at heart the same, familiar American boys – optimistic, active, greedy for money and longing for success. The heroes of biopunk, similarly to the people that I saw each day in my surroundings, couldn’t be nearly so straightforward.

When the disintegration and paralysis of society reaches a certain level, people lose their motivation to do anything at all. This is what we experienced in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s: people became extremely sceptical and passive as they realised, time and time again, that no matter what they tried, they couldn’t bring about any results, that no revolt, no expression of anger was capable of changing anything… (Hauser 1993, 15) 

Worse, in Eva’s view, people living under totalitarianism become so accustomed to the limitations imposed on them that they come to consider them normal: 

For example, the heroes of my stories often consider their situation to be marvellous and pleasant, even though by any rational analysis it is in actual fact frightening or utterly repulsive: this reflects totalitarian society with its grotesque voluntarism, its newspapers which continually declared that we, the people, were extremely happy, that we were living in a highly developed society, and that if we still had a few problems, they weren’t really so serious… (Hauser 1993, 15)2

Biopunk, then, was a literary device that allowed Eva to express the inner deformations of life under totalitarianism by externalising them into speculative biological traits. Her societies become the playground of “mutants, genetic diseases and deformations, chimaeric organisms,” (Hauser 1993, 15), and her protagonists are unable to imagine another state of being. Under the pressures of totalitarianism, her protagonists literally become monsters. 

Eva Hauserová: Self-portrait (2020)

American biopunk clearly comes from a very different impulse: the exploration of how biotechnology is going to impact society in the framework of a more-or-less corporate future. Its extrapolated biotechnology is based on real science, not metaphor.3 Its social assumptions are those of capitalism, not the sunset years of Soviet-style Communism and the collapsing economy of a failed experiment in centrally-planned socialism, based on nineteenth-century notions of industrial development and twentieth-century surveillance technology.

There is no question that the “biopunk” of contemporary film and fiction is not the same animal as Eva’s, and that her coinage of an earlier Central-East European homonym is an inconvenience to the people who take the contemporary, “Western” variant seriously. It therefore makes perfect sense that they should seek to sideline Eva’s rogue intervention, though the ways they do so are sometimes quite problematic. 

The most detailed attempt I have found to date is that of Lars Schmeink (1975-) in his article “Biopunk 101,” which was published in two slightly different versions in 2014 (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b).  Schmeink is today a respected independent scholar, based in Hamburg, with an impressive CV and a long publications list, but in 2014 he was just finishing his Ph.D. at Humboldt University Berlin , which two years later yielded his monograph Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, published by Liverpool University Press (Schmeink 2016).  The monograph itself makes no mention of Eva or her Czech biopunk – justifiably so, as it has no relevance to his argument – but one assumes that one of the reasons for his earlier essay was to tidy away this awkward forerunner, so as to avoid cluttering up his later book. 

As far as I have been able to reconstruct the publishing history, the two versions of “Biopunk 101” appeared within a couple of months of each other. The first, longer version appeared on Schmeink’s personal blog in May 2014 and is now accessible only on the Wayback Machine; the second, more formal (and shorter) variant appeared as an essay in SFRA Review in Summer 2014 (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b).  The discussion of Eva’s work in both versions is based on a mini-feature about biopunk, which appeared in the BSFA’s critical journal Vector in 1993, and which was curated by the present author. 

This comprised of three items: 

1. A slightly edited and polished version of Eva’s English-language essay, “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes”, first published under a slightly variant title in her personal fanzine, Wild Sharkaah, in 1990 (Hauser 1990; Hauser 1993). 

2. An English translation of “A Few Notes About Biopunk”, by Miroslav Fišer (1965-), first published in Czech in 1991, to illustrate how Eva’s biopunk had been received in Czech critical circles (Fišer 1993). 

3. An introduction by myself to set the context (Simsa 1993).  

Given the relatively late date of these publications (1991 for the first Czech appearance of Fišer, 1993 for Vector), both Fišer and I make the point that biopunk – which Eva herself declared to be a response to the experience of living under totalitarianism (see above) – was no longer a going concern by the time Vector appeared, because the fall of Communism had done away with the conditions that gave rise to it. This in turn leads Schmeink, whose account of Eva’s biopunk seems mostly intended to demonstrate its discontinuity from his own research, to base his discussion almost entirely on Fišer’s essay. We thus have the paradoxical situation, where Schmeink talks about biopunk as if it was some kind of impersonal movement from Eastern Europe, with Fišer as its spokesman, rather than the personal project of one individual (Eva Hauserová), supported by a couple of her acolytes (Simsa, Fišer), who essentially contributed nothing, except as a kind of all-singing, all-dancing team of bespoke fanboy cheer leaders. 

Eva is cited by Schmeink only in support of Fišer’s arguments: “Eva Hauser, another writer of Czech biopunk, in a manifest[o] from 1990 […]  translated into English in Vector, underlines some of Fišer’s statements and adds to the definition” (Schmeink 2014a, a passage that is found only in the web version of the article; it has been deleted from the abridged version published as Schmeink 2014b).  In the longer version of the essay on his blog, Schmeink does at least quote a few words from Eva herself, but in the shorter (and more official) version in SFRA Review, he quotes only Fišer and myself. Eva is named, but not allowed to speak, and one can only conclude that Schmeink has completely misunderstood the distribution of roles between Eva, Fišer and the present author; and in particular, the fact that biopunk was Eva’s invention, not ours. 

The original fanzine publication of “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement Specific for Post-Totalitarian Regimes”.  Wild Sharkaaah, No.2, December 1990. 

In fairness to Schmeink, Eva’s Wild Sharkaah was not available online at the time he was writing (it was not posted on efanzines.com till 2018), and paper copies would have been hard to find in 2014. It is therefore likely he had had no opportunity to verify the provenance of Eva’s article for himself, which might have helped clarify the pivotal nature of Eva’s contribution. The handwritten heading, the hand-drawn illustrations, and the way the article is integrated into the free-flowing text of Eva’s personal fanzine can leave little doubt about how individual this project was for her. Certainly, anyone who has read the original fanzine version of “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes” would find it hard to claim that “it remains unclear who originally coined the term,” as Schmeink does in both versions of his text (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b, 33).  That being said, I did include details of the article’s earlier publication in the bibliographic notes in Vector and a simple comparison of Eva’s author bio to Fišer’s should have been enough to show which of the two was the more significant writer. (By the time the Vector feature appeared, Eva had professionally published one novel and a short story collection, had been working as a professional editor for three years and her bio listed multiple publication credits. Fišer had gafiated. This is stated explicitly. Simsa 1993, 18.)  One, therefore, cannot help wondering whether gender bias may also have played a role. 

Another factor may have been how much time had elapsed since Eva first published her biopunk manifesto. In the early 1990s, immediately after the fall of Communism, the world was swept by a wave of interest in the post-Communist societies that had newly reopened to direct contacts with “the West,” and this was no less true of sf and sf fandom than it was of the rest of society. Eva was a known quantity in English-speaking fandom in the 1990s: she had worked as a professional editor at Ikárie magazine in Prague, which was newly publishing so many British and American writers, and had contributed stories and articles to a range of English-language publications, including a previous issue of Vector (Hauser 1992b). (Other English-language genre publications in which she appeared around this time included Matrix, BBR, Shards of Babel and Science-Fiction Studies: see Hauser 1991a, Hauser 1992a, Hauser 1992d, and Hauser 1994.)  She was also publishing her own English-language fanzine; attending multiple international conventions, including the Chicago Worldcon in 1991, and Syncon 92 in Australia as the official European GUFF delegate, the first fan from post-Communist Central Europe to be selected for one of the major international fan funds (convention reports available in Hauser 1991b for Chicago and Hauser 1992c for Australia); and she had become one of the regular ports of call for Western writers visiting Prague, including Bruce Sterling, who wrote about her in a travelogue for Wired (Sterling 1995, 155-156 plus photo on 103). 

In other words, at the time the Vector feature was published, anyone with at least a passing interest in European sf would have had an idea of who Eva was, and the editors did not see any need to emphasise this; but twenty years later, when Schmeink came to write his piece, this was evidently no longer the case and his discussion misses the context. 

In his focus on contemporary forms of biopunk, Schmeink does his best to locate Eva’s Central-East European biopunk in the past, to contain it in a bubble of late-totalitarian DIY punk subculture that has long ceased to be of anything but historical interest. In essence, he tries to present it as something like a dead language, leaving her mutants and chimaeric organisms to wander the margins of the post-Communist genre landscape, like hopeful monsters – another species of the weird zombies of Communism that are still endemic to the culture over here… 

The problem with all this is that contemporary genre scholarship is not the only possible frame of reference for studying Eva’s oeuvre, and if one takes a step back to look at her work in the framework of Gender Studies or Slavic Studies, she is still considered an appropriate topic of research. Indeed, there has been a marked upswing of interest in her work in recent years. University theses have been written about her sf of the 1980s and her involvement in fandom (Praženková 2007; Czechaczek 2015); essays have been published about the overlap between her science fiction and her involvement in the Czech women’s movement of the 1990s (Blažková 2025); at least one conference paper has been devoted specifically to her version of biopunk (Czechaczek 2018); and the Polish Scholar Joanna Czaplińska has drawn heavily on Eva’s stories in her recent study of gender aspects of Czech science fiction (Czaplińska 2022).  The donation of Eva’s literary archive to the Czech Literature Museum (Muzeum literatury–Památník národního písemnictví), after her untimely death in 2023, has also opened up new opportunities for study, as detailed by her son in an upcoming essay for the journal, Literární archiv (Hauser J. 2026). 

In short, Eva’s work is not going away and there are fields of scholarship in which it is her version of biopunk that is seen as the genuine article and the global version is the distraction. In fact, to be slightly provocative about this, from a Central European perspective, the globalised biopunk that has dominated cultural discourse for the last thirty-odd years looks increasingly like the vision of a dying corporate Utopia – a “localized referent” for a historically specific, culturally limited moment, to paraphrase Schmeink (Schmeink 2014b, 33) – while it is Eva’s biopunk and its raw engagement with the structures of totalitarianism that is once again becoming alarmingly relevant in the face of the new, post-democratic social order that seems to be sweeping our way from Airstrip Two, on the far side of the water. 

“Dystopia is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

~

FULL DISCLOSURE: Eva Hauserová was my partner. We lived together from 1994 until her death in 2023. We were not yet partners in 1991, at the time I prepared the biopunk feature that was eventually published in Vector. 

Eva Hauserová (1954-2023)

Eva Hauserová was born in Prague and originally planned to become a research scientist, receiving a Master’s degree in microbiology in 1978 and later starting an unfinished doctorate.  However, in parallel to her scientific activities, she had always had an interest in creative writing and in the 1980s this began to dominate. 

She discovered fandom in 1985 and rapidly began to produce the stories that became the basis of her idea of biopunk and her first short story collection, Hostina mutagenů [A Feast of Mutagens, 1992].  In 1988, she also won the prestigious Karel Čapek Award for her story “U nás v Agónii” [“Here, in Agony”, where Agony is the name of a planet].  

She narrowly missed becoming one of the founding editors of the premier Czech sf magazine, Ikárie, in 1990, joining the editorial staff from the second issue.  She went on to work as an editor for a range of Prague publishers, as well as a freelance translator, eventually producing somewhere in the region of a hundred book-length translations from English (she herself lost count), starting with The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas in 1993.  Her other translations included genre-adjacent work by Fay Weldon, Ruth Ozeki and Eve Ensler, and a host of Harlequin romances under various pseudonyms.  Her last translation, Clive King’s classic children’s fantasy, Stig of the Dump, is being published in 2026.  

In her own writing, she published an sf novel, Cvokyně [The Madwoman] in 1992, and continued to write genre-inflected stories throughout her career, such as those collected in Když se sudičky spletou [When the Fates Make a Mistake, 2000].  However, her later novels moved into the mainstream.  She also wrote several volumes of non-fiction, initially in relation to her voluntary work at the Prague Gender Studies Center, perhaps most notably Na koštěti se dá i lítát aneb Nemožné ženy dokažou i nemožné [Broomsticks can also be Used for Flying, or Impossible Women can Achieve the Impossible, 1995], one of the very first attempts to provide an overview of what would today be called second-wave feminism for Czech readers.  The book was an unexpected hit. 

It was also around this time that she was most active internationally, attending multiple sf conventions, contributing to English-language publications (both within the genre and in Gender Studies), and publishing her own fanzine.  Much of her English-language work from this period is signed Eva Hauser. 

Later in life, her focus shifted to environmental issues.  She was chair of the Czech Permaculture Association for several years and her last major publication was the gigantic three-volume Encyklopedie soběstačnosti pro 21. století [Encylopedia of Self-sufficiency for the 21st Century, 2016-2022], which she edited and co-wrote.  

She died in 2023.  Her final, posthumous novel, based on her experiences in the environmental movement, is forthcoming. 

Cyril Simsa

Cyril Simsa is an Anglo-Czech writer (born in London to Czech parents, but now living in Prague), with stories and articles in a range of genre publications. His short story collection is Lost Cartographies: Tales of Another Europe (Invocations Press, 2014). A second collection, Starspawn and Other Stories, is forthcoming.

~

SOURCES

Blažková, Hana. 2025. “Pozapomenutá sci-fi tradice českého feminismu. Emancipace Evy Hauserové a Caroly Biedermannové v 80. a 90. letech 20. století”. Gender a výzkum/Gender and Research online: https://doi.org/10.13060/gav.2025.004 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Czaplińska, Joanna. 2022. “Does Czech Science Fiction Have a (Feminine) Gender?” Revista Hélice, 8 (1), whole no. 32, 9-20. Translated by Carleton Bulkin. Online at https://w ww.revistahelice.com/en/book/helice-32-2/ [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 2015. 

Czechaczek, Jan. 2015. “Cena Karla Čapka ve fanzinech.” Master’s thesis, Masaryk University, Brno.

Czechaczek, Jan. 2018. “Biopunk Evy Hauserové.” Paper presented at the conference Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene/Fantastika a mýtus v antropocénu, Masaryk University, Brno, October 5, 2018. One-page abstract available at: https://ceska-literatura.phil.muni.cz/fantastika/en/fantasy-and-myth-in-the-anthropocene/conference-program [accessed 29 Mar 2026]

Di Filippo, Paul. 1990. “Ribofunk.” Boing-Boing, Winter 1990, 24. Republished online as “Ribofunk: the Manifesto”, currently at https://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/Ribofunk.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Print version not seen. 

Fišer, Miroslav. 1993. “A Few Notes about Biopunk.” Vector, 174, 17-18. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva. 1990. “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement Specific for Post-Totalitarian Regimes.” Wild Sharkaaah, 2, 1-2. Online at https://efanzines.com/WildSharkaah/WildSharkaah-02.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. The spelling of the fanzine title is inconsistent. 

Hauser Eva. 1991a. “The Changing Face of Europe.” Matrix, 94, 23-24. Online at: https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Matrix/Matrix94.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1991b. “A Czech Fan in America: Chicago WorldCon Impressions.” Shards of Babel, 34, 6-7. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Shards_of_Babel/Shards_of_Babel34-06.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992a. “Will People in Czechoslovakia Read SF in the Future?” Shards of Babel, 35, 7. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Shards_of_Babel/Shards_of_Babel35-07.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992b. “The View from Olympus.” Vector, 166, 14-16. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at: https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector166.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992c. “My Australian Diary: Syncon ’92 – and Something More.” Wild Shaarkah, 8, 1-12 [whole issue]. Online at https://efanzines.com/WildSharkaah/WildSharkaah-08.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Reprinted with corrections in GUFF: The Incomplete Chronicles, edited by David Langford. Ansible Editions, 2025. Online at https://taff.org.uk/ebooks.php?x=guffanth [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. The spelling of the fanzine title is inconsistent. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992d. “A Toothsome Smile, an Artificial Death.” Back Brain Recluse, 21, 21-23. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at: https://archive.org/details/back-brain-recluse-no.-21-1992 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva,  1993. “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes.” Vector, 174, 15-16. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Slightly revised version of Hauser 1990. 

Hauser, Eva. 1994. “Science Fiction in the Czech Republic and the Former Czechoslovakia: The Pleasures and the Disappointments of the New Cosmopolitanism.” Science-Fiction Studies 21 (2), whole no. 63, 133-140. https://doi.org/10.1525/sfs.21.2.0133 

Hauser, Jakub. [2026]. “‘Svůj ženský úděl ponesu mužně.’ Zpráva o literární pozůstalosti Evy Hauserové (1954–2023) v Literárním archivu PNP.” Literární archiv, 58, 2026 [in press].  

McHale, Brian. 1992. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge. Cited from Schmeink 2014b. Original not seen. 

Melly, George. 1970. Revolt into Style: the Pop Arts in Britain. Allen Lane. Cited from the Kindle edition: Faber, 2012. 

Neff, Ondřej. 1987. “Nová vlná v SF a kyberpunk.” Lecture delivered at Parcon, the Czechoslovak national sf convention, June 13, 1987. Noted in the convention programme in Interkom, 6/1987 [online at https://interkom.vecnost.cz/1987/19870654.htm; accessed 29 Mar 2026], and commonly referenced by other writers of the period, but I have not been able to find a published text of the lecture itself. 

Nicholls, Peter, and David Langford. [2025]. “Steampunk.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 4th edn., edited by John Clute, David Langford et al. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/steampunk [accessed 4 Apr 2026]. Entry last updated 7 Apr 2025. 

Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg. Cited from pdf e-book at https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120511 [accessed 4 Apr 2026]. 

Praženková, Monika. 2007. “Světy feministické fikce v díle Evy Hauserové.” Bachelor thesis, Masaryk University, Brno.

Prucher, Jeff, ed.  2007. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford University Press. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2014a. “Biopunk 101” [blog post], May 1, 2014, http://larsschmeink.de/?p=2548 [accessed 10 Nov 2016]. No longer available at this address but cached at https://web.archive.org/web/20150214054235/http:/larsschmeink.de/?p=2548 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2014b. “Biopunk 101”, SFRA Review, 309, 31-36. Web version not accessible as of 29 Mar 2026. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2016. Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction. (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies.)  Liverpool University Press. Online at https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781781383766 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Simsa, Cyril. 1993. “Two Short Articles about Biopunk.” Vector, 174, 12-14, 18. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Sterling, Bruce. 1995. “Triumph of the Plastic People”. Wired, 3.01, 100-107, 154-158. Plain text (minus photos) archived at https://www.wired.com/1995/01/prague/ [partially pay-walled] [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

1. Prucher 2007, 16, attributes the first appearance to a Usenet post relating to the role-playing game GURPS on 17 May 1992; Schmeink 2014b, 33, cites the literary theorist Brian McHale (1952-2025), who uses the term in his monograph, Constructing Postmodernism (McHale 1992), 255. The two sources appeared in rapid succession, and the chances of them being related seem close to zero. ︎
2. Cf. Winston Smith’s declaration at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “[T]he struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother”. Orwell 1949, 361. ︎
3. Cf. Di Filippo 1990: “Ribofunk is speculative fiction which acknowledges, is informed by and illustrates the tenet that the next revolution – the only one that really matters – will be in the field of biology.” ︎

By Cyril Simsa

Eva Hauserová promoting her non-fiction title Na koštěti se dá i lítat [Broomsticks can also be used for flying], 1995

Of the many contemporary subgenres of sf that can claim they originated as a reaction to the cyberpunk revolution of the 1980s, one of the oldest is certainly “biopunk”, especially if one counts the mini-genre of “ribofunk” – shouted into existence by the American writer Paul Di Filippo (1954-) in 1990, and just as quickly extinguished – as a legitimate precursor (Di Filippo 1990).  Probably only “steampunk”, coined by K.W. Jeter (1950-) in 1987, is older (Nicholls and Langford 2025). 

“Biopunk”, as it is used today, refers to a subgenre of sf that adopts many of the stylistic and narrative tropes of cyberpunk – a focus on stories built around an ensemble cast of petty criminals, (gene) hackers and chancers, urban subcultures, and a “revolt into style” (if the reader will pardon the throwback to the cultural criticism of an earlier era) (Melly 1970) – while sourcing its McGuffins from biotechnology, rather than cybernetics. In this contemporary sense, biopunk has its origins in the American genre writing of the 1990s, with the first documented use (from two different, and almost certainly unconnected sources) in 1992, and the subsequent attempt to identify precursors in earlier genre history.1

Di Filippo takes this as far back as H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); of more recent antecedents, Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) are frequently cited (Di Filippo 1990; Schmeink 2014b, 32).  From these American genre roots, biopunk has spread around the world and into other media, film and TV in particular. The hit TV show, Orphan Black (2013-2017), with its saga of a shadowy organisation trying to direct the future of human evolution through gene hacking and the complications that arise when some of its human clones escape, would be a good example. All of which makes a neat teleological narrative of exactly the kind that, in theory, every self-respecting punk of whatever persuasion is supposed to abhor; and none of which quite holds together when examined in a broader framework. 

Because there is a catch – of course, there is – and in a European context, this neat timeline is disrupted by the Czech writer Eva Hauserová (1954-2023), also known as Eva Hauser, who in 1988 independently came up with a literary intervention she called “biopunk,” and her coinage pre-dates the American one. This sits uncomfortably with the official chronicle, making her something later critics have had to explain away, though there are also those who have simply ignored her. (For the former, see Schmeink, who will be discussed below; for the latter, a simple Google search will reveal any number of biopunk, or biopunk-adjacent websites that have no idea of Eva’s existence.)  

Eva was living behind the Iron Curtain at the time she came up with the notion of “biopunk,” with limited access to American sources and no contact with her American contemporaries. However, like the American writers who later dreamt up their version of biopunk in the 1990s, her ideas were formed in reaction to cyberpunk – or rather, her vague impression of what she imagined cyberpunk to be, in the absence of any direct experience of the foundational texts – but with a change of focus to genetics and biology, rather than information technology and computer programming. (No doubt her educational background as a microbiologist played a role in that.)   There are, then, some parallels between Eva’s initial impulse towards biopunk and that of the writers who later adopted the same term in America, though there are also significant differences. 

In the 1980s, there was a common consensus in Czechoslovak fandom that cyberpunk was not really a viable literary genre in the conditions of latter-day Communism. As the Czech writer Ondřej Neff (1945-) argued in a classic lecture at Parcon, the Czechoslovak national sf convention, in June 1987: “It’s difficult to develop cyberpunk in a country, where one can’t even find a working telephone box.” (Neff 1987, cited from Hauser 1993, 15) 

In devising her concept of biopunk, Eva took this insight one step further, arguing that the differences between East and West in relation to cyberpunk were not just a question of technology, but also of social conditioning: 

The heroes of cyberpunk, in spite of all the novelty and colour of cyberpunk narrative, are at heart the same, familiar American boys – optimistic, active, greedy for money and longing for success. The heroes of biopunk, similarly to the people that I saw each day in my surroundings, couldn’t be nearly so straightforward.

When the disintegration and paralysis of society reaches a certain level, people lose their motivation to do anything at all. This is what we experienced in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s: people became extremely sceptical and passive as they realised, time and time again, that no matter what they tried, they couldn’t bring about any results, that no revolt, no expression of anger was capable of changing anything… (Hauser 1993, 15) 

Worse, in Eva’s view, people living under totalitarianism become so accustomed to the limitations imposed on them that they come to consider them normal: 

For example, the heroes of my stories often consider their situation to be marvellous and pleasant, even though by any rational analysis it is in actual fact frightening or utterly repulsive: this reflects totalitarian society with its grotesque voluntarism, its newspapers which continually declared that we, the people, were extremely happy, that we were living in a highly developed society, and that if we still had a few problems, they weren’t really so serious… (Hauser 1993, 15)2

Biopunk, then, was a literary device that allowed Eva to express the inner deformations of life under totalitarianism by externalising them into speculative biological traits. Her societies become the playground of “mutants, genetic diseases and deformations, chimaeric organisms,” (Hauser 1993, 15), and her protagonists are unable to imagine another state of being. Under the pressures of totalitarianism, her protagonists literally become monsters. 

Eva Hauserová: Self-portrait (2020)

American biopunk clearly comes from a very different impulse: the exploration of how biotechnology is going to impact society in the framework of a more-or-less corporate future. Its extrapolated biotechnology is based on real science, not metaphor.3 Its social assumptions are those of capitalism, not the sunset years of Soviet-style Communism and the collapsing economy of a failed experiment in centrally-planned socialism, based on nineteenth-century notions of industrial development and twentieth-century surveillance technology.

There is no question that the “biopunk” of contemporary film and fiction is not the same animal as Eva’s, and that her coinage of an earlier Central-East European homonym is an inconvenience to the people who take the contemporary, “Western” variant seriously. It therefore makes perfect sense that they should seek to sideline Eva’s rogue intervention, though the ways they do so are sometimes quite problematic. 

The most detailed attempt I have found to date is that of Lars Schmeink (1975-) in his article “Biopunk 101,” which was published in two slightly different versions in 2014 (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b).  Schmeink is today a respected independent scholar, based in Hamburg, with an impressive CV and a long publications list, but in 2014 he was just finishing his Ph.D. at Humboldt University Berlin , which two years later yielded his monograph Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, published by Liverpool University Press (Schmeink 2016).  The monograph itself makes no mention of Eva or her Czech biopunk – justifiably so, as it has no relevance to his argument – but one assumes that one of the reasons for his earlier essay was to tidy away this awkward forerunner, so as to avoid cluttering up his later book. 

As far as I have been able to reconstruct the publishing history, the two versions of “Biopunk 101” appeared within a couple of months of each other. The first, longer version appeared on Schmeink’s personal blog in May 2014 and is now accessible only on the Wayback Machine; the second, more formal (and shorter) variant appeared as an essay in SFRA Review in Summer 2014 (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b).  The discussion of Eva’s work in both versions is based on a mini-feature about biopunk, which appeared in the BSFA’s critical journal Vector in 1993, and which was curated by the present author. 

This comprised of three items: 

1. A slightly edited and polished version of Eva’s English-language essay, “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes”, first published under a slightly variant title in her personal fanzine, Wild Sharkaah, in 1990 (Hauser 1990; Hauser 1993). 

2. An English translation of “A Few Notes About Biopunk”, by Miroslav Fišer (1965-), first published in Czech in 1991, to illustrate how Eva’s biopunk had been received in Czech critical circles (Fišer 1993). 

3. An introduction by myself to set the context (Simsa 1993).  

Given the relatively late date of these publications (1991 for the first Czech appearance of Fišer, 1993 for Vector), both Fišer and I make the point that biopunk – which Eva herself declared to be a response to the experience of living under totalitarianism (see above) – was no longer a going concern by the time Vector appeared, because the fall of Communism had done away with the conditions that gave rise to it. This in turn leads Schmeink, whose account of Eva’s biopunk seems mostly intended to demonstrate its discontinuity from his own research, to base his discussion almost entirely on Fišer’s essay. We thus have the paradoxical situation, where Schmeink talks about biopunk as if it was some kind of impersonal movement from Eastern Europe, with Fišer as its spokesman, rather than the personal project of one individual (Eva Hauserová), supported by a couple of her acolytes (Simsa, Fišer), who essentially contributed nothing, except as a kind of all-singing, all-dancing team of bespoke fanboy cheer leaders. 

Eva is cited by Schmeink only in support of Fišer’s arguments: “Eva Hauser, another writer of Czech biopunk, in a manifest[o] from 1990 […]  translated into English in Vector, underlines some of Fišer’s statements and adds to the definition” (Schmeink 2014a, a passage that is found only in the web version of the article; it has been deleted from the abridged version published as Schmeink 2014b).  In the longer version of the essay on his blog, Schmeink does at least quote a few words from Eva herself, but in the shorter (and more official) version in SFRA Review, he quotes only Fišer and myself. Eva is named, but not allowed to speak, and one can only conclude that Schmeink has completely misunderstood the distribution of roles between Eva, Fišer and the present author; and in particular, the fact that biopunk was Eva’s invention, not ours. 

The original fanzine publication of “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement Specific for Post-Totalitarian Regimes”.  Wild Sharkaaah, No.2, December 1990. 

In fairness to Schmeink, Eva’s Wild Sharkaah was not available online at the time he was writing (it was not posted on efanzines.com till 2018), and paper copies would have been hard to find in 2014. It is therefore likely he had had no opportunity to verify the provenance of Eva’s article for himself, which might have helped clarify the pivotal nature of Eva’s contribution. The handwritten heading, the hand-drawn illustrations, and the way the article is integrated into the free-flowing text of Eva’s personal fanzine can leave little doubt about how individual this project was for her. Certainly, anyone who has read the original fanzine version of “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes” would find it hard to claim that “it remains unclear who originally coined the term,” as Schmeink does in both versions of his text (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b, 33).  That being said, I did include details of the article’s earlier publication in the bibliographic notes in Vector and a simple comparison of Eva’s author bio to Fišer’s should have been enough to show which of the two was the more significant writer. (By the time the Vector feature appeared, Eva had professionally published one novel and a short story collection, had been working as a professional editor for three years and her bio listed multiple publication credits. Fišer had gafiated. This is stated explicitly. Simsa 1993, 18.)  One, therefore, cannot help wondering whether gender bias may also have played a role. 

Another factor may have been how much time had elapsed since Eva first published her biopunk manifesto. In the early 1990s, immediately after the fall of Communism, the world was swept by a wave of interest in the post-Communist societies that had newly reopened to direct contacts with “the West,” and this was no less true of sf and sf fandom than it was of the rest of society. Eva was a known quantity in English-speaking fandom in the 1990s: she had worked as a professional editor at Ikárie magazine in Prague, which was newly publishing so many British and American writers, and had contributed stories and articles to a range of English-language publications, including a previous issue of Vector (Hauser 1992b). (Other English-language genre publications in which she appeared around this time included Matrix, BBR, Shards of Babel and Science-Fiction Studies: see Hauser 1991a, Hauser 1992a, Hauser 1992d, and Hauser 1994.)  She was also publishing her own English-language fanzine; attending multiple international conventions, including the Chicago Worldcon in 1991, and Syncon 92 in Australia as the official European GUFF delegate, the first fan from post-Communist Central Europe to be selected for one of the major international fan funds (convention reports available in Hauser 1991b for Chicago and Hauser 1992c for Australia); and she had become one of the regular ports of call for Western writers visiting Prague, including Bruce Sterling, who wrote about her in a travelogue for Wired (Sterling 1995, 155-156 plus photo on 103). 

In other words, at the time the Vector feature was published, anyone with at least a passing interest in European sf would have had an idea of who Eva was, and the editors did not see any need to emphasise this; but twenty years later, when Schmeink came to write his piece, this was evidently no longer the case and his discussion misses the context. 

In his focus on contemporary forms of biopunk, Schmeink does his best to locate Eva’s Central-East European biopunk in the past, to contain it in a bubble of late-totalitarian DIY punk subculture that has long ceased to be of anything but historical interest. In essence, he tries to present it as something like a dead language, leaving her mutants and chimaeric organisms to wander the margins of the post-Communist genre landscape, like hopeful monsters – another species of the weird zombies of Communism that are still endemic to the culture over here… 

The problem with all this is that contemporary genre scholarship is not the only possible frame of reference for studying Eva’s oeuvre, and if one takes a step back to look at her work in the framework of Gender Studies or Slavic Studies, she is still considered an appropriate topic of research. Indeed, there has been a marked upswing of interest in her work in recent years. University theses have been written about her sf of the 1980s and her involvement in fandom (Praženková 2007; Czechaczek 2015); essays have been published about the overlap between her science fiction and her involvement in the Czech women’s movement of the 1990s (Blažková 2025); at least one conference paper has been devoted specifically to her version of biopunk (Czechaczek 2018); and the Polish Scholar Joanna Czaplińska has drawn heavily on Eva’s stories in her recent study of gender aspects of Czech science fiction (Czaplińska 2022).  The donation of Eva’s literary archive to the Czech Literature Museum (Muzeum literatury–Památník národního písemnictví), after her untimely death in 2023, has also opened up new opportunities for study, as detailed by her son in an upcoming essay for the journal, Literární archiv (Hauser J. 2026). 

In short, Eva’s work is not going away and there are fields of scholarship in which it is her version of biopunk that is seen as the genuine article and the global version is the distraction. In fact, to be slightly provocative about this, from a Central European perspective, the globalised biopunk that has dominated cultural discourse for the last thirty-odd years looks increasingly like the vision of a dying corporate Utopia – a “localized referent” for a historically specific, culturally limited moment, to paraphrase Schmeink (Schmeink 2014b, 33) – while it is Eva’s biopunk and its raw engagement with the structures of totalitarianism that is once again becoming alarmingly relevant in the face of the new, post-democratic social order that seems to be sweeping our way from Airstrip Two, on the far side of the water. 

“Dystopia is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

~

FULL DISCLOSURE: Eva Hauserová was my partner. We lived together from 1994 until her death in 2023. We were not yet partners in 1991, at the time I prepared the biopunk feature that was eventually published in Vector. 

Eva Hauserová (1954-2023)

Eva Hauserová was born in Prague and originally planned to become a research scientist, receiving a Master’s degree in microbiology in 1978 and later starting an unfinished doctorate.  However, in parallel to her scientific activities, she had always had an interest in creative writing and in the 1980s this began to dominate. 

She discovered fandom in 1985 and rapidly began to produce the stories that became the basis of her idea of biopunk and her first short story collection, Hostina mutagenů [A Feast of Mutagens, 1992].  In 1988, she also won the prestigious Karel Čapek Award for her story “U nás v Agónii” [“Here, in Agony”, where Agony is the name of a planet].  

She narrowly missed becoming one of the founding editors of the premier Czech sf magazine, Ikárie, in 1990, joining the editorial staff from the second issue.  She went on to work as an editor for a range of Prague publishers, as well as a freelance translator, eventually producing somewhere in the region of a hundred book-length translations from English (she herself lost count), starting with The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas in 1993.  Her other translations included genre-adjacent work by Fay Weldon, Ruth Ozeki and Eve Ensler, and a host of Harlequin romances under various pseudonyms.  Her last translation, Clive King’s classic children’s fantasy, Stig of the Dump, is being published in 2026.  

In her own writing, she published an sf novel, Cvokyně [The Madwoman] in 1992, and continued to write genre-inflected stories throughout her career, such as those collected in Když se sudičky spletou [When the Fates Make a Mistake, 2000].  However, her later novels moved into the mainstream.  She also wrote several volumes of non-fiction, initially in relation to her voluntary work at the Prague Gender Studies Center, perhaps most notably Na koštěti se dá i lítát aneb Nemožné ženy dokažou i nemožné [Broomsticks can also be Used for Flying, or Impossible Women can Achieve the Impossible, 1995], one of the very first attempts to provide an overview of what would today be called second-wave feminism for Czech readers.  The book was an unexpected hit. 

It was also around this time that she was most active internationally, attending multiple sf conventions, contributing to English-language publications (both within the genre and in Gender Studies), and publishing her own fanzine.  Much of her English-language work from this period is signed Eva Hauser. 

Later in life, her focus shifted to environmental issues.  She was chair of the Czech Permaculture Association for several years and her last major publication was the gigantic three-volume Encyklopedie soběstačnosti pro 21. století [Encylopedia of Self-sufficiency for the 21st Century, 2016-2022], which she edited and co-wrote.  

She died in 2023.  Her final, posthumous novel, based on her experiences in the environmental movement, is forthcoming. 

Cyril Simsa

Cyril Simsa is an Anglo-Czech writer (born in London to Czech parents, but now living in Prague), with stories and articles in a range of genre publications. His short story collection is Lost Cartographies: Tales of Another Europe (Invocations Press, 2014). A second collection, Starspawn and Other Stories, is forthcoming.

~

SOURCES

Blažková, Hana. 2025. “Pozapomenutá sci-fi tradice českého feminismu. Emancipace Evy Hauserové a Caroly Biedermannové v 80. a 90. letech 20. století”. Gender a výzkum/Gender and Research online: https://doi.org/10.13060/gav.2025.004 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Czaplińska, Joanna. 2022. “Does Czech Science Fiction Have a (Feminine) Gender?” Revista Hélice, 8 (1), whole no. 32, 9-20. Translated by Carleton Bulkin. Online at https://w ww.revistahelice.com/en/book/helice-32-2/ [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 2015. 

Czechaczek, Jan. 2015. “Cena Karla Čapka ve fanzinech.” Master’s thesis, Masaryk University, Brno.

Czechaczek, Jan. 2018. “Biopunk Evy Hauserové.” Paper presented at the conference Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene/Fantastika a mýtus v antropocénu, Masaryk University, Brno, October 5, 2018. One-page abstract available at: https://ceska-literatura.phil.muni.cz/fantastika/en/fantasy-and-myth-in-the-anthropocene/conference-program [accessed 29 Mar 2026]

Di Filippo, Paul. 1990. “Ribofunk.” Boing-Boing, Winter 1990, 24. Republished online as “Ribofunk: the Manifesto”, currently at https://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/Ribofunk.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Print version not seen. 

Fišer, Miroslav. 1993. “A Few Notes about Biopunk.” Vector, 174, 17-18. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva. 1990. “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement Specific for Post-Totalitarian Regimes.” Wild Sharkaaah, 2, 1-2. Online at https://efanzines.com/WildSharkaah/WildSharkaah-02.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. The spelling of the fanzine title is inconsistent. 

Hauser Eva. 1991a. “The Changing Face of Europe.” Matrix, 94, 23-24. Online at: https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Matrix/Matrix94.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1991b. “A Czech Fan in America: Chicago WorldCon Impressions.” Shards of Babel, 34, 6-7. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Shards_of_Babel/Shards_of_Babel34-06.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992a. “Will People in Czechoslovakia Read SF in the Future?” Shards of Babel, 35, 7. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Shards_of_Babel/Shards_of_Babel35-07.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992b. “The View from Olympus.” Vector, 166, 14-16. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at: https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector166.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992c. “My Australian Diary: Syncon ’92 – and Something More.” Wild Shaarkah, 8, 1-12 [whole issue]. Online at https://efanzines.com/WildSharkaah/WildSharkaah-08.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Reprinted with corrections in GUFF: The Incomplete Chronicles, edited by David Langford. Ansible Editions, 2025. Online at https://taff.org.uk/ebooks.php?x=guffanth [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. The spelling of the fanzine title is inconsistent. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992d. “A Toothsome Smile, an Artificial Death.” Back Brain Recluse, 21, 21-23. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at: https://archive.org/details/back-brain-recluse-no.-21-1992 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva,  1993. “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes.” Vector, 174, 15-16. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Slightly revised version of Hauser 1990. 

Hauser, Eva. 1994. “Science Fiction in the Czech Republic and the Former Czechoslovakia: The Pleasures and the Disappointments of the New Cosmopolitanism.” Science-Fiction Studies 21 (2), whole no. 63, 133-140. https://doi.org/10.1525/sfs.21.2.0133 

Hauser, Jakub. [2026]. “‘Svůj ženský úděl ponesu mužně.’ Zpráva o literární pozůstalosti Evy Hauserové (1954–2023) v Literárním archivu PNP.” Literární archiv, 58, 2026 [in press].  

McHale, Brian. 1992. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge. Cited from Schmeink 2014b. Original not seen. 

Melly, George. 1970. Revolt into Style: the Pop Arts in Britain. Allen Lane. Cited from the Kindle edition: Faber, 2012. 

Neff, Ondřej. 1987. “Nová vlná v SF a kyberpunk.” Lecture delivered at Parcon, the Czechoslovak national sf convention, June 13, 1987. Noted in the convention programme in Interkom, 6/1987 [online at https://interkom.vecnost.cz/1987/19870654.htm; accessed 29 Mar 2026], and commonly referenced by other writers of the period, but I have not been able to find a published text of the lecture itself. 

Nicholls, Peter, and David Langford. [2025]. “Steampunk.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 4th edn., edited by John Clute, David Langford et al. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/steampunk [accessed 4 Apr 2026]. Entry last updated 7 Apr 2025. 

Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg. Cited from pdf e-book at https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120511 [accessed 4 Apr 2026]. 

Praženková, Monika. 2007. “Světy feministické fikce v díle Evy Hauserové.” Bachelor thesis, Masaryk University, Brno.

Prucher, Jeff, ed.  2007. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford University Press. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2014a. “Biopunk 101” [blog post], May 1, 2014, http://larsschmeink.de/?p=2548 [accessed 10 Nov 2016]. No longer available at this address but cached at https://web.archive.org/web/20150214054235/http:/larsschmeink.de/?p=2548 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2014b. “Biopunk 101”, SFRA Review, 309, 31-36. Web version not accessible as of 29 Mar 2026. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2016. Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction. (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies.)  Liverpool University Press. Online at https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781781383766 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Simsa, Cyril. 1993. “Two Short Articles about Biopunk.” Vector, 174, 12-14, 18. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Sterling, Bruce. 1995. “Triumph of the Plastic People”. Wired, 3.01, 100-107, 154-158. Plain text (minus photos) archived at https://www.wired.com/1995/01/prague/ [partially pay-walled] [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

1. Prucher 2007, 16, attributes the first appearance to a Usenet post relating to the role-playing game GURPS on 17 May 1992; Schmeink 2014b, 33, cites the literary theorist Brian McHale (1952-2025), who uses the term in his monograph, Constructing Postmodernism (McHale 1992), 255. The two sources appeared in rapid succession, and the chances of them being related seem close to zero. ︎
2. Cf. Winston Smith’s declaration at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “[T]he struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother”. Orwell 1949, 361. ︎
3. Cf. Di Filippo 1990: “Ribofunk is speculative fiction which acknowledges, is informed by and illustrates the tenet that the next revolution – the only one that really matters – will be in the field of biology.” ︎