Vector [BSFA] Blog
Science-Fiction, Quantum Physics and the Modernists
In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger published the paper containing his eponymous equation, one of the most significant scientific achievements of the twentieth century. In the same year Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, dedicated to what he insisted at the time on calling ‘scientifiction’. Given this, an obvious question to ask is whether the new theory of quantum mechanics had any impact on this emerging genre of literature, and if so, in what form?[1] As far as I can tell, however, no one has seriously considered this before now.[2] That’s not to say that there are no studies of the impact of quantum physics on science fiction at all – there are, but they tend to focus on later, post-war, developments. My interest lies with the earlier years, stretching from the late 1920s into the 1940s, when the theory spread beyond a small set of theoretical physicists and not only began to be applied to a range of phenomena – physical, chemical and biological – but was also presented to the general public through a number of popular scientific texts.
Unfortunately, however, with one or two exceptions, it appears to have had little impact on the science fiction stories of that era, beyond the occasional name-dropping and the odd, usually distorted, reference. it might be thought that this was because quantum mechanics was too new a theory and had not yet filtered into the consciousness of the general public, even of those who might be taken to be attuned to the latest scientific advances. Yet, this situation appears to contrast sharply with another form of literature prevalent at the time, namely Modernism. There is now a burgeoning literature on how the likes of Virginia Woolf were receptive to the new quantum physics, drawing on it to give non-traditional shape to their works. That suggests that the early authors of ‘scientifiction’ were not quite as ‘on the ball’ scientifically speaking as certain avant-garde writers in the UK. As we’ll see, however, things are not quite so clear, although there remains enough of a disparity to demand some form of explanation.
The History and Philosophy of Quantum PhysicsThe body of fundamental theoretical work that is now labelled ‘quantum mechanics’ initially developed along two, apparently different, paths, each a response to the difficulties faced by the ‘old’ quantum theory of Max Planck and Niels Bohr. It was the former who introduced ‘quanta’ of energy in order to account for the characteristics of electromagnetic radiation but it was Einstein who embodied them in the form of photons in his 1905 explanation of the ’photoelectric effect’, for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize (Kuhn 1978). Bohr, in turn, used this device to explain atomic spectra, offering a model in which electrons were set in certain orbits around a central nucleus, ‘jumping’ between them by absorbing or emitting these chunks of energy.
This model remained highly successful for the next decade or so but by the early 1920s it had begun to fray at the seams in the face of new empirical evidence. In response, Werner Heisenberg took the extreme step of abandoning talk of electron ‘orbits’ entirely and insisted that systems should be represented via observable quantities only (such as the frequencies and intensities of atomic spectra). The set of equations that he came up with seemed bizarre, however, until his colleague Max Born realised that they could be re-formulated in terms of a mathematical array known as a matrix. It was in the context of this ‘matrix mechanics’ that Heisenberg derived his famous Uncertainty Principle, which states that in the case of certain such observables (known as ‘non-commuting’, in that it matters which one is measured first), such as position and momentum, or energy and time, one can measure precisely either one or the other, but not both. This was subsequently appropriated by Bohr to formally underpin his philosophy of ‘complementarity’ which has baffled physicists and philosophers ever since but which, broadly speaking, takes measurements of quantum systems to reveal complementary aspects of their behaviour.
Around the same time, Schrödinger presented what appeared to be an entirely different approach, that came to be called ‘wave mechanics’ and which eschewed quantum jumps between electron orbits in favour of, as the name suggests, a wave-based understanding of the absorption and emission of radiation. However, as Einstein quickly pointed out, these ‘waves’ could not be regarded as real once systems with more than one electron were considered and it was Born, again, who supplied what became the accepted understanding of them in terms of the probability of obtaining a certain outcome in a measurement. Although opposed to both matrix mechanics and Bohr’s understanding of it, Schrödinger nevertheless appreciated that his formulation and Heisenberg’s were physically equivalent, a realisation that was subsequently put on a secure mathematical footing in 1932 by John (Janos) von Neumann, yielding the standard formalism still in play today.
By this point, the early 1930s, quantum mechanics was being applied to a diverse range of phenomena, from radioactive decay to the formation of molecular bonds and was, as a result, setting down a record of astonishing empirical success. Nevertheless, issues remained. Both Einstein and Schrödinger remained opposed to the emerging consensus around Bohr’s vision of the theory (which came to be known in the 1950s as the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’). Thus, Einstein maintained that something was missing from the theory and together with his collaborators proposed a famous thought experiment that came to be seen as expressing a significant and non-classical feature of quantum physics, previously articulated by Schrödinger as a kind of mysterious ‘entanglement’ between particles (Maudlin 2019). This ‘spooky action-at-a-distance’ has since been experimentally verified and its possible applications in quantum computation and communications are now under active investigation.
Schrödinger also presented his own thought experiment, featuring his now infamous cat. This was his attempt to push back against Bohr’s insistence that although microscopic systems could be represented within the framework of quantum mechanics, the macroscopic set-up used to observe them had to be described in classical terms in order for the results to be communicable. Schrödinger imagined a box containing an arrangement that would lead to the death of the cat if a piece of radioactive material decayed and not otherwise. According to the theory, that material must be described as in a superposition of decayed and not-decayed states, with a certain probability assigned to the realisation of each. But the theory also mandates that if another system interacts with that material, then the joint system also has to be described in terms of a superposition and so on, up the chain of interactions, until the cat is also included. As far as Schrödinger was concerned, what this showed was that, contrary to what Bohr maintained, the theory can embrace macroscopic situations and indeed, by the mid-1930s it had started to be used to explain the weird behaviour of liquid helium and superconducting materials. More importantly, subsequent commentators understood this thought experiment as exemplifying an issue that has come to be known as ‘the Measurement Problem’.[3]
In a nutshell, the problem is this: when the box is opened, it is always either a live (hopefully) or dead cat that is observed, never a superposition, so the question arises: what accounts for the ‘collapse’ of the superposition into a definite state? An early suggestion was that this is due to the act of observation itself and this is often presented as a central tenet of the Copenhagen Interpretation. In fact, it was vehemently rejected by Bohr and it was another physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Wigner, who actively promoted it. Despite the popularisation of this suggestion in the 1960s and ‘70s, it was widely rejected by both physicists and philosophers of physics on the grounds that it remained mysterious how, exactly, an act of observation (by whom? or what?!) could generate such a shift.
Subsequently, several alternative solutions to the Measurement Problem became available (see French and Saatsi 2020). One of the most well-known is the so-called ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’, originally proposed by Hugh Everett in 1956 (albeit not with that name). On this view, the superposition is understood to encode the different outcomes which are located in alternative ‘branches’ or, as they came to be called, ‘worlds’ of the multiverse. So, in one such branch, the observer opens the box and sees a live cat and in another, her counterpart opens it and observes a dead one. It is this understanding of quantum mechanics that is most prominently featured in recent science-fiction narratives, although, sadly perhaps, the theory itself blocks any such observer from hopping between these worlds (perhaps the best account of this interpretation is Wallace 2012).
Quantum Physics in Early Science-FictionWith the caveat that I have not sampled every issue of every Anglophone magazine, most mentions of the term ‘quantum’ refer only to the ‘old’ quantum theory of Planck and Bohr. A representative example would be Victor Rousseau’s ‘The Atom-Smasher’ (May 1930) in which the ‘key’ to unlocking the power of the atom is said to be ‘[t]he Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously but only by a certain finite amount, or multiples of this amount …’ (Rousseau 1930, p. 236). Despite this, the story itself makes little scientific sense, as the ‘atom smasher’ of the title works on the principle of a ‘wave series of a single sound extended in time to make four-dimensional action (p. 241) which allows the user to travel through time, something that was ‘theoretically implied since the discoveries of Einstein …’ (p. 243). Arthur Eddington, who confirmed Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with his famous eclipse observations, is also mentioned, as emphasising the ‘stupendous’ amount of energy ‘locked up’ in an atom (p. 235).
Leaving out those stories that similarly refer to ‘unlocking’ the power of the atom, typically in the context of producing some sort of weapon,[4] the obvious analogy between the Bohr model of the atom and the solar system formed the basis of numerous speculations about civilisations existing in the sub-atomic realm. An early example is Ray Cummings’ ‘The Girl in the Golden Atom’ (1919) in which a chemist uses a powerful microscope to observe a ‘universe in an atom’ (Cummings 1970, p. 176). Again, however, the story is scientifically nonsensical, despite Cummings’ claims to have a background in physics (claims that turned out to be vastly exaggerated; see Mullen 1999).
A better attempt can be found in R.F. Starzl’s parody of Cummings’ story, ‘Out of the Sub-Universe’ (1928), in which ‘cosmic’ rays (discovered in 1912 with the term itself coined by Robert Millikan only in the 1920s) are used to shrink the intrepid explorers to sub-atomic dimensions, whereupon they discover that time, as measured by the revolutions of the electron around the nucleus, passes more quickly. In his editorial comment Hugo Gernsback insisted that the story contains ‘excellent science, and will make you understand a great deal about the atomic world, if you do not know it already’ (1928, p. 378).
Similarly, in ‘The Pygmy Planet’ (1932) Jack Williamson suggests that certain frequencies of x-rays, ‘so powerful that they are almost akin to the cosmic ray’ (1932a, p. 155), can cause the orbits of electrons to collapse, shrinking the atoms and anything composed of them (and again there is an explicit comparison with the solar system; p. 155). Time again moves faster in these new worlds and interestingly, in response to readers’ concerns about the science behind his story, Williamson explains that given the word limit, he couldn’t include all the ‘technical details’, particularly with regard to how gravity would work in this microscopic domain (Williamson 1932b, pp. 279-280). Unfortunately, however, he then gets these details completely wrong, taking gravity to be a kind of field which exerts a pressure, with gravitational attraction resulting from material objects shielding each other from this pressure. Williamson here draws on the work of Alvin J. Powers, who rejected Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which conceives gravity, not as an attractive force, acting ‘at a distance’ as Newton maintained, but as the effect of the curvature of space-time, itself distorted by the presence of massive bodies. In neither theory is it understood as exerting some kind of ‘pressure’. As to how gravity ‘works’ at the atomic level, that remains an ongoing programme of research.[5]
Shifting to the other end of the length scale, G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s ‘The Man From the Atom’ (1923) has the hero increasing in size, through a reversal of sub-atomic division, to the point where he becomes larger than, first, the Earth, then the solar system and then even nebulae of stars. Eventually, these also merge into a great ball and, flipping the above analogy, Wertenbaker (then only fifteen) speculates that there could be ‘huge’ electrons composed of universes. Splitting electrons also feature in ‘The Marble Virgin’ by Kennie McDowd (1929) in which an ‘electron dissolver’ is used to render the particles ‘… into infinitely minute nothings of heat and light-flash.’ With atoms again envisaged as planetary systems, by changing the number of electrons they contain in this way, different elements are obtained and so a weird form of transmutation is achieved.
Further suggestive references can be found in the likes of Edward Sears’ ‘The Atomic Riddle’ (1928) which refers to ‘… the modern idea of light [as] composed of bundles of energy’ (p. 51), that is, quanta. The photon is also mentioned in ‘Minus Planet’ by J.D. Clark (1937), generally regarded as the first story about anti-matter. Clark, who was a chemist and rocket scientist, does at least get the science broadly right, although little thought is given to the consequences of using the Moon to annihilate an approaching planet made of anti-matter!
R. S. Richardson, an astronomer who wrote science fiction as Philip Latham, later discussed anti-matter, referred to as ‘contraterrene’ in his essay “Inside Out Matter” (1941), citing in support the Nobel Prize speeches of ‘three of the biggest names in atomic physics: W. Heisenberg, E. Schrodinger, and P. A. M. Dirac’ (p. 112). Dirac’s prediction, alongside the discovery of positrons by Carl Anderson in 1932, also influenced the later work of James Blish, whose story ‘Beep!’ (1954) introduced the faster-than-light ‘Dirac communicator’ which involves a form of quantum entanglement.[6]
Blish was well-known for insisting on the importance of theoretical soundness in science fiction, so when he turned to the analogy between an atom and the solar system, he offered quite a different picture from those sketched above. In ‘Nor Iron Bars’ (1957), a scientist constructs a spaceship out of ‘negative mass’[7] which, again invoking Dirac and gesturing at the latter’s energy ‘holes’ that were reinterpreted as positrons, takes it into the sub-atomic quantum domain. In this scenario, however, when the scientists step out onto the ‘surface’ of an electron, there is an acknowledgement of quantum ‘fuzziness’, at least (and in combining quantum mechanics with General Relativity, this may also be the first example of quantum gravity appearing in science fiction).
Many years later, Robert Heinlein was asked to write an article on Dirac & anti-matter for the Compton Yearbook, offering a typically boosterish summary of Dirac’s career (Heinlein, 1980). However, although he took some graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California and despite the impact of Einstein’s General Relativity, with its underlying framework of non-Euclidean geometry, on ‘And He Built a Crooked House’ (1941),[8] there is little evidence of any awareness of quantum theory in his stories. Even in ‘Let There Be Light’ (1940), in which a couple first invent light panels, then realise that they can reverse the arrangement and use light to generate electricity via a form of the photoelectric effect (which, as noted above, Einstein explained using Planck’s notion of quanta), the relevant scientific details are given entirely in non-quantum terms. Similarly, although it is claimed that L. Ron Hubbard studied engineering, mathematics and nuclear physics at George Washington University,[9] and although ‘The Professor Was a Thief’ (1940) mentions the ‘fourth dimension’ and ‘Einstein’s mathematics’, the science is poorly understood and again, quantum physics appears to have had no impact on his work.
Of such ‘Big Names’ in genre SF, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke did at least have legitimate scientific credentials. Asimov, as is well known, obtained his MA in chemistry in 1941 and his PhD seven years later. However, although in ‘Half-Breed’ (1940; the title is now, rightly, considered offensive), the protagonist is asked to explain something in a book on quantum mechanics, the theory generally gets barely a mention anywhere in his stories. However, it has been speculated that the Mule, who appears in Foundation and Empire as a disruptive influence, might be thought of as a ‘resonance’ of new developments in physics, such as quantum mechanics, ‘which must have impinged deeply on Asimov as a chemist’ (Westfahl 1997). It is also suggested that the role of a human being in the final choice between First Foundation, Second Foundation, and Gaia, the universal consciousness, reflects certain understandings of quantum mechanics in which the observer collapses the wave function. Having noted that, Asimov’s own estimation of his grasp on quantum mechanics was that it was weak.[10]
Nevertheless, direct evidence of its impact can be found in Asimov’s spoof scientific paper, ‘The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline’ (1948), featuring a fictional substance which, it is claimed, starts dissolving before it touches water! Interestingly, the time of solution varies with the mental state of the observer, so that any period of hesitation reduces the negative time of the dissolution, often effectively eliminating it as it falls below the limits of detection. Although we don’t have an explicit case of wave-function collapse, we do have the observer’s consciousness affecting a physical process. In the sequel, ‘The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline’ (1953) this dependence of the manner of dissolution on the mental state of the observer is suggested as a way of diagnosing the latter. Asimov then speculates that the chemical bonds of a thiotimoline molecule are so ‘starved’ of space that some are forced into the time dimension, so that one bond exists in the past, with another in the future, thereby allowing for the recording of future events. With this as background, the final piece in the trilogy, ‘Thiotimoline and the Space Age’ (1960) describes the attempts to create a so-called ‘Heisenberg Failure’, in the sense of trying to get a sample of thiotimoline to dissolve without later adding water to it. In every case where the thiotimoline dissolves, something happened which causes water to be added at the appropriate time. And here Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle makes an appearance: we cannot say with certainty that an individual molecule will dissolve before the water is added and the probability of it not dissolving is quite appreciable but given the large number in any given sample, the chance of all or some fraction not dissolving is infinitesimal.[11]
Turning to the UK, Clarke also had a strong scientific background, of course, obtaining a degree in mathematics and physics at King’s College, University of London in 1948. Even before then, in one of his very early stories, ‘Retreat From Earth’ (1938) he mentions ‘quantum radiations’ (Clarke 2000, p. 20), and in ‘The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch’ (1957), one of the characters is described as giving lectures on quantum mechanics. But what is really interesting is Clarke’s use of liquid helium II as a device in two of his stories. The peculiar, ‘superfluid’ properties of this substance became known in the 1930s and were explained by Fritz London in terms of a kind of quantum ‘condensation’. That Clarke had an interest in condensed states of matter is evident from his short story, ‘The Fires Within’ (1949) in which atomic electron shells are speculated to be missing. Then in ‘Technical Error’ (1950) the occurrence of a dramatic reversal of symmetry, with disastrous consequences, is explained using liquid helium, superconductivity and 4-dimensional geometry. Here the fourth dimension is not that of time, but of space, and in a nod to the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics, Clarke writes that ‘space of several million dimensions has frequently been postulated in sub-atomic physics’ (2000, p. 64). Meanwhile, ‘Time’s Arrow’, also written in 1950, relies on the association between entropy increase and the direction of time, as attributed to Eddington, who presented it in his popular science book, The Nature of the Physical World (1928). [12] Once again Clarke uses the peculiar properties of superfluid Helium II, including, supposedly, the idea that it exhibits negative entropy,[13] which implies negative time, so that the substance can be used to power a trip to the prehistoric era.[14]
Granted all this, the references to quantum mechanics in science fiction during its early years seem to be fleeting, far between and frequently inaccurate. As has been noted elsewhere, although the rise of the ‘pulps’ coincided with the new scientific developments, ‘special relativity is widely used’ but ‘quantum mechanics hardly at all apart from a few general references …’ (Lambourne et. al. 1990, p. 49). At first glance, this might not seem that surprising. After all, the theory was new and still under development, with many of its applications still to emerge and so one might expect a time lag before it appeared in literature.15 Certainly, that appears to be the case when it comes to the ‘old’ quantum theory of Bohr and Planck. However, there is a stark contrast here with the modernists, who incorporated the new physics into their works with remarkable alacrity. Or so it appears.
Modernism and Quantum MechanicsIt is debatable when, precisely, literary Modernism began, which authors should be included under its umbrella and which themes and issues it should be taken to incorporate. Broadly speaking, however, we can say that, as a movement, it began in the early twentieth century, that it included such writers as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett and that it attempted to break with traditional modes of representation by engaging with the latest advances in science and technology, amongst other cultural shifts. When it comes to that last aspect, there is now a burgeoning literature regarding the influence on and incorporation into this literature of developments in physics, specifically relativity theory and quantum mechanics. So, for example, Joyce is known to have asked for a work by Einstein (most likely the latter’s own popular exposition, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory; first published in German in 1916, translated into English in 1920). Woolf, likewise, was familiar with the popular works of Einstein’s famous British advocate, the Astronomer-Royal Eddington and also had on her shelf books by renowned physicists James Jeans (Jeans [1930]) and George Thomson (Thomson [also 1930])[15].
It is worth pausing here just to note the differences between these latter two scientists and their works. Jeans was much more steeped in the tradition of classical physics and represents a transition figure in the history of early twentieth-century physics, living through the development of quantum theory without making a major contribution to it. Thomson, however, as well as being the son of the discoverer of the electron, was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize in 1937 for his research demonstrating the particle’s wave-like nature (see Navarro 2010). Consequently, although both books emphasised these wave-like properties of matter, as embodied in Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, Thomson, being more on top of the latest developments, also recognised, albeit towards the end of his book, that these properties could not be understood in literal terms.
Why is this significant? Because the emerging quantum picture of the world is claimed to be reflected in Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves (Woolf 1931), regarded as her most experimental and innovative work. It features the overlapping internal dialogues of six characters, three male, three female, as they grow from childhood through to old age, with the soliloquies broken up by descriptions of the sea pounding the shore by a sunlit cottage during the course of one day. As the novel progresses the identities of the various characters alternately emerge, become sharply defined, then recede back into a diffuse state again, before repeating the cycle. This reflects Woolf’s overarching concerns regarding identity, self and community and, in particular, the tension between our distinct individuality and the tendency to merge into the crowd. This has been compared with Thomson’s discussion of the dichotomy between the loss of an electron’s identity within wave mechanics and its ‘stubborn individuality’ as a particle, subject to the constraints of Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (Livingstone 2018, p. 67).[16]
Further resonances with quantum theory have also been identified, as when a character expresses their selfhood in terms of possible incompatible personages, which are then reduced to a definite identity when they are observed. This has been compared to the localization of a quantum particle by observation, or more generally the shift from a state of indeterminacy to determinacy (Livingstone 2018, p. 72), as represented by the collapse of the wave function. In another passage, as the same character is contemplating their life, they suddenly feel as if the table in front of them has become insubstantial. This is strikingly reminiscent of the opening of Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, where he writes of two tables, one of which is the ‘common-sense’ or everyday table which is solid and has all the usual properties attributed to it, and the other is the table as described by quantum theory, which is ‘mostly emptiness’ (Beer 1995).[17]
Nevertheless, it has been argued that the relationship between physics and Modernism was not unidirectional (Crossland 2018; 2020). Catrina Livingstone, for example, has proposed a ‘loop feedback’ model, according to which ‘Woolf and the science writers are involved in a reciprocal process of influence’ (Livingstone 2018, p. 67). Accordingly, ‘the concepts of duality and indeterminacy in quantum physics resonate with Woolf’s pre-existing preoccupation with the multiplicity of identity, causing her to use scientific models and scientific experiments in her depictions of selfhood. Conversely, the multiplicity and fluidity of identity found in modernist writing in general, and Woolf’s writing in particular, resonate with the preoccupations of the physicists, causing them to emphasize the implications that quantum physics has for identity’ (p. 76).
However, the claim that Woolf’s writing ‘caused’ physicists to emphasise the implications of quantum mechanics for identity goes too far. First of all, what we are talking about here are popularizations of quantum physics, and although they were written by physicists themselves, the reciprocal process of influence does not manifest in the relevant papers as published in the leading journals of the day. Secondly, the issue of the implications of quantum physics for particle identity had been ‘in the air’ for many years – indeed, going back to the origins of the theory – and became explicit in 1927, through the work of Born, Heisenberg and others (French and Krause 2006; for further resonances identified in the literature, see Cousins 2023 pp. 29-30).
This drew on the development, between 1924 and 1927, of two forms of ‘quantum statistics’ describing the aggregate behaviour of quantum entities. First, Satyendra Bose retro-engineered Planck’s original work and showed that photons behaved according to what came to be called ‘Bose-Einstein statistics’ (Einstein had his name attached because he drew out the implications of Bose’s work). Subsequently, Dirac and Enrico Fermi showed, independently of one another, that electrons and protons collectively behaved quite differently, according to what is now known as ‘Fermi-Dirac statistics’. The difference is that whereas bosons tend to congregate together in the same state, fermions display the opposite tendency. It is this latter behaviour that is captured by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, mentioned above, and which explains the Periodic Table as well as chemical bonding (and hence the solidity of tables, for example). Crucially, it was realised that both forms of statistics depend on particles of the same kind being understood as fundamentally indistinguishable in a sense that goes beyond merely sharing the same set of properties, such as mass, charge and so on. Schrödinger subsequently expressed this as a loss of identity, writing ‘It is beyond doubt that the question of ‘sameness’, of identity, really and truly has no meaning’ (Schrödinger 1996, p. 122).
Thomson hadn’t quite grasped this implication of the new quantum statistics when he wrote about the ‘stubborn individuality’ of the electron as a particle.[18] More importantly, it is not the case that physicists regarded the identity of such particles as ‘fluid’ in the way that the likes of Woolf are claimed to have done, with their individuality ‘merging’ into their wave-like nature. Indeed, this is not how wave-particle duality should be understood. As Bohr emphasised, whether wave-like or particle-like behaviour is observed depends on the experimental setup. It is this which lies behind his famous doctrine of ‘complementarity’, about which a great deal has been written (see Faye and Folse 2017). Although he went on to extend this into the biological and psychological spheres, he originally intended it to refer to the relationship between two kinds of descriptions of a physical system, one causal, as represented by the property of momentum, and the other, spatio-temporal, as represented by position. Such properties are mathematically represented by ‘non-commuting’ operators and it is these that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is concerned with, and which has also been elaborated far beyond its original theoretical basis.
The claim that this notion of complementarity resonates in some sense with Woolf’s writings is commonplace in the literature (Cousin 2022, p. 30). Thus, the complexity of familial inter-relationships expressed in her semi-autobiographical novel, To The Lighthouse (Woolf 1927), has been analysed in terms of various kinds of duality, gender-based and otherwise, which have then been related to Bohr’s notion and wave-particle duality more generally. However, the novel was actually written between 1925 and 1927 and as Xavier Cousin notes, during that time, ‘quantum mechanics was only just starting to be formulated by a handful of isolated physicists; complementarity did not exist, as conceptual issues that prompted the need for it had not yet been appreciated; and popularised discussions of quantum theory were still limited to the mysteries of the atom, and hence the “old” version of the science, which – while relevant – did not contain any of the quantum-concepts from mature quantum mechanics that scholars typically identify in Woolf’ (Cousin 2022, p. 71).
A similar sceptical stance has been taken by Michael Whitworth towards claims that elements of The Waves, as well as its very title (which was changed from ‘The Moths’) are also suggestive of these kinds of resonances (Whitworth 2001). Thus, he argues that consideration of her earlier novels ‘reveals that Woolf had developed many aspects of her own wave/particle model of the self in anticipation of the physicists’ (p. 162).[19] Furthermore, Whitworth suggests that the above resonances, in particular between Woolf’s novel and the work of Schrödinger, are ‘disrupted’ by considerations of the possible influence of other scientific discourses (p. 164). So, for example, the characters in The Waves describe their wave-like state in terms of filaments or fibres, connecting them to one another or allowing them to hear sounds from far away. However, Whitworth maintains, rather than taking this as representing the influence of quantum physics, it could just as easily be drawn from metaphors used to describe magnetic lines of force (p. 164). Of course, this is possible but it is worth noting that Thomson, whose popular book Woolf had on her shelf as indicated above (but whom Whitworth does not mention at all), used the analogy of the gossamer spider, with its filaments stretched out around it, as an analogy for the electron and its waves (Thomson 1929, p. 220).[20] Such comparative evaluations of the impact of particular scientific theories, and their mediation via analogies and metaphors, on literary works are notoriously tricky, but in the case of The Waves and quantum mechanics, at least, such impact cannot be so easily dismissed.[21]
ConclusionWhy is it that there is a plethora of studies arguing for the influence of quantum notions on Modernist writers such as Woolf, whereas there is so little corresponding material when it comes to the early science fiction authors? Certainly, it was not the case that the UK was more receptive to the development of quantum mechanics than the USA (Coben 1971). One might wonder about the role of science popularisation, although Eddington and Thomson for example, gave several series of popular lectures in the USA throughout the 1920s and ‘30s.
I suspect the answer may lie elsewhere. In his autobiography, Clarke refers to ‘hyperspace’, as licenced by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as a kind of ‘Swiss Army Knife’, able to be used by science-fiction writers for many different purposes (Clarke 1990, p. 58). Thus Gernsback, in another editorial, waxed lyrical about Einstein’s latest attempt at unifying gravity and electromagnetism but the emphasis was all on the possibility of building ‘the fantastic machines which our scientification prophets have told us of for many years’ (Gernsback 1929, p. 5).[22]
Quantum mechanics, at least as initially presented and interpreted, offered no such opportunities, at least not until the elaboration of the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’[23] The Modernists, on the other hand, had no need for, and indeed eschewed, any such technology-oriented device.[24] As extended, dramatically, from the microscopic realm to that of human relationships, what the theory gave them instead was an alternative framing of the latter, one that allowed them to articulate concerns and ways of thought that they may already have been entertaining but which they could now express in novel ways. It would be some years before the prophets of ‘scientification’ would catch up with such developments.[25]
Steven French is a retired historian and philosopher of science who writes reviews for The BSFA Review and SF2 Concatenation. Some of his own stories can also be found scattered across the internet. ReferencesAsimov, I. (1972), The Early Asimov, vol. 2, Fawcett Crest.
Beer, G. (1995), ‘Eddington and the Idiom of Modernism: Physics, Politics and Literature in the 1930’s’, in Science, Reason, and Rhetoric, ed. H. Krips. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 295-315.
Bowler, P.J. (2009), Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early TwentiethCentury Britain. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Cheng, J. (2012), Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America. University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Clarke, A.C. (2000), The Collected Stories, Gollancz.
Coben, S. (1971), ‘The Scientific Establishment and the Transmission of Quantum Mechanics to the United States, 1919-32’, The American Historical Review, 76, pp. 442466.
Cousin, X. R. A. (2022) UnQuantum Woolf: The Many Intellectual Contexts of To the Lighthouse’s Metaphorical Wave-Particle Binary, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/14558/
Crossland, Rachel (2018), Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Crossland, R. (2020), ‘Waves, Particles and Pronouns – Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, History of Science Blog of the Royal Society;
https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/06/waves-particles-and-pronouns-virginiawoolfs-orlando/
Cummings, R. (1970/1919), ‘The Girl in the Golden Atom’, in Moskowitz, S (ed.), Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the ‘Scientific Romance’ in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 175-220.
Darwin, C.G. (1931), The New Conceptions of Matter. London, Bell and Sons.
French, S. and Krause, D. (2006), Identity in Physics: A Historical, Philosophical, and Formal Analysis. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
French, S. and Saatsi, J, (eds.) (2020), Scientific Realism and the Quantum. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Faye, J. and Folse, H.J. (eds.) (2017), Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Physics : TwentyFirst Century Perspectives, Bloomsbury.
Gernsback, H. (1929), ‘The Amazing Einstein’, Amazing Stories Vol. 4 no. 1 (April 1929), p. 5.
Heinlein, R. (1980), Expanded Universe. Ace Books.
Henry, H. (2003), Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Jeans, J. (1930), The Mysterious Universe. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kuhn, T.S. (1978), Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Lambourne, R.J., Shallis, M., Shortland, M. (1990), Close Encounters? Science and Science Fiction. Bristol, Adam Hilger.
Livingstone, C. (2018), ‘Experimental Identities: Quantum Physics in Popular Science Writing and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’, Journal of Literature and Science 11, pp. 66-81.
Livingstone, C. (2022), Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity; Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Maudlin, T. (2019), Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
May, A. (2019), ‘Science Fiction Posing as Science Fact’, In: Fake Physics: Spoofs, Hoaxes and Fictitious Science. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. pp. 1-22.
Mullen, R.D. (1999), ‘Two Early Works by Ray Cummings: “The Fire People” and “Around the Universe”’ Science Fiction Studies 26, part 2: https://www.depauw.edu/site/sfs/backissues/78/mullen78art.htm
Navarro, J. (2010), ‘Electron diffraction chez Thomson: early responses to quantum physics in Britain’ , British Journal for the History of Science 43, pp. 245–275.
Nevala-Lee, A. (2018), Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L.
Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. New York, Harper Collins.
Robinson, K.S. (2019), ‘Science fiction: The stories of now’, New Scientist 16 September.
Schrödinger, E. (1944), What is Life – the Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Schrödinger E. (1996), Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Thomson, G.P. (1929), ‘New discoveries about electrons’, The Listener 1, pp.219–220.
Thomson, G.P. (1930), The Atom. The Home University of Modern Knowledge series; London, Thornton Butterworth Ltd.
Westfahl, G. (ed.) (1997), ‘Building on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation: An Eaton Discussion with Joseph D. Miller as Moderator’ Science Fiction Studies 24, Part 1: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/asimovpanel71.htm
Weyl, H. (1918), Raum. Zeit. Materie. Berlin, Springer.
Whitworth, M. (2001), Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor and Modernist Literature, Cambridge UP.
Woolf, V. (1927), To the Lighthouse. London, Hogarth Press.
Woolf, V. (1931), The Waves. London, Hogarth Press.
Woolf, V. (1941), Between the Acts. London, Hogarth Press.
[1] I am here only considering Anglophone works due to space constraints. Further research is required to examine the impact, if any, of quantum physics on the science fiction literature of other languages, including, most obviously given the scientific context, French, German and Russian.
[2] A recent study of the relationship between science and science-fiction in inter-war America (Cheng 2012) contains an entire chapter devoted to Albert Einstein, relativity theory and time-travel but has only one mention of quantum theory, in the context of Einstein’s unhappiness with the later formulation of the theory and his famous statement that ‘God does not play dice’ (Cheng 2012, p. 186).
[3] Surprisingly, despite now appearing in numerous popular representations of science, from Ursula le Guin’s short story ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ (1974) to several episodes of The Big Bang Theory, Schrödinger’s thought experiment had almost no impact on the physics community until the late 1950s.
[4] H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free (1914), is usually cited as the forerunner of such stories and John W. Campbell’s foreshadowing of the development of the atomic bomb is well-documented (Nevala-Lee 2018 pp. 188-197).
[5] Several years later, in his own story, ‘Super-Neutron’ (1941), Asimov dismissed the comparison between atoms and solar systems as ‘being in a class with the Ptolemaic scheme of universe’ (Asimov 1972, p. 57). Unfortunately, he too gets the physics wrong when it comes to gravity.
[6] ‘De Broglie waves’ are also mentioned, which we’ll come across again below and, more unusually, so is the name of the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl who helped introduce the mathematics of group theory into quantum physics. Blish also had a fascination with Patrick Blackett, whose observations of cosmic ray tracks helped confirm the existence of the positron and whose work on ‘gravitational magenetism’ influenced Blish’s idea of an anti-gravity ‘spindizzy drive’ introduced in the Cities in Flight series.
[7] Negative mass was first proposed as a theoretical possibility by Joaquin Luttinger in 1951 and was subsequently developed by Hermann Bondi who, together with Fred Hoyle, advocated the steady-state alternative to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.
[8] There is a notable contrast between the influence of relativity theory and that of quantum mechanics during this period.
[9] Although there is no specific course in nuclear physics given in The George Washington University Bulletin of 1932, ‘Modern Physical Phenomena’ is listed, which included ‘Molecular and Atomic Physics’, taught by Professor Thomas B Brown, whose book, Foundations of Modern Physics (Wiley 1940), does include extensive consideration of quantum theory and its applications.
[10] As standardly understood, the collapse of the quantum wave-function due to any purported role of the observer has nothing to do with making a choice or decision. Having said that, recent elaborations of the Many Worlds Interpretation – according to which there is no such collapse of course – have drawn on decision theory in order to accommodate the theory’s probabilistic aspect; see Wallace 2012.
[11] These spoof papers are discussed in May 2019.
[12] Quantum physicist George Darwin, grandson of the great Charles who also wrote a popular book on quantum physics (Darwin 1931), also gets a mention.
[13] It doesn’t. The concept was introduced by Schrödinger in 1944.
[14] One of the physicists in the story is described as a Quaker – a clear reference to Eddington, who was a conscientious objector during WWI. Clarke’s tutor at King’s, George McVittie, a cosmologist and expert on General Relativity, was a PhD student of Eddington’s.
15 Lest it be thought there was a geographical ‘lag’, with American scientists slow to catch up with theoretical developments, although this was true up until the mid-1920s, by 1930 US-based physicists no longer felt the need to travel to Europe to learn the latest ideas.
[15] One of the editors of the series in which this book was published was H.A.L. Fisher, Woolf’s cousin.
[16] It is worth noting that in addition to the above books, Woolf was also aware of newspaper reports, book reviews, lectures and radio broadcasts about quantum theory (Livingstone 2018; 2022). Indeed, Whitworth (2001) prioritises these over the popular science books just mentioned.
[17] It has been pointed out, however, that there is no ‘incontrovertible evidence that Woolf ever read his
[Eddington’s] writing (Cousin 2022, p. 22). Nevertheless, when she has a character in her final novel, Between the Acts (1941) insist that according to the latest science ‘nothing’s solid’, it is hard to deny the correspondence.
[18] As it turns out, quantum particles can either be regarded as ‘non-individuals’, where this requires not only a new metaphysics but a new underlying logic as well, or they can be taken to be individuals, but then constraints have to be introduced to account for the relevant statistics; for further details, see French and Krause 2006.
[19] Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Einstein ascribed particle-like properties to light with his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 and explicitly used a wave/particle model in 1917 to lay down the theoretical foundation of what we now call laser technology.
[20] As already noted, Whitworth emphasises the role of periodical and radio broadcasts when considering Woolf’s influences, which is why I’ve cited Thomson’s 1929 Listener piece here. The analogy is also given in his 1930 book.
[21] Cousin also acknowledges that Woolf’s later works, such as The Waves, could have been influenced by the ‘new physics’ (2022, p. 208; although see p. 36).
[22] Specifically, ‘space-flyers’, which would use sunlight to generate electricity which, in turn, if Einstein’s new theory were experimentally confirmed, would nullify gravity.
[23] In this regard, it is worth noting Peter Bowler’s comment: ‘Eddington’s writings on the new physics not only deflected attention away from the potential practical applications; they also stressed that by undermining old-fashioned materialism, quantum and wave mechanics reintroduced a role for the human mind as a component of reality’ (Bowler 2009, p. 23).
[24] Hence Cousin’s observation of the lack of any ‘smoking gun’ in Woolf as another source of scepticism regarding the effect of quantum physics on her work is beside the point (Cousin 2022, p. 209).
[25] Woolf herself appreciated Stapledon’s work, for example, telling him that he was grasping ideas that she had tried to express, ‘much more fumblingly’ (quoted in Robinson 2019). The impact of advances in astronomy on both have been explored in Henry 2003.
Vector 299/Modernisms: Guest editorial by Paul March-Russell
Over the course of the last thirty years, the standard model of literary modernism has eroded.
This model offered an origin story, beginning with the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Henry James and the poetry of W.B. Yeats; a consolidation in the figure of Ford Madox Ford and the ethos of Impressionism; a quickening in the face of war and the avant-garde, as represented by Imagism and Vorticism; a fluorescence in the post-war aftermath of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; and then a slow decay during the 1930s and `40s, culminating in the endgames of Samuel Beckett. What this narrative described was the rise and fall of a literary doctrine – art for art’s sake – in which the fever dream of history could be cooled by the impersonal application of myth and symbol. The type of artist this narrative valued was austere, detached, ironic and analytical. For John Carey, in his jeremiad The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), such an image was but an excuse for elitism, social prejudice, and even fascism.
For an undergraduate like myself, though, it seemed a bit rich for the Merton College Professor of English Literature to be condemning other writers as elitists, especially when he pronounced that what the masses really wanted was the middlebrow novels of Anita Brookner. Growing up in working-class Gillingham, in a single-parent family that barely kept itself above the breadline, what I wanted was not Brookner’s insufferable Hotel du Lac but J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, outmanoeuvred on the 1984 Booker Prize shortlist by that year’s Chair, Professor Richard Cobb. When eight years later I was studying Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and realised that a whole passage had been parodied by Alfred Bester in The Stars My Destination (1955), this received history about modernism and mass culture began to smell decidedly fishy.
Luckily, I was not alone. If Carey’s ill-judged intervention did any good, it was to encourage literary scholars to look critically at the formalist assumptions that underwrote the standard model, which effectively duplicated the rhetoric of Eliot and Ezra Pound. Both William Greenslade and Peter Nicholls (not to be confused with the originator of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) wrote directly in response to Carey. Greenslade’s Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880-1940 (1994) rooted modernism’s emergence in the structural anxieties of the late Victorian period, rather than the prejudices of individual authors, whilst Nicholls’s Modernisms (1995) took a comparatist approach to emphasise that the standard model was only one story within a series of competing and overlapping developments within the European and Anglo-American avant-gardes. Nicholls, in particular, was fully aware of the work that feminist scholars, such as Shari Benstock and Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia Smyers, had already done in extending the modernist canon beyond Woolf, the token woman. Beginning with essay collections such as Modernist Writers and the Marketplace and High and Low Moderns (both 1996), a very different image of Pound’s ‘serious artist’ emerged: one preoccupied with the marketing and branding of their work in a marketplace that they shared with their ostensible non- or anti-modernist rivals. Whilst Lawrence Rainey, in Institutions of Modernism (1998), uncovered the networks of patronage that underwrote modernism’s economic base, Peter McDonald in his British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (1996) asserted that the public sphere desired by modernism was already an invention of the late Victorian age and its ever-proliferating range of periodicals, little magazines, paperback reprints and newly minted popular genres. Such transformations went hand-in-hand with what Thomas Richards had already termed ‘the commodity culture of Victorian England’. With an increasing emphasis upon the cultural and socio-economic origins of modernism, by the decade’s end, modernist studies had turned to the technocultural context, beginning with Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998).
Yet, whilst modernist scholarship was freeing itself from earlier paradigms, the standard model was being enforced by the dominant shibboleth of literary and cultural studies in the 1990s – postmodernism. Far from being the slayer of grand narratives, as proposed by its most acute theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernism in its institutional guise repeatedly cast itself as more open, eclectic, and diverse than its closed, hierarchical and monocultural modernist predecessor. A perfect summation of this hypocrisy is seen in Andreas Huyssen’s landmark text, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (1986). At one point, Huyssen focuses upon Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as a modernist classic that presents technology, and the reconciliation of labour and capital, ‘as a harbinger of social progress’ through the ‘metaphoric witch-burning’ of the android Maria and the suppression of the mob (Huyssen 1988: 81). Although Huyssen also cites Thea von Harbou’s original novel, nowhere does he describe Metropolis as science fiction, neither its influence upon archetypal ‘tech-noir’ films such as Blade Runner (1982) nor its exemplification of a local sf tradition in Germany (Cornils 2020); let alone Lang and von Harbou’s next collaboration with Frau im Mond (1929). To do so would be to acknowledge the eclecticism and promiscuity of genres that postmodernism had sequestered for itself. Instead, Lang and von Harbou’s use of science fiction renders their treatment of mass culture not only more ambiguous than what Huyssen claims but also evocative (up to a point) of Siegfried Kracuaer’s contemporaneous observation that social change ‘leads directly through the center of the mass ornament, not away from it’ (Kracauer 1995: 86).
Brigitte Helm in costume of Maria (robot), on the set of Metropolis, 1926. Fritz Lang is sitting on a chair.Although the legacy of postmodernism as a concept remains, in the 21st century it has been combated by the so-called ‘New Modernist Studies’. In introducing the PMLA special issue on the topic in 2008, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz argued that ‘expansion’ was the keynote of this new approach, whether that be temporally (shifting the dates of modernism from the more familiar 1890-1940 to anywhere between the 1850s and the 1970s); spatially (emphasising modernist practices from the Global South); and vertically (highlighting modernism’s interactions with mass culture, mass media and the literary marketplace). Despite their obvious excitement at re-energising modernism at the expense of its once fashionable counterpart, postmodernism, there are two key problems in Mao and Walkowitz’s summary. The first is an unreflective cosmopolitanism which, whilst celebrating ‘the transnational turn’ in modernist studies, nonetheless regards those trends from the perspective of an anglophone tourist in those cultures. Although this criticism goes beyond the purview both of this editorial and the new modernist studies, to signal a discrepancy at the heart of comparative literature, it is worth noting that Mao and Walkowitz play down the extent to which Global South modernisms register the damaging effect done to their cultures by the combined and uneven developments of western capitalism. Secondly, in expanding modernism beyond its standard model, it almost seems as if anything can now be called ‘modernist’; at one point, Mao and Walkowitz even toy with the idea that all of postcolonial writing can be regarded ‘as a form of modernist literature’ (Mao and Walkowitz 2008: 740). While the new modernist studies threaten to re-colonise Humanities departments, they seem to have lost sight of what ‘modernism’ was.
In contrast, I suggest that reading science fiction alongside modernism helps to shed light upon them both. Sf critics, when they have turned to the possible relationship between modernism and science fiction, have tended to reproduce an unquestioning view both of what modernism is and what sf was breaking from. Fred Pfeil for example, looking backwards from cyberpunk and its identification with postmodernism, regards the New Wave as a moment when the genre ‘briefly becomes modernist’ (Pfeil 1990: 85-6) in contrast with pulp sf’s ‘pre-pubescent techno-twit satisfactions’ (84). More sophisticatedly, Phillip Wegner has offered a putative history in which science fiction emerges from an early realist phase embodied by H.G. Wells; experiences its ‘first modernist moment’ with such writers as Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon and Yevgeny Zamyatin; undergoes a second realist phase with the rise of pulp sf; achieves a full-scale ‘modernist period’ from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s; before culminating in the rise of postmodern sf in the 1980s (Wegner 2007: 7-10). Yet, as Andrew Milner has observed, Wegner fails to explain why Wells is a realist and his immediate successors are modernist (Milner 2012: 30). There are further problems: like Pfeil, Wegner reads backwards from the 1980s; values ‘literary’ utopianism over pulp sf of the same period; flattens out overlapping trends, eddies and flows into a single narrative; and largely disregards when and where modernism and science fiction occurred in the non-anglophone world. More recently, J.P. Telotte has revalued pulp sf as a modernist practice by charting its stylistic similarities with cinema, in particular, the latter’s ‘composite gaze’ that elided both fantasy and actuality (Telotte 2019: 9). Although Telotte compensates for the limitations of Pfeil and Wegner, he doesn’t define modernism, describing instead formal similarities between sf and the already modernist technology of cinema. Similarly, the authors of the handily titled Speculative Modernism (2021) look for thematic similarities between the High Modernists and their pulp or scientific romance counterparts; the latter’s modernism is simply taken as read because of their commitment to novelty and innovation. Significantly, it is an actual practitioner, China Miéville, who focuses on the language of pulp modernism and its underlying stance towards the cosmos. Writing of H.P. Lovecraft’s eldritch prose, Miéville asserts ‘that the frenzied succession of adjectives’, the indescribability of what is being described, and ‘its obsessive qualification and stalling of the noun’ signifies ‘an aesthetic deferral according to which the world is always-already unrepresentable’ (Miéville 2009: 511-2). If for Lovecraft, this unrepresentability is indicative of a ‘sublime backwash’ (511) emanating from a malign cosmic presence, for modernists as politically diverse as Theodor Adorno and Wyndham Lewis, it evokes the discontinuous experience of modernity in which socio-economic ties are reified in the interests of capital, and the world comes to us fractured and hollow but also shocking, thrilling and vertiginous.
In Modernism and Science Fiction (2015), I argued that the sf imaginary is suspended between the twin ‘poles of immanence and transcendence’ (March-Russell 2015: 6), and that it is through this dialectical movement that sf explores the nomic quest, which the historian Roger Griffin sees as defining modernism in response to ‘the secularizing and disembedding forces of modernisation’ (Griffin 2007: 116). A central starting-point for my research was to recuperate the multiple scientific, technological, and mathematical contexts in which both modernism and scientific romance emerged, an investigation that Will Tattersdill has since extended by exploring the intersections between science, fiction, and the Victorian periodical press. I think my approach remains useful, insofar as it delineates science fiction as both a mode and a para-modernist practice, one that has affinities with other, more recognisable forms of modernism, such that it could be utilised by those forms, and that this dialogue was both generative and reciprocal. I am also delighted that the book inspired a panel at the MLA convention in 2019, an online section of Modernism/Modernity in 2022, and now this special issue of Vector. But the book – bound by word limits and the series focus – was never intended to be the final say but a springboard to other (hopefully better) investigations. In particular, with the exception of the Argentinians Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, it failed to address responses from the Global South.
More work needs to be done in this area. Instead of attempting to merge all of postcolonial writing under the rubric of the New Modernist Studies, we could focus on the socio-economic and technological imbalances that characterise sf from the Global South, and which act as a symptom of colonial rule. We could, for instance, take the narrator’s encounter with the ‘television-handed ghostess’ in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) as an emblematic moment. Although the phantom has its origins in Yoruba myth, the narrator’s description of how he can both see and hear his mother and neighbours ‘talking about me’ (Tutuola 1954: 164) conflates indigenous folklore with an encroaching western technology. Instead of the primitivism with which western reviewers romantically associated Tutuola, the scene articulates the narrator’s estrangement from both his community’s beliefs and the technological gifts of a spectral modernity. Too often the literature of West Africa is described as ‘magical realist’ (a western conception that has its origins in Germany during the First World War) whereas, from Tutuola to Ben Okri to such writers of the African Diaspora as Nnedi Okorafor, Wole Talabi and Tade Thompson, speculative fiction serves as a legitimate vehicle to explore the estranging effects of globalisation and neo-colonialism. Whilst Africa, China, India and Latin America increasingly shape our understanding of contemporary sf, we need to consider how indigenous futurisms also constitute a global modernism.
The contributions here tend to cleave to Anglo-European modernisms but they significantly extend the standard models of both modernism and sf. We are especially grateful to Nina Allan for her thoughts on J.G. Ballard and her consideration of writers who are achieving new prominence: Kay Dick, Anna Kavan and Ann Quin. Andrew M. Butler focuses on the cyborg imagery to be found in Fernand Léger and Thorvald Hellesen. Angela Acosta also begins with art, in the work of the Spanish surrealist Ángeles Santos, before considering the roles of utopianism and dystopianism in short stories by Ángeles Vicente and Halma Angélico. Henry Farrell’s interview with Kim Stanley Robinson explores the modernist influences that lie behind his novel Icehenge (1984). And lastly, check out other related items that appear on the website, such as our cover artist James Gillham’s interview with Paul Minott about Marcel Duchamp.
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Cornils, Ingo. 2020. Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries. New York: Camden House.
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McDonald, Peter D. 1996. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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March-Russell, Paul. 2015. Modernism and Science Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Miéville, China. 2009. ‘Weird Fiction’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Mark Bould et al. 510-5. London: Routledge.
Milner, Andrew. 2012. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Nicholls, Peter. 1995. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Pfeil, Fred. 1990. Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture. London: Verso.
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Richards, Thomas. 1991. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. London: Verso.
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Tattersdill, Will. 2016. Science, Fiction and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-commissioning editor of Gold SF. He is currently writing a study of J.G. Ballard’s Crash. His introduction to Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins is forthcoming from MIT Press, as is his chapter on modernism and prosthetics in The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.
Vector 299/Modernisms: Torque Control by Phoenix Alexander
I half-jokingly say to anyone who engages me on the topic of science fiction that the 1960s and 1970s were the pinnacle of craft in the genre.
This period, of course, encompasses the New Wave, interpreted by Philip Wegner (cited by our wonderful guest editor, Paul March-Russell) as the moment when science fiction crashes into the modernist sensibilities of Literature-with-a-capital-L, exploding formal and thematic conventions. When science fiction, in Wegner’s words, ‘briefly becomes modernist.’
This is far too brief a space (and far too ignorant an author) to offer anything more than a speculation of the socio-historical forces that brought about this convergence. Perhaps it was the unhappy but generative confluence of decolonization, civil rights struggles, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the resurgence of crises of and about immigration. Science fiction – that bright imaginer of glittering new technology and utopian social formations – suddenly found its joy leached away as the futures it tantalized became manifest in bleaker and, truthfully, mundanely cruel realities. Literature, always seen as a dangerous beast in times of social upheaval, became implicated in countercultural movements, and science fiction was no exception. It was time to throw away the spaceships and oddly familiar aliens, the simpering space damsels (jettison them entirely, they use up far too much oxygen) and dashing colonists. Outer space lost the sheen of adventure and became dull, cold, dead, and empty; Inner space became the place: woman looked out into the cosmos, and saw her own neuroses and hopes and desires staring, baldly, back at her. Doris Lessing defined inner-space fiction best (and possibly first) in the epigraph to her 1972 novel, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: ‘there is never anywhere to go but in.’
Bessie Amelia Emery HeadIf the contributors to this special issue ‘tend to cleave to Anglo-European modernisms’, let me, in this remaining space, slice a bracing paper-cut before the cleft (if you will excuse the word-play). Let me make the bold claim that the Botswanan author, Bessie Amelia Emery Head, is one of the landmark figures of twentieth century Anglophone modernism. Let me cite A Question of Power (1974) as a novel that, like its almost-contemporary, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… (1977), writhes not just in a refusal of prevailing cultural norms pertaining to race (on Head’s part), gender (both Russ and Head strangle that particular serpent) and class (likewise), but enacts a sitting-in that space. A discomfort that, like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), is almost, but not quite, deadly. It is almost too much for the English language to bear.
Perhaps the comparison is unfair. Russ’s novel is acceptedly ‘science fiction.’ Head’s is not. I, of course, argue that both should be welcomed into the home-place of genre.
Version 1.0.0A Question of Power was Head’s third novel, and the second of hers to be published in the Heinemann African Writers’ Series: a bold, vexed, and expansive project that brought writers from the continent of Africa to the United Kingdom, from 1962 to 2003. (Again, here is not the place to transcribe the debates about whether the novel form, a distinctly European technology, was appropriate to writers and artists from primarily oral traditions. The series gave us Head, and Amos Tutuola, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and so many other literary greats). Head herself was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1937 to a white woman and a black father. Much of her life was spent traveling between regions, stateless, illegible to an Apartheid regime. Her mental health, unsurprisingly, suffered. A Question of Power is a largely autobiographical novel that documents one woman’s struggle to make a ‘home-place’ (to repeat Carla Peterson’s human construct) in a country that not only wanted her dead, but that did not recognize her existence. Cruelty abounds within the narrative, but so too does beauty and grace. At times, the narrative falls apart, rupturing as it veers from descriptions of domesticity to mythic terror. Medusa makes an appearance, along with Hitler, Buddha, God Himself and His angelic cohorts, and Priapic demons that torment her with their sexuality. Caligula speaks. Icons of ‘classical’ western education manifest in the novel’s setting of Motabeng, Botswana, reversing the visual iconography of African art that so inspired those venerable European modernists. It is an extraordinary work.
Helen Kapstein writes of the ‘peculiar shuttling movements’ made by Head throughout her life: moving from state to state, inverting violent social norms and turning them back upon themselves, ‘trespassing’ between frameworks of normalcy. Perhaps this is where the modernist subject resides, having ‘reeled towards death’, and then ‘turned and reeled towards life’ (Head, A Question of Power, p. 219). In moving synchrony, it is a trajectory that similarly informs the writing of contemporary Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase. Speaking in a 2023 conversation in World Literature Today about her short story ‘Peeling Time’ (2022), Tsamaase describes it as a journey ‘from oppression to freedom, in conjunction with demonstrating one woman’s agency.’
If I may characterize contemporary SF: it has performed a similar swinging-back-necessarily-to offer stories of hope and adventure, inclusivity and peace: places where, as Tsamaase poignantly remarks in the same interview, the woman ‘does not die.’ The genre begrudgingly agrees, in one voice, to keep the woman on the spaceship, after all, and the modernist subject, in all its mess and complexity, may finally make it to outer space.
Phoenix Alexander, March 2024
Stuck in the Middle with You: Speculative Structure and Concentric Reading in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
Immediately praised upon its release, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) stands as one of the most significant books of the 21st century. Though it has its skeptics, the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Nebula Award for Best Novel and won in Literary Fiction at the British Book Awards. The novel’s support across the communities of historical, speculative, and literary fictions is itself quite interesting but, suffice to say, the novel was well received and remains so in myriad lists of Best Books of the Century.
One reason potentially behind its plaudits is how Cloud Atlas attempts to catalogue the challenges, tensions, and anxieties of its post-postmodern period. Many of the sociopolitical concerns shared by theorists regardless of their periodizing name of choice also drive Cloud Atlas’ structure and world. Less a realist representation of the contemporaneous moment than a warning about violent mistakes being repeated over and over, the novel assesses what entwines human’s past, present, and future morally as well as, in the broadest sense, politically. Put simply, Cloud Atlas is one of the most comprehensive attempts at understanding and representing the anxieties of the present moment.
The impressive chronological and physical scope of Cloud Atlas is both obvious from its audacious structure and poured over in critical assessments. More than any other element, its expansive world motivates and helps organize analysis of the novel. Spanning roughly 1200 years with sections set on four different continents, Cloud Atlas presents a truly global vision of connectivity through time and space. The recurrence of objects, themes, and markers, as well as the reappearance of distinct, previous texts in newer sections, binds the eleven sections together as not simply diegetically related, but in many ways as repetitions of similar stories, phenomena, and souls.
The boomerang structure of the novel, in which six different narrators and chapters comprise eleven sections, all but one of which are split in half, shoots the story forward in time from the 1850s to the 31st century, and then back around to the 1850s at novel’s end. More specifically, we begin and end with Adam Frobisher’s “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” Robert Frobisher’s “Letters from Zedelghem” comprises the second and tenth sections, “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” is the third and ninth sections, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” fourth and eighth, “An Orison of Sonmi-451” fifth and seventh, and then, uninterrupted in the middle of the novel, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” comes sixth. Cloud Atlas’ unique structure allows for historical analysis in two directions, first in a more typical form of historicity and second as reassessment of chronologically earlier sections based on glimpses of the future of this world. Put differently, readers can see how certain actions and themes ripple forward through time, to an eventual post-apocalyptic world, as well as identify moments for potential change as they wind backwards in time. Narratively, that all but the farthest future section are split in two suggests that not only can’t the present or future be understood without the past, but that the past can’t be fully understood without imagining future worlds and consequences.
Those future consequences, for the novel itself, are ecological cataclysm, plague, and nuclear fallout. The dystopic imagination of the novel also garners much attention in critical assessments, and understandably so given the odd relationship between Cloud Atlas’ disastrous future and its seemingly hopeful ending. “Sloosha’s Crossin’” envisions an Earth reduced to pockets of humanity running from some indistinct plague and searching for any tenable lands left after global environmental cataclysm and nuclear war. Zachry, the section’s narrator and a native of a tribe of farmers on a former Hawaiian island, tells the tale of his relationship, and travails, with the Prescients, a group of foreigners who’ve saved and maintained some technological capabilities from before the novel’s Fall. While the section represents the chronological end point of Cloud Atlas, the “Ev’rythin’ After” of the chapter title refers to the only small portion of Zachry’s tale that occurs after the actual events at Sloosha’s Crossin’ and, more broadly, to the novel that remains after this chapter. Not only is the time of the novel fractured, then, but not upset by the rendering ambiguous of “after,” which we can read as a temporal marker or a diegetic one.
The history presented in Cloud Atlas stops at this point in the future, with little indication of what happens after. The framing makes clear that at least some humans live on, but where precisely and how many is left open. Thus, the novel invites readers to consider everything in the novel after the moment at Sloosha’s Crossin’ in light of Zachry’s actions. At Sloosha’s, Zachry unintentionally led a tribe of violent cannibals, the Kona, to his family, then saved himself by hiding as he watched the Kona massacre his family. That guilt haunts Zachry his entire life, and it’s a moment of individually minded inaction for which Zachry seeks to atone. Mitchell is careful not to demonize Zachry to readers, because acting in a moment like that is far easier said than done and because Zachry now stands as a proxy. Cloud Atlas slings backwards in time from the point of “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” inviting readers to consider if a better future might be possible by investing in action and community. Though Zachry lives in a distant, fictional future, memory of his tale becomes vital to understanding where hope might reside in Cloud Atlas as a whole in the face of impending ecological, biological, and nuclear disaster.
As such, Cloud Atlas can be read in a third direction: concentrically. Concentric reading of the novel breaks down further, both in terms of the literal center of the novel, “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” and with the reader’s contemporary moment positioned as the center to which the novel’s past reaches and from which its future extends. Readers are invited to consider the stories and moments that lead to the dystopian future of the novel and what repeated moments and themes from that imagined future portend cataclysm in earlier moments. In equal measure, readers are challenged to consider their moment as the center point of Cloud Atlas and to judge said moment by not just past failures and violence, but the future inherency of such violence as well. All six stories in the novel either stem from or build to a critical moment of individual action which could have ripple effects through time and space. While the scope of any one action seems, at best, limited and certainly not world historic, the passage of texts and symbols through Cloud Atlas suggests any belief or action, positive or negative, could be one that casts a long shadow.
SECTION OVERVIEWS
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
Cloud Atlas opens in mid-nineteenth century New Zealand, following American lawyer Adam Ewing as he awaits ship repairs in the Chatham Islands to begin the long journey home to San Francisco. While wandering about the island, Ewing meets Henry Goose, an esoteric and foreboding English surgeon who immediately worms his way into Adam’s confidence. As the sections of “The Pacific Journal” progress, Adam becomes increasingly more ill, which Henry blames on a vague, exotic parasite for which he will treat Adam; in reality, Henry is slowly poisoning Adam to then steal what he assumes to be a chest full of gold in Ewing’s cabin. In the first section, Adam also witnesses the whipping of a Moriori slave, Autua, by a Maori overseer, backed by a cavalcade of white missionaries. Adam and Autua share a brief moment of eye contact, which Autua remembers when he sneaks onto the Prophetess and stows away in Adam’s cabin, begging him for help and passage to somewhere new. Begrudgingly, Adam obliges and manages to assist Autua in proving his bonafides as a deck hand, which secures him passage to the Prophetess’ next stop in Hawaii.
Section two of “The Pacific Journal” picks up with Adam growing increasingly frail and anxious as, as Henry tells it, his worm keeps spreading through his body. Goose assures Ewing of his plan, however, and manages to keep him none the wiser about the slow poisoning. With Adam on the verge of death, Henry reveals his doings and reasoning, that he wanted Adam’s gold and killed him for it. Fortunately, Autua intervenes and eventually fights off Henry and saves Adam, deboarding him in Hawaii to recover and rest. There, Adam imagines his return to San Francisco and of a life guided by new principles.
Letters from Zedelghem
In a novel full of stylistic variance, with each section written as a different genre, “Letters from Zedelghem” may be the most jarring. While several other entries are one-way communiques (Ewing’s journal, Luisa Rey’s book, Cavendish’s memoir), Frobisher’s letters to his lover, Sixsmith, are collected and presented as a whole, but with none of the responses from Sixsmith. As such, readers receive Frobisher in an odd isolation, referring to Sixsmith’s own letters and reproducing conversations but removed from the ongoing dialogue of which he is a part. This first half takes place from late June through August of 1931 and the second half covers October through mid-December. The tumultuous seven months see Frobisher run from creditors on a scheme to be an amanuensis for a renowned composer, Vyvyan Arys. Aged and syphilitic, Ayrs has no new work to speak of, and Frobisher views this as a prime opportunity to gain shelter, money, and time to compose for himself, while even possibly rehabilitating his name. Ayrs has never met Frobisher at this point, but Robert’s cocksureness extends from a certain nothing-to-lose status. He has no money, regard, or connections besides Sixsmith, despite his privileged upbringing and schooling.
Frobisher and Arys do manage to establish a productive and nearly familial relationship for several months; however, both are schemers by nature and exploiting the partnership for their own gain. Frobisher, in addition to having an affair with Arys’ wife, Jacosta, continues to insist that his revival of Arys’ stature will allow him to submit and orchestrate his own masterpiece, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet.” Arys, however, knows of Frobisher’s wayward past and affair with Jacosta and holds both over Robert as incredibly powerful blackmail, threatening to destroy Robert’s name if he refuses to stay and write new material under Arys’ name. Frobisher contemplates murdering Vyvyan, but instead steals his Luger and runs, again, to a hotel, where he finishes composing the Sextet and, to end the chapter, composes one last letter to Sixsmith before committing suicide.
Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
“Half-Lives” perhaps feels the most novelistic and familiar of all of Cloud Atlas’ sections. What we read is the experiences of journalist Luisa Rey in the form of a mystery novel, allowing for slight movement between perspectives, something the Ewing and Frobisher sections lack given their form. The section opens, in fact, not with Luisa but with Rufus Sixsmith, Robert’s old lover, now sixty-six and a scientist at a nuclear energy company, Seaboard. This is the first, and only, appearance of an actual character in a subsequent story (not including virtual appearances). While the choice of Sixsmith for such a distinction might seem odd, his narrative move from a deeply personal crisis (Robert’s suicide) to a widely existential one (nuclear catastrophe in “Half-Lives”) helps illustrate the connection that Cloud Atlas consistently draws between the two. Fittingly, Luisa’s crusade to expose the remorseless danger Seaboard poses is both personally motivated and communally minded.
Sixsmith and Luisa get stuck in an elevator together, beginning the latter’s involvement with the “Sixsmith Report,” an analysis of Seaboard’s practices that will expose their malevolent neglect. What follows is a compelling and twisty hard-boiled thriller, with Luisa hunted by Seaboard’s unofficial assassin as she searches for a surviving copy of Sixsmith’s report. She’s assisted by Joe Napier, who we meet as a nearly retired security guard at Seaboard and becomes sympathetic to Luisa’s cause. Eventually, and perhaps expectedly, Luisa does obtain and release a copy of Sixsmith’s report, sinking Seaboard’s stock though, as is made evident later in the novel, not the fate of malicious corporate practice within energy companies in general. Luisa’s victory is a small, even pyrrhic, one but a triumph for her nonetheless. The tension between individual success and global change concretizes in “Half-Lives” and drives subsequent sections.
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
Timothy Cavendish, a down on his luck editor in present day London, undergoes perhaps the most sweeping change of any of Cloud Atlas’ protagonists, growing from an irreverent, weaselly literary agent to a still irreverent but humbled, gracious, and on the lamb scribe by the end of his writing. Despite the power of his pen, Cavendish finds himself among unsavory lots. Having recently signed a notorious gangster, Dermott Hoggins, whose racy autobiography flops, Cavendish experiences increasing pressure from Hoggins and debt collectors of all stripes. Upon defenestrating an eminent critic after a scathing review, Hoggins finds himself in prison and thus out of the profits from his now best-selling book. After a brief period of elation for Cavendish, Hoggins’ goons come to extort old Timothy to the tune of 50,000 pounds. Desperate, Cavendish turns to everyone in his address book before attempting to woo his brother, Denholme, whose patience is clearly strained, yet again. Denholme refuses but does inform Timothy of a favor owed to him, one that will allow the latter to go on the run to wait out the searches from more debt collectors and Hoggins’ gang. Cavendish accepts, gladly, being hoodwinked into a far-off and tightly secured nursing home, Aurora House, to be subjected to all manner of scorn and infantilization. “Ghastly Ordeal” prompts consideration of the ways in which globalization affects not only our present, but also recontextualizes our pasts while threatening the future. Timothy Cavendish ghastly ordeal may be, to him, primarily about his escape from imprisonment in a nursing home; for readers, his ordeal is more about attempts to self-signify, to craft and control one’s own narrative, in a world global capitalist structure so eager to regulate our bodies and experiences.
An Orison of Sonmi-451
Thematically, “An Orison of Sonmi-451” gestures toward the rest of Cloud Atlas immediately and regularly. Sonmi-451’s almost meta digressions on power and autonomy frame each preceding section in an explicitly philosophical way, while also relating her own journey from service industry clone to sentience. Besides passing mention of Sonmi-451’s unusual comet-shaped birth mark, however, the section saves its diegetic connections and callbacks for a dizzying flurry in the last few pages, just before a brazen cliffhanger. Sonmi-451, essentially doing a final interview for the record before her death sentence, recounts the time between her “ascension” and capture and reaches the night of her capture as readers hit the section break. She talks of a truly transformative experience with a particular movie, a 21st century relic long forbidden to all but a select few in Neo So Copros: The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. After the humor and hijinks of Cavendish’s memoir, the moment would read as a gag if Sonmi-451 weren’t so starkly earnest. Yet here is Sonmi-451 expressing genuine devotion for the filmed version of Cavendish’s memoir, largely because it depicts such a strange looking world from centuries before.
Sloosha’s Crossin’ and Everythin’ After
In this far-future moment, the last diegetically known vestiges of humanity reside on the islands of Hawaii (stylized as “Ha-Why” in Zachry’s tongue) in various hunter-gatherer tribes. Zachry, and his tribe the Valleymen, live in constant fear of attack from the Kona, a ruthless and cannibalistic tribe with the advantages of horses and better weaponry than the more agricultural Valleymen. In addition to the various Hawaiian natives, the off-land “Prescients” appear throughout “Sloosha’s Crossin’” as symbols and explorers of the wider world unknown to Zachry and his people. Prescients still have much of the modern technology from before the Fall, including rapid transit ships, modern medicine, computer technology, and even some guns. Prescients are notoriously secretive and cagey, especially in Zachry’s mind, and while they maintain a strictly trading-based relationship with the islanders, the specter of their colonial conquest hangs over “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” especially when Meronym begins an extended stay with Zachry’s family. Meronym reveals much later in the chapter that the plague is now reaching Prescient strongholds – which, to best estimate, appear to be on the U.S. and/or Canadian west coasts – and they’re observing Hawaii as a potential place to re-settle.
Cloud Atlas reaches its structural climax and begins the return of its boomerang structure in section six, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After.” While all the themes readers become accustomed to in the previous five sections return and are supplemented in “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” the title itself and the narrative framing complicate the temporality of an already temporally complex novel. The physical journey in “Sloosha’s Crossin’” functions as a metonymy for the novel as a whole, as Zachry’s and Meronym’s travel up a sacred, abandoned mountain and then back down into a radically altered future mirrors, in a way, the reader’s journey forward in time, into the future, and descent back to the moment of Ewing, whose given name is even more suffused with meaning after “Sloosha’s Crossin’”.
RINGS OF CONFUSION
Cloud Atlas begins with a pun, one that confuses sense of place and direction. “Beyond the Indian hamlet,” begins this entry in Adam Ewing’s journal, a mile marker cloaked in racist identity markers. The journal date, November 7th, includes neither a year nor a place, leaving readers wondering, at the outset, where and when Ewing is. Whether the use of Indian refers to actual Indians or India itself, serves as a catch-all for some other brown-skinned ethnic group, or is the misnomer applied to Native Americans remains an open question. As Adam traipses through “rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo” the possibilities narrow, yet still readers are left to wonder. Such ambiguity serves to destabilize clear historical narrative. The deeply personal genre of diary does not require such details, Adam’s words being chiefly for himself. The combination of highly specific observational details and broadly unclear physical and chronological markers disorients readers, making them feel privy to and part of Ewing’s general confusion and out-of-placeness, a sensation Cloud Atlas will continue evoking in each section.
Robert Frobisher finds himself scattered and running in a land in the midst of radical change. The historical break of WWI and WWII seep through Frobisher’s own timelessness, or perhaps out-of-timeness. Robert isn’t living or acting particularly anachronistically, but in his letters to Sixsmith he floats through reference points, rejecting the past, modernity, and the future. He compels Sixsmith, when he visits, to,
Lose yourself in the city’s rickety streets, blind canals, wrought-iron gates, uninhabited courtyards…leery Gothic carapaces, Ararat roofs, shrubbery-tufted brick spires, medieval overhangs, laundry sagging from windows, cobbled whirlpools that suck your eye in, clockwork princes and chipped princesses striking their hours, sooty doves, and three or four octave bells, some sober, some bright. (47)
While he’s simply describing the city’s wide-ranging styles and influences, all baked into the layout and construction, the effect of the passage is to set Frobisher as lost in a swirl of times and modes, a state he wishes Sixsmith to join him in. Readers meet Frobisher as he travels to a place that resists a clear chrono-classification, a place where medieval, Gothic, and classical Turkish design mix with blatant symbols of modernity in advanced clock towers and sooty doves. Antiquity and modernity cohabitate. As they do, also, in Frobisher’s description of Ayrs’ estate, the west wing of which is in disrepair with, among several other issues, “rainwater runneling medieval sandstone” (62). The passing acknowledgement of the chateau’s medieval foundation speaks, briefly, to its true age and place within the architectural mix of Bruges, though Zedelghem lies slightly removed from the city. With the west wing shuttered off, money goes to upkeep of the east wing with its “moody central-heating system and rudimentary electricity that gives one crackling shocks from the light switches” (63). While the antiquated portion of the chateau slowly falls apart, the maintained portion, while comfortable and relatively safe, threatens with the dangers of modern technology. Moody and crackling electric systems carry the potential for widespread damage and danger, as does the mold and infestation of the west wing.
Sixsmith faces the calamity of the future in the opening moments of “Half-Lives,” where he ponders whether the American empire marches its way to collapse or unprecedented reach. Sixsmith, now sixty-six and a scientist at Seaboard, gazes over a balcony and gauges the fall, he remarks on his positioning, “West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, heroic, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, berserking American continent” (89). Sixsmith stands at the precipice, between the Pacific expanse of Ewing’s travails and the old, crumbling estate of his beloved Robert, during a crucial moment of empire, the summer of 1975 mere months after the Fall of Saigon but, in terms of nuclear energy, four years before the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania and eleven years before the Chernobyl disaster in the U.S.S.R. The United States has finally admitted defeat in the Vietnam War, yet remains, as Sixsmith notes, hungry for expansion to improve its own global influence and standing during the Cold War. Ventures into the Middle East and Latin America would continue as the U.S. and U.S.S.R. sought control of the global order. With few options for physical expansion, a fact symbolized by Sixsmith’s positioning, the U.S. faces either an imperial fall or must adopt a new strategy.
Ultimately, “Half-Lives” occurs after a series of momentous breaks in history. The break of “pure science” after the use of nuclear bombs on Japan; the break of truth and reporting after Watergate; and the break, and resituating, of American imperialism after Vietnam. The latter notion is how the section ends, calling back to the beginning with Sixsmith standing at a point of precipice and considering the American continent. Now Bill Smoke, having just run Luisa off a bridge, stands in the morning light as “The American sun, cranked up to full volume, proclaims a new dawn” (142). The U.S. decimated Japan, approached the brink of nuclear war in Cuba, ravaged Vietnam in a failed effort, and yet remains as “pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, [and] beserking” as ever (89).
The second half of “Letters from Zedelghem” begins almost immediately with the anxiety of the inter-war period in Europe as a microcosm of the dilemma between global inevitability and individual action that “Half-Lives” clarifies. While riding through the Dutch countryside, Frobisher notes how “the land grows crater-scarred, crisscrossed with collapsing trenches and pocked with burnt patches where not even weeds take root” (440). He describes the vegetation as “lifeless charcoal” and says the land has “mildewed” as it anticipates more violence. Frobisher has been benefiting from the separation that Arys’ wealth provides; while the mansion has its own scars and reminders, it doesn’t prompt the same considerations as “the density of men in the ground” that Frobisher must confront in the countryside (440).
As much as the memory of WWI hangs over the land, the impending onset of WWII hangs over the characters. Marty Dhondt, a merchant and Frobisher’s escort for this countryside trip, speaks of his time during WWI, which he was able to ride out in Johannesburg due to his wealth and, as Frobisher says, his foresight. “Wars do not combust without warning,” Dhondt replies, “They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood” (444). Dhondt’s reply, like Sach’s consideration of time, provides a way of reading the novel as a whole, a way of looking at and for the small moments of violence that connect each section, some as ripples and some as cascades. The cataclysms that lead to the future of “Sloosha’s Crossin’” are not sudden. They are, rather, smoke in each of the preceding sections, an approaching disaster that could be redirected but isn’t. Dhondt casts war as utterly inevitable, something that can only be sidestepped rather than something that can be eliminated. “Another war is always coming,” he says to Robert, “they are never properly extinguished” (444). Dhondt’s fatalism regarding the “always coming” nature of war, whether literal battle or a cultural war, may not be wrong. It is, he says, “The will to power, the backbone of human nature” which sparks wars, and diplomacy simply “mops up war’s spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one” (444). Each section of Cloud Atlas concerns some confrontation of will-to-power, concerns multiple impositions of the strong upon the weak, and concerns the constant legitimizing of forms of oppression. Those aspects of human nature do seem to be, by the novel’s admission, inevitable.
Dhondt’s assessment of vacating while the “little fires” are still “over the horizon” works as a metaphor for the novel as well. The choice(s) one makes in those moments are the most consequential. Dhondt’s new worry is one Cloud Atlas seems to share, though without the obvious classist and racist subtext, namely that “the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched” (444). WWII is but a few years away from this moment, and surely Dhondt’s comment is a metatextually knowing one. Even so, the novel poses the same worry to readers, that the next war, whether it be on a battlefield or against some systematic pressure, may be too big to escape. Indeed, the fire may already be upon us in the pervasiveness of global capitalism and, especially, climate crisis. Dhondt’s commentary both foreshadows WWII and challenges readers to consider our own positions within inevitable catastrophe.
Even the novel’s speculative sections are set amidst momentous change. “An Orison” occurs just before the ultimate dissolution of Nea So Copros, not due to Sonmi’s rebellion but because of inevitable rot. Sonmi-451’s assessment of Neo Seoul casts it as a natural extension of sociopolitical happenings in the 21st century rather than some radical break in history. Sonmi-451 enumerates the ills of Nea So Copros to the Archivest,
Nea So Copros is poisoning itself to death. Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless, its air toxloaded, its food supplies riddled with rogue genes. The downstrata cannot buy drugs to counter these privations. Melanoma and malaria belts advance northward at forty kilometers per year. Those Production Zones of Africa and Indonesia that supply Consumer Zones are now 60-plus percent uninhabitable. Corpocracy’s legitimacy, its wealth, is drying up. The Juche’s rounds of new Enrichment Statutes are sticking band-aids on hemorrhages and amputations. Corpocracy’s only strategy is that long favored by bankrupt ideologies: denial. (325)
Destabilizing effects of climate change, including the increased ranges of viruses and bacterium and the rendering inhospitable of equatorial locations, and the toxic results of, at this point, centuries of pollution and industrial waste have left the earth at the far-reaches of its hospitable conditions for human life. Even the Upstrata are feeling the effects, though they can live in denial and separated from what are functionally death zones where the poor live.
Similarly, “Sloosha’s Crossin’” takes place after worldwide cataclysm yet before an impending biological disaster in the form of global disease. This section, like “An Orison,” reads eerily familiar (in 2004 and especially now), lending further credence that the connecting piece of the novel’s structure is its readers. Choices must be made throughout in times of instability and unknowing, on the precipice of radical change and, sometimes, following massive upheaval. The choices characters make in those moments help us to understand the world of the novel and the relationship between its past and future, but the moments themselves challenge readers to imagine how their own choices fit within the continuum.
CHOICES ALL THE WAY DOWN
Cloud Atlas often places characters in meaningful interregnums, both personally and culturally. The specific decisions made are, obviously, significant to the progression of the novel. As much, if not more, significant, however, is that such moments exist, and their stakes established. Even when individual decisions do not lead directly to radical, progressive change that they are in the position of having to make tough choices is a challenge for readers to imagine themselves in the same position, and to reflect on the choices we make everyday that could have unforeseeable ripple effects.
Following from the emphasis put on Zachry’s choice at Sloosha’s Crossin’ and his engagement with the Abbesses’ three prophecies, the novel becomes more explicitly engaged with the possibility of revolutions, big and small, and the impact of individual actions. Sonmi-451’s revolution will fail, as she has already been captured and sentenced, but her memory echoes for readers through the rest of the novel as it reverses its chronology. The novel ends in a post-apocalypse, so clearly revolution never occurred. As such, when the novel reverses course, it shifts the call to action from its characters to readers, inviting us to remember and learn from the failures of this diegetic past and future in order to avoid the eventual fall. This begins with a small moment decentering fate. When Sonmi-451 tells Union she “was not genomed to alter history,” she’s told “no revolutionary ever was” (327). Beyond the surface ‘anyone can change history’ reading, Hae-Joo’s response extends to the novel itself, which seems to suggest a cataclysmic fall is inevitable yet the choices we make within that are our own, and meaningful.
“Half-Lives” challenges us further still in its examinations of passive complicity. Isaac Sachs, a meek scientist at Seaboard who knows the contents of Sixsmith’s report and decides to release it to Luisa, is thrust into a fight he truly believed science to be separate from, a naïve yet genuine belief. In the midst of agony over whether to shred or release Sixsmith’s report, Isaac “longs for his old lab in Connecticut, where the world was made of mathematics, energy, and atomic cascades, and he was its explorer” (128). The pure practice of science is what appealed to Isaac, but now he and his ideas are “the property of Seaboard Corporation” and his loyalties collide. The vision of science as an innocent playground, while genuinely felt, is dangerous. Even Isaac’s positioning of himself as an explorer of a world that makes inherent sense and has truth waiting to be discovered reeks of some colonial efforts. Tellingly, the use of past tense in saying the world was made of scientific principles and phenomena in the “old lab” suggests a break not only in the expectations and freedom of his job, but in the world itself. The world is no longer math and chemistry and biology; the world is, rather, narrative, a dirty game played between, in this case, Grimaldi and Luisa.
What seemingly pushes Isaac to give the report to Luisa is his remembrance of a moment that casts a long shadow over the entire section, one that has, to this point, remain unmentioned. “Then his thoughts slide to a hydrogen buildup,” we’re told, “an explosion, packed hospitals, the first deaths by radiation poisoning” (128). Any writing about nuclear power, especially one set in the 1970s, wrestles implicitly with the legacy of the Manhattan Project and the detonating of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the time gap between “Letters from Zedelghem” and “Half-Lives” elides a lot of world historical events, none haunt Luisa Rey’s mystery quite like the bombs, an event that forever tainted any supposed purity of scientific exploration. Isaac clings to that old vision, yet he knows where that road leads, having seen it play out a few decades prior. The human toll of unfettered power scares Isaac into action as he finally realizes he can never escape the “political orders…where erroneous loyalties can get your brain spattered over hotel rooms” (128), nor can the practice of science. The dueling philosophies of Grimaldi, “power is truth,” and Luisa, “truth is power,” cannot be disentangled, just as science cannot be disentangled from politics nor personal action from communal or global context.
Elsewhere in “Half-Lives,” Javier goads Luisa into considering the haziness of far time by asking her whether she would see into the future if she had the ability. Their ensuing conversation about the possibility of changing the future via foresight begins to reshape the function of the novel going so far into both the future and the past. “If you could see the future,” Javier says, “that means it’s already there. If it’s there, you can’t change it” (401). Luisa responds that whatever you see in that moment “isn’t made by what you do. It’s pretty much fixed, by planners, architects, designers, unless you go and blow a building up or something. What happens in a minute’s time is made by what you do” (401). Luisa’s entire journey speaks to her insistence that individual actions in the present matter and of the importance of speaking truth to power. And her actions will, eventually, have some effect, at least a local one when the Swannekke plants shut down. The legacy of her actions, and the ripples through history, is left open and, seemingly, small in the novel’s long history because of the priorities of those with political and economic power.
Ultimately, Luisa tells Javier that changing the future is “a great imponderable” and wonders if “Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power” (401). How those in power shape and decide the future comes to bear almost immediately after Luisa considers the potential, in a moment that predicts the events of the book’s world. The corpocracy of Nea So Copros, which we know to happen, is framed as a specific priority of those with the most power, as well as a nationalistic endeavor. Mixed into smatterings of jingoism and worries over who else might cede global control if the US doesn’t, a few businessmen, on whom Luisa is eavesdropping, consider the future and “our country’s rightful – corporate – empire” (403). “The corporation is the future,” they continue, “We need to let business run the country and establish a true meritocracy” (403). This conviction reads as a sly reference to the impending presidency of the business obsessed Ronald Reagan and, for readers in the early 2000s, the presidency of George W. Bush and the ever-increasing kowtowing to big business lobbying and corporate mindsets in the US after Luisa Rey’s story. Reading the passage after the election of Donald Trump, and his fashioning of himself as the ur-businessman, feels like a further extension of the novel’s conception of power and the future. In essence, then, Cloud Atlas points to past moments that, in hindsight, presaged the contemporary 21st century moment, as well as future visions that demonstrate the natural extensions of that present. In other words, the novel presents a virtual past and future through which readers must dig to find the center shell, the 21st century present.
What the second part of “Half-Lives” puts most into perspective is a clear way of reading the significance of Cloud Atlas’ structure of embedded virtual shells of presents. Individual actions, while seemingly overwhelmed by corporate and economic powers, do matter as potential agents of change, whether immediately or over centuries. “Half-Lives” causes no illusions that Luisa’s dogged pursuit of corruption has a large-scale impact in her time; the nuclear plant does shut down, and the CEO, Lloyd Hooks, is nominally punished, but the corporate politics proceed largely unhindered. President Ford’s sly remarks regarding the punishment of Hooks make that clear, “My administration makes no distinction between lawbreakers. We will root out the crooks who bring ignominy to corporate America and punish them with the utmost severity of the law” (434). Hooks, also a Nixon appointee, is, ostensibly, punished with a vigor Ford did not have when pardoning Nixon who, for all his crimes and transgressions, did not disrupt “corporate” American in the same way. Ford’s labeling of only corporate America as a concept worth defending, while perhaps shocking in its candor, does not surprise given where the novel goes in its future. Luisa’s actions brought down one corporation, not a whole system that values said corporations more than individual citizens. And yet, Cloud Atlas’ general pessimism about where the future leads never extends to the importance of individual actions and decisions. The real future of the novel that we, as readers, know exists in a hazy, distant time that renders it essentially useless to someone like Luisa. All she can do, as she tells Javier, is hope that her actions from minute present to minute present can help generate global change eventually.
CENTER PIECE
As inventive as its structure is, the question remains whether Cloud Atlas is an assessment or a prediction. While the textual chronology is layered, there remains a gap: what fills the space between the ambiguous beginning and the speculative ending of the novel? Ewing’s sections implicate readers by troubling any firm sense of time and place while also directly engaging the question of individual action in global contexts. “Half-Lives” and “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” however, fold reads into the novel even more fully, the former by suggestion and the latter quite directly.
In an echo of Sixsmith pondering the new American dawn in the first section of “Half-Lives,” another about-to-be-murdered Seaboard scientist, Isaac Sachs, ponders change and history,
We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up – a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. (393)
He continues by considering the distinction between simulacrum and actuality, if any such distinction exists, and finally, before the C4 explodes his flight, a conception of time that can be reasonably read as the construction of Cloud Atlas itself, “One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous presents)” (393). Cavendish’s present moment, assumed to be around the time of the novel’s writing and publication in the early 2000s, could be the primary “shell” residing in the five other sections’ presents and be said to be the reader’s own to a degree. That conception works well for considering the connections of other presents to specific moments in the early 21st century, work the novel certainly encourages. However, especially as time passes, the reader’s own present moment, whenever they’re reading the book, becomes the most interior shell, the painted moment encased within all others in the novel.
Despite an abundance of writing on the novel’s structural features, not much is made of the framing or title of “Sloosha’s Crossin’.” Readers learn early in the section that they are thrust into the position of audience to an elder in the community spinning a yarn about the past. We later learn this is Zachry’s son speaking, and through him readers learn of the Fall, the particulars of which remain hazy but involve global plague, environmental catastrophe, most likely nuclear fallout, and the slow decimation of the human species. Yet the hope remains that Zachry’s tale of overcoming, of ascendence to a dangerous precipice, might lead to a return to something greater. That hope, as beleaguered as it is, lies firmly in humanity and in memory. Cloud Atlas rejects any actual peace, instead leaving Zachry and the remaining Prescients to consider how to forge ahead in building some sustainable, and not Fall-susceptible, community. Rampant violence still exists in this far future, and the threat of decimation looms, but as the novel begins its structural turn and descent, the narrative prompts readers to look back on that past and how its truths might shape the future.
Nearly all “Sloosha’s Crossin’” maintains this narrative structure and voice, even with occasional interjections from Zachry’s son asking for food or quiet or rest. The introduction of oral tradition to the novel’s genre-hopping is interesting, however the final page of the section shocks any sense of context. After wrapping up by waking up on the Prescients ship, Zachry’s yarn gives way to his son commenting on his reliability, or lack thereof, “Zachry my old pa was a wyrd buggah…most o’ Pa’s yarnin’s was jus’ musey duck fartin’” (308). The sudden introduction of Zachry’s son, and Zachry’s death, prevents Zachry from becoming a dogmatic figure, like Sonmi-451 is to him and the Valleymen, while also making clear the importance of memory to change. The son now has Meronym’s orison, which contains holograms of Sonmi-451 and remained dear to Zachry, and he invites his audience, including readers, to sit and watch. “Sit down a beat or two,” he tells us, “Hold out your hands. Look” (309). Look at what? The past. The opening of the orison to reveal Sonmi-451 transitions the novel to the second half of her interview, and the amount of truth in Zachry’s tale, which his son can never quite determine, is now a question for readers going forward as Cloud Atlas completes its future. Cloud Atlas’ future is determined; ours is in our hands now.
IN YOUR HANDS
So what could change at this pivotal moment in our own history to avoid the fate of “Sloosha’s Crossin’”? What is the positive flipside, if any, of Henry’s violent, essentially nihilist vision of humanity? Cloud Atlas proffers two possibilities, one incredibly subtle and the other the final line, and one of the greatest takeaways, of the novel. Adam, resting and healing in Hawaii after being saved from Henry by Autua, imagines the eventual exchange with his father-in-law upon his return to San Francisco when Adam pledges himself to the abolitionist cause. Newly philosophical, Adam, in an echo of Isaac Sachs’ final ruminations, ponders that “history admits no rules; only outcomes” (507). He continues, “What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief” (507). In effect, Adam agrees with Henry. History is not the march of preordained actions or even logically compelled. Acts, kind or malicious, are performed based on socially generated and engrained beliefs. Heather Hicks summarizes this realization as Cloud Atlas functioning as a warning against an impending apocalypse but not necessarily a prediction of one, “Mitchell’s novel implicitly adds to this series of propositions that if we believe both events and selves are old as well as new, we may invest ourselves in both in a less destructive fashion” (13). Humans, Adam seems to be realizing, are on their own and wholly responsible, and he now intends to attune his actions to actively creating a better, more just world, rather than simply believing one is inevitable. “If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being…[and] a purely predatory world shall consume itself” Adam insists. Alternatively, he argues, if we believe in a just, equitable, peaceful, and shared world, then such a world can come into being. Not, however, without incredible and sustained effort, “Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword” (508). His father-in-law’s (assumed) response makes the intense effort necessary even clearer, as one life spent doing “battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature” irrevocably ends as “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean” (509). Adam’s conversion to abolitionism means little in any grand scheme. It’s even unclear how Adam follows up this decisive moment, we have no access to how his life continues. But his decision is a real step toward shaping a world he wants his son to inherit, a decision guided by the kindness of Autua and the fact that Adam owes his life to a person he considered lesser at the beginning of his journey. Fittingly, however, Adam hopes and imagines here, still far from the life he intends to live going forward; his choice remains unsettled and, thus, malleable.
Adam insists he “must begin somewhere,” and that insistence on acting when and in whatever capacity possible allows Adam to flip his father-in-law’s contempt, much like he flips Henry’s violence, by asking “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” (509). Adam’s flipping of his father-in-law’s phrase is a poignant supplement to his previous comment about belief and humanity; while his father-in-law believes in the (white, aristocratic) status quo, Adam now chooses to believe in a more collective, more unified world, one in which every action contributes to and helps move a much larger whole. Adam, in other words, believes himself a part of something much grander now, something perhaps beyond purely human society.
The ambiguity of Adam’s positioning extends to readers’ own when encountering Adam’s renewed belief and hope. As much as his multitude of drops line, Adam’s earlier query about fate may just as well hang over the novel as a unifying question, “Is this doom written within our nature?” (508). We, as readers, know what befalls the world in Cloud Atlas: plague, ecological disaster, nuclear fallout, and seemingly perpetual war. What stock can be put in Adam’s faith in ethical action knowing what the centuries to come will bring, knowing how the same forms of predation and violence ripple through all six timelines? Here the novel’s speculative qualities become a challenge rather than simply a tool of warning. The boomerang structure of the novel presents a doomed future but with several potential inflection points along the way, Adam’s chief among them. Cloud Atlas leaves hanging what’s to come beyond its covers. By showing us the doom to come and wrapping us back around, Cloud Atlas unsettles its own timeline. Perhaps Adam’s decision starts some ripple effect that alters the future of the novel. Of course, the history of the 20th and 21st centuries are far from encouraging in terms of mass change brought on by belief in a more equitable, communal world as Adam suggests is necessary. But just as Adam finds himself in the midst of a momentous change in his life upon which he must act, so too might readers, who, as the final shell of the novel’s structure, are challenged to speculate and believe in a radically different, and more expansive, world.
Works Cited
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Norton, 2006.
Bayer, Gerd. “Perpetual Apocalypses: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Absence of Time.” Critique, vol. 56, no. 4, 2015, pp. 345-354.
Begley, Adam. “Brilliant Stutter-Step Novel Cuts Smoothly Through History.” Observer, 16 August 2004.
Bentley, Nick. “Trailing Postmodernism: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Zadie Smith’s NW, and the Metamodern.” English Studies, vol. 99, no. 7, 2018, pp. 723-743.
Bissell, Tom. “History is a Nightmare.” The New York Times, 29 Aug. 2004, 7.
Brown, Kevin. “Finding Stories to Tell: Metafiction and Narrative in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.” Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture, vol. 63, no. 1, 2016, pp. 77-90.
Childs, Peter and James Green. Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Commissiong, Anand Bertrand. Cosmopolitanism in Modernity. Lexington Books, 2012.
Hicks, Heather. “‘This Time Round’: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism. Postmodern Culture, vol. 20, no. 3, 2010.
Knepper, Wendy. “Toward a Theory of Experimental World Epic: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.” Ariel, vol. 47, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 93-126.
Meloy, Maile. “Cloud Atlas a Series of Virtuosic, Soaring Stories.” NPR, 1 March 2004.
Mezey, Jason Howard. “‘A Multitude of Drops’: Recursion and Globalization in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2011, pp. 10-37.
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. Random House, 2004.
Norfolk, Lawrence. “Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.” Independent, 27 February 2004.
Shanahan, John. “Digital Transcendentalism in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.” Criticism, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, pp. 115-145.
Shaw, Kristian. “Building Cosmopolitan Futures: Global Fragility in the Fiction of David Mitchell.” English Academic Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2015, pp. 109-123.
Tait, Theo. “From Victorian travelogue to airport thriller.” The Telegraph, 1 March 2004.
Turrentine, Jeff. “Fantastic Voyage.” Washington Post, 22 August 2004.
Wood, James. “The Floating Library: What Can’t the Novelist David Mitchell Do?” New Yorker, 5 July 2010, pp. 69-73.
Interview with Renan Bernardo
By Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Renan Bernardo is a Nebula finalist author of science fiction and fantasy from Brazil. His fiction appeared in Reactor/Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Podcastle, Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Samovar, Solarpunk Magazine, and others. His writing scope is broad, from secondary world fantasy to dark science fiction, but he enjoys the intersection of climate narratives with science, technology, and the human relations inherent to it. His solarpunk/clifi short fiction collection, Different Kinds of Defiance, was published in 2024. His fiction has also appeared in multiple languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. He can be found at Twitter (@RenanBernardo), BlueSky (@renanbernardo.bsky.social) and his website: www.renanbernardo.com
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF magazine & the soon to be relaunched Galaxy magazine. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
JPG – In many of your stories you juxtapose the past with the present, layering multiple times together, tell us about using this narrative device, and how you use it for emotional effect?
RB – Layering past and present together without necessarily resorting to flashbacks is an excellent device to make the reader flow along with the main character’s feelings without breaking the pace of the story. I believe the past has a lot of things to say. Our past shapes who we are, so it always adds an interesting layer to my stories. Many answers to the present and the future are in the past. I believe that you were thinking of “Soil of Our Home, Storm of Our Lives” when you thought about that question. In this story, there are three timelines layered separately: past, present, future, each with different things to say about the characters, different emotional cores to introduce that end up fusing in the end. The challenge is always to weave them all together, so they don’t feel detached from each other, but I like to believe that I achieved it in this particular story.
JPG – Your stories often present utopias, but as you mention in your forwards, one person’s utopia can be another person’s dystopia. Can you speak about this concept and why cultures have a difficult time envisioning positive futures that include everyone?
RB – There are two stories in the collection that introduce this concept: “Anticipation of Hollowness” and “To Remember the Poison.” In “Anticipation of Hollowness,” there’s a sustainable city where everything seems perfect but the city is extremely gentrified and no one from lower or middle class is able to live in it anymore. And “To Remember the Poison” is an extreme version of it: a society based on justice, sustainability, and equality that got so detached from the rest of the world that it became an exclusive haven closed to the world. And though its focus is on education and expanding their “green” world, its inhabitants tend to follow a line of thought not so different from what billionaires imagine with their projects of selective bunkers or space stations. And given the concentration of resources and knowledge of Verdoá (the city in the story), it becomes a colonizing power in the region.
Both stories are novelettes that show what happens when you create something good that doesn’t consider everyone. I think this is very common in the world, sadly. Humans are capable of building lots of great things and devising great solutions for crises, but it’s often hard to see the whole. Even if you take prejudice, hate, and conflicts out of the equation, it’s quite a challenge to devise a futuristic technology/city/idea and at the same time be aware of all its implications. But whenever you can’t consider the whole, or at least include everyone gradually in your solutions, then it’s incomplete.
JPG – Tell us about your take on the genre of solarpunk, and what drew you to writing it?
RB – When I write solarpunk, I want to introduce the point of view of the Global South, particularly Brazil. I believe writers from the Global South have a lot to say regarding solarpunk and the climate crisis because our point of view tends to be different from those from “developed” countries. We have a history of being excluded and that means our stories (all meanings of the word) are less seen throughout the world. Brazil has an important story with climate and we’re facing some harsh consequences of the climate crisis right now. Not only that, but Brazil is a pioneer of solarpunk with the anthology Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World (Worldweaver Press). And though this anthology has some outdated views about solarpunk, it was an important mark in the genre. Long story short, my intention with the genre is bringing a Brazilian view on solarpunk to a wider audience.
JPG – What role do you think fiction and art can play in preventing and repairing issues brought about by climate change?
RB – First, awareness and education. I believe that through fiction and art you can see things you wouldn’t see on your own. This is true for dystopias and this is true for solarpunk. Science fiction was always the realm of ideas. We had tons of stories in the past that inspired scientists and inventors, so it’s the right place to brew those kinds of solutions as well. Even if the story isn’t hard on science, if it gives someone hope and cheers someone up in a time of crisis, then it has already worked.
JPG – Many of your stories feature technological innovations in repairing nature, what role do you think tech will play in addressing the environmental issue we all face, and do you think it is safe to look to tech to repair the very issues it has caused us?
RB – I’m kind of skeptical. Looking at generative AIs, for instance, or social networking, we kind of see excellent innovations used for the bad. In our current economic system, everyone is worried about making a lot of money very fast, so that tends to bend innovative solutions to these purposes. There’s hope with some regulation and a shift in ways of thinking, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover so we can focus our tech in repairing part of the environmental crisis and trying to prevent the worst in the future. In my stories, I also like to show these shifts in the ways of thinking. People might still be worried about making money, but when a lot of people already have what to eat and where to live, it becomes easier to focus on better solutions for everyone.
JPG – Many of your stories feature elderly characters, and in your forward you mention this being important to you. Why do you think that the elderly are often excluded from fiction, and why do you find their inclusion important?
RB – The young, particularly young men, had always been considered the face of triumph. We see that a lot, perhaps even more in American fiction. And it influences the whole world. Particularly in science fiction, we can see that since the pulp magazines of the 20s, then when we move to modern movies, it’s the same. There’s almost always someone between 20 and 50 years old saving the world. So fiction always had a tendency of focusing on youth. It’s where the action and energy is. The elderly are excluded from society in a lot of different ways, and that is just one of them. So that’s one of the reasons why I think including elderly protagonists in my stories is important. I think they have stories to tell and it opens a lot of unexplored possibilities. How can a character with limited mobility save their community? How can a retired professor go on an adventure? In my collection, you’ll see them mainly in “When It’s Time to Harvest” and “The River That Passed Through My Life.”
JPG – As a Brazilian author, what challenges do you face when writing for English language markets?
RB – There’s the language, of course, since I’m not a native speaker. But there’s also some barriers that I think different kinds of minorities face in different forms. Perhaps my story isn’t American enough, or there’s a character doing something that the reader isn’t used to. Or my story’s structure or themes might not fall into the categories that are expected by English language markets. You have to make your story comprehensible on a narrative level without removing its roots. As the author Gunnar de Winter mentioned in a recent article he published at the SFWA blog: “we’re always worrying about having our voice misunderstood”. The thing that sometimes hurts is that to some readers it’s easier to understand an alien culture than a real culture in our own world.
JPG – Sometimes you write in English, and some of the stories in the collection are translated from Portuguese, do you find that any of the emotional effect is lost when translating from one language to another?
RB – There’s actually one story translated from Portuguese in the collection. The other ones were written in English. I don’t find anything is lost with translation. I think people see translations with a sort of prejudice, but a good translation can be as excellent as the original source. We’ve been consuming mostly translated fiction in Brazil, and I think this is a reality opposed to what happens in the US. Since our markets are flooded with American/English authors, Brazilians do read mostly translated works. My own Nebula-finalist story is a translation and I don’t think it has lost anything in it. I believe lots of people would agree. Of course, it helps that I’m both the author and translator. My take on it is that I think more people should read translations. There’s a whole world of wonderful stories out there. Rachel Cordasco does excellent work cataloguing and shouting about translated works, and I think everyone should be following her lead on that.
JPG – You are a Nebula finalist this year, what has that experience been like for you?
RB – It has been unbelievable and amazing at the same time. I didn’t expect it to happen. It’s a validation we all need sometimes, so it has been a very pleasant experience. I never imagined myself to figure besides the writers I read and admire so much like Naomi Kritzer, Ai Jiang, Wole Talabi, P.A. Cornell, and so on.
JPG – What are you currently working on, and what’s coming up next for you?
RB – I’m writing a new novella right now, but I have a dark SF novella coming from Dark Matter Ink next year called “Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle”. I also recently had stories out in Reactor/Tor.com, Worlds of If, Apex Magazine, and Diabolical Plots.
Interview with Samantha Mills
by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Samantha Mills is a Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning author living in Southern California, USA. You can find her short fiction in Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and others, as well as the best-of anthologies The New Voices of Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2023. Her debut science fantasy novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, is out now. You can find more at www.samtasticbooks.com.
JPG – The culture in The Wings Upon Her Back is a theocracy where labor and religion are intertwined, can you tell us about using this as a worldbuilding device?
SM – When developing The Wings Upon Her Back, I wanted a claustrophobic, monocultural setting to reflect the isolation of the main character and the fraught history of her city. Everything had to revolve around the five gods that are sleeping overhead.
In the book, the division of labor is a core tenet of their religious and social framework because they are emulating the gods, who arrived with very clearly defined roles. I ended up with five sects: the workers and farmers are the biggest groups, who keep the city running; the scholars and engineers are documenting and implementing the teachings of the gods; and the warriors keep the city isolated from outside forces. The primary conflict of the book comes from the unbalancing of these factions, as the warriors take more power over the others.
One of my favorite worldbuilding techniques is to build out social expectations – what everyone is supposed to believe, what everyone is supposed to do – and then to imagine the characters who do not fit the mold. I set a limit at five sects because it automatically creates tension: you can’t actually sort the breadth of humanity or the tasks needed to keep society running into such a small number of categories!
This tension permeates the book. There are jobs, such as medicine, that rely on teachings from multiple gods, and therefore arouse some unease. And there are many individuals who don’t fit neatly into their sect. My main character, Zemolai, was born into a family of scholars, but left them to be a warrior. The hodgepodge group of rebels she falls in with later in life have all either changed sects, or are revolting against the expectations placed on workers specifically. The right to question the division of labor (and therefore, the teachings of the gods) is central to the story.
JPG – How did your background in Library Science influence your writing of the Scholar Sect and their relationship to documents and research?
SM – I definitely drew on some of the ideals of the archival profession to develop the scholars. Their purpose is to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They desire to understand as much of their past as possible, and to make those works accessible to anyone who is interested, and that puts them at odds with an administration that is more concerned with controlling the national narrative. It isn’t just about the right to preserve these texts, but the right to publish them and share them.
A major conflict starts in the book because one of the lead scholars orders a cataloguing project, and in the course of going through the archives item by item, a student comes across a heretical document that was thought to be destroyed. It’s also really easy to keep it hidden because collections like this are so vast that a couple sheets of paper filed in the wrong spot are missing for good. (Ask me how I know!) The subplot that unspools from this discovery is a fight over censorship, free speech, the freedom to read without government interference or surveillance—all perennially relevant topics for librarians!
JPG – In the book, myth and history are blurred together in ways that affect the people’s understanding of their place in the world, sometimes leading to confusion, what inspired this and do you think this also becomes an issue in our “non-fictional” world?
SM – This is also directly tied to my experience as an archivist. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we preserve history. Archives have limited space and they develop narrow collection guidelines in order to prioritize what to keep. It creates these pockets of history— specialists who know the nuance of one community or time period really well. You’ll have a city’s primary history museum displaying a timeline of major events. And then you’ll have these little historical societies collecting the papers of smaller communities that the museum didn’t have room for, and you get an entirely different perspective on the same time period.
It’s the big picture history that’s always been a problem. It’s impossible to teach the full range of human experience across all time. And so, history is always oversimplified. It’s divided into coherent chapters in textbooks. If you get twenty pages on the Industrial Revolution, it’s going to include only the most pivotal dates, the biggest names, and broad generalizations about what life was like. But at no point in history did everyone in a society have the same background, the same experiences, the same beliefs. There is always more complexity.
I believe that the history we teach is always mythologized. We tell the tales of Great Men (some Great Women lately, too), and we tell our history like it’s a narrative of linear progress that led directly to the present day. This also means our history changes over time, as our understanding of it changes. Every new generation of researchers looks back and finds details that were left out of the main narrative, and that can be very confusing. It can leave people disoriented and defensive and arguing that it has to be fake because it doesn’t match the history they learned in school. But the history they know is already a story, and there are always more stories.
JPG – Much of the conflict for the protagonist arises from a sense of duty to one’s family versus duty to one’s profession and sect, and the compromises that arise from that conflict. Tell us about using this device as a source of drama?
SM – I really wanted to explore the parallels between dictatorial rule and abusive relationship dynamics, and one of the primary modes of control in both those cases is to isolate one’s target. For a nation, this may present as closed borders, perpetual war, whipping up fear about inside and outside threats. For an individual, this means isolating the victim from friends, family, or any other type of support network that might provide an outside perspective.
In the book, the primary antagonist is the leader of the warrior sect, Vodaya. She is an abusive figure who believes not just in the supremacy of the warriors, but of herself. She can’t tolerate any dissent. When the primary conflict of the novel kicks off, Zemolai’s family is on the opposite side. The scholars are fighting for free speech and the right to question the gods, while the warriors are fighting for control and the fulfillment of their god’s edicts. I took the abuse narrative and raised the stakes— Vodaya literally turns Zemolai’s family into enemies of the state, and Zemolai is caught between her love for her family and her utter belief in the ideals of her profession and mentor.
JPG – In grand SFF tradition, the chapters all begin with excerpts from fictious books and documents. Were these written as part of the chapters, or did you plan out the text and write them separately, and has your work as a librarian inspired this cross referencing of text?
SM – These came surprisingly late in my drafting process! In the first few drafts, the subplot about heretical works in the archives was not as prominent as it became in the end. I was primarily focused on the main two timelines – Zemolai as a youth getting caught up in a fascist movement, and Zemolai as an adult coming to terms with what happened to her and how she can make amends for it.
It was when I started doing more theme work, about history repeating itself, cycles of intergenerational trauma, and so on, that I developed a third story about all of this happening generations earlier. The disillusionment that Zemolai experiences mirrors the history of the city feeling abandoned by its gods. I decided to slip this third story in via chapter epigraphs and interludes because I love that sort of thing, and I wrote it all in the style of documents I might find in an old collection. Some are only fragments, some pieces have no attribution, and there are clearly missing pieces. We never get the full story in my line of work—just tantalizing glimpses of the past, which we serve up on a platter for researchers and then hope they can piece the clues together!
JPG – My favorite character, if I can call it a character, is the God-tree. Can you tell us about this element of the book, what inspired it, and how it works?
SM – One of the great things about science fantasy is you get some wiggle room to ask – is it magic or is it technology? In this book, the gods are gods of knowledge and technology. Their gifts sometimes come in the form of schematics. But the humans they inspired were villagers with a far simpler society. In developing the religion, I tried to create symbolism that would exist between these two modes. These are ordinary people trying to comprehend more advanced beings.
Because the gods are physically accessible—sleeping above the city, with the portals to their realm visible in the sky—their devoted followers were able to build towers to reach them. These towers are haphazard in appearance. The building materials are different every few floors, as they either ran out of supplies or developed better construction plans.
They designed buildings that were twenty-five stories tall. Five sets of five. I liked the idea of the mecha god’s tower being just short of the portal. And being as devoted as they are, they weren’t going to just plop a lackluster ladder on the roof. They planted this glorious tree instead, which reflects the strange foliage that exists on the other side. And every time the god’s hand comes through, it chars the tree.
There are hints in the epigraphs that the first followers who reached the portals bashed themselves against it, many dying, until one of the gods woke up, took pity on them, and provided instructions on how to get in safely. That technology was then built into the tree. The leader of the sect connects to the equipment with a mechanical cord and says the words given by the gods, and that command activates the portal opening. They do not know whether it is magic or technology. They only know that it works.
JPG – The Wings Upon Her Back is your debut novel, but you’ve also been successful as a writer of short fiction. How does the process of writing short versus long form differ for you, and do you have a preference depending on what kind of story you want to tell?
SM – I actually wrote books before I learned to write short stories! The process is similar. When I have an idea, I take notes on paper. At that stage the idea still feels malleable. I can brainstorm all I want and it doesn’t matter if the details are contradictory because it’s just brainstorming. When I think I have a clear enough idea on the setting, characters, and main plot points, I’ll move my notes to the computer, leaving out anything that doesn’t fit with the rest.
If it’s a short story, I’ll just arrange those notes chronologically and start drafting. It’s short enough that I can fill in the blanks as I go. And then I edit it three thousand times to tighten the language and the scene transitions to get it as sleek as I possibly can.
For a book, there are too many threads for me to dive in right away. I need the beginning, the end, and what order the major turning points need to happen. Then I start filling in the blanks in an outline, deciding how my characters are going to get from turning point A to turning point B, and so on. I layer in some notes about character development. I work backward from the end and drop tentative suggestions of where the setup needs to happen to make that ending possible.
And then once I’m drafting, I find all sorts of new problems and plot holes and missing pieces, and I’ll keep a running document of things I need to fix or add in edits. I focus on getting one draft down, and then I have a bunch of puzzle pieces to play with in draft two.
I would say that I turn to short stories when I want to try an experimental format. My short stories are often the climax of a character arc, with backstory and worldbuilding sprinkled around it in interesting ways. I turn to novels when I want to explore more facets of the main idea, which means a fuller cast of characters with differing goals and more focus on what they learn along the way.
JPG – What are you currently working on and what’s coming up next for you?
SM – I have two top secret short story projects that I am working on this summer! I’ll be very excited to share more details when I can.
I’ve also been editing a new novel. I’m calling it The Secret Sea Monster WIP. It’s my favorite thing I’ve written in a long time. I think it has a good blend of the meaty theme work that folks have been enjoying in The Wings Upon Her Back, combined with a bit more humor and a ragtag group of characters trying to escape an infamous prison island that is surrounded by sea monsters. Hopefully I can get that in front of editors later this year. Cross your fingers for me!
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF magazine & the soon to be relaunched Galaxy magazine. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
Issue 300, ‘Community’— Call for proposals
Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky
Science fiction, for all it encompasses strange new worlds and fantastical creatures, is a literary genre that is built and sustained by human communities. Writers, artists, and creators have imagined new social formations, technologies, economic, ecological, and sociopolitical systems for centuries; indeed, science fiction may be the most nakedly political of all literary genres, as thought-provoking as it is beguiling. Who is present in narratives of futurity? What kinds of technologies enable—or stymie—human connection? How can inter-species communities develop and flourish?
Pre-internet, fanzines and conventions were the spaces where editors, authors, and fans met, shaping the genre in new and exciting ways. Praise and critique and conflict and collaboration were equally already common before social media. Some landmark dates include: the first WorldCon (1939), the first British science fiction convention, Eastercon (1937), the Maleyevka seminars, Nihon SF Taikai (from 1962), and many others, around the globe.
In 2024, the ideologies of ‘community’ are under pressure and scrutiny. Violent geopolitical events shadowplay on smartphone screens, small enough to fit in the palm of our hands, fulfilling the most dystopian dreams of the genre; we venture to fight and commiserate and celebrate with people from all over the world, instantly. Where wealthy industrialists were (and are) once praised as saviors of humanity with the glittering promise of their space programs, now SF tends to show how the relentless logics of capitalism undermine any notions of transcendence. The challenge of space travel was supposed to unite us. What would the pioneers of SF make of the now-straining politics around the International Space Station, scheduled for dismantling by 2030?
In light of these challenges, the Vector team—for the journal’s milestone 300th issue—invites contributions that reify the notion of ‘community’ as it manifests in speculative cultures. What tools can SF offer us to construct better tomorrows, together? How can we innovate new ways of collaborating, such as the world-building projects of Syllble? What does ‘community’ look like in fiction, non-fiction, conventions, awards, conferences, collaborations, online spaces, and other literary and paraliterary formations?
Suggested questions / topics
- history of fandom/conventions
- the practice of writing: zines, magazines, letters
- science fiction publishing: editors and collaborators on the printed page
- utopias and dystopias
- terraforming
- defining personhood
- future societies
- sex and sexuality
- navigating conflict
- political divides, past and present
- interspecies alliances
- the posthuman
- the future of communication
- translating SF
Please submit your proposal by June 15th, 2024 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 July 31st, 2024.
Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats.
Electricity as a Speculative Device: The Romanian Modern(ist) SF
This article explores how Romanian science fiction novels written between 1899 and 1954 engage with modernity. I am particularly interested in examining how key texts that center around the protagonist’s exploration beyond the familiar realms intersect with a modern development that was a game changer in human history: electric energy. The analysis centers on three novels from the modernist era − Victor Anestin’s pioneering Romanian Sci-Fi novel, În anul 4000 sau o călătorie la Venus [In the Year 4000 or A Trip to Venus] (1899), Henri Stahl’s Un român în lună [A Romanian on the Moon] (1914), and Felix Aderca’s Orașe scufundate [The Submerged Cities] (1937) − and one written and published in the aftermath of WWII − Drum printre aștri [Path Among Stars] (1954), penned by I. M. Ștefan and Radu Nor. If the works written during the interwar period represent initial major forays into the Sci-Fi genre, it wasn’t until the postwar era that the first notable presence of Sci-Fi in Romanian literature, holding institutional significance and capturing general interest, emerged. By including a novel written in the 1950s in this inquiry, I aim to challenge the chronological convention of the modernist era ending with World War II. The emergence of the communist regime, influenced by the Soviet model, signaled an unparalleled drive toward industrial and technological advancement in a European nation that was among the least developed, with a rural population twice the continental average (Murgescu, 140). Such a transition is all the more justifiable in the case of electricity, as the pace of electrification accelerated after World War II, particularly between 1950 and 1970 (Murgescu, 344), witnessing the shift from electricity as a speculative concept to a democratically commodified resource.
Victor Anestin, the advocate of a scientific literature
It is noteworthy that Romanian Science Fiction originated amid the modernization process, which extended beyond economic and political spheres to encompass social dimensions. As such, Romanian SF emerging at the end of the 19th century not only served to popularize science but also played a pivotal role in building trust in science.
While there were earlier texts that could in hindsight be classified as science fiction stories, the first Romanian science fiction novel emerged in 1899 under the title În anul 4000 sau o călătorie la Venus [In the Year 4000 or A Trip to Venus], penned by Victor Anestin, who is the pioneer of the genre in Romania. He was recognized during his era as the “Flammarion of Romania” not just for translating a fragment of Camille Flammarion’s Les merveilles célestes [Celestial Wonders] (1865) in Revista Olteană [Oltenian Review] in 1889, or for installing a telescope believed to have been a gift from the French author known for his popular science works about astronomy (Robu, as cited in Anestin, 6-9) on the roof of his house. Anestin was also acknowledged for his efforts in popularizing astronomy in the Kingdom of Romania at the close of the 19th century, heavily influenced by Flammarion’s writings.
The Romanian writer produced works that he himself considered contributions to the popularization of astronomy, such as Romanul Cerului [The Novel of the Sky] (1912), and science fiction works, including the previously mentioned novel, O tragedie cerească [A Celestial Tragedy] (1914) and Puterea ştiinţei [The Power of Science] (1916), referred to as ‘scientific novels’ (Anestin, 288). Additionally, he was active in the contemporary press, participating in discussions about science and literature in the Kingdom of Romania. In an article titled Ce au cu astronomia? [What do they have against astronomy?], published in 1913 in Ziarul călătorilor și al științelor populare [The Travelers’ and Popular Sciences Newspaper], he criticizes Felix Aderca, the author of the science fiction novel Orașele scufundate [The Submerged Cities] (1937), now acknowledged as a modernist writer. Starting from the third poem in Aderca’s debut cycle titled Spinozism Științific [Scientific Spinozism] (1913), Anestin reproaches Aderca for lacking scientific understanding of astronomy, stating that, for Aderca, ”the outcomes of astronomy are regarded as mere fairy tales” (Anestin, 365).
Anestin raises here an issue that the Western world extensively investigated and debated, beginning in the second half of the 20th century (Aït-Touati, 3): the connection between various domains of knowledge, and the correlation between literature and science, which “has been a discipline unto itself” (3), according to the French historian of literature and sciences, Frédérique Aït-Touati (Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 2011). Victor Anestin proposes a viewpoint extending beyond his critique of Felix Aderca’s poem. He asserts that the ”scientific novel”, as he calls it, represents a mode of writing that integrates literary form with scientific content, presenting science not solely as narrative but as a manifestation of truth: scientific truth is indeed modern truth. According to him, to contribute effectively to the SF literature, which he labels the ”scientific novel”, one must possess a comprehensive understanding of scientific advancements and consistently strive to convey truth.
That’s why, in Anestin’s 1898 article titled Scientific Novel, regarded by Mircea Opriță as a theoretical manifesto of anticipation (464), the author cited as a prime example of a proper scientific novel is Flammarion rather than Jules Verne: ”Jules Verne’s vivid imagination often leads to numerous errors contrary to science, whereas Flammarion never does so: even when constructing hypotheses, he does so only on the foundation of scientific truths” (Anestin, 189).
Nevertheless, this quote may appear as a paradox for an English reader given the dispute between Jules Verne and H.G. Wells at the start of the 20th century. Often referred to as “the English Jules Verne”, Wells writes a preface for Seven Famous Novels by H. G. Wells (later edited and published as The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G. Wells), published by Knopf in 1934. In attempting to distance himself from the influence attributed to Verne, he defines both his own style and Verne’s, while also offering a proto-definition of the genre. The paradox I referred to arises from the contrasting views on Verne held by Anestin and Wells. Anestin believed that Verne was primarily a science popularizer who relied too heavily on imagination. However, Wells considered his own work to be merely an “exercise of imagination” (iii), while Verne’s speculations were both practical and feasible: ”his work dealt almost exclusively with actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts” (Wells, iii).
The dissemination of science in a casual manner, as astutely observed by Mircea Opriță (465), emerged during the early decades of the 20th century, marking the presence of Henri Stahl as the second significant Romanian author of Soft science fiction. Identifying himself as a ”Sunday astronomer” (Stahl, 14) due to his anxiety over Anestin’s influence, Stahl’s behavior appears to mirror that of Wells, although I will refrain from labeling him a Romanian Wells. Not only is he more relaxed regarding scientific accuracy, but with him, ”the power of imagination, humor, and a touch of sentimentality are called upon to contribute to the success of a scientific novel” (Opriță, 465). Far from the social commentary implied by Wells in his writings, Stahl manages to liberate Anestin’s scientific novel from its scientific nature and to emphasize, above all, its status as fiction.
As noted by Mircea Opriță, following Florin Manolescu’s line, the first critic to write a book on Romanian SF in the 1980s, the genre will not produce such manifestos for a long time from now on. During the 1930s, it shifted towards “sensational pulp literature” or the “fantastic,” altering its “scholarly component” (Opriță, 465). Regarded as minor literature during that period, it saw a significant transformation in the 1950s, during which local tradition was largely set aside.
However, what persisted was the connection that science fiction maintained with the modernization of Romanian society, propelled by both a modern ethos and technological advancements, with electricity prominently featured among them.
The “electrical thinking” in Romanian SF
The term “electrical sun”, though it may sound like a science fiction title, was actually used in an advertisement in a Romanian magazine (Curierul de Iași) in 1868 to announce the first demonstration of street lighting. The event took place in Iași, a city situated in the present-day eastern region of Romania, that served as the capital of Moldavia, and gained prominence as one of the two key cities within the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia since 1859 (alongside Bucharest). This moment foreshadowed the year 1884, when Timișoara—now one of the most important cities in western Romania, but then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—became the first city in Europe to be illuminated with electric lightning, earning the title the “Citadel of Light of Europe” (Mihai Caba, Dilema Veche, 2023).
It is not coincidental that, in the first two significant Romanian science fiction novels, travelling into outer space meant taming and thus mastering electricity. A source of fear at the end of the 19th century, but also a symbol of confidence in progress, electric energy emerged as main character and element, at times fluid and at times material, without which Romanian science fiction would not have been the same. At the close of the 19th century, discussions were underway in the Romanian sphere between progressives, the supporters of electricity, on the one hand, and conservatives, those resisting the new technology, on the other. Meanwhile, on an international level, considering the example of the United Kingdom, electricity experts of the 1880s-1890s redirected their attention from efforts to “domesticate” electricity through testing street lighting publicly, to emphasizing the promise of a brighter future facilitated by electricity (Domesticating Electricity, 2008, 4). In this context, science fiction literature appears to align with the progressives, seeking to domesticate electricity through speculations on future advancements.
In În anul 4000 sau o călătorie la Venus [In the year 4000 or A Journey to Venus] by Victor Anestin, the first space opera novel in the Romanian Kingdom, published in 1899, the journey to Venus by the scientists Asales and Saitni would not be possible without a rocket powered by electric accumulators. The appearance of the electric power source—specifically the accumulators in this context—is not a mere coincidence. Firstly, it reflects the societal concerns prevalent at the end of the 19th century. Graeme Gooday’s research on the British context reveals a pervasive skepticism toward electricity, shared by both experts and the general public. This skepticism is reflected in the contemporary depictions where electricity appears either “mysterious” or “hazardous” (3). While there are no studies in Romania that parallel the investigations conducted by Gooday for Great Britain, information from the second volume of Istoria tehnicii și a industriei românești [ The History of Romanian Technology and Industry] (2020), edited by Dorel Banabic, indicates that skepticism toward new technology is a characteristic of the Romanian context as well. The establishment of the first technical museum in 1909 holds significant importance, as stated by its creator, Dimitrie Leonida, who emphasized its role “in the training of electricians and in preparing the population to accept new electronic technologies and products” (Istoria tehnicii, 16-17). The necessity of such a museum to facilitate the acceptance of new technology not only signals distrust, but also represents an attempt to “domesticate” electricity.
Secondly, the explanation of how the rocket operates, enabling Anestin’s characters to journey to Venus through the use of an accumulator, is significant because it likely reflects the discussions within Romanian society in 1899. By that time, not only had public lighting been tested and implemented in several cities, such as Craiova and Bucharest, but the first electric power plant in Craiova was established in 1897 − 15 years after the world’s first electric power plant built by Thomas Edison in New York (1882) (Istoria tehnicii…, 11). Furthermore, science fiction literature not only engages with scientific problems and debates, but also delves into the socio-cultural atmosphere of the century, examining how society receives, assimilates, and understands science. In this case, although electric accumulators already existed at that time, Anestin’s novel highlights their importance and possibly alludes to the anticipation of the year 1911 when the first electric accumulator factory, named Tudor, emerged in the Kingdom of Romania (10).
While Anestin’s text reveals that the rocket’s source of electricity is the accumulator, and we understand that this resource, like any other, is finite − each case of excessive electricity consumption is consistently detailed by the narrator − the novel leaves the method of delivering electric energy to the accumulator in outer space as a puzzle. As such, in the middle of the novel, following a conference in which Asales speaks to the Venusians about Earth’s cosmological knowledge, he makes a note:
“A few days after this conference, I had a very long discussion with Saitni about how we could acquire electricity for the accumulators of our vehicle, enabling us to return to Earth. Not without apprehension, I initiated this conversation, knowing well that Saitni, like me, was unaware of a means by which we could capture electricity from the atmosphere. We lacked the necessary equipments because, being too large, we couldn’t bring them with us” (Anestin, 127).
What is particularly suggested here is that electricity is traversed by the following contradiction: on the one hand, it allows for physical emancipation from natural conditions and even leaving Earth; on the other hand, electricity can only come from Earth, so leaving it entails a crisis. Despite the crisis, electricity appears to be a force that can be harnessed and domesticated, even without a clear understanding not of its origin (Earth), but rather of its nature. This is because, ultimately, the rocket begins functioning due to a Venusian named Silanis, who “connected the accumulators of the vehicle with a thick wire made of an unknown metal on Earth. The attempt aimed to channel all the electricity through that wire into the accumulators, which had a strong receptive force” (128).
From being framed as having an almost magical status in 1899, as portrayed by Anestin’s text, which depicted it as a mysterious force controlled solely by “initiates”, there was a gradual shift in how electricity was presented. Alongside the evolution of the electro-technical industry in the Kingdom of Romania, electricity is progressively conceptualized as a “transformative power” (Gooday, 15). Consequently, transitioning from a form of energy and fluid (as seen when electricity “flows” through a wire (Anestin, 128)), electricity gradually transforms into something tangible (light) and “a mode of motion” (Gooday, 15).
Published in 1914, Un român în lună [A Romanian on the Moon] is a novel in which Henri Stahl, as stated in the Preface, suggests “a very gradual detachment from Earth”, distinguishing it from the literature of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, who depicted “our globe disappearing in an instant” (Stahl, 13). This remark is significant because this slow detachment is made possible by electricity, and because this gradual process reflects the status of electricity in the Romanian context at the time of writing and publishing this novel: a status distinct from that portrayed in Anestin’s text.
The deliberate slowness suggested here reflects a confidence in the power source of unknown origin. In Un român în lună [A Romanian on the Moon], electric current transcends its role as a mere resource and assumes the characteristics of an aesthetic object. It functions not only as a color – specifically, blue – but also as an emotion, embodying a more corporeal essence rather than a purely rational one. Houses adorned with lights in every window signify occasions for celebration and joy. Moreover, beyond being an indispensable prerequisite for space travel, electric current assumes the role of an agent, a friend reminiscent of characters in Romanian fairy tales: an eagle meets its demise through the activation of electric current passing over the electric rocket (named “aerosfredelul”) (Stahl, 47), while contemplating a butterfly, the Romanian on the Moon is torn between destroying it with an electric spark or keep it (61).
I present below an excerpt from the aforementioned novel, which Stahl himself describes as an “astronomical novel” (9). This passage succinctly captures the contemporary viewpoint on electric lighting, while also reflecting the significant events in the electro-technical industry in the Kingdom of Romania during that period:
“I couldn’t sleep peacefully due to the excessive light. Our narrow flying cabin was indeed brightly illuminated a giorno, with an abundance of light as even the director of K. K. Privat-Allgemeine-Aktien-Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft himself could not have imagined. This light came not so much from the Sun, which remained just as small and feeble as we earthlings see it in winter, but rather from waves of blue light, like those of voltaic arc globes, coming from above and below, from the Earth in the first square, from the Moon in the last square.” (111)
“K. K. Privat-Allgemeine-Aktien-Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft”, or AEG, most likely refers to a German electricity company founded in 1884 by Emil Rathenau. In in the Kingdom of Romania in 1895, AEG opened representation stores and repair workshops (Istoria tehnicii…, 10), probably for electric bulbs, hence the mention of “voltaic arc globes” in the above paragraph.
The transition from the “scientific” fiction, as outlined by Anestin, to that of Stahl, where electricity appeals to the senses, is noteworthy. This suggests that in the meantime, electricity has been subdued, and its source is not an actual voyage beyond Earth, but an expansion of imagination beyond the constraints of nature. Electricity enables fiction to transcend nature or reshape it into something more spectacular than perceived in romanticism/realism.
As Anestin aligns himself with Flammarion, embracing the role of a science popularizer, particularly in astronomy, and Stahl, influenced by him, takes on the label of a “Sunday astronomer” (Stahl, 14), Felix Aderca emerges as the pioneering science fiction novelist who completely embraces a role beyond the confines of scientific accuracy and historical realism. He does so by asserting that literature primarily serves as a domain of fiction, with scientific inquiry playing a secondary role. While his work, Orașe Scufundate [The Submerged Cities] (1937), fundamentally serves as a melodrama against an SF backdrop, Aderca, as proposed by Mircea Opriță, raises the standards of literature through the use of fantasy (Opriță, 43).
Aderca envisions a new reality, one in which humanity is forced to live at the bottom of the oceans, a response to Earth’s incessant cooling rendering life on its surface impossible. There are four places that harbor the last former inhabitants of Earth, namely, the underwater colonies of Hawaii, Cape Verde, Ceylon, and the industrial city in the Pacific, Mariana. These are conceived as cubist geometric structures, extremely transparent due to one of the materials specific to modernity that Aderca uses extensively, that is glass. The glass not only renders the body transparent, undergoing unprecedented physiological transformations such as body temperature dropping to 25 degrees, leading to numerous cases of asphyxiation (Aderca, 79), as well as having other detrimental effects. Mircea Opriță astutely observes the strong thematic connection between the cold setting, created by the low temperatures in the ocean and the glass structures, and emotional detachment:
”This refrigerating setting aligns with the attributes allowed within it: emotional detachment, thinly veiled cynicism under the guise of extreme lucidity; false optimism sustained through olfactory drugs and anesthetic spectacles, masking the profound fear of nothingness. Far from the nature that created him, man depletes himself. Biological regression heralds the imminent death of the species, prompting the acute awareness of the lack of a planetary future” (69).
Thus, if in Stahl’s city, where the blue, electric light of the Earth met the Moon’s light, in the still-romantic spirit of the early 20th century, electricity held the dual power to save and destroy humanity. In Aderca’s glass city, despite being sought and yearned for, salvation is no longer possible. The sun ultimately dies, and humanity is annihilated. Yet, salvation is no longer sought in electricity; instead, it is sought in the atom. This is not surprising, given that research on the atom and debates around it were flourishing in the early 20th century. In approximately three decades, understanding of atoms shifted from them being perceived as a compact, solid mass, akin to a “plum pudding” (Thomson, 1897), to a vast space with minuscule particles arranged in a model resembling the solar system, featuring a nucleus at the center (Rutherford, 1909). By the year 1925, with the development of the Quantum Mechanical Model by Erwin Schrödinger, the structure of the atom was understood to resemble that of a cloud, and its position was revealed to be volatile and probabilistic (Rachel Fountain Fames, 2023, 15-17).
However, the atom envisioned by Aderca differs from Schrödinger’s, a perspective that was not popular in that era. Instead, it aligns more with Rutherford’s conception of the atom as a solar system, where the path from the nucleus represented by ”a lamp” to the electronic shell, depicted as ”cones”, can be established and delineated. The manuscript left by the deceased president of the Hawaiian colony contains a lamp with eight cones, described by a character named Santio as follows: “The eight cones are like eight ovens, which, with eight different gases, at a certain temperature caused by platinum coils, are meant to progressively break down atoms. The president did not find the gas for the last cone…” (Aderca, 91). What is interesting in this vision is that the author envisions the atom’s nucleus as a lamp, a source of light likely to be electric, given that we are already in the midst of the Romanian interwar period when public lighting is much more advanced compared to the previous era. Furthermore, through the description of gas 8 in the last cone, which would potentially save humanity if discovered, it seems that the author combines the understanding of the atom with that of electricity. To find gas 8 in the universe, either a fluid is needed (“if the necessary fluid for the last cone truly exists in the Universe” (92)) or a force that must be extracted from matter (“if he fails to find gas 8 now, to extract the force from matter, and escape to the new planet, Xavier’s death will be more dreadful than that of all the people buried in Formoza” (213)).
The destruction of humanity, unable to discover gas 8 and thus master the atom, is a failure not only of mankind but also of its “electric thinking”. Envisioning a decent end for humanity, where ”vials with essence, opium, and morphine” are distributed among the population of Hawaii, Dr. Harwester also speaks about humanity’s progress up to that point, the year 5000. Progress is confined to the mastery of electrical energy and its assimilation to such an extent that thought/reason acquires the attribute “electric,” as if reason were inseparable from electricity. Here’s the full quote: “It would be the only end worthy of the people who have transformed this globe of rocks and mud into a celestial jewel, those who have endowed the initial protoplasm with the virtues of electric thinking. Do any of you know a more flavorful end to this biological and solar ball?” (94).
While “bourgeois” literature falls under censorship and entire literary subgenres, such as detective literature, are prohibited, science fiction literature was institutionally supported during the communist regime. The most successful SF novel of the 1950s is Drum printre aștri [Journey Among the Stars] (1954) by Radu Nor and I.M. Ștefan, which depicts the journey of a team of Romanian researchers throughout the solar system over the course of a year. They travel aboard an asteroid propelled by a rocket conceived and built using domestic resources. What’s amusing here, as observed by Iovănel in both a 2013 article and his literary history from 2021 (the first to include SF literature in the canon), is that although the rocket is atomic, it uses water as fuel, “functioning as a steam locomotive”(Fantastica, 2013).
Nevertheless, despite the incorporation of socialist ideology into the narrative—highlighted by the depiction of all significant discoveries as Soviet accomplishments, the consistent dependence of Romanian explorers on Soviet aid, and the resolution of all challenges through party meetings—a less overtly addressed yet pervasive issue in Romania during the 1950s emerges: food shortages. The reported abundance of food during the space journey, with a chemist-cook cultivating diverse and ample supplies in space greenhouses for sumptuous meals, indirectly alludes to the scarcity of such abundance in the actual world, particularly in 1950s Romania.
Moreover, by referencing electricity and the developments in the electrical industry, such as household appliances, Drum printre aștri [Journey Among the Stars], despite its ideological nature, carries on the Romanian SF tradition by interweaving the histories of SF and electricity. Expressions like the “electric refrigerator,” “pocket electric flashlight”, “electric microprojector,” “electric vacuum cleaners,” and the “electric kettle” speak not only about the developments in electrical energy but also likely reflect the aspirational status of such objects in communist Romania. The electric kettle has one of its earliest mentions in the periodical press in 1922 (Universul), featured in the advertisements section at a time when it hadn’t gained widespread popularity. It was only in 1927 that the electric kettle developed by Arthur Leslie Large became a widely commercialized product. The electric vacuum cleaner, portrayed in the novel not as a household appliance but as a public utility employed for cleaning the city, has one of its earliest appearances in the periodical press in 1911 (Universul), in the classified ads section.
In Radu Nor and I.M. Ștefan’s novel, televisions multiply and become portable, and people on the streets listen to the discussions of the members of the Astronomical Institute. This is not accidental, as, on the one hand, Romanian television began broadcasting in 1956, and, on the other, towards the end of the 1950s, the first television sets manufactured in Romania were produced (Istoria tehnicii…, 41). Thus, there is a shift from the diffuse image of electric current in previous novels, seen as a fluid, as a driving force, to a material and pragmatic image. Electricity no longer merely saves or propels us toward the future; instead, it facilitates our lives and diminishes geographical barriers by providing access to information, albeit limited to what the regime dictates.
Delving into critical SF novels from 1899 to 1954 in relation to the pivotal modern development of electricity, my aim was to underscore how SF literature adeptly captures not just the scientific advancements of the era but also the dynamics of the socio-cultural modern Zeitgeist. If my investigation focused on one of the most renowned science fiction works of the Stalinist era, its aim was to illustrate that despite the constraints imposed by canonical accounts on literature, the onset of the post-World War II era accelerated the modernization process initiated decades earlier. This strengthened the connection between science fiction literature and modernity. Thus, by employing electricity as a speculative device to craft expansive, intricate worlds imbued with philosophical and political significance, science fiction skillfully weaves a narrative that aligns with the history of electricity in Romania. It explores the progress in electrical engineering and delves into how society perceives and embraces these advancements. Therefore, Romanian SF emerges as a body of literature that reflects the tensions and debates surrounding emerging technologies and their transformation into societal phenomena.
Amalia Cotoi is Assistant Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She recently edited a special issue on modernism and Bruno Latour for the Philobiblon Journal: Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities (2/2023), and she is now collaborating with an international group of scholars on a special issue titled ‘Integrated Modernisms’ for the Echinox Journal.Works Cited
Aderca, Felix, Orașele scufundate, Nautilius, Nemira, București, 2014 [1937].
Aït-Touati, Frédérique, Fictions of the Cosmos. Science and Literature in the Seventeeth Century, Chicago, translated by Susan Emanuel, The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Anestin, Victor, În anul 4000 sau o călătorie la Venus, edited by Cornel Robu, Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1986 [1899].
Dorel Banabic (ed.), Istoria tehnicii și a industriei românești, II. Electrotehnica, energetica, transporturile și învățământul tehnic, Editura Academiei Române, București, 2020.
Iovănel, Mihai, Istoria literaturii române contemporane, 1990-2020, Polirom, București, 2021.
Iovănel, Mihai, ”Un cuplu clasic al sefeului românesc: Radu Nor și I.M. Ștefan”, in Fantastica, 7/2013: https://fantastica.ro/un-cuplu-clasic-al-sefeului-romanesc-radu-nor-si-i-m-stefan/.
Manolescu, Florin, Literatura S.F., Univers, București, 1980.
Murgescu, Bogdan, România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500-2010), Polirom, București, 2010.
Opriță, Mircea, Anticipația românească, Editura Viitorul Românesc, București, 2004 [1994].
Petrescu, Camil, Noua structură și opera lui Marcel Proust (1935), in Teze și Antiteze, Editura 100+1 Gramar, București, 2002.
Stahl, Henri, Un român în lună, 2, Editura Tineretului, București, 1966 [1914].
Ștefan, I.M., și Radu Nor, Drum printre aștri, 3, Editura Tineretului, București, 1959 [1954].
Wells, H. G., The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G. Wells, Avenel Books, New York, 1978 [1934].
The Valediction: Christopher Priest (1943-2024)
Have not many of us felt we have been living in a parallel universe since 2016? Brexit, Trump, QAnon, space billionaires, anti-vaxxers, AI deepfakes, microplastics, dashes for growth as the world burns, Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine…
Maybe the planet slipped through a portal when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on? Or maybe we just stepped into a Christopher Priest novel and we’ve been trying to get out ever since?
Chris was the master of the imperceptible reality shift. That moment when we slip into an alternate reality, and everything distorts around us, and we can’t find the way back, because we didn’t realise we’d stepped across a threshold until it was too late. But maybe there’s another way? Or a series of pathways? But which is the right one? Is there a right one?
Reading Chris’s fiction was to lose oneself. To experience the vertigo of existential angst. But not so much in the story itself. Of course it’s a fiction, we know that, this isn’t a novel by McEwan or Amis junior, we don’t need telling. No, the dread is not that this fiction is made up, but that it is one of many fictions, unfolding indefinitely around you. And then you’re lost, lost like the protagonist, gripping to the contours of reality as the map – very neatly, very expertly – is elegantly pocketed by the author.
We read, I read, Chris’s fiction precisely for that moment. The moment of deception. The moment we realise we have been deceived. And there’s no going back. We can only read on, not in hope of revelation, but in hope of understanding better the prestidigitation, the trick of it. Yes, the trick has been played, there’s no going back, but for every good magician there’s a willing assistant. So much better to be the sidekick, hand in glove, observing, participating, knowing the trick is always more than the trick itself.
That was Chris’s invitation to his readers. To step out of the stalls, out of the shadows, onto the stage, into the limelight. To tread the boards with the storyteller, the one who shapes meaning from thin air, to catch his words and handle them with care, to palm the key so that the illusionist can make his escape yet again. To trip the light fantastic together.
It’s an unnerving experience to begin with. But with practice confidence grows. Knowing, yes, you will be sawn in two. But knowing, yes, you will be made whole again. The trick, for there is a trick, is to trust to the tale. Just not the teller.
Smoke and mirrors? No, not quite. An author needs their assistant, the attentive reader. It’s a liberating, even democratising, experience. Night after night, book after book, the trick falls upon the author to perform. And the willing assistant is vital to that performance – they may not practise the trick, but how they conduct themselves, learning the cues, reading the signs, responding intuitively to what the maestro requires of them…
Yes, without an attentive assistant, there would be no performance at all. No trick, no magic, no wonder. Only a darkened theatre, a disgruntled audience, a critical floor manager picking over the discarded stubs. Yes, writers need readers to be more than just popcorn accessories.
Chris had the reputation of being an occasional curmudgeon. His blast at the 2012 Clarke Award shortlist was notorious, but when he won the BSFA Award for The Islanders (a brilliant book), he made light of the incident, declaring that the massed throng of voters should probably now resign. In company, he was a witty, generous man – numerous writers have, since his death, described the support he gave them; it’s just that he took the business of writing very seriously. And what he expected of himself, he hoped also of his readers. In that sense, he led by example.
Chris once remarked that he did not abandon SF but that SF abandoned him. His unexpected appearance in 1983 on the first of Granta’s lists of the best young British writers, alongside the likes of Amis, McEwan, Rushdie and Barnes, possibly looked to those within the genre as if he had found a door in the wall and sneaked into the sunnier climes of literary fiction. Far from it since Chris, a natural outlier, was never fully accepted there either. His receipt of both the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Prestige (1995) suggests someone who straddled the worlds of mainstream and genre fiction or who benefitted from the dissolution of such distinctions. But equally it might suggest someone who could, by happenstance, appeal to demographics that would usually not see one another, like the obscure protagonists of The Glamour (1984). Like it or not, this was a writer who found their home in the margins, nibbling at the edges of what constituted the borderlines. It may not have been good for Chris’s bank balance, until Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Prestige in 2006, but it was this odd (shall we say ‘adjacent’?) cultural positioning that helped to generate one of the finest bodies of literature in the post-war period.
Chris did not outgrow SF; rather, he grew the genre so that it could encompass an author like himself, and by so doing, he inspired other writers, who did not emerge from the traditional magazine market, to create work in a speculative mode. His influence is apparent in writers like Nina Allan, Adam Roberts and Lavie Tidhar or last year’s Clarke Award winner, Ned Beauman. But, most of all, Chris grew a readership. By which I don’t only mean the dedicated fans who bought his work so that, although he never cracked the lucrative US market, Chris could go on producing fiction right up until the end. (In fact, the period from The Islanders [2011] to Airside [2023] possibly constitutes one of the most remarkable late runs of any major writer.) No, what I mean is that Chris helped to grow the kind of serious, attentive reader for science fiction which has meant that, over the last fifteen years, much of the most important contemporary fiction is to be found on the shortlists of the BSFA and Clarke Awards rather than the Man Booker. By taking the form seriously, and by encouraging others to do the same, Chris’s influence on what is now produced under the umbrella term of ‘SF’ is far greater than book sales can ever suggest. It is no coincidence that when Mark Fisher was looking for case studies for his influential thesis on the weird and the eerie, he chose Chris’s game-changing novel The Affirmation (1981).
When, at a reading at the University of Kent in 2011, I introduced Chris as Christopher, he stopped me and said, ‘No, Chris to my friends’. Reality contorted, in a single word, and I stumbled on because that’s what you have to do when inducted into Chris’s world. I was proud then, and I am proud now, to say that Chris Priest was my friend. Go on, you can still get to know him, read his books.
The Resistance
It might seem rather strange to start writing a column for Vector focusing on sf as a fiction of practical resistance to capitalist realism and oppression in a special issue on sf and modernism. After all, isn’t modernism the literature of the metropolitan elites? Influential books such as John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) certainly make this case. The latter argues that writers from the educated classes sought to maintain their elite status in the face of challenges from the masses by creating modernism, ‘a body of literature and art deliberately made too difficult for a general audience’ (393). His illustrative list of such elitists includes T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but also less obviously conservative writers, such as H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf.
While Wells was educated, he was hardly from the educated classes, being the son of a shopkeeper and domestic servant. His brilliant novel Tono-Bungay, charting the rise and fall of a quack medicine, was serialised from 1908 in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review, one of the foundational modernist magazines. The lively style of first-person narrative Wells adopted for the novel was highly influential on the work of modernist writers, including Ford’s own The Good Soldier (1915). Yet far from being deliberately difficult in order to deter general readers, Wells was a popular writer who expressed the dreams of millions who aspired to escape from the class-bound hierarchies of the age As George Orwell pointed out, reading Wells’s sf during the early years of the twentieth century at a time of lingering Victorian values and moral hypocrisy was a liberating experience because he ‘knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined’ (171).
One feature that modernism and sf share is a resistance to the capitalist conception of time: the relentless metronomic recording by the factory or office clock of the seconds, minutes and hours of empty time to be filled by work. Instead, both genres enable the depiction of time as elastic: moments that stretch to encompass the entirety of eternity and epochs that pass in the blinking of an eye. The archetypal example of this latter phenomenon is Well’s The Time Machine (1895), in which his protagonist fast-forwards from Victorian London into a distant class-flipped future in which the Morlocks, evolved offspring of the workers, hunt and eat the descendants of their former masters, the Eloi. While the satire is savage, the experience of time travel itself is recorded in aesthetic terms through the hero’s description of watching ‘the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full’ before blurring into a ‘fluctuating band’ faintly visible against a ‘wonderful deepness of blue’ (17).
Woolf similarly deploys the prose equivalent of time lapse photography in the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse (1926): ‘Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes towered among the roses’ (150). Through such means she conveys the end of one stage of civilisation as elsewhere the First World War rages. The fact that she drafted these passages during the nine days of the General Strike in 1926 is itself an implicit comment on the fragility of a capitalist realism which otherwise often seems inescapable. As Kim Stanley Robinson has highlighted, Woolf corresponded with, and was influenced by, Olaf Stapledon and passages in her work can clearly be read as sf.
Unlike Wells, Woolf was from the educated classes but her own access to formal education was of course strictly limited on account of her gender. She reflects on this question in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and frames this discussion of her present not principally by acknowledging the positive changes of recent years but in terms of the as-yet unfulfilled possibilities of one hundred years in the future (i.e. in the 2020s) by when the norm might have become the sf scenario that ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’ (12). Like Wells, part of the appeal of Woolf was that she also knew that the future was not going to be ‘respectable’. In her vision of the years ahead, it is not so much class as the norms of gender and sexuality which are flipped and even rejected outright. Orlando, the 400+ year-old protagonist of her 1928 novel of that name, lives first as a man for a couple of centuries, then as a woman, understanding the flaws and advantages of both sexes while sometimes wondering ‘if she belonged to neither’ (122).
Unsurprisingly, writers politicised by the radical experience of living during the 1930s drew upon both Wells and Woolf to combine modernist techniques, such as textual montage and first-person stream of consciousness, with near-future settings to depict the new social opportunities that would arise from the simultaneous transformation of both class and gender politics. Examples include John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936) and Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935). However, the return to cultural dominance of more conventional realist approaches to fiction during the Second World War long left novels of this type looking like obscure anomalies unconnected to the traditions and genres that are used to control how literary history is understood. Indeed, even at the time of its publication, Mitchison’s frank representation of female social and sexual self-actualisation, set in locations including the Soviet Union, a fascist England and an independent socialist Scotland, proved too much for the literary establishment and she effectively had to exile herself from London as a result of the backlash. Although the Mitchison renaissance began a few years ago, it has taken until the 2020s, and the real-life emergence of the social transformations she foresaw, for her achievements to start gaining the recognition they deserve.
During the intervening years, modernism and sf have largely been confined to separate spheres despite some notable exceptions. The influence of literary modernism was clearly discernible during the New Wave of the 1960s, especially in the work of J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss. However, while the work of these writers was clearly resistant to the established political order of postwar Britain, it was not always clear what the political implications of that resistance were. Nor, on the whole, could their position on gender be linked to the feminist positions of Woolf or Mitchison. In this respect, Michael Moorcock, their editor at New Worlds came closer with his The Cornelius Quartet (1968-77), in which political resistance is directly linked to rejecting norms of gender and sexuality. However, the obvious landmark text in the conjoining of modernism and sf in the name of resistance was Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), published midway between the Woolfian 1920s and our present 2020s, poised tantalisingly on the threshold of a post-binary-gender future.
Russ, as a scholar and teacher of modernism, was of course in part directly influenced by Woolf herself. However, there is no need for us to restrict Woolf’s well-known idea of ‘thinking back through our mothers’ to bioessentialist norms. One of the other ‘mothers’ that Russ thought back through was Wells, who is a direct influence on the idea of trans-temporal agency running throughout a number of her stories and novels, beginning with ‘The Second Inquisition’ (1970). In this story, a sixteen-year-old girl growing up in the USA of 1925 is apparently visited by a woman, a Trans-Temp Agent, from the future. During a discussion between the two about The Time Machine, the girl asks the visitor if she is an Eloi or, as she suspects, a Morlock and the latter confirms that she is indeed a Morlock, simultaneously a figure of terror and a transformed future.
The ambiguous figure of the Trans-Temp Agent returns in Russ’s most famous novel, The Female Man (1975), in the form of Jael, who tells the other J’s, Joanna, Jeannine and Janet (alternate fictional versions of Russ herself), that the reason there are no men in the utopian Whileaway of the future is because she and her ‘Womanland’ contemporaries defeated ‘Manland’ in a war of extermination. Viewed from the twenty-first century this might look like a problematic instance of radical feminist essentialism but there is no reason for us to assume that Russ regards Jael as other than an unreliable narrator. Moreover, Russ’s later story ‘What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ (1983) reworks one of Jael’s Trans-Temp interludes from The Female Man to imagine a reality in which women and men are fighting together for change. In Joanna Russ (2019), Gwyneth Jones asks whether this might mean that the possibility of a no longer exclusively female Whileaway ‘has become “more probable” for Russ than ‘“Manland versus Womanland’s” mutually assured destruction?’ (153)
Jones argues that Russ herself was a Trans-Temp Agent, committed to enacting resistance to the dominant social order and driving change from within the sf community of the 1970s ‘as an exceptional woman in a male-ordered organisation’ (111). While that struggle to transcend the gendered, sexual and social norms of capitalist realism continues, the context has radically changed since Russ’s time. In many ways, we’re closer to that goal and have moved beyond the essentialism that is still evident in some of her work. The apparent setbacks of recent years – Trump, Brexit and other manifestations of reactionary populism – are actually violent backlashes to progressive change rather than genuine political shifts in their own right. Or, to put it another way, rather than the situation, which characterised most of the twentieth century, of there being a dominant established order which upheld strong social norms, we now live in a world of competing realities, which means the context for resistance has shifted. We can see how this changed context applies to today’s sf by analysing a contemporary novel drawing on the approaches of Russ and other predecessors, Lauren Beukes’s Bridge (2023).
In an interview with Nerd Daily, Beukes discussed her inspiration for Bridge as coming in part from the realisation that we are currently living through a period of cultural schism between large groups of people holding incompatible views that is getting continually wider: ‘The truth (in a post-truth era) is that we already live in alternate realities from each other’. Beukes does not attempt to effect some sort of fantasy resolution but instead turns to the conjoined legacy of modernism and sf to help us think through this state of affairs as one of the consequences of a situation in which large enough numbers of people now understand their lives as temporally and socially complex that the normative capitalist understanding of reality – calendar time, the gender binary, fixed (hetero)sexual identities – is under threat.
The novel begins with titular heroine Bridge (short for Bridget) struggling to sort out the cluttered apartment of her recently deceased mother, Jo, while still recovering from years of therapy. However, it quickly transpires that her memories of taking trips as a child with Jo to parallel universes are not in fact delusional but were enabled by ingesting flakes of the otherworldly ‘dreamworm’ that she finds hidden away. Bridge becomes obsessed with jumping between multiple realities and thereby finding one in which her mom is still alive, despite their differences. Showing many different versions of Bridge caught up within the basic activities of everyday life, allows Beukes to explore women’s experiences in general. More specifically, by also including flashbacks to Jo’s alternate experiences, the novel reveals the complex historicity of each passing moment of time as a set of branching mother-daughter relationships.
In Bridge, Beukes uses alternative versions of Jo’s name, such as Joanne and Jo-Anne, to indicate that we are in a particular timeline. This invites us to read the novel as an allusion to The Female Man and its four ‘Js’. In the same manner that Russ sets up an intricate interplay between four fictional versions of herself in order to think herself beyond gender-role dominance, Beukes switches between a dizzying array of mother-daughter combinations – many of which are difficult relationships – to find the ones that work across different cultural contexts. Therefore, we may consider Beukes to be thinking back through her metaphorical mother, Russ, in creating these multidimensional temporal relationships as a way to ‘bridge’ across sometimes difficult cultural and binary divides.
The practical utility of novels such as Bridge, therefore, like the above-mentioned works by Wells, Woolf, Mitchison and Russ, is that they don’t just provide us with a compensatory escapist resolution to our everyday-life problems but they also teach us about the temporality and the mutability of the social norms that construct our reality. Reading this type of sf attunes us to those moments when the ‘joins’ show because something that happens makes us suddenly aware that there has been a shift in social and political attitudes. For a brief moment we become aware that everything will now change, even as the way the world is framed for us – by the media and governments – is designed to reconfigure itself as seamlessly as possible in the shape of this new reality. Every time we become aware of such fissures in social reality is a reminder that resistance to capitalist norms is possible and that we can live freely and differently.
Nick Hubble is an academic and critic, whose books include The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017) and (co-edited with Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Joe Norman) The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks (2018). Nick has written for Strange Horizons, Foundation, Parsec, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The BSFA Review. They are on Twitter as @Contempislesfic.
Works Cited
Lauren Beukes, ‘Q&A’. Nerd Daily: https://thenerddaily.com/lauren-beukes-author-interview/ Accessed 9 Mar 2024
Gwyneth Jones. Joanna Russ. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
George Orwell. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Volume 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
Jonathan Rose. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
H.G. Wells. The Time Machine. London: Everyman Library.
Virginia Woolf. Orlando. Hammersmith: Grafton Books, 1977
Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own / Three Guineas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. Hammersmith: Grafton Books, 1977
Destroying ‘Centuries of Evil Work’: Female-Authored Dystopian Science Fiction in Spain
The Speculative and Surrealist Origins of Spanish Modernism
Ángeles Santos’s painting, Un mundo [A World] (1929), is a large surrealist composition one may easily miss if one is too eager to reach Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum. In 1929, at the age of seventeen, Santos presented Un mundo at the Ninth Autumn Salon of Madrid where prominent Spanish intellectuals like Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Vicente Huidobro, and Federico García Lorca noticed her work. The three-by-three metre painting projects a surrealist world not unlike literary utopias of the early twentieth century. A world in the shape of a cube hangs suspended by angels in the sky. Female figures clad in dark dresses race down a staircase, reaching towards stars that serve as anchors for this small world. The image is equally precarious as it is carefully crafted. Santos painted the self-sufficient world with the same dark, muted palette as the cloudy blue sky. There, one can see into buildings as miniature humans go to work, play sports, and ride the steam train that snakes its way across each side of the cube. What lives do these people lead? What references to modern Spain can be found in this painting and similar works of literature? How might we recognize the contributions of women within this milieu?
“Un mundo” by Ángeles Santos (1929) photographed by eckelon is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.Spanish women actively participated in the Silver Age of Spanish Literature, yet they have often been excluded from anthologies, tributes to modernist writers, and Spanish literature courses. During the Second Spanish Republic (1931-9), women gained the right to vote (1931), the right to divorce (1932), and abortion was legalised in 1937 thanks to Minister of Health, Federica Montseny. Although women benefited greatly from new leisure activities and technologies like street cars, aeroplanes, and film, they also faced limitations living in a society that subjugated women. Despite her initial success as a young artist, Ángeles Santos suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930 and she was sent to a sanatorium. María Alejandra Zanetta surmises that her crisis can be attributed to vehemently misogynistic male intellectuals and the bad reception of her paintings at an exhibit in Barcelona, all of which precipitated a stylistic change towards painting landscapes and portraits with ‘a soft style with happy pastel tones’ (116). Put another way, Santos was left adrift from the very oneiric settings, dark palette, and representations of women that defined her artistic vision. Her surrealist artwork was perhaps too intuitive of the state of women who, in Tertulia [The Gathering] (1929), stare defiantly at the viewer. While artists like Salvador Dalí and Picasso painted politically informed, surrealist compositions and writers like Pedro Salinas and Vicente Aleixandre imagined new worlds in their poetry, women have largely been left out of the conversation about Spanish modernism on account of their personal and artistic identities.
“Tertulia” by Ángeles Santos (1929) photographed by Iso Brown FR is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.Spanish modernist women cultivated experimental and speculative writing techniques in response to rapid social and technological changes taking place in Madrid and other urban centres. In what follows, I will analyse two science fiction short stories by Ángeles Vicente and Halma Angélico, titled respectively ‘Cuento absurdo’ [‘Absurd Story’] (1908) and ‘Evocación del porvenir. Homenaje en España a la Madre en el año…’ [‘Evocation of the Future. Tribute in Spain to the Mother of the Year…’] (1930). These authors construct dystopian societies that mirror the lack of control women experienced prior to the Second Spanish Republic. I will provide a brief overview of Spanish speculative modernism followed by a textual analysis of both stories. I argue that the dystopian settings and experimental narrative techniques found in these stories are the speculative methods chosen to grapple with the contradictions of modern society’s technological progress and emerging authoritarianism. These women faced the double marginalisation attributed to género, the word for both ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ in Spanish. They are known as ‘sinsombreristas’, and part of the ‘hatless’ modern women active in the cultural milieu of early twentieth-century Spain yet systematically excluded from the literary canon for decades.
Teaching and researching multi-hyphenate marginalised writers of the ‘other Silver Age Spain’ in an American context is a continuous process of translation and cultural mediation. I often get asked to name significant Spanish women writers and explain why it is important to study them, if such a niche field cannot compare to the literary juggernauts of the American and British canons. I, too, assumed that Spanish science fiction of the early twentieth century was too esoteric and would yield few search results. While it is true that more research is needed in this area, I believe the common keywords myself and other scholars use have a lot in common with the border-crossing, community-based lives many modernist Anglophone writers lived: transatlantic, experimental, translation, female liberation, queer futures, cross-media, and collaboration. In fact, this way of understanding the inherent experimentalism, queerness, and political commitments of Spanish modernist writers leaves little doubt that speculative writing, especially science fiction, abounded during Spain’s Silver Age.
Avant-garde artistic communities emerged out of the nascent modernism and redefinition of Spanish national identity during the first third of the twentieth century. The period from 1898, the point at which Spain lost its remaining colonies of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States, and 1936, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War is recognized as the Silver Age of Spanish literature. New technologies came into use, and neuroscientist and occasional science fiction writer Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the 1906 Nobel Prize for Medicine, a first for Spain. Artists and writers experimented with dreamlike and symbolist techniques like surrealism and ultraism, leading to an increase in fantastical work. For example, the journal Blanco y Negro [White and Black] organized a contest for fantastic stories in 1903 (Ana Casas 359). As Nil Santiáñez-Tío notes in the introduction to his anthology of Spanish science fiction from 1832 to 1913, works by Spanish writers were not included in contemporary Spanish literature anthologies or English language anthologies of science fiction. Of course, the question of translation and circulation is never far from mind, as works by Jules Verne became bestsellers in nineteenth century Spain (9).
The tropes of utopia and dystopia gained popularity in Spanish speculative fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for they became a vehicle for writers to examine human morality and spirituality. Well-known Spanish writers like Emilia Pardo Bazán, Miguel de Unamuno, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna also wrote speculative work even if they are better known for their realist fiction, newspaper articles, and essays. Juan Herrero Senés explains in his 2021 anthology, Mundos al descubierto: Antología de la ciencia ficción de la Edad de Plata (1898-1936) [Worlds to Discover: Anthology of Silver Age Science Fiction (1898-1936)], that science fiction was a minor genre during this period and lacked visibility, thus making it difficult to point to ‘a strong science fiction tradition native to Spain’ (17). He characterises Silver Age science fiction by its caution and pessimism when confronted with new social realities, leading to a prevalence of dystopias in which the authors confront the fear of losing civil liberties and being thrust into a future Spanish society gone awry. Science fiction at the time was judged as not having much aesthetic merit, but Herrero Senés does point to journalists Nilo María Fabra, José de Elola, and Jesús de Aragón as active writers of science fiction. José de Elola published more than twenty science fiction novels between 1919 and 1927 under the pseudonym ‘Coronel Ignotus’, forming the fictional-scientific library within the Sanz Calleja editing house.
Unsuspecting Dystopias: Spanish Women Writers of Science Fiction
Teresa López-Pellila and Lola Robles’s 2019 two-volume anthology of posthuman and dystopian fiction by Spanish female authors shows the diversity of speculative work by women writers. While the anthology primarily includes the term ‘science fiction’ in reference to the genre, these stories are speculative in a wider sense. They include fantastic and absurd stories, modern myths, and mad scientists. As López-Pellisa traces a female speculative modernist tradition in the prologue, she points out how such writing has often not been classified as science fiction. One such example is Emilia Pardo Bazán’s 1879 novel, Pascual López, about a medical student who develops an alchemical process to turn coal into diamonds. Throughout the stories included in the first volume, readers will find dystopian environments depicting the dailiness of futures constructed in the minds of writers who witnessed how emerging authoritarianism and new technologies threatened to pull people and cities apart.
Dystopias are rife with contradictions and attempts by individuals and societies to establish control. Ángeles Vicente and Halma Angélico’s stories exemplify what James Reitter, Robert Stauffer, and William Gillard describe as the sociological side of dystopias masquerading as utopias in their ‘Utocalypse’ chapter of Speculative Modernism (2021). They do not mention Spanish or Latin American writers or texts in the chapter, however Spanish writers also wrestled with the role of the individual in society and the use of new technologies. Vicente and Angélico’s stories align well with the imperatives of works like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which Gillard et al consider ‘utopian in nature but creates a rather sinister world that is utterly intolerant of other “impure” races or even biological impulses’ (32). This sense of establishing control by documenting daily life is something Spanish writers have been doing since the nineteenth century through the literary and artistic tradition of costumbrismo.
I propose that Vicente and Angélico’s stories represent ‘cuadros de costumbres’, vignettes of everyday life, that detail the dailiness of life in dystopias presented as utopias. Costumbrista stories have morals represented by different character types (tropes) and situations as the narrator guides the reader through the city. For example, in ‘Vuelva usted mañana’ [‘Come Again Tomorrow’], Mariano José de Larra writes of an impatient Frenchman aptly named Monsieur Sans-delai who tries to complete his business in Spain over the span of a few days only to become annoyed by the constant refrain of the story’s title.
Daily routines and habits can be found in speculative poetry and fiction across cultural and historical contexts. Spanish speculative stories remind me of the ones I recently read as a juror for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds and Diverse Writers grants. All the excerpts had a strong sense of place informed by real, or imagined, languages and cultures. 2023 Diverse Writers grant winner Ysabelle Cheung’s story ‘Please, Get Out and Dance’ comes to mind as a fantastic example of immersing the readers in a world where the characters must leave a disappearing city. Characters get swept up in the momentum of these disappearances, which showcase the power of grief and loss while bringing mundane routines and objects, especially food, into view. There is a sense of finality in Cheung’s story of evacuation and goodbyes that carries over across cultures and historical periods, reminding me of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ (1976), and Vicente and Angélico’s depictions of men and women searching for rules and meaning in literal and figurative ruins.
Ángeles Vicente’s ‘Absurd Story’ (1908)
Vicente’s body of work includes social commentary in support of women’s rights, scientific and science fiction, and Zezé (1909), the first Spanish novel with a lesbian protagonist that predates Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). She writes of medical students tormented by dreams of the souls of cadavers (‘La trenza’/‘The Braid’), reinterprets the popular Spanish myth of Don Juan from the female perspective (‘La derrota de Don Juan’/‘The Defeat of Don Juan’), and writes about man and machine in ‘Historia de un automóvil’ [‘History of an Automobile’]. Vicente was born in Murcia, Spain and grew up in Argentina to Spanish parents. She would later settle in Madrid with her husband. Unfortunately, details about her life beyond 1920, including the date of her death, remain unknown. ‘Cuento absurdo’ [‘Absurd Story’] exemplifies the dailiness of staging the apocalypse in a modern Spanish city frozen in time. These vignettes of life depict the dangers of human greed and the threat of annihilation when a new society falls back on old traditions.
Guillermo Arides, an anarchist scientist, wants to destroy humanity with his invention that would annihilate all living beings. After honestly professing his knowledge of physics and ability to annihilate the world, he must appear before a judge, only to be laughed at by those who believe he is simply a mad scientist. Once free, he calls his loyal followers to his lab, all too eager to destroy tyrannical society with his invention. He triumphantly yells the Latin phrase, ‘Consumatum est!’ [‘it is completed’], the same words attributed to Jesus Christ dying on the cross (48). His loyal followers can only imagine what destruction may await them beyond his lab. Perplexed by their own survival, the survivors wander the city and witness scenes of transit systems, funeral processions, and domestic life frozen in time. Once they complete their tour of the city, they return to the lab where Arides proceeds to make the frozen people and animals disappear. From there, the survivors must forge on and make a new society out of the wreckage, which does not go according to plan. Using costumbrista generic conventions to represent daily life and customs, the survivors fall back on old human vices and their society quickly becomes a dystopia. Fighting breaks out and Arides becomes incensed by the displays of egoism and cruelty, resolving to destroy the city altogether by the end of the short story.
Vicente repurposes the sense of dailiness and satire achieved by costumbrista literary techniques in this dystopia to represent the societal fears brought about by scientific advancement and civil liberties. The story opens as follows: ‘The social problem was resolved once and for all by Guillermo Arides, the most terrible and brilliant anarchist of the past, present, and future’ (47). As an anarchist scientist, he thrives on social disorder to envision a stateless society of his own creation. The opening teases that a solution to the social problem was created by Arides himself, leaving readers wondering what aspects of this modernist urban society with its street cars, striking workers, and soldiers could have given rise to a ‘social problem.’ To destroy humanity, Arides will utilise ‘ignored interplanetary fluids’ (47) subjected to great pressure in his machine to destroy all living beings except for him and his ‘correligionarios’, or followers. Arides then delivers an impassioned speech to his followers:
Siblings, Arides called to his followers, I have called you here because the time has come to end the existing tyranny, with its privileges and infamies. In a second, many centuries of evil work will be destroyed, and there will be no inhabitants on this planet other than us, we who are gathered in this conveniently isolated area. We will no longer have more laws than our own instincts. You who remain will be tasked with the high mission of founding a new humanity. Our freedom will be our happiness. (48)
Arides professes a disdain for the ‘many centuries of evil work’, indicating a fear of technological progress and perhaps Western civilization itself. Arides calls on his followers to celebrate a new humanity built on the ashes of the old. Instead of joyously yelling and clapping after the speech, his followers stand in silence, wholly unmoved by his charisma. In what ways would this machine create a new world? The men and women fearfully look aroundl before finally shouting, ‘Yes!’ when asked if they are ready for a new humanity to rise out of the ashes. For Arides, the destruction is beautiful and necessary, a chance to reclaim an Edenic sense of paradise on Earth. Little do his followers know that they have willingly become his test subjects.
To see the devastation, survivors must take to the streets to witness human life frozen in time. There is an echo here of Spanish costumbrista literature, insofar as the narrator would stroll through the city and observe what people are doing: the bad deals they make, decisions that will cause shame to their family, and other scenarios used to make a moral argument. Arides instructs the survivors to tour a city with sprawling avenues reminiscent of Madrid’s Gran Vía. The survivors witness a dystopian scene in which people remain at their job posts and reveal the world in all its imperfections:
The scene repeated: rigid and inert bodies appeared everywhere. Some had fallen and others maintained the position in which they were surprised by the catastrophe. In the stores, merchants and sellers remained grouped in their different activities, some of them smiling, others serious and phlegmatic, as if they were ready to continue their conversations. In the homes, the inhabitants appeared committed to their domestic tasks. Were it not for the collapsed bodies and the rigidity of those that remained in their lifelike state, one could still doubt the cataclysm. (49-50)
The dailiness of Vicente’s dystopia is striking, for there is nothing particularly abnormal about the composition of these scenes. Merchants are in the middle of making sales and servants clean homes as their wealthy owners sit reading nearby. This very dailiness is what the anarchist scientist most abhors, the mundanity of social inequities. As in other costumbrista works, social classes can be identified through descriptions of behaviour, dress, and occupation. Vicente’s descriptions of city life are not surprising for the early twentieth century insofar as Arides’s meddling brings the city to a standstill and turns living beings into corpses. The survivors view these scenes up close, and they begin to recognize the flaws that plagued modern society. To this end, Arides directs their attention to protesters gathered in a plaza, ‘many of them standing and with expressions that showed as if they were still listening to a silent speaker who extended his arms from a large balcony’ (50). Evidently, class differences incited rebellions and raised discontent. Arides then asks his followers, ‘Are all of you now convinced by the success of my work?’ (51).
The survivors return to the lab and Arides turns his machine on again to remove the frozen cadavers while leaving the buildings and other material objects intact. From there, he tells the group to do as they please but to not accumulate wealth or to otherwise recreate old traditions. Unfortunately, little time passes before someone sets up residence in the royal palace and the group begins arguing about work productivity. Men fight over Esther, the prettiest woman of the group, and Arides goes home that evening upset about the failure of his project. In her doctoral dissertation on Vicente’s short fiction, Sara Toro Ballesteros reads ‘Cuento absurdo’ as a ‘the satire of a socialist utopia’ (249), pointing to these arguments as evidence of infighting among those with socialist ideals. Finally, Arides realises a solution to humans lapsing into their old customs. He jumps out of bed and exclaims, ‘I should have thought to transform, not society, but man’ (56). Why then could he not annihilate everyone, if all the survivors are doing is oppressing one another? With that, he sets the city ablaze, destroying all sentient life as if to prove that no version of humanity can escape these mortal and moral flaws. Vicente ends with an ellipsis, as if even the words themselves were swallowed whole by flammable gas.
Halma Angélico’s ‘Evocation of the Future’ (1930)
Arides’s ‘utopia’ could not last even a year, let alone a lifetime, but Angélico’s story builds on the work of generations. No longer are decisions as humorous and, at times, flippant as Vicente’s absurd story. In ‘Evocation of the Future. Tribute in Spain to the Mother of the Year…’ (1930), Angélico takes the threats to female autonomy and the political activism of her generation to create a story set in the future. Halma Angélico and Ana Ryus were pseudonyms María Francisca Clar Margarit signed her short stories (the former) and theatre (the latter) with. She spent her early childhood in the then-Spanish colony of the Philippines before moving to Madrid in 1898 (López-Pellisa and Robles 59). As a young adult she worked in well-established newspapers like ABC and El heraldo de Madrid [The Madrid Herald], and Clara Campoamor and María de la O Lejárraga’s feminist press Mujer y Cultura integral y femenina [Women and Culture Integral and Female]. Angélico does not often get cited alongside other female modernists despite being as politically active as María Teresa León and Carmen Conde, having served as vice-president of the Union of Spanish Women and Female Spain and president of the Female Lyceum Club. In 2019, Ivana Rota published critical editions of Angélico’s short story collections El templo profanado (Pro mater) (1930) [The Defiled Temple (For the Mother)] and La desertadora [The Deserter] (1932). Her speculative work trends on the side of dystopian, with her 1938 comedy Ak y la Humanidad [Ak and Humanity] taking inspiration from the play of the same name by Russian writer Jefim Sosulia to showcase a political dystopia that premiered during the Spanish Civil War.
What would you do if you were charged with ‘crimes against Maternity’ (67), as in Angélico’s story? How far would you go to defend the utopia your foremothers created?
‘Evocation of the Future’ is an eerie tale that steadfastly defends a society celebrating its annual tribute to the mother of the year. Even if the rituals seem strange at first glance, many parallels exist between this dystopia masquerading as utopia and the status of human rights in the twenty-first century. The violence women continue to face happens at such high rates that the word ‘feminicidio’ in Spanish refers to women being murdered because of their gender, sex, and/or sexuality. As in Angélico’s other work, the story introduces themes of maternity and female autonomy approximately two hundred years after 1930. As Rota describes in her article, ‘Halma Angélico: Una mirada hacia la maternidad desde la España de 1930’ (2018), Angélico has created a future society ‘in which the institution of family and the presence of partners has disappeared entirely’ (30). An elder gives a speech declaring how much society has improved since moving on from its former, uncivilised ways. He speaks out against what the society considers the horrors of abortion, which was illegal at the time, and he is met with raucous applause.
If the dailiness of Vicente’s speculative modernism draws from scenes of a modern Spanish city, Angélico replaces technology with a filter of beauty and glamour that obscures the oppression the young characters experience. The story begins with a scene of an enormous atrium filled with beautiful architecture and music:
In the centre of the atrium, a large podium stands covered in silks embroidered with gold and stones. Before it, lies an Altar of rosy marble and embossed bronze. All around, palm leaves sway their monumental fans; the ground, made of glass and marble, covers itself in roses… A far-away chorus of boys sings and, softly, the melodies of a fantastic organ that sharpens or flattens its sounds with rhythms and melodies unknown to us, reaches the lodge and inundates it with its voices… It is a temperate day. The bells that seem to be made of gold have just sounded; it would be ten in the morning in our time. Now choirs of girls arrive. They are all dressed the same. (61)
This setting with its marble altar and embroidered silks evokes a certain timelessness reminiscent of church ceremonies. This is not a site of excess, but one of adoration. Palm leaves sway, children sing, and bells ring as the community gathers to celebrate maternity in this locus amoenus, or ‘pleasant place’. Even the weather is favourable, and the narration has a certain celebratory flair to it, drawing readers into this supposed utopia. The narrator even helps readers interpret the scene, pointing out music not known to us, and telling time for those who are not native inhabitants of this society.
It soon becomes apparent through the ordered procession of children that the dailiness of this society leaves no room for individuality, and instead is designed to protect its version of ‘el hogar’, meaning both ‘hearth’ and ‘home’ in Spanish. As Rota notes, the ‘white pale woman’ (Angélico 62) who speaks with the children follows Christian values when condemning individuality and promoting equality. Following the initial procession, the children bicker amongst themselves, and the teacher chides them for being rude to their ‘siblings’. When a girl only identified as number 14 cries, the woman asks, ‘A woman as healthy as you is crying?’ (62). The girl gives an embarrassed look at her guardian and wipes her eyes. Every child has a number, something carried over from dystopias like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), to keep the children from becoming too individualistic. They must follow the three principles of virtue, talent, and work in this society based on mutual respect and cooperation. Like the disagreements in Vicente’s story, these moments show points of tension within these societies and the small ways daily life discourages independence and individuality.
The oldest elder raises his hand to begin his speech on this most solemn day for the nation: ‘We are gathered here to pay tribute to the Mother; Mother!, the highest hierarchy of woman and nation’ (63). He praises Maternity and Mothers, thanking God for the Mothers of past and present. The elder serves as our anthropological guide to the story, recounting the mythic origins of this annual celebration. Tributes are common cultural events in Spain as people gather to pay their respects to an individual or group of people at a location of significant cultural or personal importance. This case is no different as the elder explains, ‘Each year, as you all know, we gather at this site … to offer to the Mothers of the Nation this tribute of our admiration, love, and respect… No one Mother is honoured, because doing so would be to forget the unknown one, whose abnegation is impossible to verify or assess’ (64). The word ‘abnegation’ denotes a level of selflessness that can only be attained when a woman devotes herself fully to others, such as serving as a mother. He continues by celebrating how this society has conquered the barbaric ideas of the twentieth century that rid society of the false equality of inclusion.
From here, the façade of a beautiful, enlightened society unravels as readers begin to see the true nature of this sanctity of motherhood. By the end of the story, the elder elicits gasps from the crowd upon mentioning ‘crimes against Maternity’ (67). He leaves no doubt that the perpetrators of these crimes are women who ‘kill their children before or after being born’ (68). Most importantly, the story does not leave room for the perspective of women or dissidents, instead carrying out its worldbuilding through the speech that lasts most of the story. The most drastic measure and one so invasive so as to echo present legal means of controlling women and other marginalised groups is the strict control over fertility: ‘In no other way now, since our medical inspection, before and after [sexual] unions, periodically monitors and determines the citizens’ impossibility of frauds in births, thereby punished by us with the hardest of sanctions, as you all know’ (67). The audience reacts with raucous applause in praise of women who were martyrs in their era for protecting the sanctity of children and fertility, and the elder reminds them that their society is compensation for those dark times. The population supports and is already well acquainted with the idea of surveillance of sexual unions, worded in such a way as to connote social support. While each child and adult may be cared for, the flagrant violation of privacy and autonomy offers a direct social commentary about women’s rights in Spain at the time, which were only a few years off from a short window of time when women’s suffrage, divorce, and even abortion were legalised.
Angélico’s speculative tribute to motherhood ends in an ordered procession with pleasant music. Scented herbs are placed in the fire and the story ends as mysteriously as the final ellipses. I wonder if the female figures in Santos’s Un mundo are participating in a ceremony that keeps the odd cubed world spinning in the sky. They seem to – a group of women wearing identical long dresses, playing music for the denizens of this small world. Speculative traditions were so ingrained in the literature and art of modernist Spain, yet speculative stories and storytellers faced erasure due to their genre (and gender) being perceived as less serious. Vicente’s literary work remains understudied yet her ‘Cuento absurdo’ exemplifies the nascent science fiction of Silver Age Spain through which writers reimagined the potential dangers of Spain’s burgeoning modernity in recognizable apocalyptic cityscapes. Couched within the backdrop of a mad scientist set on making a new world, Vicente’s story reveals anti-capitalist and anarchist tendencies of collective action and communal living that would gain traction among anarchist political groups in the leadup to the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, both stories urge readers to pay attention to one’s surroundings and avoid lapsing into the mundanity of traditions when other ways of living are possible. The next time you pick up a worn copy of a book by a modernist writer you know and love, ask yourself if there’s something a little speculative about their work that you might have overlooked before.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Sturgeon Symposium: Celebrating Speculative Communities hosted by the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas where a version of this project was presented on a virtual panel in Fall 2022.
Author Bio
Angela Acosta is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Davidson College with a PhD in Spanish from The Ohio State University. She has published on Spanish modernism, female life-writing, and literary personas in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies. She is co-editor with Rebecca Haidt for a forthcoming Special Issue of Feminist Modernist Studies on Spanish Sapphic Modernity (2024). She is a 2023 Utopia Award Finalist, 2023 Rhysling Finalist, and 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honourable Mention. Her speculative poetry and short stories have appeared in Shoreline of Infinity, Space & Time, Radon Journal, and Apparition Lit. She is author of the Elgin nominated speculative poetry collection Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and chapbook A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023).
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Santos, Ángeles. Tertulia. 1929, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, https://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/mundo.
—. Un mundo. 1929, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, https://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/mundo.
Toro Ballesteros, Sara. Viaje al mundo de las almas: la narrativa breve de Ángeles Vicente. Editorial de la Universidad de Granada, 2014.
Vicente, Ángeles. Zezé, ed. Angela Ena Bordanada, Ediciones Lengua de Trapo, 2005.
Zanetta, María Alejandra. ‘Ángeles Santos (Portbou, Gerona, 1911).’ La otra cara de la vanguardia: Estudio comparative de la obra artística de Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos y Remedios Varo, Edwin Mellen Press, 2006, pp. 111-155.
[1] See José Carlos Mainer’s seminal essay on the creation of the Silver Age of Spanish literature, La Edad de Plata (1902-1939): Ensayo de interpretación de un proceso cultural (1968).
[2] All English translations in this article are my own.
[3] See Tània Balló’s 2015 documentary Las Sinsombrero: Sin ellas la historia no está complete for an introduction to these modern women and the term ‘sinsombrerismo’ coined by Ramón Gómez de la Serna during the 1920s.
[4] See Ángela Ena Bordonada’s book La otra edad de plata. Temas, géneros y creadores (1898-1936). These writers, including Carmen Conde, María de la O Lejárraga, and Lucía Sánchez Saornil, were othered due to their gender, genre, and political and aesthetic commitments.
[5] See his short story collection Cuentos de vacaciones: Narraciones pseudocientificas, first published in 1905. .
[6] The nineteenth and twentieth-century Spanish women writers in this first volume include Emilia Pardo Bazán, Ángeles Vicente, Halma Angélico, Condesa de Campo Alange, Alicia Araujo, María Guéra (co-authored with her son Arturo Mengotti), Magdalena Mouján Ontaño, Teresa Inglés, Roser Cardús, Rosa Fabregat, Blanca Mart, Mayi Pelot, Elia Barceló, Rosa Montero, and Lola Robles.
[7] See Michael J. Hartwell’s article “Nineteenth-Century Spanish Costumbrista Writers” for an overview of costumbrismo in Spain and notable costumbristas Mariano José de Larra, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Serafín Estébanez Calderón, and Cecila Böhl von Faber.
[8] For a complete list of stories and Vicente’s speculative work, see Mercedes Barranco Sánchez.
[9] There are only a handful of scholars of Vicente’s work at present, but interest is growing. For those who can read Spanish, I recommend Angela Ena Bordanada’s 2005 critical edition of Zezé and Ana Fernández González’s doctoral dissertation on Vicente’s writing.
[10] Rota also notes in ‘Entre utopía y distopía: el cuento “Evocación del porvenir. Homenaje en España a la Madre en el año…” de Halma Angélico’ that birthrates in Spain declined from 1900-1930 as a result of the development of contraceptives (226).
[11] In fact, there are so few mentions of futuristic technology that the most notable one Rota points out is the sound system that allows everyone within and outside of the temple to hear the tribute (220).
This article is part of Vector’s academic peer-review track.
Ukrainian Women in SF: A Roundtable Conversation
Interviewed by Michael Burianyk
Nataliya Dovhopol, Natalia Matolinets, Iryna Hrabovska, Daria Piskozub and Svitlana Taratorina are five young, diverse Ukrainian women writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Not only is their fiction significant but they also have a YouTube channel “Фантастичні talk(s)/Fantastic talk(s)” (@fantalks) where they discuss the history and current state of Ukrainian fantastic literature and interview foreign writers. All are fluent and articulate in English. More importantly they are expressive in their understanding of their own work and the importance of Science Fiction and Fantasy in understanding real life. Their insights into their writing reveal how it fits into contemporary Ukrainian culture and literature. Their responses are often touching and even harrowing, considering the horrific war they are experiencing.
Note for the following that both Nataliya Dovhopol and Natalia Matolinets share the same first name, spelled the same in Ukrainian, but use different English spellings.
What themes and topics do you explore in your work?
Nataliya Dovhopol I combine my interests in local history, mythology, art history and cultural studies with my degree in Theory and History of Art. I consider my novels to be historical fantasy (To Find the Amazon’s Land, The Knight of the Drevlyanian Land and the Lady Eagle) and ethnic fantasy (Wandering Circus of the Silver Lady). I also explore urban fantasy and like to experiment with genres and topics to reveal unknown pages of Ukrainian history, but always in the context of the real world. As well, suffering a lack of coming-of-age stories in my childhood, I want today’s youngsters to easily find exciting books by Ukrainian authors.
Iryna Hrabovska I’ve written in many genres, including detective stories and adventure novels. But most of all I love researching history. My debut was the steampunk duology Leoburg mostly set in a world with an alternate European history. My new trilogy (The Crystal Castle) is a sword and sorcery fantasy based on the events of the Hundred Years’ War. I am particularly proud of my mystical story The Closest to Hell, about the disappearance of miners in one of the first mines in Donbas in the early 20th century. It’s based on historical material about the small mining town of Snizhne, where I was born, and I want Ukrainians to see the Donetsk region not only as a place of war but also as a place of beauty and fantasy.
Natalia Matolinets I started writing fantasy based on different mythologies, as they were a huge part of my reading while growing up. I later developed an interest in travel, history and arts, so urban fantasy became my safe haven where I could combine whatever I wanted and send my characters to the places that I loved. Even though some of my books were inspired by Greek myth (Hessi), royal France (Ceramic Hearts), my current interest is Eastern and Central Europe. I began my urban fantasy journey with the Varta in the Game trilogy, which was also published in the Czech Republic and is coming out soon in Poland. This story is my attempt to explore the European context of Ukraine which had many ties with neighboring countries. After the Varta trilogy I decided to work more from the Ukrainian perspective. Just before the full-scale Russian invasion I finished The Alliance for the Rescue of Tiles and People, my tribute to pre-war Lviv, its multicultural past and to Ukrainians as a part of urban life, memories of which have been erased or forgotten. Currently I’m working on a new project about the Belle Epoque. In 2023 I had an opportunity to work on it as a resident of the Prague UNESCO City of Literature.
Svitlana Taratorina I grew up in the very russified Ukrainian Crimea, but when I moved to Kyiv at the age of 18, I immediately began writing fiction only in Ukrainian. I started writing urban fantasy based on Ukrainian history, folklore and mythology as a path to my Ukrainian identity. I tried to understand who I was, as a Ukrainian, wanting to know how the empire, Russian or Soviet, distorted and destroyed my history and culture. My first novel, the urban fantasy Lazarus is about postcolonial trauma. Set in the 1910s, my research showed that despite being presented as a period of Russian cultural dominance Kyiv had always been a multinational, multicultural, and multireligious city with Ukrainians playing a leading role. It’s now been translated into Polish. Poles have had a similar experience of Russian colonialism, and I think that fantasy well illuminates postcolonialism. With the beginning of the full-scale war, I became increasingly interested in science fiction and post-apocalyptic stories. My second novel, House of Salt, just published in 2023, is a post-apocalyptic novel with elements of science fiction and horror. It is based on the history and myths of my native Crimea and is a reflection on the 2014 Russian occupation of that peninsula. Since February of 2022, I’ve completed three short stories. One of them is a historical fantasy based on the history of Crimea in the first century AD. The other two are post-apocalyptic stories – my interpretation of the experience of living during the war. Science fiction and the post-apocalyptic genre allows me to understand what Ukrainians are going through now.
Daria Piskozub I always knew I would work in SFF genres. I loved the concepts of foreign lands and chivalric quests, but as I grew older, I understood that SFF can be so much more. Fantastic worlds are a playground where current problems and issues can be examined. While epic fantasy was my earliest interest my debut came in 2020 with the post-apocalyptic novel Machina. Since my major in university was Computer Sciences I thought of what it would take for our society, a society of ideas and meritocracy, to return to valuing brute force. I paired the most “savage” vision of human society with perhaps civilization’s biggest potential achievement – AI. The sequel to Machina – Hemma – was supposed to come in 2022 but due to the invasion it only came out this last summer. I’m also interested in the idea of space opera and in those anxious times just before the invasion I wrote a short story about Ukraine of the 23rd century ready to join the space race. In 2022, heavily influenced by the war, I wrote two more short stories. One of them is about a world where the dead remain as visible spirits. The still living are able to see how many soldiers and civilians died for their land in the past. The spark that pushed me to write this story was the reality of death coming from all sides – scrolling social networks to see dozens of daily obituaries, hearing of friends’ deaths on the frontlines, and starting every event with a minute of silence in memory of the fallen. I feel as if I am only beginning to grasp the extent to which the invasion has impacted my writing – both in style, themes and genres.
What were the literary and genre influences that inspired you? Were books and literature your primary love or did film and television play an important part?
Nataliya My favorite fantasy book was the Ukrainian classic Forest song by Lesya Ukrainka. I was raised on traditional Ukrainian songs and legends, so had this passion at my roots. I didn’t read much SFF while growing up but then discovered Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber in my aunt’s village library. Charmed was my favorite TV show and I watched every fantasy movie I could find.
Iryna The first book I remember reading as a child was The Land of Fireflies, a beautifully illustrated middle-grade Ukrainian fantasy story, by Viktor Blyznyets. While growing up I read a lot of fantasy – The Talking Parcel by Gerald Durrell, the Myth Adventures series by Robert Asprin, and later The Hunger Games by Susan Collins, The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, and so on. I was also greatly influenced by English gothic and vampire novels, as well as by the works of Ukrainian writers, especially those of the 1920s and 1930s, part of the “the Executed Renaissance” like Ivan Bahrianyi and Mykola Khvylyovyi. One of the most striking books that inspired me was that combination of mysticism and historical research, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova which inspired me to study history. Other contemporary fantasy authors who have had a great influence on me include Leigh Bardugo and Joe Abercrombie. As for television, I will always be a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the greatest shows ever created in my opinion and which has probably had the biggest influence on me to this day.
Natalia I learned to read with the help of Greek myth, so gods, heroes, divine powers and royal intrigues were a part of my upbringing. I was a keen reader being surrounded by my parent’s huge library. Once, a Ukrainian publisher showed me a newly published book during the Lviv Book fair- Harry Potter – and it feels strange to me now to recall a moment when nobody knew Harry Potter! Later, I discovered the The Lord of the Rings.
Svitlana The first children’s fantasy books that impressed me were the OZ series by L. Frank Baum. I came to these stories through the Russian writer Alexander Volkov, who, conveniently behind the Iron Curtain, simply stole Baum’s stories and rewrote them in Russian. After the collapse of the USSR, I started reading all the SFF translations I could get my hands on. In the1990s, the book market was flooded with terrible Russian translations, or rather ad hoc adaptations. However, this is how I first read A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, books by Michael Moorcock, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Roger Zelazny, Harry Harrison and others. I was 13 or 14 years old and will remember for the rest of my life the impression these unique and unusual books made on me and it was probably that reading experience that motivated me to write fantasy and science fiction. My favorite TV series at that time were Lexx and Х-Files and my favorite movies are space horror like Alien.
Daria I am a little younger than my colleagues and can shed some light on the experience of the first generation of Ukrainian Independence. I was born in 1997, 6 years after the USSR collapsed. My parents, who did not have a chance to read in Ukrainian in their childhood, diligently bought Ukrainian books for me. Every year more and more books would be translated, and they shaped my life. At the age of 7 I read J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Then Eragon by Cristopher Paolini. Then Lord of the Rings. These three books defined my love for fantasy, and I realized that I wanted to write it. As I reached adolescence, a wave of popularity for young adult fiction rose and I was able to read them in Ukrainian – The Hunger Games, and Divergent, for instance. Soon after classics of the genre were translated, Herbert’s Dune, Asimov’s Foundation, Jordan’s Wheel of Time and so on. I’m also a big fan of SFF on television and one of the first TV series I got hooked on was Charmed – translated in Ukraine as All Women are Witches, a reference to the last line of Hohol’s (aka Nikolai Gogol) horror story Viy.
There is a strong trend of more Ukrainian SFF being published. Why did you think this was happening?
Nataliya It’s mainly about escapism. After spending the night in a bomb shelter and doom scrolling all day, one needs something less traumatic. Yet, SFF can also help to cope with feelings, to project one’s own experiences on those in the stories. Then the ban on book imports from Russia and a growing interest in Ukrainian culture has created more of a demand for domestic literature.
Natalia The Ukrainian book market is growing in general and it’s just natural that more SFF would be published and sold. Publishers are also getting better at marketing their SFF books. When I debuted in 2018 with two books of young adult fantasy, I had trouble explaining what ‘young adult’ meant. My work was often thought of as ‘childrens’ books’ and it was difficult to reach the right audience. Now this has changed for the better.
Svitlana The situation started to change in 2014. Ukrainians became more interested in contemporary Ukrainian literature and publishers searched for new voices. After 2022, the ban on imported Russian books contributed to the development of the Ukrainian book market and the development of all its genres. However, SFF in Ukraine has had a very long tradition and it isn’t surprising that this genre is developing faster than others.
Daria The events that we have experienced pushed the edges of what people perceived as normal. Ideas of fighting total evil, the need to embark on a quest more important than your own life – all of this is native to SFF. It’s also a lense through which one can identify painful realities. There is more than enough reality in contemporary Ukrainian life that complex fantastic worlds can be weaved that reveal very painful truths.
There is a clear trend that more women are writing genre fiction. What has encouraged this and are there recognizable differences between works produced by women and their male colleagues?
Iryna Since women are thought to read more books, they are more likely to choose works written by women. Then there is the stereotype that women write for other women or for teens, so books by women have a wider audience and are more interesting to publishers. Women also choose popular genres, like romantic fantasy and young adult, that men are less likely to write so publishers seek them out. I also see a trend of male writers, after much criticism, to be better at depicting female characters, having them drive the plot and make decisions. LGBTQIA+ characters are appearing too, but mostly in works written by women.
Natalia Women are more often regularly on social media like Instagram and Tiktok where there is a huge SFF audience. Male writers often have a prejudice against social media, especially those dominated by young women. So as the publishing industry has grown, it became somewhat easier to publish SFF and more writers were able to use social media to gain attention.
Svitlana This is a global trend and Ukraine wants to be seen in a global context. The phenomenon of our group’s “Fantastic Talk(s)” channel has shown the power of synergy and that several voices together are stronger than one.
Daria Since 2014 many Ukrainians have joined the Armed Forces. While the percentage of women in uniform is large in comparison to other countries, there are still many more men. Some of them are writers, illustrators and publishers. A lot of Ukrainian literature, not just SFF, is on hold while their authors are putting their lives on the front lines. Much will not be written. This may have tilted the balance to more female voices.
Many people have heard of the simplistic and reductive belief in a ‘cultural and linguistic divide’ between western and eastern Ukraine, but even so it is indisputable that the country was heavily russified. So, how important is it to have genre literature in Ukrainian?
Iryna Most Ukrainians want to read western SFF even if most Ukrainians don’t know English at a high enough level to read in it. However, there is a trend where the much more English proficient Ukrainian youth order books in English from Amazon and other platforms because Ukrainian publishers are not translating fast enough. This is especially true in YA where speed is everything. Young people want to read a book when it is discussed by book bloggers and goes viral and not a year later. But not everyone can afford to buy books abroad. So as Ukrainian SFF is gaining momentum, its authors cannot fully satisfy the demand. Ukrainian translations are badly needed and recently there have been near battles between publishers for translation rights. This shows that having genre literature in Ukrainian is extremely important. It’s a virtuous feedback loop – larger audiences are satisfied, more money is raised for the book market allowing more writers to be published.
Svitlana Ukrainian literature is only literature written in Ukrainian. It is important that genre literature be written in and translated into Ukrainian both for the development of language and culture, but also for Ukrainian national identity. Growing up in the very russified Crimea of the 1990s I spoke only Russian until the age of 18. All the SFF books I read before were translated into Russian. But, thanks to my mother, I grew up wanting to find my Ukrainian identity. For me, using Ukrainian for my writing became a way of protesting Russian-imperial narratives and a way to understand who I really was.
Daria Genre fiction can provide a lens through which to view reality. Every genre speaks to what Ukrainians are experiencing no less than mainstream literature. Reading in one’s native language provides solace and closure. What language should people read if not their own? Is their need to speak, to hear, to read any less than any other people? I didn’t even know Russian until adolescence, which happened right before the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea. Then, I read every new SFF release I could get my hands and since little was translated into Ukrainian I had to resort to books in foreign languages. The Russian book market was huge and was flooding the Ukrainian market, so it was easier to find those books. Yet after the annexation of Crimea, I decided I would not consume any Russian content, so switched to reading and watching in English. Why is it important for me to publish in Ukrainian? I am Ukrainian, so I want to read in my own language. If Ukrainian writers do not take care of the cultural and linguistic needs of their people who will? In 2024 that question is as poignant as ever since it’s quite clear that Ukrainian cultural workers are a threat to Russian imperialism and if it succeeds, a decent amount of them would be dead and others coerced into Russian culture. It already happened to the Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian intelligentsia a century ago in early Soviet times.
Nataliya My parents had a huge library with many Ukrainian classics and as a child I was a bookworm. My grandmother encouraged me to read and learn by heart. But of course, there were a lot of Russian classics as well, and many Russian translations of world literature. I grew up in Kyiv in the 1990s, and my school’s Foreign Literature program also included a lot of Russian classics. The first modern book I read, written by a Russian writer and set in Moscow made me think that writing in that language is cooler. Most of pop culture was in Russian and even Ukrainian-speaking kids were forced into it to fit in. Yet, at some point I realized that it didn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. If everyone aims for popularity and a large market, who is going to make Ukrainian authors popular?
Was there ever any pressure to write and publish in Russian to reach a bigger audience outside of Ukraine?
Iryna I feel more pressure to write in English to reach a wider audience. English-speaking authors have many more opportunities compared to Ukrainian authors. I am not at all interested in the Russian-speaking audience outside Ukraine, because in most cases they have different values. As far as russified Ukrainians are concerned many read books in Ukrainian without any problems and are as interested in Ukrainian culture and books as those who are Ukrainian speakers. As for the people who don’t want to read in Ukrainian, my books won’t change their views even if Russian missiles don’t. Though I live Kyiv now, I was born and raised in the Donetsk region stereotypically considered “Russian speaking”. At the age of 16 I wrote my first story in Russian, and then immediately realized that I couldn’t belong to Ukrainian literature if I don’t write in it. I started writing, in Ukrainian, in 2003-2007, when the Ukrainian publishing market barely existed. All book distribution networks were flooded with cheaper imported Russian books. As a result, many Ukrainian authors wrote in Russian to try to get published there and reach the Ukrainian audience at the same time. This humiliating situation only changed after 2014 and the ban on the import of Russian printed materials. They are now experiencing the first years of free development of their market and a wave of interest in everything Ukrainian, which is evident in the huge increase in new fiction titles.
Svitlana I never thought about writing in Russian though I know many from Crimea who made a choice in favor of the Russian-language market. Now they are part of Russian culture and publishing books in Russia means sponsoring that economy and their war.
Daria I never had any intention of publishing in Russian. I was born after Ukrainian independence and my family, and all my social circle, was Ukrainian speaking. Moreover, the experience that my grandparents and their ancestors had with anything Russian – government, language etc. – were so horrific that I didn’t want to be a part of that culture.
Natalia I don’t think I would even be able to write a book in Russian. Even though I heard it on TV as a child, it was never a part of my life in school or at home. In my teen years I had no idea that there are people in Ukraine who still spoke Russian. Being from Lviv, in western Ukraine, this perspective was easy to come by. I would visit book fairs and saw that Ukrainian writers and books did indeed exist. So, I was never interested in writing in anything but Ukrainian. As far as reaching for a Russian-speaking audience, I don’t see a reason. Why would a writer deny enriching Ukrainian literature and instead choose the language of those who occupied and killed their ancestors for centuries and as they do now. As for the Russian-speaking audience in Ukraine, they know the Ukrainian language well, especially the youth who learned it at school and had to pass Ukrainian tests to get into university. My first translation offer, after the annexation of Crimea and occupation of Donbas, was from a Russian publisher. Though I had dreamed of getting translated for years I declined it.
How important is it that Ukrainian SFF be translated into other languages and how can foreign publishers be encouraged to undertake such translations? What are some of the problems associated with translation?
Daria There is a great need for translators who know Ukrainian. Unfortunately, a lot of Slavic studies programs in foreign universities are focused on Russian language and literature, so there’s a lack of people who not only can translate from Ukrainian but who are contextually prepared for such work. I’ve even heard of a couple of instances when Russian-speaking translators were offered to translate Ukrainian texts, which surely can’t produce great results.
Nataliya I agree with Daria. When you fill in a grant proposal there is a requirement that the translator be a native speaker who knows Ukrainian as a second language. It is quite a difficult task, considering that Ukrainian has not been the most popular language to learn. Even foreign students, while coming to Ukraine, usually chose Russian as “more prospective”. The situation is gradually changing now. Ukrainian became the biggest trend of 2022 on Duolingo, and I hope that soon there will be qualified translators interested in taking on Ukrainian texts.
Iryna When we talk about global trends in SFF, the biggest ones are diversity and postcolonialism. Ukraine has been under the influence of empires for a long time and still fights for its independence, identity and existence. Ukrainians have a unique experience that many foreigners don’t have since they are going through the biggest war since World War II. In one way or another, almost all works of Ukrainian SFF deal with the war and the colonial past, so Ukrainian SFF is not isolated from this global context of decolonization. Ukraine also has a diverse and distinctive mythology, rich folklore, and ancient history – all of which allow Ukrainian SFF authors to weave this into their works which will allow foreigners to experience a previously inaccessible world.
Natalia I remember being told once that translation is a luxury. And indeed, I feel that’s so, and I feel lucky with each opportunity to have my stories and books translated. Ukraine is still undiscovered, not only in terms of SFF. Ukrainians haven’t had a chance to speak loudly about their heroes and tragedies, about their folklore and historic roots. The English-language market respects and supports authentic voices and modern SFF represents many cultures and Ukrainians have good stories awaiting to be discovered.
Svitlana Translation is an opportunity to speak with people from other cultures – it’s cultural diplomacy. Translations of Ukrainian texts allow the whole world to see the beauty and depth of the Ukrainian soul, to better understand the character of Ukrainians, to better feel what we are fighting for. All texts created by Ukrainians today are influenced by the experience of war in one way or another. Even if we are talking about science fiction and fantasy. Ukrainian writers want to share this experience with the world. This is the only way the world will be able to understand who it supports and why Ukrainians must win, why it needs to be supported.
Is the Ukrainian market saturated with translations from world SF and Fantasy, or are there gaps in what is available? Are there still issues with translations into Russian versus Ukrainian?
Nataliya As for the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian translations, it is getting better, but it’s not enough. Some book rights are provided to Russian publishers for the whole post-Soviet space. And of course, most of the world’s SFF heritage were translated into Russian first, and anyone could easily find them on Russian pirate websites. It’s good that many Ukrainian readers refuse to read anything in Russian but not everyone was so conscious and responsible.
Natalia Translations in Ukraine are mainly of English language literature but in recent years the SFF market has more books by Polish authors, and there is quite a lot of German YA books. It’s simpler with English, because there are fewer problems to find translators, and since it is popular world-wide, local publishers don’t need extra promotional effort. But as a writer, I believe that discovering SFF of different countries, especially neighbors, can be the next big thing. There is already a trend for authentic stories taking over the English-language market, bringing multiple cultures closer. Of course, when we speak about so-called “small markets”, it’s harder to try something new, but I am very interested in reading urban fantasy set in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic or Hungary written by local authors. As for Russian translations Ukrainian publishers haven’t done this for years already.
Svitlana My experience with working in a huge publishing house gives me the advantage of knowing that it is easier to find a translator from English than a translator from another language. So, yes, most of the translations on the Ukrainian market are from English. However, the situation is gradually leveling out. Further integration into Europe will attract translations from other languages. The Ukrainian publishing market has great potential. As for translation from other languages into Russian, I agree with Natalia, this is no longer acceptable.
What problems does Ukrainian SSF have to overcome in the next few years?
Iryna Ukrainian SFF is gaining momentum. Even though not all genres of the SFF spectrum are yet represented in Ukraine, and certain sub-genres have only 1-2 works, Ukrainian authors are quickly filling these gaps. In the next few years Ukrainian fiction will have to expand and deepen its genre diversity, fight against the arrogant attitude about genre literature being only frivolous entertainment, and to enter foreign markets to expand its audience. Of course, all these tasks are impossible without Ukraine’s victory in the war with Russia, so the first priority of Ukrainian writers, like all Ukrainians, is to help the army.
Svitlana I had a discussion with Andrzej Sapkowski of The Witcher fame. He said that Ukrainian science fiction writers have a unique experience of life during the war. It is this experience that will allow Ukrainians to write convincingly about war (it is very difficult to imagine an epic or dark fantasy without battle scenes). We will be expected to write about war and our literature will be associated with texts about war, but Ukrainian writers need to show how diverse their contemporary literature is and that they have something to share.
Daria There are at least three problems – growth, recognition and translation, the last which I’ve already commented. About the first, there is a need for many more authors and many more books to satisfy the need for Ukrainian stories. Then, echoing Iryna, SFF is still marginalized. Book fairs segregate SFF authors and books into spaces too small to present all new releases. This isolation states, “here’s mainstream literature, discussing important topics and here’s SFF, entertaining but not serious”.
This focus on young writers as yourself doesn’t hide the fact that Ukrainian SFF has existed for a long time. There have been very popular and successful Ukrainian writers who predominantly wrote in Russian for a pan-Soviet audience. Is there a divide between writers of your generation and those older Ukrainian writers? Are their works problematic in any way and can they still represent Ukrainian literature?
Svitlana The situation in Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR was that for a time SFF was written in Russian by inertia. Russian was the language of the USSR, and all residents of the Soviet republics knew Russian. Thus, it was more profitable for authors to write in Russian than in their native language. The large post-Soviet space meant bigger circulations and higher royalties. The recent shared experiences allowed them to write recognisable stories for large numbers. However, after 2014, the situation changed dramatically. A whole new generation of Ukrainian science fiction writers grew up who wanted to write in Ukrainian. They no longer shared a common past with writers from other post-Soviet countries. The past became alien and hostile, and the new writers wanted to develop Ukrainian culture. The publishing market began to rapidly Ukrainianize. In my opinion there is no divide between writers of my generation and older Ukrainian writers who predominantly wrote in Russian because these writers never really represented Ukrainian literature. They were always a part of Russian or post-Soviet literature and my peers never felt any connection with them. I was much more influenced by American SFF authors than by those Russian-language writers who lived and wrote in Ukraine. A whole generation of readers has grown up who do not know them, and no one wants to read those who have even been translated into Ukrainian. Their latest works prove that they do not know the needs of the current Ukrainian reader and that they do not belong to contemporary Ukrainian SFF.
Daria Ukrainian authors that I know who wrote in Russian before 2014 have opted to break off all their ties to Russian publishing or language after the annexation of Crimea. Those people – who were Russified and discovered their identity and now are writing in Ukrainian – are Ukrainian writers. Were there those who continued to write in Russian up to 2022 and after? Yes. However, I agree with Svitlana that by that point those names were Ukrainians by nationality only, which can be proven by their lack of public reaction to the February 2022 invasion and their complete estrangement with Ukrainian readers.
But I really want to focus on modernity, on the authors who are either beginning their path now or have emerged in the last 10-20 years. This is the generation of SFF writers who have experienced what few nations have since WWII and I believe that this is the generation that will produce some of the greatest books of SFF in the years ahead. With time and the help of translators from around the world we will share the texts that will connect our cultures.
Slava Ukraini! Glory to Ukraine!
Slava SFF! Glory to Science Fiction and Fantasy! Slava Ukrainski SFF! Glory to Ukrainian Science Fiction and Fantasy!
Michael Burianyk is a Canadian living in Nice, France. He has a Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Alberta, worked in the petroleum industry and has published two geophysical monographs. He has been a life long reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy and has profound interests in Ukrainian history, mythology and its genre literature. He has published an article on Ukrainian SFF in Locus Magazine and one on Ukrainian mythology for the Locus Guest Blog.
Duchamp’s time machines: Paul Minott in discussion with James Gillham
Paul Minott worked as a leading graphic designer for over thirty years, working for
numerous international design consultancies in London and abroad. He ran a
successful partnership in London before embarking on a teaching career at Bath Spa University. He now works making one-off abstract prints using an etching press.
James Gillham completed a practice-led Ph.D. in Fine Art at the University of Reading in 2014, researching capability via the intersection of institutional demands and intersubjective expectation. He continues this research by painting the Humpty character from Olaf Stapledon’s Last Men in London, and by seeking similar representations in Science Fiction. James lives and works in Wiltshire, and is the cover artist for the latest issue (299) of Vector.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. VIA CREATIVE COMMONS/COURTESY PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
Marcel Duchamp’s famous work The Large Glass (1915-23) has been duplicated numerous times, by artists such as Richard Hamilton (1965) and Ulf Linde (1961). Duchamp’s approval of these pieces emerges from his established interest in the ready-made, but also points to a more nuanced conception of time situated in popular contemporary European Modernist thought.
Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (1912) is perhaps the most explicit example of this interest with temporality, but the glass mechanisms such as Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925) bring these engagements into clearer focus. These spinning devices suggest an investigational approach to time’s passage – expansions and contractions operating between objective measurement and subjective experience.
Duchamp’s ludic approach to time has interested artist and printmaker Paul Minott for many years, and is the impulse behind Minott’s latest work: Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps. Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps is an Artificially Generated visual essay, showing Marcel Duchamp alongside his various time machines.
Minott discusses Duchamp’s Modernist conception of time and how this appeared in Duchamp’s artwork – while finding parallels with contemporary use of Artificial Intelligence to generate images – with fellow artist James Gillham.
James Gillham – Tell me about this new work, Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps. It’s different to your current printmaking, what prompted you to make it?
Paul Minott – I’m not sure if it’s a ‘work’ exactly; the entire sequence of images was made with Midjourney in the space of about 10 minutes. What might be done with them, if anything, remains to be seen. Like Duchamp, I’m prepared to wait, to let ‘dust breed’ as it were. My son had made a sequence of images with a prompt describing an imagined photograph of two dodgy blokes in a dingy pub. His first prompt was a deliberate mistake, in that he asked for a ‘1600s photograph’.
What returned was a jovial tavern scene resembling a Dutch genre painting, but as a sepia photograph, or perhaps a Daguerreotype. Midjourney had synthesised time and medium to create an illusion of an impossible photograph. By simply changing just the date, each subsequent iteration returned a convincing photographic ‘look’ for each decade. The two blokes carried a resemblance across the sequence, while everything else changed. It was like a multi-generational story.
So I figured I’d put Midjourney’s photographic ‘knowledge’ to the test, and asked it to recreate a real historic photograph with a minimal prompt. I’d always been struck by a photo Man Ray took of Duchamp in 1920 where Duchamp is standing behind his Rotary Glass Plates as its glass blades spin. The spinning blades had the effect of blurring out the figure behind, and Duchamp became a ghost…or a time traveller. So I idly wrote the prompt:
/imagine: Photograph by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp standing beside a Readymade
and was astonished by what came back. A dapper gent, with some resemblance to Duchamp’s deadpan expression, holding four variants of a contraption that could only be informed by his Rotary Glass Plates, even though I’d not suggested this. What did this AI thing know? I wondered. I submitted the same prompt again, and back came another set, remarkably consistent with the first. Thinking back to the original scene, I remembered there was a Cyrillic eye chart pinned to the wall. So I added ‘optical charts’ to the next prompt and asked for a younger, and then an older Duchamp. The younger set gave me possible doubles of Dalí and Buñuel, while the older set captures Duchamp’s brooding, hermetic quality.
JG – It seems that he was interested in time and space. Duchamp’s most famous painting is Nude Descending Staircase (1912); these pieces propose a sort of simultaneity?
PM – Well, I think time was certainly in the work. If you think about the rotary pieces there is a sense of perpetual motion, and as they spin, there’s a sense of depth through a kind of peculiar optical illusion. I think he was very in tune with the idea of going slow and going fast. He spends a long time manifesting work, for example, The Large Glass (1915-23). It takes him about 15 years to work on it, only to then abandon it. The working title he gives to The Large Glass is a Delay in Glass. So, there’s this idea that things are not necessarily made for this moment, but for some other moment.
JG – The Large Glass was of course replicated by Richard Hamilton in the 60s. And Hamilton, through the Independent Group, had a link with Paolozzi who leads us back to New Worlds magazine, Ballard, and others. There seemed to be a lot of activity during this time that brings together Modernist Science Fiction and the Modernism associated with the Visual Arts. Do you think this ‘call back’ to Duchamp by Hamilton and others is as important as it appears?
PM – It’s tempting to think that Hamilton was ‘looking backwards’ by replicating The Large Glass, but this was really a technical exercise and the centrepiece of the 1966 Duchamp retrospective which Hamilton was organising at the Tate. While very elderly at this point, Duchamp had been ‘rediscovered’ by young American artists by virtue of his first (!) retrospective in California in 1963. And so in a sense, Duchamp was suddenly a ‘contemporary artist’ because his ironic detachment struck a chord with an emergent sense of ‘cool’. This ‘cool’ acquired the moniker of Pop, a self-conscious rejection of forties/fifties abstraction with its existential pretensions and painterly concerns. Hamilton himself defined this new sensibility:
‘Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low cost, Mass produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.’
It strikes me that this list might be an apt description of the trajectory SF has taken from its pulp, low-brow status in the early fifties to the dominant cultural influence it is today. My understanding also, is that New Worlds (under Moorcock’s editorship) represented a similar break with earlier SF writing: it became cooler, more ironic, more tentative and speculative…and like Hamilton, took a ‘British’ turn, more introspective. Ballard’s ‘inner space’: an intersection between eros, thanatos, mass media, and technology, seems pertinent to both fields, especially by the mid-sixties.
JG – When we think of Modernism we tend to think of a speeding up of time, using mechanisms to speed things along. Duchamp travelled across America, and indeed from Europe to the US.
PM – Yes! Seven times I think he crosses the Atlantic, sometimes at the most perilous times. One interesting thing about Duchamp in relation to his Readymades is not so much what they looked like. He would choose things that were as aesthetically insignificant as possible, trying to evade any notions of ‘taste’. So I think he was more interested in choosing something that had no aesthetic value or significance at all, but given the right time and place – the situation – would acquire a sense of significance. So in a way, using a prompt in AI is rather like a Readymade in that a simple set of instructions or descriptions might become for example a snow-shovel hanging from the ceiling (In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915)). So in other words, the titles of his Readymades are almost like prophecies, like a description of something yet to happen. At some point, at some moment in time, this particular thing will happen. And in a way the words are the art as much as anything else is.
JG – So it’s coming together of time and space. I’m reminded of that bit at the start of M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) when under hypnosis, a person is able to travel not just in space through astral projection, but also through time. And I suppose it might tap into the climate of scientific discovery of the time. I suppose Duchamp would have been feeding off that?
PM – Well, I think he was, especially the ideas of Henri Poincaré and non-Euclidean space. Duchamp in his early years talked a lot about the fourth dimension. Later on, he comes up with the notion of the infra thin, which is a strange kind of subtle distinction, if you like, between one condition and another condition. Much has been said of The Large Glass as being a kind of slice through four-dimensional time, which brings to mind Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) which became popular in the 1920s, exactly that moment where those kinds of ideas about dimensionality are coming to the forefront. Duchamp was a child of the late Victorian period, born in 1887. So certainly, there was stuff in the air, the emergence of what came to be known as the New Physics. Towards the end of his life, Duchamp reacquainted with Salvador Dalí, both spending their summers in Cadaques, Spain. Dalí was similarly fascinated by quantum mechanics, as it was understood at the time. So I think the elasticity of time was always kind of a thread that runs through Duchamp’s life.
JG – What are the parallels between Duchamp and the contemporary use of Artificial Intelligence to generate images – would he have approved, do you think?
PM – Less concerned with the merely ‘optical’, Duchamp used playful homophonic language as a generator of images which could be quite mechanical in their execution. The titles of many of his works read like predictions of forthcoming events (rendezvous in his terms): a snow shovel will one day hang from the ceiling in advance of the broken arm. It’s nonsense, and yet a kind of ‘anartistic’ intelligence could create something from such a cryptic clue. His works were propositions that, at one time and one place, happen to have that appearance, but there’s the sense that
Given:
1. the right time, and
2. the right place
a completely different image might emerge.
His all important signature was never a signifier of ownership or authorship, so much as one of a detached witness. His father, like da Vinci’s, was a notary. Ultimately, it mattered little by whom his work was made. It’s the titles that do the work. To quote a later conceptual artist, Sol LeWitt, the idea is the machine that generates the art. It seems to me that this way of using words in AI to generate images is the direct descendant of Conceptualism. One could enter the same instruction, time after time, and within minutes receive a different visual outcome, always rendered with a high degree of plausibility. And it wouldn’t matter who writes the words.
In a sense, the physical Readymade is as it were the ‘instant, pop-up outcome of an algorithm’; an object simply hanging in time and space, just one of an infinite number of possibilities. Random, meaningless and yet strangely beautiful and self-conscious. AI art one might argue is a Readymade generator.
I think Duchamp might’ve regarded AI as the vindication of his ‘anartistic’ ideas about originality, creativity, and posterity.
JG – Is there a connection between Duchamp’s interest in the Readymade, and AI? Or perhaps more so the selection of randomised contrivances by the artist like in The Large Glass?
PM – Yes. The Large Glass is a synthesis of bizarre processes, a slice through four dimensional space, as if captured in a split second onto photographic glass. It makes no visual sense to us because we exist in a plane which can’t conceive this dimension. Or one might think of his Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14) whereby three identical lengths of string were dropped from a given height, and how they fell became the basis for other works. The idea that planned chance and coincidence could create a new kind of art is exactly where we are with this.
In 1957 he gave a lecture entitled The Creative Act, one thrust of which was that time itself was the only arbiter of value for works of art, and that half a century would have to pass before any work might achieve significance. He was clearly alluding to his own, belated reputation, and it certainly became true in his case. I think at some point he also said that his use of time was his greatest contribution to art. The best biography of Duchamp is the Ephemerides accompanying his retrospective in Venice in 1993, whereby his entire life is set out in time travelling fragments: Tuesday Ist March 1960 followed by Monday 2nd March 1936 etc. He was constantly in motion, travelling very light, unencumbered. I think in this sense his conception of time was Modernist: fragmented, peripatetic, coincidental, distended.
I once playfully imagined that The Large Glass was some kind of time-travel machine. He worked on it for years, abandoned it (‘definitively unfinished’), exhibited it briefly in Brooklyn after which it accidentally broke. After a long delay, he decides to painstakingly repair it, relishing every crack, and finally has it installed (forever!) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in a room dedicated entirely to himself. A note that he writes in 1913 in preparation for The Large Glass becomes the title of an installation he begins 30 years later. He then spends a further 20 years building this in secret, and prior to his death, leaves detailed instructions for its final installation in the same room as The Large Glass. And then there’s all those suitcases (Boîtes en valises): surely every time traveller needs a suitcase? But to make 300 of them (some posthumously!) over decades suggests multiple, perhaps simultaneous, destinations.
These sixteen images of alternative Duchamps, in different settings with different imaginary objects, evoking different moments in time, yet all made within 10 minutes and remarkably consistent seem to me appropriate somehow. A single verbal prompt at one point in time (like the title of a Readymade) can generate a series of alternate but equally viable ‘realities’ across time.
JG – So the generation of the images or Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps through artificial intelligence is akin to a Readymade in some way, in that a Readymade is already there and it’s being positioned by the artist in a certain place? Is that the same sort of process with the MidJourney AI system?
PM – Where I’ve been using it myself, rather than use verbal prompts I’ve been asking it to blend simple geometry to see whether it can create new shapes which I wouldn’t ordinarily conceive. I find that fairly quickly you’re in dialogue with this thing and you ask yourself, ‘is it creating the image or am I creating the image’?
There are some wonderful examples of people doing this very, very seriously – incredible, clever, complex use of prompts. So all kinds of technical prompts are being used, photographic and cinematic language, mis-en-scene instructions. There are certain artists who are using AI to generate remarkably carefully well-crafted images. I can’t believe that they are not the artists in that respect. What’s extraordinary about Midjourney is that it provides images that are so convincingly real in many forms – so it might be real Manga, it might be real photography, might be real 1940s illustration, real Norman Rockwell. What’s powerful is the fact that it renders things, at least at first glance, so convincingly real in and of itself, and it does it so fast. That’s where it becomes difficult to say, who is creating this? Two people could put in exactly the same prompt, at the very same time and it’ll generate two very different outcomes. And this seems to me akin to a kind of Multiverse. Given the same circumstances this particular cocktail of ingredients could generate one or another form of life.
JG – So in a way AI moves the computer away from the objective thinking machine to the subjective feeling machine – because it brings into focus something which is subjective only to itself and to others, rather than the standard view of the logical single reality. In Modernism, perhaps in both experimental literary Modernism and artistic Modernism, there’s a tendency toward subjective truth pushed up against scientific truths – which I wonder if AI warps a bit?
A bit like in C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet (1937) where Ransom finds a monolith, which details the history of the planet he’s stranded on, Malacandra. And similarly in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1936), where the explorers of the Antarctic find a kind of fresco that describes in picture format the history of their culture. The reason those people see the frescoes and think they’re truthful is because they accept on face value that the stories they’re telling through pictorial language are true. And they just accept that it’s true. Whereas I think now we’re much more sceptical in the post-truth world of the truth behind an image.
PM – Yes, one thinks of Plato’s allegory of the cave.
JG – So these images are like an alternate history – like, for example, The Man in the High Castle (1962)? Darko Suvin talks about alternate history novels starting in the Victorian era. I wonder about these Duchamp images and what we perceive as a true image – because these images do look like the real photographs of Duchamp in front of his own artwork. I’m reminded of the photograph in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) – a pornographic photograph of a woman with a pony. There’s the idea that a photograph has some sort of residual truth about it, which these photos that you’ve created with AI have that sense of truth about them. In an excellently plural way, and in a way that mirrors what you’ve been saying, that same pornographic photo also crops up in Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears the Policeman Said (1974). So even though fictional, like the pornographic pony photos, these AI images feel real. They feel true.
Given that Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps could be considered as an alternate history, what do you think Duchamp, or even the Duchamp of these pictures, would have thought about AI generated images?
PM – One gets the sense that Duchamp only did those things which amused him, and he frequently insisted that deep down he was very lazy, or at least only partially ‘engaged’. So I think this thing which enables anyone to make funny images, using just wordplay and no other ‘artistic’ skill, with a minimum of effort, would’ve been ‘ameusement’ to him. I think one of the key drivers in the popularity of AI is its facility at generating humorous (or at least absurd) verbal and visual outcomes. Surprise and humour are not things we generally associate with ‘serious’ art, but it was a central concern for him (and others such as Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel) who sought to puncture the seriousness of ‘art’. I think this is an important quality of much Modernist art and literature which is often overlooked. In this sense, AI has a Dada spirit of which he would’ve approved.
I read recently a description of AI by one of its proponents which was that it was akin to ‘making sand think’. In the same vein as ‘letting dust breed’, I can’t think of anything more Duchampian. And finally, Duchamp’s own epitaph reads ‘D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent’ (Besides, it’s always the others who die)…so these images, which imagine him still living in other speculative realities seem very fitting indeed.
References:
Duchamp’s Studio at 246 W. 73rd St., NYC, by Man Ray
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/83334
From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise)
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/89071
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/51449
Étant donnés
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/65633
In Advance of the Broken Arm
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/105050
Review of The International Black Speculative Writing Festival 2024
Founded by Dr Kadija George Sesay, the International Black Speculative Writing Symposium and Festival was a three-day in-person event at Goldsmiths, University of London, held in February 2024, alongside a single-day online event for global audiences. The festival offered workshops for writers, readings and performances, speakers’ panels, interviews, and group discussions. The festival’s many partners included Comma Press, Spread The Word, New Writing South, Writing East Midlands, TLC, Writing Our Legacy, Peepal Tree Press and Yaram Arts. The event was supported by Arts Council England, Professor Deidre Osborne and the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. The festival’s authorised bookseller was This is Book Love. The BSFA had a stall featuring its publications, showcasing African writers from the Luna Press and launching Kampala Yénkya – an applied African speculative culture project on imagining climate futures by Dilman Dila and Vector editors.
As the first of its kind, the festival promised all the thrills of a new experience, alongside the anticipation of a skilfully curated event. Across its online and in-person events, titans of Black Speculative Fiction abounded, including Sheree Renée Thomas, Professor Reynaldo Anderson, Dr. Karen Lord, Dr. Courttia Newland, and Leone Ross. I spent three days at Goldsmiths absorbing new fiction in all its forms, building new personal and intellectual connections, and exploring new ways of thinking about Black Speculative Fiction.
Professor Reynaldo AndersonFriday; or, Previous Conceptions of the World Need Not Apply
I entered the festival with a giddiness in my bones. There was a distinct sense that I was on the precipice of something new, where previous conceptions of the world need not apply.
The first day of the festival consisted of workshops, panels, and readings, which encouraged me to think about the many ‘ways’ and ‘whys’ of writing Speculative Fiction. Workshops by Ama Josephine Budge and Leone Ross on activism and sexuality respectively explored the consequences of writing when nothing else is impossible. In a session chaired by Reynaldo Anderson, Budge and Heather Goodman shared research on their interventions into scholarship on Black Speculative Fiction.
The emerging theme of combining the theoretical with the practical continued in the next sessions, while distinctly international approaches made sure that the festival quickly lived up to its name. Yvonne Apiyo Brändle-Amolo spoke about Afrofuturism and her Femme-activism as a politician and visual artist in Switzerland, while Speculative Fiction by Akila Richards and Claudia Monteith creatively explored experiences of mixed heritage people in Germany.
Readings filled the afternoon. Immersing myself in the power of performance reminded me of the diversity of forms Speculative Fiction takes. I heard Courttia Newland, Luan Goldie, and Peter Kalu read from their short stories in Collision: Stories From The Science Of Cern (2023), accompanied by singer Naomi Kalu. Peter Kalu also showcased Simulacrum Funk: The Game (2024), created by himself, Tariq Mehmood and Melvin Burgess, based on the setting of a dystopic future England that their trilogy of novels share.
Before the launch of Akila Richards’ debut poetry chapbook closed the evening, Courttia Newland’s keynote shared some personal reflections on the evolution of Black British Speculative Fiction. For a day that began on the precipice of possibility, it ended with a sense that Black Speculative Fiction in particular was paradoxically bound and unbound by its context.
This feeling was a premonition for Saturday.
Saturday; or, The Real World Bites Back
If I spent the first day of the festival wide-eyed and dreamy about the endless possibilities that Black Speculative Fiction promised, the second day of the festival brought reality back with bite.
The morning’s workshops by Ronnie McGrath, Florence Okoye, Ellah Wakatama and Temi Oh took me through the real-world inputs that often inspire fantastical pieces of fiction. From new technologies to legacies of trauma, Speculative Fiction imagines futures with a foot firmly in the imperfect present. The imperfect present reappeared in the panel discussion on decolonising Speculative Writing in Literature and Publishing. Chaired by Dr Toyin Agbetu, Gerald and Steven Vreden, Ronnie McGrath and Yvonne Apiyo Brändle-Amolo spoke about what decolonisation means for their work from their respective contexts of Suriname/Netherlands and Kenya/Switzerland, as well as the ways that their work inspires hope for change.
The panellists, Decolonising Speculative Writing in Literature and Publishing. Chaired by Dr Toyin Agbetu, Gerald and Steven Vreden, Ronnie McGrath and Yvonne Apiyo Brändle-Amolo . (Photo credit: the Festival Team of Volunteers)But the imperfect present did not linger long. The year 2300 beckoned. In the keynote conversation, Patrick Vernon interviewed Reynaldo Anderson from the future for the Museum of Grooves, which curates Black history and the existence of Black people who lived on Earth prior to a fictional World War IV. Partly tongue-in-cheek fun and partly prescient insight, the conversation reminded me that invention is not apolitical, that hope is a prerequisite to survival, and that the future needs protecting as much as imagining.
The festival refused to leave its audience in the grip of such creative tension. Readings and performances proved to be the best release. Temi Oh, Karen Lord, and Gerald Verden read from their current novels, while Anni Domingo and Tonderai Munyevu discussed how they reclaimed Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) through a Black gaze in their play Mansfield Park at the Watermill (2023). The evening ended with Storyteller Usifu Jalloh delivering coded and symbolic narratives and literature of traditional Africa, Senegalese masquerade performer, Moulaye Diallo, sharing his art, and a screening of In Praise of Still Boys (2021) by JULIANKNXX.
Hope, politics, imagination, and play were all present by the end of the festival’s second day. Now, the appearance of the imperfect present in a space of limitless possibility seemed less an intrusion and more of an opportunity. I left the festival with a sense that the synergy between the ways we think and the way we live depends on expanding both categories infinitely.
Usifu JallohSunday; or, No Such Thing As Endings
The festival’s final day was a bittersweet occasion. A jam-packed agenda was still on the cards, but the end of the programmed events loomed large on the horizon. Every captivating conversation and every enthralling new idea felt ever more ephemeral, like sparks flying off a match. Suddenly, the concreteness of possibility was receding. Even so, it was difficult to see how the festival would (or could) end. After all, a spark will catch, eventually.
The morning began with form at the forefront. Peter Kalu gave a workshop on building choice-driven games, while Alby James explored what it meant to portray Blackness in film, alongside a Q&A with writer and filmmaker Nosa Igbinedion. Ellah Wakatama’s conversation with Tade Thompson dived into Thompson’s creative process and the politics of worldbuilding, particularly for imagining new future versions of Africa. In a tandem conversation, Troy Onyango, Calah Singleton, and Emmanuel Omodeinde discussed current trends in publishing Speculative Fiction.
Once again, readings proved energising, reigniting the excitement of the festival. Patience Agabi inspired young readers and families with her Leap Cycle series (2020 – 2024), while Dr. Aisha Phoenix, Ioney Smallhorne, and Ronnie McGrath read from their short stories in Glimpse: An Anthology of Black British Speculative Fiction (2022). As with the festival, Glimpse is the first of its kind, and, as with the festival, I suspect it will not be the last.
By the time the keynote conversation came around, the festival was coming to a close. Chaired by Joy Francis, Karen Lord and Leone Ross discussed their works and creative processes with a warmth and generosity of spirit that epitomized the festival. The energy was infectious, spilling out into the open mic session hosted by Michael Chilokoa. Anyone could take part and share their art. The openness and compassion of the exchange was a fitting end to proceedings. It signified that all the connections that had been made, all the ideas that had been shared, and all the worlds that had been invented, could not now recede into obscurity.
Joy Francis and Karen Lord (Photo credit: the Festival Team of Volunteers)The inaugural International Black Speculative Writing Symposium and Festival drew together diverse perspectives on Black Speculative Fiction from academia, publishers, authors, and artists. The festival at once looked backwards and forwards, providing a roadmap for accessing a wealth of Black Speculative Fiction while inspiring new ways of thinking for and about the future.
I came away from the festival feeling challenged and stimulated. The match had been lit, and the fire that would inevitably follow suggested that there was no such thing as an ending – neither for Black Speculative Fiction, nor for the festival. There will be more to come.
Amirah Muhammad is a PhD student at the University of York, researching Black British Speculative Fiction. She graduated with a First in BA (Hons) in English and American Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London, followed by a Distinction in MA in Literary Studies: American Literature and Culture at the same institution. She is also a member of the YCEDE Scholars Board, and her professional experience lies in social mobility and improving university access.Future of Education: Wild Blue Yonder by Daniel Hesk
The world is changing and there is little doubt that the future will be different from today, possibly profoundly.
In the face of these possible futures, what could this mean for education and for FoNS? What do we teach and how do we teach it? What is it like being a student or a lecturer here?
We invite you to join FoNS in the year 2045. What will you be doing? How will you be learning or teaching? We do not just want to hear about futuristic technologies or subject matter, nor do we want a purely dystopian vision. Instead, we invite you to write about what life is really like using those technologies or learning about relevant subjects in the context of a challenging world. Build us a world where we can look around and see the fabric of our faculty and university in all its detail.
www.imperial.ac.uk/natural-sciences/education-and-teaching/short-story-competition/ Wild Blue Yonder By Daniel HeskI’m sat on the bench and I’m cold, and I’m tired, and here is what I can see:
1. The prim lawn, stretching off into the haze of dusk. An upswelling wind pulls a few leaves across the grass and mud towards me. My eyes water in the chill blast.
2. The tower, emerald dome still set afire by a sun which from my vantage has long since sunk into the ravenous outline of the library.
3. The statue, looking almost conventional from this angle. Lines of neon-red graffiti adorn its torso, too remote to read but I can guess at their essence. They must be recent, really recent – unmolested by caretakers or rainwater.
4. The grey buildings across the road, featureless in the dark, only two or three windows glowing. As I watch, a silhouette appears in the highest, backlit by bright fluorescence. It recedes after a second or two.
5. The sky, a pale azure turning to brilliant orange in the west. Something is unzipping it – over my head extends a lengthening streak of slate, diffuse at the back but hardening to a strict point at its end. There is a steady roar, like waves crashing somewhere far distant. Four turbines thrashing like crazy, modified fuselage churning out aerosol in immense volumes.
6. No stars. Not these days, thanks to our long and fruitful efforts.
When Leo arrives he approaches from my left and stands over me, grinning to hide his exhaustion. Two fingers tap behind his ears, and the implants are disabled. I ask him what he was listening to and the band he names sounds like a crossword clue. He calls me Al, because he finds it funny and he can’t pronounce Alparslan off the cuff.
‘Come on, Al,’ he says, ‘project time,’ He tries to take my hand.
‘Yeah,’ I respond, manoeuvring out of the way. ‘I know.’ I stand and stalk off towards the library. Unprepared for these English winters, I’m wearing just thin jeans and an Oxford shirt. The cold wraps around me. It burrows into my flesh. I imagine there might be frost tomorrow, emergent in the lee of buildings and bushes. I don’t think I’ve never seen frost before, not in my country, except maybe as a very young child. I have a vague memory of the fountain pool in our town square turning to ice, of the smooth and glittering surface like a mirror under my palm. Still, they say half your early memories are just subsequent inventions. I can’t trust myself to know.
In the library’s glass façade I see Leo following me. He’s dressed more sensibly than I am in a long, thick jacket. He fiddles with the lapel; I suspect he wants to shed the coat and drape it caringly over my shoulders. I walk a little faster and step gratefully indoors, sirocco air from the heaters a welcome relief. The rooms are largely empty, and I recognise many of the sparse occupants from our own course. Most degrees don’t set assignments this close to Christmas, but most degrees don’t have to justify their existence to the extent that Maths does. The department has been on death row for years, and they apparently feel that increasing the workload will present an image of vitality and necessity.
We find a spot on the fourth floor, by the western windows. The setting sun shines over the rooftops like a lighthouse from out across a black and frozen sea. Leo removes a silver rod from his pocket and fans it out into a screen and keyboard with a languid flick of his wrist. I try to ignore him and bring out my own laptop, firmly and consistently rectangular. It recognises my face and lights up, a picture of my parents frowning at a museum in İstanbul. I lean back in the chair until it starts to creak, and pull up the project. Spreadsheets and code, code and spreadsheets. Local Precipitation Effects of Marine Cloud Brightening, 2036-2039.
‘I can’t believe this,’ mutters Leo. ‘That we have to waste time on this crap.’ ‘Whatever. Just get on with it.’ I keep looking at the screen, but I hear him swing around to face me.
‘I mean, we’re supposed to be maths students, for god’s sake. I know it’s important, but there’s thirty other courses doing exactly this.’
I click my teeth together. ‘You realise that we are doing maths. You know, with the numbers and the sums and everything.’
‘Come on, you know what I mean.’
I do know what he means, unfortunately. My feet kick the ground and I rotate, not to look at him but back at the window. The sunset is unbelievably beautiful, a deepening bloodstain on the sky. The sulphur we’ve been pumping without end into the stratosphere has spread to every reach of the earth, making the Wild Blue Yonder that little bit whiter, making every evening shine that little bit more like burnished gold. They say you used the get the same effect after tests of nuclear weapons. The final formula for the aerosol was developed here, actually, at Imperial. It reflects enough heat to offset hundreds of thousands of times its weight in carbon dioxide. If you believe the press releases, it’s going to save the world.
Yes, we are the beating heart of progress. One of the last few universities in the UK, but we’re immune to the closures now. Practically every degree has turned its gaze towards the roiling, boiling planet, to the neglect of any other frontiers. Besides medicine, it’s the only
thing governments are willing or able to fund. There’s no time for any other pursuits. No time left at all.
‘Fifty people died in Kiribati last week.’ I say flatly. Leo pauses.
‘Yeah, I saw that. In Tuvalu or something…’
‘Tarawa.’ I still don’t look at him.
‘That’s it. Damn shame.’
‘A rogue wave took out the foundations of an emergency shelter. Whole thing just collapsed into the sea.’
‘Sure, tragic, but that’s not our fault.’ This now, this I laugh at. The sound of it rings with impertinence across the low-ceilinged space. From far behind me another student coughs, while a third drums their fingers on the table. In abject silence, noise can be contagious.
‘Of course it’s not our fault. By and large, it’s not the fault of anyone born this century. Still our planet though, isn’t it?’
‘Hmm.’ He folded his arms. ‘I think you’re looking at this wrong.’
Honestly, he’s a lot more tolerable when he’s arguing instead of flirting. ‘Go on, what do you think?’
‘You see Al, for me it’s about the principle…’
The sun disappears at last, and the starless sky presses down on the city like a bandage, like a hand.
***
I’m standing under a dark alder and I’m warm, and I’m tired, and here is what I can feel.
1. The rough bark behind me, uncompromisingly alive. My fingers trace its contours, the solid grooves slick with moisture and moss.
2. The leaf litter under my feet, crushed and crackling between bootheel and pavement. The little flakes carry their deaths with them, darting, dancing along the breeze.
3. The air, frigid and all too warm for this time of year. I sometimes imagine I can taste the changes in the wind, all the new and pervasive chemicals. What weaknesses we can find in the belly of the beast.
4. Leo’s coat across my shoulders. It’s heavy, and it smells of rain. I promised to return it tomorrow, and it’s a promise I intend to keep to the bastard. He left his gloves in the pockets and I play with the idea of pulling them on.
5. Hope, unexpected, maybe unwarranted. It wells up inside me and I exhale, my breath freezing instantly into a mist that swirls and drifts outwards into the night.
6. The world, spinning softly, dawn-bound, older than it has ever been before.
Inspired by my belief in the all-consuming severity of the climate crisis, and current theories of the geoengineering efforts that may have to be spearheaded by scientific institutions. I’m interested in how an increasingly singular focus for the natural sciences might be perceived, both in terms of its necessity and what other avenues might fall by the wayside amid such a pragmatic approach to research.
Daniel Hesk