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The IAFA is pleased to announce that the winner of this year's Crawford Award isCall and Response (Neon Hemlock) by Christopher Caldwell.

The Crawford Award, given by the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts, recognizes an outstanding writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year.

The judges were Joyce Chng, Eddie Clark, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, and Brian Attebery. Kelly Robson is award administrator. …Read More

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the recipients of its 2026 Specialty Awards.

Bad Hand Books is the recipient of the Specialty Press Award, given to a specialty publisher whose work has substantially contributed to the horror genre, whose publications display general excellence, and whose dealings with authors have been fair and exemplary.

The Richard Laymon President's Award, presented to a volunteer who has served the HWA in …Read More

PEN America announced the 2026 finalists for ten literary awards on January 29, 2026. The awards will confer nearly $350,000 to writers and translators. ... Spanning fiction, poetry, essay, translation, and more, these Longlisted books are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence. Awards, titles, and authors of genre interest include:

PEN/Jean Stein Book Award ($75,000)

• The Devil Is a Southpaw, Brandon Hobson (HarperCollins)
• Things in Nature Merely …Read More

The 5-title shortlist for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize has been announced. Titles and authors of genre interest includeThe True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine (Grove),Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron), and Intemperance by Sonora Jha (HarperVia).

The winner will be announced April 23, 2026. The $35,000 prize is awarded to an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary …Read More

The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced the finalists for the 38th Annual Lambda Literary Awards (the Lammys ), celebrating the best lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender books. Categories, authors, and titles of genre interest include the following:

LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction

• Volatile Memory, Seth Haddon (Tordotcom)
• Cry, Voidbringer, Elaine Ho (Bindery)
• Beings, Ilana Masad (Bloomsbury)
• Two Truths and a Lie, Cory O'Brien (Pantheon)
• Blood on Her Tongue, Johanna …Read More

Zando announced the launch of Evil Twin, a new imprint focusing on horror, from psychological twists to supernatural terror and bone-chilling gore, in February 2026.

According to Publishers Weekly, Nancy Trypuc, deputy director of marketing at Zando, will be the publishing director. Masie Cochran, editorial director, and Hayley Wagreich, director of original development, will oversee acquisitions.

Zando CEO Molly Stern said,

As we have with Slowburn, Zando is building on …Read More

Nancy Omondi is the recipient of this year's Working Class Writers Grant, presented by the Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF). The $1,000 grant is given annually to assist working class, blue-collar, poor, and homeless writers who have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction due to financial barriers which make it hard to access the writing world.

Nancy Omondi is a Kenyan speculative fiction writer whose work is defined by atmosphere …Read More

Writer and organizer M.R. Hilde Hildebrand, 80, died in her home in Glendale AZ on March 4, 2026, after entering home hospice care for rheumatoid arthritis in 2025.

Hildebrand was born in 1946. In the 1970s, she became an active member, organizer, and host in Phoenix AZ fandom, working to help with conventions including Leprecon, Coppercon, and the 1978 Worldcon. She ran staff lounges and a book-selling service at various …Read More

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

Novel

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

MILESTONES

CURTIS C. CHEN is now represented by Sara Megibow of Megibow Literary Agency.

JOSUE OF PACHUCA is now represented by Arley Sorg of kt literary.

 

AWARDS

MARTHA WELLS was presented the Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization Copperhead Award at AggieCon 55 for contributions to Texas fandom.

 

BOOKS SOLD

STEPHEN KING and PETER STRAUB sold Other Worlds Than These, the final book of the Talisman Trilogy, to …Read More

The Resistance/ Vector 302

As Heraclitus pointed out, you can’t step in the same river twice. The current is continually flowing, responding to the seasons and the weather, swirling into ever changing fractal patterns. While this is literally true, the power of the adage is metaphorical. We live with this constant change. Some people like it. Some people don’t like it. But it’s more complicated than that. For most of the history of the human race – up to the end of the Palaeolithic and into the Neolithic – people lived fluid, seasonally nomadic lives in tune and rhythm with natural change. Just to be clear, I’m not romanticising that lifestyle. To paraphrase George Orwell, I’m a selfish and lazy intellectual who expects their oat milk and New Statesman to be delivered to the doorstep. However, the larger point that I’m trying to make is that we can choose to live fluidly in relation to change or we can choose to live against change, by metaphorically damming the river. Most of recorded history is dominated by the latter approach, which broadly takes the form of imposing solid-state, hierarchical social structures in place of fluid cultures. 

Here, I’m defining culture not in the narrower sociological sense as being the way of life of a particular society, but in the broader anthropological sense of the holistic manner in which humans interact with each other and the wider natural world. When sociologists talk about social reality, they are talking about the norms and behaviours resulting from a particular social structure. In the world today, the dominant social structure is that of nation states, bound together through a system of global capital. The core organisational features of the nation state are rigid class hierarchy and a hard binary divide between two genders. These features are so central to the ‘social reality’ of a nation state like the UK that many confuse them with inescapable human nature and biology. However, if culture is seen as broader and independent of social structure, then it challenges the norms that constitute social reality. The clash between these two opposed value systems underpins the culture wars that have increasingly raged across the Anglosphere and beyond. 

While it is difficult to think outside the parameters of the social structures we inhabit, science fiction does offer imaginative possibilities for freeing ourselves from such constraints. For example, in devising ‘the Culture’, Iain M. Banks suggested that a future technologically advanced civilisation could choose to align itself with a fluid sense of life and change outside state structures rather than attempting to socially engineer a perfect society within those structures in the manner of Soviet Communism. In 2025, however, we are not choosing between solid-state socialism and some sort of futuristic anarcho-communism. Instead, the choice being offered – at least, as it’s often portrayed in the mainstream media – appears to be between, on the one hand, varying models of authoritarian ‘respect’ for traditional values and, on the other hand, ideas of autonomy and social justice, which are now often described by their political opponents as the ‘woke’ progressivism of a metropolitan liberal elite. Demoralised, as most of us are, by the seemingly endless ebb and flow of the struggle between these two apparently opposing worldviews, it’s difficult to imagine any meaningful future let alone the prospect of a utopian culture. It’s far easier to picture a not-too-distant future in which two women are huddling outdoors at night by a bonfire while wolves howl around them. 

However, when we encounter this scene at the opening of E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again (2025), it’s not intended to represent the aftermath of societal collapse but rather offered to us as a snapshot of a new cultural pattern of life emerging in Britain. Lucy Gillard is telling the documentary filmmaker Hester Moore about her experiences during the 2020 Covid pandemic fifty years earlier, while they celebrate Beltane. Both women have worked to enable the reintroduction into the Cairngorms of the wolves that they are listening to. In this novel, rewilding is the physical manifestation of a deeper transformation of the UK from closed solid-state society, mired in distrust and collapsing public services, to what we might see as the beginning of a zoefuturistic open culture that is connected holistically to the environment. 

Swift narrates the future by alternating between the stories of her two protagonists, always jumping forward a few years at a time. This allows her to sketch in plausible political shifts in the background, such as a political coalition between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats paving the way to an introduction of proportional representation and a ‘Right to Roam’ bill, enabling access to the countryside. While these developments are important, they pale into insignificance in comparison with the shifts in consciousness that Lucy and Hester experience as environmental and political conditions change. For example, when 16-year-old Lucy and her Gran go on a journey to the ‘temperate rainforest’ (78) of Dartmoor in 2030, it’s not a tourist-industry weekend break but something more like an expedition into the wild. It’s a journey of growth for Lucy but also an example of how experience can be liberated from capitalist commodification. Without having undertaken this trip, she would not go on to embrace countercultural values and become one of the central organisers of a protest camp outside Balmoral which is part of a campaign to return crown lands to the commons. 

When There Are Wolves Again is subtly written and the focus is always on character-driven story but the subtext – from the namechecking of seasonal festivals to the moon-phase-motif section breaks – is that we should embrace a new cultural sensibility and spirituality beyond the straight and narrow instrumental logic of late capitalist Britain. In this respect, the novel reads like an updating of 1970s countercultural feminist concerns for a specifically British twenty-first-century context. Shortly after I read When There Are Wolves Again, I read the Scottish writer Margaret Elphinstone’s first two novels, which also draw on feminist thinking to call for a new cultural pattern in Britain, but in the context of the 1980s.

Elphinstone’s The Incomer, is set in the ‘far future’ – at least 3-400 years into the future – and was published in the iconic grey-bordered design of The Women’s Press sf series. It came out in the same year (1987) as Banks’s first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas. Far from Banks’s shiny AIs and biotechnology-enhanced trans-humans, Elphinstone’s characters live in a largely pre-industrial-revolution world of rural villages and horse and carts. Although the society she depicts is clearly post-collapse and there have been nuclear accidents, if not all out war, at some point, it quickly becomes obvious that this level of technological development doesn’t simply reflect reduced capability but is a matter of conscious choice. People have adopted different norms to those of the twentieth century when the novel was written. For example, society is now matrilineal. Householders are adult women, and the men of those households are their brothers, sons, uncles and so on. Apart from anything else, this arrangement enables the expansion of genetic diversity for what would otherwise be isolated settlements, as women often choose to take men from other settlements or traders and travellers as the father of their children. 

Both autonomy and respect are not only central to this society but also necessary to support its philosophy of nonviolence. Adults are treated as responsible for their own actions, but this acknowledgment of their agency also leads to them being treated with respect. Consent is sought not just for sexual relations but even for proximity, conversation, questions – basically for all forms of familiarity outside the household. The implicit logic behind this social philosophy is that by entering into these kinds of exchanges with strangers, one is not only taking responsibility for the consequences of this interaction and its effects on both self and other but also opening oneself up to change and becoming different. This change is something that can both be feared and hoped for. For example, the innkeeper Bridget finds the travelling musician Naomi ‘intriguing, attractive even’ as though representing ‘some part of herself that she might have been but had not quite become’ (63). On the other hand, she cries silently for Naomi to stop playing her music ‘before the whole fabric of life was rewoven, before she took Bridget’s ordered years and unravelled them, setting them up in a new pattern, a new weaving of threads which would wind her away from everything that was sure and familiar’ (64).

The importance of music to the novel and its sequel, A Sparrow’s Flight (1989), reflects the idea of cultural exchange as being one way of facilitating the unmaking and making of cultural patterns that is part of the process of living fluidly with the continual prospect of becoming different. Naomi acts as an agent of change by travelling and playing her fiddle at fairs and festivals and also by teaching music to both men and women. She also learns new music where she can and even from the past. In A Sparrow’s Flight she teaches herself Bach’s Drei Sonaten und Drei Partiten für Violine from a score that has been preserved since the before times in a sealed room. In this respect, Elphinstone’s novels turn out to be more like those of Banks than is superficially apparent. Both situate the true value of artistic culture – including ‘high culture’ – as lying in its capacity to help enable the wider culture entering into a fluid holistic relationship with the environment. Music is particularly effective in this respect because like Heraclitus’s river it consists of swirling patterns, which can be endlessly combined and recombined. 

Elphinstone is able metaphorically to map music to environment by showing Naomi as a traveller. In the first half of A Sparrow’s Flight, walking becomes fluid as tramping over endless hills is compared to voyaging over the waves, so that settlements become islands. Journeying with someone becomes an intensified form of negotiating the boundaries of autonomy and respect with the result that both are changed and become different. Time dilates and separates from the linear narratives of history. As Naomi observes, ‘Time is only short if you want to use a person. Otherwise there is the present which is all the time in the world’ (54). This resonates with the logic behind the episodic story-journey narrative structure of When There Are Wolves Again. Swift and Elphinstone are not just exploring shifting the cultural pattern of life in Britain. More specifically, they are asking the question of what life after patriarchy might look like and offering some answers.

Another novel that does something similar, although in a more provocative style, is Alice Albinia’s Cwen (2021). ‘Cwen’, as we are informed by the novel’s epigraph, is the old English word for ‘woman, wife, female, ruler of a state’. Here, it is also the name of a small, unmanned, island and the spirit presiding over its Neolithic cairn and nearby spring, who also fulfils the function of chorus in the novel, punctuating chapters which describe a courtroom-based ‘Inquiry into Unfair Female Advantage in the Islands’ with reflections on several thousand years of experience. The ‘Islands’ are an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Scotland, whose culture has been transformed by a subtle programme of intervention in support of women led by former cabinet minister’s wife, Eva Harcourt-Vane. The loose inquest format of the novel, in which the women Eva has worked with testify as to their collective motivations and achievements, invites readers to ponder whether it is indeed time both for a thoroughgoing overhaul of the patriarchy and to put ‘gynotopia’ – a term Albinia playfully throws in – in the dictionary or, indeed, on the map.

Beneath the playfulness, though, the episodic narrative works to similar effect as Swift and Elphinstone’s novels by weaving a new cultural pattern. However, Albinia wasn’t content to just explore these ideas novelistically, writing a non-fictional companion to Cwen, The Britannias (2023), which describes her journeys over a period of ten years to many of the smaller islands surrounding Britain, often focusing on the Celtic women associated with them. In her introduction, she notes that, ‘It was reassuring to be shown – through writing of this book about British island history – that patriarchy is only a recent invention’ (Albinia 2023: xx). The liminal nature of these islands – in some cases shifting shape over time in response to sea levels – suggests a fluid culture of becoming that both predates and potentially postdates the linear narratives of official British history. The western coastline in particular was characterised by different trading relationships and nationalities, anticipating the polylingual character envisioned in zoefuturism. Albinia describes a 1509 wedding in Rathlin – an island between Ireland and Scotland – in which the Scottish bride spoke English, Gaelic and French. Foreshadowing Swift’s fictional portrayal of the campaign to open up royal land, Albinia discusses how Scotland gained control of its foreshore and seabed from the Crown Estate as a result of the Scotland Act 2016. 

While the historical information it discloses is invaluable, the real strength of The Britannias lies in Albinia’s descriptions of the journeys she takes and the people she meets, and the activities they engage in including music, performance, and protest. She is the real-life counterpart of Elphinstone’s Naomi and Swift’s Lucy and Hester. What all these books reflect is both that the culture we live in does not stand still but continuously swirls and flows, always becoming something different, and that we can embrace that change and even weave new patterns in relation to it. 

Works Cited

Alice Albinia. The Britannias: An Island Quest. London: Allen Lane, 2023.

Alice Albinia. Cwen. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021

Margaret Elphinstone. The Incomer. London: The Women’s Press, 1987.

Margaret Elphinstone. A Sparrow’s Flight: A Novel of a Future. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989. 

E.J. Swift. When There Are Wolves Again. London: Arcadia, 2025. 

Nick Hubble (they/them) is a writer, researcher and critic, whose books include The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017) and Culture Wars in Britain (2026). They have written for Strange Horizons, LA Review of Books, Tribune, Speculative Insight and ParSec. From Autumn 2026, Nick will be the new editor of Foundation. They also blog at Prospective Cultures and may be found on BlueSky @thehubble101.bsky.social.

The Resistance/ Vector 302

As Heraclitus pointed out, you can’t step in the same river twice. The current is continually flowing, responding to the seasons and the weather, swirling into ever changing fractal patterns. While this is literally true, the power of the adage is metaphorical. We live with this constant change. Some people like it. Some people don’t like it. But it’s more complicated than that. For most of the history of the human race – up to the end of the Palaeolithic and into the Neolithic – people lived fluid, seasonally nomadic lives in tune and rhythm with natural change. Just to be clear, I’m not romanticising that lifestyle. To paraphrase George Orwell, I’m a selfish and lazy intellectual who expects their oat milk and New Statesman to be delivered to the doorstep. However, the larger point that I’m trying to make is that we can choose to live fluidly in relation to change or we can choose to live against change, by metaphorically damming the river. Most of recorded history is dominated by the latter approach, which broadly takes the form of imposing solid-state, hierarchical social structures in place of fluid cultures. 

Here, I’m defining culture not in the narrower sociological sense as being the way of life of a particular society, but in the broader anthropological sense of the holistic manner in which humans interact with each other and the wider natural world. When sociologists talk about social reality, they are talking about the norms and behaviours resulting from a particular social structure. In the world today, the dominant social structure is that of nation states, bound together through a system of global capital. The core organisational features of the nation state are rigid class hierarchy and a hard binary divide between two genders. These features are so central to the ‘social reality’ of a nation state like the UK that many confuse them with inescapable human nature and biology. However, if culture is seen as broader and independent of social structure, then it challenges the norms that constitute social reality. The clash between these two opposed value systems underpins the culture wars that have increasingly raged across the Anglosphere and beyond. 

While it is difficult to think outside the parameters of the social structures we inhabit, science fiction does offer imaginative possibilities for freeing ourselves from such constraints. For example, in devising ‘the Culture’, Iain M. Banks suggested that a future technologically advanced civilisation could choose to align itself with a fluid sense of life and change outside state structures rather than attempting to socially engineer a perfect society within those structures in the manner of Soviet Communism. In 2025, however, we are not choosing between solid-state socialism and some sort of futuristic anarcho-communism. Instead, the choice being offered – at least, as it’s often portrayed in the mainstream media – appears to be between, on the one hand, varying models of authoritarian ‘respect’ for traditional values and, on the other hand, ideas of autonomy and social justice, which are now often described by their political opponents as the ‘woke’ progressivism of a metropolitan liberal elite. Demoralised, as most of us are, by the seemingly endless ebb and flow of the struggle between these two apparently opposing worldviews, it’s difficult to imagine any meaningful future let alone the prospect of a utopian culture. It’s far easier to picture a not-too-distant future in which two women are huddling outdoors at night by a bonfire while wolves howl around them. 

However, when we encounter this scene at the opening of E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again (2025), it’s not intended to represent the aftermath of societal collapse but rather offered to us as a snapshot of a new cultural pattern of life emerging in Britain. Lucy Gillard is telling the documentary filmmaker Hester Moore about her experiences during the 2020 Covid pandemic fifty years earlier, while they celebrate Beltane. Both women have worked to enable the reintroduction into the Cairngorms of the wolves that they are listening to. In this novel, rewilding is the physical manifestation of a deeper transformation of the UK from closed solid-state society, mired in distrust and collapsing public services, to what we might see as the beginning of a zoefuturistic open culture that is connected holistically to the environment. 

Swift narrates the future by alternating between the stories of her two protagonists, always jumping forward a few years at a time. This allows her to sketch in plausible political shifts in the background, such as a political coalition between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats paving the way to an introduction of proportional representation and a ‘Right to Roam’ bill, enabling access to the countryside. While these developments are important, they pale into insignificance in comparison with the shifts in consciousness that Lucy and Hester experience as environmental and political conditions change. For example, when 16-year-old Lucy and her Gran go on a journey to the ‘temperate rainforest’ (78) of Dartmoor in 2030, it’s not a tourist-industry weekend break but something more like an expedition into the wild. It’s a journey of growth for Lucy but also an example of how experience can be liberated from capitalist commodification. Without having undertaken this trip, she would not go on to embrace countercultural values and become one of the central organisers of a protest camp outside Balmoral which is part of a campaign to return crown lands to the commons. 

When There Are Wolves Again is subtly written and the focus is always on character-driven story but the subtext – from the namechecking of seasonal festivals to the moon-phase-motif section breaks – is that we should embrace a new cultural sensibility and spirituality beyond the straight and narrow instrumental logic of late capitalist Britain. In this respect, the novel reads like an updating of 1970s countercultural feminist concerns for a specifically British twenty-first-century context. Shortly after I read When There Are Wolves Again, I read the Scottish writer Margaret Elphinstone’s first two novels, which also draw on feminist thinking to call for a new cultural pattern in Britain, but in the context of the 1980s.

Elphinstone’s The Incomer, is set in the ‘far future’ – at least 3-400 years into the future – and was published in the iconic grey-bordered design of The Women’s Press sf series. It came out in the same year (1987) as Banks’s first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas. Far from Banks’s shiny AIs and biotechnology-enhanced trans-humans, Elphinstone’s characters live in a largely pre-industrial-revolution world of rural villages and horse and carts. Although the society she depicts is clearly post-collapse and there have been nuclear accidents, if not all out war, at some point, it quickly becomes obvious that this level of technological development doesn’t simply reflect reduced capability but is a matter of conscious choice. People have adopted different norms to those of the twentieth century when the novel was written. For example, society is now matrilineal. Householders are adult women, and the men of those households are their brothers, sons, uncles and so on. Apart from anything else, this arrangement enables the expansion of genetic diversity for what would otherwise be isolated settlements, as women often choose to take men from other settlements or traders and travellers as the father of their children. 

Both autonomy and respect are not only central to this society but also necessary to support its philosophy of nonviolence. Adults are treated as responsible for their own actions, but this acknowledgment of their agency also leads to them being treated with respect. Consent is sought not just for sexual relations but even for proximity, conversation, questions – basically for all forms of familiarity outside the household. The implicit logic behind this social philosophy is that by entering into these kinds of exchanges with strangers, one is not only taking responsibility for the consequences of this interaction and its effects on both self and other but also opening oneself up to change and becoming different. This change is something that can both be feared and hoped for. For example, the innkeeper Bridget finds the travelling musician Naomi ‘intriguing, attractive even’ as though representing ‘some part of herself that she might have been but had not quite become’ (63). On the other hand, she cries silently for Naomi to stop playing her music ‘before the whole fabric of life was rewoven, before she took Bridget’s ordered years and unravelled them, setting them up in a new pattern, a new weaving of threads which would wind her away from everything that was sure and familiar’ (64).

The importance of music to the novel and its sequel, A Sparrow’s Flight (1989), reflects the idea of cultural exchange as being one way of facilitating the unmaking and making of cultural patterns that is part of the process of living fluidly with the continual prospect of becoming different. Naomi acts as an agent of change by travelling and playing her fiddle at fairs and festivals and also by teaching music to both men and women. She also learns new music where she can and even from the past. In A Sparrow’s Flight she teaches herself Bach’s Drei Sonaten und Drei Partiten für Violine from a score that has been preserved since the before times in a sealed room. In this respect, Elphinstone’s novels turn out to be more like those of Banks than is superficially apparent. Both situate the true value of artistic culture – including ‘high culture’ – as lying in its capacity to help enable the wider culture entering into a fluid holistic relationship with the environment. Music is particularly effective in this respect because like Heraclitus’s river it consists of swirling patterns, which can be endlessly combined and recombined. 

Elphinstone is able metaphorically to map music to environment by showing Naomi as a traveller. In the first half of A Sparrow’s Flight, walking becomes fluid as tramping over endless hills is compared to voyaging over the waves, so that settlements become islands. Journeying with someone becomes an intensified form of negotiating the boundaries of autonomy and respect with the result that both are changed and become different. Time dilates and separates from the linear narratives of history. As Naomi observes, ‘Time is only short if you want to use a person. Otherwise there is the present which is all the time in the world’ (54). This resonates with the logic behind the episodic story-journey narrative structure of When There Are Wolves Again. Swift and Elphinstone are not just exploring shifting the cultural pattern of life in Britain. More specifically, they are asking the question of what life after patriarchy might look like and offering some answers.

Another novel that does something similar, although in a more provocative style, is Alice Albinia’s Cwen (2021). ‘Cwen’, as we are informed by the novel’s epigraph, is the old English word for ‘woman, wife, female, ruler of a state’. Here, it is also the name of a small, unmanned, island and the spirit presiding over its Neolithic cairn and nearby spring, who also fulfils the function of chorus in the novel, punctuating chapters which describe a courtroom-based ‘Inquiry into Unfair Female Advantage in the Islands’ with reflections on several thousand years of experience. The ‘Islands’ are an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Scotland, whose culture has been transformed by a subtle programme of intervention in support of women led by former cabinet minister’s wife, Eva Harcourt-Vane. The loose inquest format of the novel, in which the women Eva has worked with testify as to their collective motivations and achievements, invites readers to ponder whether it is indeed time both for a thoroughgoing overhaul of the patriarchy and to put ‘gynotopia’ – a term Albinia playfully throws in – in the dictionary or, indeed, on the map.

Beneath the playfulness, though, the episodic narrative works to similar effect as Swift and Elphinstone’s novels by weaving a new cultural pattern. However, Albinia wasn’t content to just explore these ideas novelistically, writing a non-fictional companion to Cwen, The Britannias (2023), which describes her journeys over a period of ten years to many of the smaller islands surrounding Britain, often focusing on the Celtic women associated with them. In her introduction, she notes that, ‘It was reassuring to be shown – through writing of this book about British island history – that patriarchy is only a recent invention’ (Albinia 2023: xx). The liminal nature of these islands – in some cases shifting shape over time in response to sea levels – suggests a fluid culture of becoming that both predates and potentially postdates the linear narratives of official British history. The western coastline in particular was characterised by different trading relationships and nationalities, anticipating the polylingual character envisioned in zoefuturism. Albinia describes a 1509 wedding in Rathlin – an island between Ireland and Scotland – in which the Scottish bride spoke English, Gaelic and French. Foreshadowing Swift’s fictional portrayal of the campaign to open up royal land, Albinia discusses how Scotland gained control of its foreshore and seabed from the Crown Estate as a result of the Scotland Act 2016. 

While the historical information it discloses is invaluable, the real strength of The Britannias lies in Albinia’s descriptions of the journeys she takes and the people she meets, and the activities they engage in including music, performance, and protest. She is the real-life counterpart of Elphinstone’s Naomi and Swift’s Lucy and Hester. What all these books reflect is both that the culture we live in does not stand still but continuously swirls and flows, always becoming something different, and that we can embrace that change and even weave new patterns in relation to it. 

Works Cited

Alice Albinia. The Britannias: An Island Quest. London: Allen Lane, 2023.

Alice Albinia. Cwen. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021

Margaret Elphinstone. The Incomer. London: The Women’s Press, 1987.

Margaret Elphinstone. A Sparrow’s Flight: A Novel of a Future. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989. 

E.J. Swift. When There Are Wolves Again. London: Arcadia, 2025. 

Nick Hubble (they/them) is a writer, researcher and critic, whose books include The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017) and Culture Wars in Britain (2026). They have written for Strange Horizons, LA Review of Books, Tribune, Speculative Insight and ParSec. From Autumn 2026, Nick will be the new editor of Foundation. They also blog at Prospective Cultures and may be found on BlueSky @thehubble101.bsky.social.

Short fiction writer and editor Lee Martindale died March 10, 2026 after a brief illness.

Martindale was born in 1949 and raised in rural Kentucky. She sold her first story, YearBride , in 1992 at the age of 43. Her stories have since appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the Sword and Sorceress anthology series, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy, Sorcerous Signals, Bubbas of the Apocalypse (2001), Catopolis (2008), Chicks …Read More

The REH Foundation has announced the nominees for the 2026 Robert E. Howard Awards, honoring work that is substantively devoted to the life and/or work of Robert E. Howard or that carries on the spirit and tradition of Robert E. Howard, to better recognize and celebrate his influence on future generations of writers.

Members of the REH Foundation vote on the awards. Voting ends March 15, 2026.

The Atlantean-Outstanding …Read More

International Thriller Writers has announced the finalists for the 2026 Thriller Awards. Titles and authors of genre interest include:

Best Series Novel

• The Big Empty, Robert Crais (G.P. Putnam's Sons)

Best First Novel

• Death at the White Hart, Chris Chibnall (Pamela Dorman)

Best Young Adult Novel

• This Stays Between Us, Margot McGovern (Penguin Young Readers)
• Shiny Happy People, Clay McLeod Chapman (Delacorte)
• The …Read More

The Audio Publishers Association (APA) has announced the winners of the 2026 Audie Awards, recognizing distinction in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. Books and authors of genre interest among categories with winning titles of interest include:

Audiobook of the Year

• WINNER: Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins, narrated by Jefferson White (Scholastic Audio)

• King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby, narrated by Adam Lazarre-White (Macmillan Audio)
• Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte …Read More

The Bookseller has announced the shortlists for the 2026 British Book Awards. Titles and authors of genre interest include:

Author of the Year

• Elif Shafak
• A.F. Steadman

Fiction

• Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4th Estate)
• Boleyn Traitor, Philippa Gregory (HarperFiction)
• The Rose Field: The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

• The Devils, Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz)
• Ice, Jacek …Read More

By James C. Bassett

Brian Aldiss, map of ‘Helliconia.’ https://brianaldiss.co.uk/writing/novels/novels-h-l/helliconia/

I recently came across a most curious and unsettling pair of essays by Brian Aldiss that I am still trying to process, because they seem to strike against the very heart of science fiction literature, and even much of Aldiss’s own writing. “As far as we know, we are alone in a universe,” Aldiss points out in the second of these essays on the subject of aliens (Aldiss 1999, 340), and he is absolutely right. As far as we know.1 But although the jury is still out on the Big Question, in this essay Aldiss seems fervidly convinced that extraterrestrial sentience simply does not exist. When Aldiss argues “the case for mankind’s solitary state here [the universe], for which the evidence is plentiful” (Aldiss 1999, 334). He appears to accept an absence of evidence as evidence of absence, an extrapolative leap which defies logic and scientific method.

“There is no scientific evidence that [alien sentience exists], any more than there was ever any evidence for the long-held belief in spontaneous generation”2 (Aldiss 1999, 335), an unfair comparison, because spontaneous generation (the theory that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter—for example, that flies grow from rotting meat or that frogs grow from mud) was disproved by scientific evidence against it, a state of affairs that has not been reached regarding the existence or non-existence of sentient extraterrestrial life.

Still, anyone who believes in aliens absent any definite proof is misleading themselves, according to Aldiss. Such belief “represents a continuation of that venerable credulity” (Aldiss 1999, 340) that cursed our race with gods and monsters. Yet absent any definite proof that aliens do not and have never existed, Aldiss seems to be just as guilty of relying on a type of faith — just as “credulous” — in forming his conclusions.

Whatever the reasons for it, or the reasoning behind it, this personal disbelief in the existence of aliens is of little consequence to anyone but Aldiss himself. Of far greater import, however, and far more troubling to the science fiction genre, is an earlier essay in which Aldiss presents an overview of the development of the role and portrayal of sentient alien life in SF literature from its long pre-Campbellian days to the present, and an examination of the causes and effects of the debased and increasingly “monsterish” concept of aliens and what is alien (Aldiss 1996).

I call this first essay troubling because Aldiss uses it to declaim the presence of aliens not only in the real world but also in fiction — even though he himself often featured aliens in his own fiction, including of course the Nebula Award-winning novella “The Saliva Tree” (and a “monsterish” alien, at that) and the highly acclaimed Helliconia trilogy.3 

Aldiss included aliens in his science fiction for the same reasons he included robots and rayguns and rocketships and every other classic trope of science fiction: as a literary device to advance the story. Aldiss was always a very literary writer (he was one of the first writers of the modern era to write intelligent literary science fiction, at a time when the field was dominated by schlocky American pulp writing), and throughout his long and illustrious career he fiercely supported and defended the literature of science fiction. This explains his preoccupation with explaining why science fiction is slighted by the Establishment — but it cannot explain his thesis that aliens are the sole reason. 

Fortunately, for all his historical insight, Aldiss never succeeds in validly relating his conclusions to his stated intent of showing that aliens are the reason that “for all its commercial success, SF has failed to be accepted, or indeed even seriously considered, in literary circles” (Aldiss 1996, 1). Still, the fact that one of the genre’s most respected writers and scholars would make such an argument should raise a warning (if not a few hackles) among both writers and readers of science fiction.

Aldiss explicitly states that his essay is about “the unexamined preoccupation with aliens and alien life, their general hobgoblin role in SF, and whether that preoccupation is at all reasonable” (Aldiss 1996, 1). Ignoring for the moment both the over-generalization inherent in this statement and the curious assertion that the preoccupation with aliens is “unexamined”4, we can see in this statement of purpose one of the basic flaws underlying Aldiss’s proposal: this problematic reference to “reasonableness”, a concept fundamental to his essay.

What, precisely, does Aldiss mean by “reasonable”? More importantly, because it is a deliberately provocative statement, what precisely does he consider to be unreasonable about aliens?

“We have had the audacity in the past to believe that conscious life existed on the Moon, on Mars, on Venus, and beyond”, Aldiss complains (Aldiss 1999, 335). Such speculation was incorrect, certainly, but why audacious? There is nothing wrong with speculation per se as a human endeavour5 — especially when employed in speculative art. All fiction is speculative to some degree, and is not required or expected to portray reality exactly as it is.

If science fiction is characterized by “alienation, whether through the presence of an alien or the simple isolation of the human: humanity made strange in the world or the world made strange for humanity” (Rabkin 1983, 3), then aliens are simply a modern, technologically influenced interpretation of the archetypal “legion of monsters”, from goblins to gods, that we have inherited from our evolutionary past — they are yet one more refraction of the phylogenetic impulse that has led us to create both religion and mythology.6 Aldiss acknowledges this: “Aliens . . . have come up through the floorboards of the distant past” (Aldiss 1996, 8).

However, he laments, with the expansion of our scientific knowledge of the solar neighborhood, “the Martians have faded into the cold sands of their hypothetical world” (Aldiss 1996, 3), as though this failure of aliens to settle next door implies that aliens therefore must not exist anywhere, a stance that comes dangerously close to the “unisample exo-extrapolation” decried by Aldiss in the same essay. Yet despite this troublesome lack of aliens in our real-world experience, SF continues to employ them, and it is this, ultimately, to which Aldiss objects: “High SF disclaims aliens, Low SF embraces them” (Aldiss 1996, 9).

But Aldiss never succeeds in establishing why this should matter so — why the mere presence of aliens, alone and above any other factor, should preclude SF from critical estimation. And it is when he attempts to qualify an answer that his focus disappears. While it certainly is true that “popular SF seized upon the alien without bothering with its philosophical implications” (Aldiss 1996, 9), such shallowness is not peculiar to SF, but marks the ranks of popularity in literature as a whole. Aldiss further weakens his argument by the gross generalization that “pluripresence [of aliens] has been universally adopted without that conceptual questioning which was once a hallmark of good SF” (Aldiss 1996, 9; emphasis mine). Having delineated the difference between High and Low SF, Aldiss then ignores any separation with such generalizations. A separation is crucial, but it is not one built on the grounds claimed by Aldiss.

“Just as the derisive term sci-fi has taken over from SF, so the damaging idea of aliens as a) external to us and b) almost universally hostile has greatly prevailed” (Aldiss 1996, 8). Greatly, yes, but not universally — and in fact I would argue that the shallowness demonstrated by this damaging idea is one of the hallmarks of Low SF that specifically delineates it from High SF; of sci-fi as opposed to science fiction. If “the concept of what is alien has decayed” (Aldiss 1996, 9), it has done so only in Low SF, and not in High SF. From Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama to Card’s Speaker for the Dead to Robert Wilson’s The Harvest to McDevitt’s The Engines of God to Okorafor’sLagoon, in Lem, Le Guin, and Liu, aliens still in large part retain their inspiring “sense of wonder” and their ability to stimulate philosophical enquiry. Aldiss even acknowledges as much when he says Fogg and Barr’s Coti Mundi project “was certainly no excuse for another bogeyman outing; rather, a fine example of SF’s constructive ingenuity” (Aldiss 1996, 5). Obviously, Aldiss admires the creativity evident in properly analyzed aliens and is not necessarily wholly opposed to their use in SF. In fact, his desire to “retreat from xenophobic violence” and “[come] to terms with our demons” (Aldiss 1996, 8) can be seen as a direct call to use the semiotic power of the external alien as a significatory means of exploring the internal alien.7

According to Robert J. Sawyer, “science fiction is at its best . . . when it is giving us unique insights into what it means to be human, examining the human condition in ways that mainstream fiction simply can’t”8 (Sawyer 1996, 10). Aliens are a means of achieving this; they are a device in a writer’s toolkit, and are as valid as any other, be it allegory or first person narration. Still, Aldiss complains only about aliens — and no other literary device — having “acquired almost religious status in SF circles” (Aldiss 1996, 6).

High SF uses aliens — and many other devices — as a means to examine ourselves and our relation to the world. And so, too, does “accepted” literature, a fact which Aldiss ignores. As a single example, aliens and other science fictional elements appeared in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s works (most notably his classic Slaughterhouse Five), which are by the rabid denials of many critics not SF, but literature.

Is it such denials of our genre’s worth by outsiders that leads Aldiss to proclaim that we might “have trouble . . . justifying our belief that SF, that stormy ocean of miscellaneous work, has reason” (Aldiss 1996, 1)? SF is only one small stormy sea within the great and tempestuous ocean that is literature.

Aldiss further complains that “aliens have become axiomatic in SF, but an axiom is not proof” (Aldiss 1996, 6). Is he implying that the use of fictional aliens in a fictional setting is unreasonable only in SF? If it is unreasonable, it must be so absolutely, in “mainstream” literature as well as in SF — in Vonnegut as well as in Van Vogt. And if axiomatic aliens are unreasonable, then why not, too, FTL or time travel? Or even human travel beyond the limits of cislunar space, a concept which has yet to be made more than theoretical? If the merely axiomatic is grounds for unreasonableness, then SF is by its very nature unreasonable — but so is all of literature beyond the strictest, most journalistic realism.

Aldiss moves even farther afield in his attempt to discredit the presence of aliens in SF when he makes the unreasonable statement that “there is a desperation about those who seek alien life” (Aldiss 1996, 6). We who write science fiction do not necessarily seek alien life — we create it (in imagination only), and we do so for solely artistic purposes (Kepler’s Somnium aside). Art is not merely representational, even when it is used for representational ends. This was the lesson of Cézanne and the Impressionists. In the words of Albert Murray, “art is the process by which raw experience is stylized into aesthetic expression” (Scherman 1996, 71) — in other words, art does not depict Nature, it remakes Nature.

This is not to say that rationality and reason have no place in art, but theirs is by definition a secondary role. Yet Aldiss seems to call for these as the primary, if not sole attributes of art. “Are we to suppose that other species will also reason?” (Aldiss 1996, 1) he asks in the introduction to the first essay. Is it not the raîson d’etre of SF to suppose, beyond the boundary of what is strictly known and/or accepted?

Why, then, should an alien sentience be any more unreasonable an artistic conceit than Impressionism’s intentional unrealness? “Martians are an invention of the human mind . . . and not a discovery” (Aldiss 1996, 6), Aldiss complains. But so is all art.

Still, according to Aldiss, it seems to be aliens and aliens alone that have relegated SF to literature’s ghetto. Retreating only somewhat from his earlier wholesale generalisations, he asserts, “most of them [i.e., aliens] have dwindled to groundless fantasy, and disbar SF from serious acceptance” (Aldiss 1996, 10). Why, then, is Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which aliens not only appear but figure prominently, one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the twentieth century?

While it is certainly true that in large part aliens’ “seriousness as archetypes is trivialised” (Aldiss 1996, 10), it in no way follows that this one fact is responsible for all our genre’s reputational woes. Any writer who trivializes their subject matter trivializes their work. This is a universal fact, not at all peculiar to SF. If most SF writers produce trivial SF literature, so too do most mainstream writers produce trivial mainstream literature. “Of course we have good writers still . . . but they have become lost in the madding crowd” (Aldiss 1996, 8).

Here at last we come to the real problem. Sturgeon’s law applies to everything, to SF as well as to mainstream literature: 90% of it is crap. Yet good literary writers become elevated above the crowd of Jackie Collinses and John Grishams while good SF writers all too often are left to sink beneath the sea of mediocrity. Critics treat good literary writers with respect and use their names to incant Literature, but they ignore good SF writers and judge the genre by its basest examples. In his introduction to an historical collection placing science fiction within the Irish literary tradition, Jack Fennel states

Until quite recently science fiction was regarded as marginalia by Irish literary critics, if it was acknowledged at all. Dismissive rather than openly hostile, this lack of attention reflected a commonplace assumption that the genre was frivolous and not worthy of serious consideration. From this point of view, science fiction is . . . irrelevant by dint of its abstraction from the here and now. (Fennell, x)

Fennell wrote this specifically for an Irish context, but the assessment is generalisable.

The question that Aldiss’s first essay begs, then, and which Aldiss ignores, is no less than this: why is SF as a whole dismissed on the basis of its most trivial examples, while capital-L Literature is uplifted by the merits of its most outstanding examples? After all, science fiction is merely a different narrative perspective from contemporary realism, as Stanislaw Lem points out when he talks about “the real world — the world that realism describes in its contemporary shape and that science fiction tries to describe at other points on the space-time continuum” (Lem 1984, 35). Furthermore, “science fiction uses such images to ask deeper hypothetical questions that go to the core of who we are as human beings — questions that might not be as easy to articulate in other kinds of writing” (Fennell, x). And as Bryan Appleyard noted in no less a bastion of respectability than The Times of London, “The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF?” (Appleyard 2007).

In spite of its claims of revolutionary avant-gardism in proclaiming such radical schools as post-structuralism and deconstruction, critical theory has always been and remains tremendously conservative, slow to change established views or to admit new works to its accepted canon.9 Science fiction is slowly breaching the walls of the literary establishment, so that “Today, there are growing numbers of critics willing to discuss science fiction; there are scholarly journals and conferences, university press publications, and college textbooks devoted to science fiction” (Westfahl 2000, 63).

Still, SF suffers — but it does not suffer alone. We often overlook the fact that it is not just SF, but all genre literature — Romance, Westerns, thrillers, detective novels, et al. — whose worth is largely rejected by the mainstream literati, simply because it willingly confines itself to a particular genre, thereby limiting its “universal appeal.” Because genre literature of any kind is considered “inferior,” accepted literary writers cannot be admitted to write such nonliterary work.10 Graham Green wrote crime novels, but was never considered a genre writer because of his previously established reputation as a literary writer (Lem 1984, 49); García Márquez, Borges, Hawthorne, Orwell, Pynchon, Calvino, Vonnegut, Ishiguro, and many others may use fantastic, even “science fictional” elements in their works, but the acknowledged literary quality of such works — and their authors’ reputations — apparently inoculates them against being considered (and, generally, marketed) as “genre”. (If you’re looking for Slaughterhouse Five, or another highly regarded Vonnegut novel, Sirens of Titan, which is stuffed to the gills with a plethora of SFnal tropes such as space travel, time travel, interplanetary war, robots, and, yes, aliens, you are almost certain to find them not in the Science Fiction section of your local bookstore, but in Fiction or Literature.) This may be unfair, but it is hardly the kind of “personal” slight against SF that so many have made it out to be.11

SF’s own unique history may be partly responsible for the lack of critical respect given its particular genre. Science fiction as a distinct genre arguably was invented out of whole cloth in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback created Amazing Stories to immediate and great success. But because SF is “a specialized and demanding literature,” Barry Malzberg notes

There were not in the 30s and 40s (and perhaps even to the mid-50s)12 enough competent science fiction and fantasy writers to fill the available space . . . there was more room than there were acceptable stories and novels. Editors had to scramble to develop writers and they also had to let a lot of marginal material through. . . . Editors at the second-rank markets who knew better had to often stretch a point, simply to maintain sufficient copy. (quoted in Resnick and Malzberg 2008, 33)

In any case, critical rejection of SF as a whole (or, indeed, of any genre) based on its worst examples is akin to Aldiss’s own objection to aliens — because this SF is bad, all SF is bad; because aliens do not exist here (so far as we know), they do not exist, period. It is the same kind of unisample exo-extrapolation that Aldiss himself claims to abhor in alien apologists. “What is unreasonable is to believe that extrapolation from only one example can have scientific plausibility. This was Kepler’s error” (Aldiss 1996, 6).

In these two essays — though, fortunately for us, not in his greater body of work — it is Aldiss’s error as well.

~

1. This (rather contentious) conundrum — that a universe 13.8 billion years old filled with at least 100 billion galaxies and perhaps 200 billion trillion stars should be teeming with life, yet we have no evidence that there is or ever was another sentient technological race to keep us company — is commonly called the Fermi paradox, after Enrico Fermi’s famous (and possibly apocryphal) question, “where is everybody?”
   ︎
2. If aliens do exist, they could well be saying the same about us — a position which is hardly fair, as I for one am more than reasonably certain of my own existence. ︎
3. Furthermore, Aldiss admits in yet another article decrying the lack of respect given to the SF genre that “[a]s a youth, I most enjoyed stories of disorientation. A reader did not know where he was, in past or present or future, or who was speaking, man, android, or alien.” (Aldiss 2007) ︎
4. Much has been written examining aliens both literal and metaphorical. As merely one example, Julia Kristeva wrote an entire book, Strangers to Ourselves, dealing with the psychological and semiotic ramifications of the “outsider” both internal and external. ︎
5. “Speculation is the art of tiptoeing beyond verifiable fact”, Aldiss himself writes (Aldiss 1999, 335). It is also the basis for many scientific advances — as well as the basis of science fiction. ︎
6. Many, of course, argue that religion and mythology are one and the same. ︎
7. In fact, Aldiss himself said that he believed science fiction to be “a metaphor for the human condition” (Young 2007). ︎
8. Sawyer wrote this about his novel The Terminal Experiment, in which the title character discovers scientific proof for the existence of the human soul. Sawyer was thematically inspired by Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” and “The Star” because “each asserts as real an aspect of religion normally taken on faith, and then examines the repercussions of that reality” (Sawyer 1996, 11,12; emphasis mine). The Terminal Experiment won the 1996 Nebula Award for Best Novel. ︎
9. Terry Eagleton notes that the literary cannon “is usually regarded as fairly fixed, even at times as eternal and immutable” (Eagleton 1983, 201). ︎
10. See Lem (1984), p. 48. ︎
11. It is possible (but far beyond me to determine) that to Aldiss it was in fact a very personal slight. Speaking of the two years of research he did to make Helliconia a scientifically plausible world, he noted that “that cosmological set-up now has been shown to exist in deep space. There is somewhere like that. So why am I treated as though I’m a hack? Why didn’t the TLS ever review those books?” (Kerridge 2017). Later in the same interview he says “I don’t like the label [science fiction], but I put up with it”. The interview did not delve into why a man who had been awarded an OBE for services to literature felt that he was treated as a “hack”. ︎
12. Malzberg further points out that this period happened to coincide with “science fiction’s so-called Golden Age”. ︎

Works cited

Aldiss, Brian. 1996. “Kepler’s Error: The Polar Bear Theory of Pluripresence.” Science Fiction Studies 23,1:1–10.

——-. 1999. “The Inhabited Place.” Extrapolation 40,4:334–340.

——-. 2007. “Why are science fiction’s best writers so neglected?” Times Online November 23.

Appleyard, Bryan. 2007. “Why don’t we love science fiction?” The Sunday Times December 2. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/why-dont-we-love-science-fiction-hn0r7tr7p8v.

Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fennell, Jack. 2018. “Introduction: The Green Lacuna.” A Brilliant Void: A Collection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, vii—xiv. Dublin: Tramp Press.

Kerridge, Jake. 2017. “Brian Aldiss interview: ‘there’s too much snobbery about science fiction’.” The Telegraph 21 August. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/brian-aldiss-interview-much-snobbery-science-fiction/.

Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lem, Stanislaw. 1984. Microworlds: writings on science fiction and fantasy. Edited by Franz Rottensteiner. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Rabkin, Eric S. 1983. Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Resnick, Mike And Barry Malzberg. 2008. “The Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues XXXIX.” The SFWA Bulletin 42,2:31–36.

Sawyer, Robert J. 1996. “About the Nominees: Robert J. Sawyer.” The SFWA Bulletin 30,1:10–12.

Scherman, Tony. 1996. “The Omni-American.” Interview with Albert Murray. American Heritage 47,5:68–77.

Westfahl, Gary. 2000. “Who Governs Science Fiction?” Extrapolation 41,1:63–72.

Young, Kirsty. (Host). 28 January 2007.  Desert Island Discs: Brian Aldiss [Radio broadcast]. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0093tnd.

~

James C. Bassett’s fiction has appeared in Amazing Stories, the World Fantasy Award–winning anthology Leviathan 3, and many other markets around the world and online. He co-edited the anthologies Zombiesque (DAW Books, February 2011, with Stephen L. Antczak and Martin H. Greenberg) and Clockwork Fairy Tales (ROC, June 2013, with Stephen L. Antczak). He co-wrote and co-starred in the 1987 film Twisted Issues, a “psycho-punk splatter comedy” that Film Threat Video Guide named to its list of “25 underground films you must see” and that is receiving rave reviews on Letterboxd in its remastered Blu-ray release.

By James C. Bassett

Brian Aldiss, map of ‘Helliconia.’ https://brianaldiss.co.uk/writing/novels/novels-h-l/helliconia/

I recently came across a most curious and unsettling pair of essays by Brian Aldiss that I am still trying to process, because they seem to strike against the very heart of science fiction literature, and even much of Aldiss’s own writing. “As far as we know, we are alone in a universe,” Aldiss points out in the second of these essays on the subject of aliens (Aldiss 1999, 340), and he is absolutely right. As far as we know.1 But although the jury is still out on the Big Question, in this essay Aldiss seems fervidly convinced that extraterrestrial sentience simply does not exist. When Aldiss argues “the case for mankind’s solitary state here [the universe], for which the evidence is plentiful” (Aldiss 1999, 334). He appears to accept an absence of evidence as evidence of absence, an extrapolative leap which defies logic and scientific method.

“There is no scientific evidence that [alien sentience exists], any more than there was ever any evidence for the long-held belief in spontaneous generation”2 (Aldiss 1999, 335), an unfair comparison, because spontaneous generation (the theory that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter—for example, that flies grow from rotting meat or that frogs grow from mud) was disproved by scientific evidence against it, a state of affairs that has not been reached regarding the existence or non-existence of sentient extraterrestrial life.

Still, anyone who believes in aliens absent any definite proof is misleading themselves, according to Aldiss. Such belief “represents a continuation of that venerable credulity” (Aldiss 1999, 340) that cursed our race with gods and monsters. Yet absent any definite proof that aliens do not and have never existed, Aldiss seems to be just as guilty of relying on a type of faith — just as “credulous” — in forming his conclusions.

Whatever the reasons for it, or the reasoning behind it, this personal disbelief in the existence of aliens is of little consequence to anyone but Aldiss himself. Of far greater import, however, and far more troubling to the science fiction genre, is an earlier essay in which Aldiss presents an overview of the development of the role and portrayal of sentient alien life in SF literature from its long pre-Campbellian days to the present, and an examination of the causes and effects of the debased and increasingly “monsterish” concept of aliens and what is alien (Aldiss 1996).

I call this first essay troubling because Aldiss uses it to declaim the presence of aliens not only in the real world but also in fiction — even though he himself often featured aliens in his own fiction, including of course the Nebula Award-winning novella “The Saliva Tree” (and a “monsterish” alien, at that) and the highly acclaimed Helliconia trilogy.3 

Aldiss included aliens in his science fiction for the same reasons he included robots and rayguns and rocketships and every other classic trope of science fiction: as a literary device to advance the story. Aldiss was always a very literary writer (he was one of the first writers of the modern era to write intelligent literary science fiction, at a time when the field was dominated by schlocky American pulp writing), and throughout his long and illustrious career he fiercely supported and defended the literature of science fiction. This explains his preoccupation with explaining why science fiction is slighted by the Establishment — but it cannot explain his thesis that aliens are the sole reason. 

Fortunately, for all his historical insight, Aldiss never succeeds in validly relating his conclusions to his stated intent of showing that aliens are the reason that “for all its commercial success, SF has failed to be accepted, or indeed even seriously considered, in literary circles” (Aldiss 1996, 1). Still, the fact that one of the genre’s most respected writers and scholars would make such an argument should raise a warning (if not a few hackles) among both writers and readers of science fiction.

Aldiss explicitly states that his essay is about “the unexamined preoccupation with aliens and alien life, their general hobgoblin role in SF, and whether that preoccupation is at all reasonable” (Aldiss 1996, 1). Ignoring for the moment both the over-generalization inherent in this statement and the curious assertion that the preoccupation with aliens is “unexamined”4, we can see in this statement of purpose one of the basic flaws underlying Aldiss’s proposal: this problematic reference to “reasonableness”, a concept fundamental to his essay.

What, precisely, does Aldiss mean by “reasonable”? More importantly, because it is a deliberately provocative statement, what precisely does he consider to be unreasonable about aliens?

“We have had the audacity in the past to believe that conscious life existed on the Moon, on Mars, on Venus, and beyond”, Aldiss complains (Aldiss 1999, 335). Such speculation was incorrect, certainly, but why audacious? There is nothing wrong with speculation per se as a human endeavour5 — especially when employed in speculative art. All fiction is speculative to some degree, and is not required or expected to portray reality exactly as it is.

If science fiction is characterized by “alienation, whether through the presence of an alien or the simple isolation of the human: humanity made strange in the world or the world made strange for humanity” (Rabkin 1983, 3), then aliens are simply a modern, technologically influenced interpretation of the archetypal “legion of monsters”, from goblins to gods, that we have inherited from our evolutionary past — they are yet one more refraction of the phylogenetic impulse that has led us to create both religion and mythology.6 Aldiss acknowledges this: “Aliens . . . have come up through the floorboards of the distant past” (Aldiss 1996, 8).

However, he laments, with the expansion of our scientific knowledge of the solar neighborhood, “the Martians have faded into the cold sands of their hypothetical world” (Aldiss 1996, 3), as though this failure of aliens to settle next door implies that aliens therefore must not exist anywhere, a stance that comes dangerously close to the “unisample exo-extrapolation” decried by Aldiss in the same essay. Yet despite this troublesome lack of aliens in our real-world experience, SF continues to employ them, and it is this, ultimately, to which Aldiss objects: “High SF disclaims aliens, Low SF embraces them” (Aldiss 1996, 9).

But Aldiss never succeeds in establishing why this should matter so — why the mere presence of aliens, alone and above any other factor, should preclude SF from critical estimation. And it is when he attempts to qualify an answer that his focus disappears. While it certainly is true that “popular SF seized upon the alien without bothering with its philosophical implications” (Aldiss 1996, 9), such shallowness is not peculiar to SF, but marks the ranks of popularity in literature as a whole. Aldiss further weakens his argument by the gross generalization that “pluripresence [of aliens] has been universally adopted without that conceptual questioning which was once a hallmark of good SF” (Aldiss 1996, 9; emphasis mine). Having delineated the difference between High and Low SF, Aldiss then ignores any separation with such generalizations. A separation is crucial, but it is not one built on the grounds claimed by Aldiss.

“Just as the derisive term sci-fi has taken over from SF, so the damaging idea of aliens as a) external to us and b) almost universally hostile has greatly prevailed” (Aldiss 1996, 8). Greatly, yes, but not universally — and in fact I would argue that the shallowness demonstrated by this damaging idea is one of the hallmarks of Low SF that specifically delineates it from High SF; of sci-fi as opposed to science fiction. If “the concept of what is alien has decayed” (Aldiss 1996, 9), it has done so only in Low SF, and not in High SF. From Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama to Card’s Speaker for the Dead to Robert Wilson’s The Harvest to McDevitt’s The Engines of God to Okorafor’sLagoon, in Lem, Le Guin, and Liu, aliens still in large part retain their inspiring “sense of wonder” and their ability to stimulate philosophical enquiry. Aldiss even acknowledges as much when he says Fogg and Barr’s Coti Mundi project “was certainly no excuse for another bogeyman outing; rather, a fine example of SF’s constructive ingenuity” (Aldiss 1996, 5). Obviously, Aldiss admires the creativity evident in properly analyzed aliens and is not necessarily wholly opposed to their use in SF. In fact, his desire to “retreat from xenophobic violence” and “[come] to terms with our demons” (Aldiss 1996, 8) can be seen as a direct call to use the semiotic power of the external alien as a significatory means of exploring the internal alien.7

According to Robert J. Sawyer, “science fiction is at its best . . . when it is giving us unique insights into what it means to be human, examining the human condition in ways that mainstream fiction simply can’t”8 (Sawyer 1996, 10). Aliens are a means of achieving this; they are a device in a writer’s toolkit, and are as valid as any other, be it allegory or first person narration. Still, Aldiss complains only about aliens — and no other literary device — having “acquired almost religious status in SF circles” (Aldiss 1996, 6).

High SF uses aliens — and many other devices — as a means to examine ourselves and our relation to the world. And so, too, does “accepted” literature, a fact which Aldiss ignores. As a single example, aliens and other science fictional elements appeared in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s works (most notably his classic Slaughterhouse Five), which are by the rabid denials of many critics not SF, but literature.

Is it such denials of our genre’s worth by outsiders that leads Aldiss to proclaim that we might “have trouble . . . justifying our belief that SF, that stormy ocean of miscellaneous work, has reason” (Aldiss 1996, 1)? SF is only one small stormy sea within the great and tempestuous ocean that is literature.

Aldiss further complains that “aliens have become axiomatic in SF, but an axiom is not proof” (Aldiss 1996, 6). Is he implying that the use of fictional aliens in a fictional setting is unreasonable only in SF? If it is unreasonable, it must be so absolutely, in “mainstream” literature as well as in SF — in Vonnegut as well as in Van Vogt. And if axiomatic aliens are unreasonable, then why not, too, FTL or time travel? Or even human travel beyond the limits of cislunar space, a concept which has yet to be made more than theoretical? If the merely axiomatic is grounds for unreasonableness, then SF is by its very nature unreasonable — but so is all of literature beyond the strictest, most journalistic realism.

Aldiss moves even farther afield in his attempt to discredit the presence of aliens in SF when he makes the unreasonable statement that “there is a desperation about those who seek alien life” (Aldiss 1996, 6). We who write science fiction do not necessarily seek alien life — we create it (in imagination only), and we do so for solely artistic purposes (Kepler’s Somnium aside). Art is not merely representational, even when it is used for representational ends. This was the lesson of Cézanne and the Impressionists. In the words of Albert Murray, “art is the process by which raw experience is stylized into aesthetic expression” (Scherman 1996, 71) — in other words, art does not depict Nature, it remakes Nature.

This is not to say that rationality and reason have no place in art, but theirs is by definition a secondary role. Yet Aldiss seems to call for these as the primary, if not sole attributes of art. “Are we to suppose that other species will also reason?” (Aldiss 1996, 1) he asks in the introduction to the first essay. Is it not the raîson d’etre of SF to suppose, beyond the boundary of what is strictly known and/or accepted?

Why, then, should an alien sentience be any more unreasonable an artistic conceit than Impressionism’s intentional unrealness? “Martians are an invention of the human mind . . . and not a discovery” (Aldiss 1996, 6), Aldiss complains. But so is all art.

Still, according to Aldiss, it seems to be aliens and aliens alone that have relegated SF to literature’s ghetto. Retreating only somewhat from his earlier wholesale generalisations, he asserts, “most of them [i.e., aliens] have dwindled to groundless fantasy, and disbar SF from serious acceptance” (Aldiss 1996, 10). Why, then, is Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which aliens not only appear but figure prominently, one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the twentieth century?

While it is certainly true that in large part aliens’ “seriousness as archetypes is trivialised” (Aldiss 1996, 10), it in no way follows that this one fact is responsible for all our genre’s reputational woes. Any writer who trivializes their subject matter trivializes their work. This is a universal fact, not at all peculiar to SF. If most SF writers produce trivial SF literature, so too do most mainstream writers produce trivial mainstream literature. “Of course we have good writers still . . . but they have become lost in the madding crowd” (Aldiss 1996, 8).

Here at last we come to the real problem. Sturgeon’s law applies to everything, to SF as well as to mainstream literature: 90% of it is crap. Yet good literary writers become elevated above the crowd of Jackie Collinses and John Grishams while good SF writers all too often are left to sink beneath the sea of mediocrity. Critics treat good literary writers with respect and use their names to incant Literature, but they ignore good SF writers and judge the genre by its basest examples. In his introduction to an historical collection placing science fiction within the Irish literary tradition, Jack Fennel states

Until quite recently science fiction was regarded as marginalia by Irish literary critics, if it was acknowledged at all. Dismissive rather than openly hostile, this lack of attention reflected a commonplace assumption that the genre was frivolous and not worthy of serious consideration. From this point of view, science fiction is . . . irrelevant by dint of its abstraction from the here and now. (Fennell, x)

Fennell wrote this specifically for an Irish context, but the assessment is generalisable.

The question that Aldiss’s first essay begs, then, and which Aldiss ignores, is no less than this: why is SF as a whole dismissed on the basis of its most trivial examples, while capital-L Literature is uplifted by the merits of its most outstanding examples? After all, science fiction is merely a different narrative perspective from contemporary realism, as Stanislaw Lem points out when he talks about “the real world — the world that realism describes in its contemporary shape and that science fiction tries to describe at other points on the space-time continuum” (Lem 1984, 35). Furthermore, “science fiction uses such images to ask deeper hypothetical questions that go to the core of who we are as human beings — questions that might not be as easy to articulate in other kinds of writing” (Fennell, x). And as Bryan Appleyard noted in no less a bastion of respectability than The Times of London, “The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF?” (Appleyard 2007).

In spite of its claims of revolutionary avant-gardism in proclaiming such radical schools as post-structuralism and deconstruction, critical theory has always been and remains tremendously conservative, slow to change established views or to admit new works to its accepted canon.9 Science fiction is slowly breaching the walls of the literary establishment, so that “Today, there are growing numbers of critics willing to discuss science fiction; there are scholarly journals and conferences, university press publications, and college textbooks devoted to science fiction” (Westfahl 2000, 63).

Still, SF suffers — but it does not suffer alone. We often overlook the fact that it is not just SF, but all genre literature — Romance, Westerns, thrillers, detective novels, et al. — whose worth is largely rejected by the mainstream literati, simply because it willingly confines itself to a particular genre, thereby limiting its “universal appeal.” Because genre literature of any kind is considered “inferior,” accepted literary writers cannot be admitted to write such nonliterary work.10 Graham Green wrote crime novels, but was never considered a genre writer because of his previously established reputation as a literary writer (Lem 1984, 49); García Márquez, Borges, Hawthorne, Orwell, Pynchon, Calvino, Vonnegut, Ishiguro, and many others may use fantastic, even “science fictional” elements in their works, but the acknowledged literary quality of such works — and their authors’ reputations — apparently inoculates them against being considered (and, generally, marketed) as “genre”. (If you’re looking for Slaughterhouse Five, or another highly regarded Vonnegut novel, Sirens of Titan, which is stuffed to the gills with a plethora of SFnal tropes such as space travel, time travel, interplanetary war, robots, and, yes, aliens, you are almost certain to find them not in the Science Fiction section of your local bookstore, but in Fiction or Literature.) This may be unfair, but it is hardly the kind of “personal” slight against SF that so many have made it out to be.11

SF’s own unique history may be partly responsible for the lack of critical respect given its particular genre. Science fiction as a distinct genre arguably was invented out of whole cloth in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback created Amazing Stories to immediate and great success. But because SF is “a specialized and demanding literature,” Barry Malzberg notes

There were not in the 30s and 40s (and perhaps even to the mid-50s)12 enough competent science fiction and fantasy writers to fill the available space . . . there was more room than there were acceptable stories and novels. Editors had to scramble to develop writers and they also had to let a lot of marginal material through. . . . Editors at the second-rank markets who knew better had to often stretch a point, simply to maintain sufficient copy. (quoted in Resnick and Malzberg 2008, 33)

In any case, critical rejection of SF as a whole (or, indeed, of any genre) based on its worst examples is akin to Aldiss’s own objection to aliens — because this SF is bad, all SF is bad; because aliens do not exist here (so far as we know), they do not exist, period. It is the same kind of unisample exo-extrapolation that Aldiss himself claims to abhor in alien apologists. “What is unreasonable is to believe that extrapolation from only one example can have scientific plausibility. This was Kepler’s error” (Aldiss 1996, 6).

In these two essays — though, fortunately for us, not in his greater body of work — it is Aldiss’s error as well.

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1. This (rather contentious) conundrum — that a universe 13.8 billion years old filled with at least 100 billion galaxies and perhaps 200 billion trillion stars should be teeming with life, yet we have no evidence that there is or ever was another sentient technological race to keep us company — is commonly called the Fermi paradox, after Enrico Fermi’s famous (and possibly apocryphal) question, “where is everybody?”
   ︎
2. If aliens do exist, they could well be saying the same about us — a position which is hardly fair, as I for one am more than reasonably certain of my own existence. ︎
3. Furthermore, Aldiss admits in yet another article decrying the lack of respect given to the SF genre that “[a]s a youth, I most enjoyed stories of disorientation. A reader did not know where he was, in past or present or future, or who was speaking, man, android, or alien.” (Aldiss 2007) ︎
4. Much has been written examining aliens both literal and metaphorical. As merely one example, Julia Kristeva wrote an entire book, Strangers to Ourselves, dealing with the psychological and semiotic ramifications of the “outsider” both internal and external. ︎
5. “Speculation is the art of tiptoeing beyond verifiable fact”, Aldiss himself writes (Aldiss 1999, 335). It is also the basis for many scientific advances — as well as the basis of science fiction. ︎
6. Many, of course, argue that religion and mythology are one and the same. ︎
7. In fact, Aldiss himself said that he believed science fiction to be “a metaphor for the human condition” (Young 2007). ︎
8. Sawyer wrote this about his novel The Terminal Experiment, in which the title character discovers scientific proof for the existence of the human soul. Sawyer was thematically inspired by Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” and “The Star” because “each asserts as real an aspect of religion normally taken on faith, and then examines the repercussions of that reality” (Sawyer 1996, 11,12; emphasis mine). The Terminal Experiment won the 1996 Nebula Award for Best Novel. ︎
9. Terry Eagleton notes that the literary cannon “is usually regarded as fairly fixed, even at times as eternal and immutable” (Eagleton 1983, 201). ︎
10. See Lem (1984), p. 48. ︎
11. It is possible (but far beyond me to determine) that to Aldiss it was in fact a very personal slight. Speaking of the two years of research he did to make Helliconia a scientifically plausible world, he noted that “that cosmological set-up now has been shown to exist in deep space. There is somewhere like that. So why am I treated as though I’m a hack? Why didn’t the TLS ever review those books?” (Kerridge 2017). Later in the same interview he says “I don’t like the label [science fiction], but I put up with it”. The interview did not delve into why a man who had been awarded an OBE for services to literature felt that he was treated as a “hack”. ︎
12. Malzberg further points out that this period happened to coincide with “science fiction’s so-called Golden Age”. ︎

Works cited

Aldiss, Brian. 1996. “Kepler’s Error: The Polar Bear Theory of Pluripresence.” Science Fiction Studies 23,1:1–10.

——-. 1999. “The Inhabited Place.” Extrapolation 40,4:334–340.

——-. 2007. “Why are science fiction’s best writers so neglected?” Times Online November 23.

Appleyard, Bryan. 2007. “Why don’t we love science fiction?” The Sunday Times December 2. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/why-dont-we-love-science-fiction-hn0r7tr7p8v.

Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fennell, Jack. 2018. “Introduction: The Green Lacuna.” A Brilliant Void: A Collection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, vii—xiv. Dublin: Tramp Press.

Kerridge, Jake. 2017. “Brian Aldiss interview: ‘there’s too much snobbery about science fiction’.” The Telegraph 21 August. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/brian-aldiss-interview-much-snobbery-science-fiction/.

Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lem, Stanislaw. 1984. Microworlds: writings on science fiction and fantasy. Edited by Franz Rottensteiner. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Rabkin, Eric S. 1983. Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Resnick, Mike And Barry Malzberg. 2008. “The Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues XXXIX.” The SFWA Bulletin 42,2:31–36.

Sawyer, Robert J. 1996. “About the Nominees: Robert J. Sawyer.” The SFWA Bulletin 30,1:10–12.

Scherman, Tony. 1996. “The Omni-American.” Interview with Albert Murray. American Heritage 47,5:68–77.

Westfahl, Gary. 2000. “Who Governs Science Fiction?” Extrapolation 41,1:63–72.

Young, Kirsty. (Host). 28 January 2007.  Desert Island Discs: Brian Aldiss [Radio broadcast]. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0093tnd.

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James C. Bassett’s fiction has appeared in Amazing Stories, the World Fantasy Award–winning anthology Leviathan 3, and many other markets around the world and online. He co-edited the anthologies Zombiesque (DAW Books, February 2011, with Stephen L. Antczak and Martin H. Greenberg) and Clockwork Fairy Tales (ROC, June 2013, with Stephen L. Antczak). He co-wrote and co-starred in the 1987 film Twisted Issues, a “psycho-punk splatter comedy” that Film Threat Video Guide named to its list of “25 underground films you must see” and that is receiving rave reviews on Letterboxd in its remastered Blu-ray release.

Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Locus Award-winner Stephen Graham Joneswill be joining us as a Guest of Honor at the Locus Awards Weekend on May 29-31, 2026, in Oakland, California! We're very happy to welcome him. Jones joins fellow Guests of Honor Nnedi Okorafor and Tananarive Due, as well as a program of amazing local creators, for an unforgettable celebration.

From his website: Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling …Read More