Industry News

MILESTONES

VAISHNAVI PATEL is now represented by Jordan Hill of New Leaf Literary & Media. Patel sold contemporary fantasy We Dance Upon Demons, following a burnt-out reproductive health care worker, to Sareena Kamath at Saga Press via Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency.

OGHENECHOVWE DONALD EKPEKI is now represented by Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media.

ROBERT J. SAWYER will be a Writer in Residence at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced …Read More

For its 30th anniversary, Tachyon Publications hosted a celebratory party and reading, held Sunday, October 5, 2025 at the San Francisco Public Library in San Francisco CA. After light refreshments in the lobby, the Koret Auditorium opened at 3:00 p.m. for an SF in SF reading by Tachyon authors Joe R. Lansdale and Samantha Mills.

The San Francisco Public Library further commemorated Tachyon's 30th with an exhibit on the third …Read More

The StokerCon Governing Committee has announced the details of StokerCon 2026, or StokerCon 10. The convention will be held June 4-7, 2026 at The Westin Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh PA. Tickets can be purchased on Eventbrite. In-person admission is $300 and virtual is $75.

The six Guests of Honor will be Linda D. Addison, Rachel Harrison, Billy Martin, John Shirley, James Tynion, and Ann VanderMeer.

The Governing Committee, including James Chambers, …Read More

Writer and organizer Celeste Rita Baker, 67, died October 30, 2025.

Baker was a Virgin Islander born July 29, 1958. She moved between St. Thomas and the US several times. She published short stories in The Caribbean Writer, khōréō, Lightspeed, F&SF, Moko Magazine, Strange Horizons, and more. Her work is also included in anthologies such as Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction (2010), People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy (2016), …Read More

The winners of the 2025 Prix Utopiales and the 2025 Prix Utopiales Jeunesse have been announced. The prizes recognize work in the fantastic genres published or translated into French.

Prix Utopiales (Adult Literature)

• WINNER: La dernière tentation de Judas, Philippe Battaglia (L'Atalante)

• Sous la brume, Yann Bécu (L'Homme Sans Nom)
• Le Mensonge suffit, Christopher Bouix (Au Diable Vauvert)
• Aatea, Anouck Faure (Argyll)
• Re:Start, Katia Lanero Zamora (Argyll)
…Read More

We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose (Melville House) is the winner of The Goldsmiths Prize, created in 2013 by Goldsmiths College at the University of London.

Other shortlisted authors and titles of genre interest include Helm, Sarah Hall (Faber) and The Expansion Project, Ben Pester (Granta).

The £10,000 prize is awarded to a book by a British or Irish author that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of …Read More

The 2025 Galaxy Science Fiction Convention, recently branded as Galaxycon, took place in Chengdu from October 18-21, 2025, drawing China's SF community and an international presence for three days of events centered around the 40th annual Galaxy Awards. Galaxycon was held on the newly developed Chengdu Science and Technology Innovation Ecological Island in the Tianfu New Area, Chengdu's designated high-technology belt. The site was created by Zaha Hadid Architects who …Read More

National Book Tokens have announced the winners of the 2025 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. The awards aim to reflect the truly diverse tastes of real booklovers and the bookshops they love to visit across the UK and Ireland. Winners of genre interest follow.

Young Adult Fiction

• WINNER: Wish You Were Her, Elle McNicoll (First Ink)

• What Happens Online, Nathanael Lessore (Hot Key)
• Skipshock, …Read More

The Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour is open to submissions from unpublished writers of color based in the UK until March 1, 2026.

The winner will receive £4,500, one runner-up £2,500, and up to six shortlisted authors will each receive £850. All writers will also receive mentoring from one of the prize's publishing partners: Bloomsbury, Daphne Press, Del Rey, Gollancz, HarperVoyager, Hodderscape, Orbit UK, …Read More

The British Fantasy Society (BFS) has announced the winners of the 2025 British Fantasy Awards:

Best Fantasy Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award)

• WINNER: Masquerade, O.O. Sangoyomi (Forge)

• Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan (Orbit)
• Fathomfolk, Eliza Chan (Orbit)
• A Shadow Over Haven, David Green (Eerie River)
• The Green Man's War, Juliet E. McKenna (Wizard's Tower)

Best Horror Novel (the August Derleth Award)

• WINNER: My Darling …Read More

The World Fantasy Awards winners for works published in 2024 were presented during the 2025 World Fantasy Convention, held October 30 - November 2, 2025 in Brighton, UK.

The Life Achievement Awards, presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field, went to Juliet Marillier and Michael Whelan.

The World Fantasy Awards winners are:

Best Novel

• WINNER: The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; …Read More

by Philip A. Suggars

There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeves’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet as they ever did. The sky is the same old blue.

After a while you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little, and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.

This is the terrain of the weird. Not quite full-blown fantasy, but the quiet unease that things might not be quite right. A sense that the ground beneath your trainers might be a little less solid than you previously thought.Few books map out this territory more ingeniously than The City & the City by China Miéville or The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson. Both of these novels deal in epistemic slippage, the boundaries of what is knowable and what is known, (what Miéville himself has referred to as “sublime backwash”). Each exists at the extreme of the other. Where Miéville presents us with a world where the structure of the real is brutally policed, Hope Hodgson describes a universe where there is absolutely and gloriously no epistemological structure whatso-fucking-ever.

William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (Penguin, 2008)

In Miéville’s murder mystery, Inspector Borlú, a policeman from the city of Besźel investigates a murder that requires him to work with a partner in the twin city of UI Qoma. Nothing too odd there you might think, except for the fact that the two cities share much of the same physical space. In order to maintain the illusion of separateness and sovereignty, citizens of one city must “unsee” anything pertaining to the other, ignoring people, buildings and even events that occur right in front of them. Failure to do so results in an intervention from the shadowy and terrifying force known as Breach.

Treated with a near mythical dread, Breach, makes any violators or evidence of transgression disappear, maintaining the ideal of separateness. They have an almost supernatural ability to detect and punish any infractions and in many ways function much like the Agents in the Matrix. They’re spectral, terrifying antagonists who are rarely seen and cannot be beaten. Only they have access to the duality of the world as it is and as it is perceived.

That said, one of the brilliant things about the novel is that crossing between the cities is a bureaucratic activity. Visitors must queue up to pass through a universal access point, Cupola Hall, filling out forms and editing their perceptions as they go. (Imagine entering Narnia via passport control.)

Now, let’s flip this on its head.

In The House on the Borderlands, if there is an equivalent of Breach they’re all out for coffee and donuts. Within the book’s framing narrative, an old man dwells in a remote house that seems to be perched precariously on the edge of space and time itself. Violent swine-things emerge from the wilderness and attack him. A pit opens into infinity. The house falls into disrepair as does reality itself. Time speeds up and slows down and the old man sees the solar system wither and die, meeting with the spirit form of his lost love in the process. (Clearly, the cosmic horror equivalent of drunk-texting your ex).

The novel, though, is more than just a cavalcade of grotesque set pieces. Hope Hodgson’s book articulates just what happens to the human mind when the epistemological scaffolding holding up consensual reality is removed. Without anything like Breach to police the borders of the real, the old man in The House on the Borderlands is placed in a condition of radical exposure, seeing everything, including those things which exist on a scale too large for the human mind to process, and it destroys him.

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (Penguin Classics, 2005)

It’s illuminating to compare Hodgson’s main character, the old man, to the (similarly nameless) Time Traveller from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. as both experience a similarly nihilistic telescoping of time, but their ultimate fates differ radically.

When Wells’ Time Traveller pushes beyond the limits of human civilisation, (perhaps the first fictional portrayal of a post-human futurity), he arrives on a desolate beach millions of years in the future. A dying red sun hangs in the thinning air. Humanity and all its works are long gone and only monstrous crabs and even stranger lifeforms populate the desolate landscape.

This entire section of the novel is pervaded by a kind of cosmic melancholia that can be viewed as the ultimate end point of Victorian Progressivism. Indeed, Wells’ character seems able to naturalise his experiences because he brings this framework and values along with him. Although he mourns for the end of human history, the Time Traveller’s visit to the abyss is a perverse form of scientific field trip, imbued with the same moral and evolutionary logic exemplified by humanity’s differentiation into Eloi and Morlock.

Hodgson’s old man’s experience, by contrast, is striking in its brutality, a vision of totalising annihilation. The sun burns out, the stars gutter and the entire universe itself reduced to nothing. There is no divine order revealed here, no redemption or a return to a cosy human scale cosmology. The vast scale of the old man’s vision annihilates the possibility of meaning itself.

Similarly, where Miéville’s twin cities are constructed from the rules of seeing and unseeing, The House on the Borderlands gives us the total opposite: a senseless cosmos of no rules, no enforcement nor any pretence of order. The weird here is not a glitch in the system. It is the revelation that there was never a system in the first place.

It’s fair to say that societally we’re somewhere in the middle of these two extremes right now, that the five hundred years or so since the invention of print has been the equivalent of sleeping on Borlú’s sofa: uncomfortable, but still governed by house rules. We got verifiable truth, experts, and certified sources. (A Breach of sorts also, perhaps). But it’s hard not to feel that that period is coming to an end, that while we were sleeping, the internet and digital culture pushed our bed into the old man’s house on the edge of the abyss.

In our own digital present, there’s a powerful temptation to read the chaos of information, conspiracy, and disinformation we are currently experiencing as proof that nothing is real, that nothing matters and that everything is just swine-things in the dark. From here, it can be a short hop to nihilist politics:  a worldview where verifiable truth is impossible, authority is always a lie, and the only rational position is cynicism or withdrawal. Hodgson’s doomed recluse seems to embody some of this temptation, overwhelmed into passivity by the scale of the challenge.

But to read The House on the Borderlands as a political allegory is not to collapse into cosmic despair, but to learn from its warning. We are not condemned to inhabit the old man’s house. If we’re next to the abyss, that doesn’t mean we have to tumble in. Noticing that reality is unstable is not the same as surrendering to relativism. We can resist nihilist politics precisely by refusing to slide into the seductive intellectual laziness of “everything is fake” or “all sides are the same.” The weird may teach us to see the cracks, but perhaps it also demands us to keep looking, to keep thinking and to keep questioning not as a retreat from reality, but as a form of care for it.

The answer to epistemic collapse, therefore, isn’t to shrug like Hodgson’s recluse and let the swine-things win. There is a philosophical and moral distinction, I think, between questioning the framework and denying reality itself. While the weird may draw attention to how things fit together (or not) and why, it is not an invitation to retreat from the rational. Rather, it should encourage us to ask how the rules around truth are made, who enforces them, and what happens when they falter.

 If Miéville’s novel describes the edges of over-policed perception, Hodgson shows us the dangers of letting the bottom drop out entirely. Both extremes are traps. The political task is to inhabit the weird middle, the unstable, shifting zone between order and chaos, without surrendering to despair.

This insistence on scrutiny is hardly new. It has, in fact, a long democratic pedigree. The socialist firebrand politician, Tony Benn, never one to mistake deference for democracy, distilled it into five plain questions we should ask emissaries from Breach or peddlers of red pill relativism:

• what power have you got?
• where did you get it from?
• in whose interests do you exercise it?
• to whom are you accountable?
• and how can we get rid of you?

So, we carry on watching the sky. And if it seems a bit too purple, maybe we don’t insist it’s blue out of habit or call it green out of spite. We just keep looking, keep asking, and perhaps resist the pressure to unsee.

~

Philip A. Suggars has a single yellow eye in the middle of his forehead and a collection of vintage binoculars.

His work has appeared in a range of publications including Strange Horizons, The Guardian and Interzone as well as being featured on many short-form podcasts. His writing has won the Ilkley short story prize, been long-listed for the BSFA short story award and been included in The Best of British Science Fiction Anthology series.

When not writing words, he records music as one half of the post-punk electronica outfit, we are concrete. Born and raised in South London, he currently lives on the south coast with his family. His debut novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World will be published by Titan Books in 2026.

The shortlist for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2025 has been announced. Titles and authors of genre interest include:

• Universality, Natasha Brown (Faber & Faber)
• Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
• The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Alice With a Why, Anna James, illustrated by Matthew Land (HarperCollins)
• Katabasis, R.F. Kuang (HarperCollins)
• So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell (Vintage)
• The Café at the Edge …Read More

John Clute, co-founder of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, has announced the release of a Substack site associated with the online database, which will host both short free-access posts and longer posts for subscribers. Posts on the site will include essays, news updates, reflections, and more, intended to clock the sf world as it changes, and more particularly how SFE records and honours these changes.

Clute said,

Most of …Read More

The Canadian Children's Book Centre (CCBC) has announced the winners for the 2025 CCBC Book Awards, celebrating outstanding literary achievement with seven children's book awards. Awards of genre interest include:

Arlene Barlin Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy

• WINNER: The Headmasters, Mark Morton (Shadowpaw)

• Fledgling, S.K. Ali (Kokila)
• Lockjaw, Matteo L. Cerilli (Tundra)
• Waking the Dead and Other Fun Activities, Casey Lyall (Greenwillow)
• Where the …Read More

Updated 11/3/25: Colette H. Fozard and The Development Center for Chengdu Worldcon, Inc. announced on November 2 that they will begin to reach out to 2023 Hugo Award winners to gather information to deliver trophies.

Updated 10/28/25: Fozard and DCFCW have shared in a press release that DCFCW and Chengdu Worldcon have accepted a commitment of action by Dave McCarty to ship the remaining Hugo trophies, made after he …Read More

Vector editors are supporting a workshop on applied SF at the University of Lagos as part of a larger collaboration with the African Speculative Fiction Society and Aké Arts & Book Festival.

If you are in Lagos, join us: www.africansfs.com/events

Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, received 1,962 valid ballots, down from 3,436 at Glasgow 2024. 1,338 nominating votes were cast electronically (another two sent by surface mail arrived too late to count); that's down from 1,720 in 2024.

The procedure for counting nominations remains the E Pluribus Hugo, or EPH, system. The rather complicated system gives a single point to each voter's ballot, dividing that point …Read More

By James Henstock

 Cultivated (lab-grown) meat has emerged from science fiction into a genuine commercial product. The promise of sustainable, animal-free meat has captured the interest of governments concerned with national food security in a time of rapid and unpredictable climate change. Supported by a rapidly developing $3Bn industry, cultivated meat is now available for limited public consumption.

However, public opinion on cultivated meat is strongly polarised. Since most people haven’t yet tried cultivated meat, preconceptions have instead been formed by its depictions in science fiction which may be either inspiringly utopian or more commonly, starkly dystopian. Real culture-grown products are being introduced to a consumer base with expectations based on imagined realities. 

In this article I will introduce some of the technology that underpins the production of cultivated meat, and how its origins in the biopharmaceutical industry present both opportunities and challenges for manufacturing appetising food. How far does the reality of cultivated meat match the science fiction representation? Can scientists and storytellers work together towards a shared utopian vision of this Future Food?

A new era: the Post-burger 

On Monday 5th August 2013, Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post unveiled the world’s first cultivated beef burger at a press conference in London, thus launching a new era in food. The burger was cooked and eaten, and whilst being described as ‘close to meat, but not as juicy’ and costing around $325,000 nevertheless inspired a boom in investment that saw the creation of over a hundred start-ups and university spin outs, plus a handful of very well-capitalized companies in the USA, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands (Mead, 2013; Gregory-Manning & Post, 2024). Since 2013 it is widely estimated that over $3.1 billion has been invested into cultivated meat enterprises, with a peak in 2021 (GFI, 2023). New consumer markets are opening up following regulatory approvals in Singapore, China, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Israel and the UK as governments recognise the value of a diversified ‘Alternative Proteins’ ecosystem in enhancing food security in response to growing population challenges and climate change. 

Yet the concept of ‘synthetic’ meat has been in the public consciousness for generations. Since first being articulated in fiction in 1897 (as a gift from the Martians in Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz), social and technological revolutions have triggered particular bursts of literary creativity in the 1930s, 1950’s and 1960s, corresponding to increasingly mechanised intensive farming practices and the overall boom of technological progress in the 20th century, not least of which was in biomedicine and laboratory cell culture. In a 1931 essay on the future of science, Winston Churchill wrote:

‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished. That gloomy Utopia of tabloid meals need never be invaded. The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.’ 

Churchill’s predictions and the early optimism of fin de siècle authors in humankind’s salvation through science are admittedly taking some time to realise, yet the technology required to bring cultivated meat to fruition is being developed at pace. 

Muscle formation starts with the proliferation of cells, which ultimately merge into long muscle fibres.

Whilst Post’s showcase burger in 2013 was created using this process, others have questioned the full-scale feasibility of the approach and sought to identify alternatives that might be easier to engineer. If the complex process of muscle synthesis ultimately results simply in fibres rich in animal protein, perhaps there are easier ways to simulate this. Since the product will be cooked as food, does it need to have the biological authenticity of true muscle? 

One of the most common alternatives to true muscle cells for making cultivated ‘meats’ is in fact obtained from the connective tissue of muscle. When grown in culture, these connective tissue cells naturally form sheets, balls, and fibres, rich in collagen and proteins, yet without the characteristic cellular structure of muscle. As an achievable and scalable solution this has proven to be a successful approach for several companies, but does it meet the consumer expectation of cultivated meat? Since these cells are typically taken from animal skin biopsies, they could perhaps be more accurately described as cultivated scabs, rather than cultivated meat (Pasitka et al, 2023).

Another question is what animal’s cells to culture. Throughout human history, livestock agriculture has focussed on a very few species which were domesticated from wild animals over thousands of years. The choice of meat-giving animal in most cultures has therefore been limited by the availability of suitable animals and by the ability of the regional landscape and environment to support husbandry. Selective breeding over millennia has given rise to thousands of breeds of sheep, cows, pigs, and poultry suited to the needs of civilisations, and more recently to satisfy the efficiency requirements of intensive farming. This has given rise to some spectacular statistics: chickens are now one of the most populous animals in the world, with over 26 billion at any given moment (200 million are killed for food each day), and domesticated mammals (including cows, pigs, and sheep) form around 630 million tonnes of Earth’s biomass – compared to just 22 million tonnes for all wild land mammals (Roser, 2023; Greenspoon et al, 2023). 

Such a limited focus on just a few species raises many concerns around environmental sustainability and the effects of pandemic diseases on livestock, but also provokes the following question: If we don’t have to farm the whole animal, why limit our choice to these core species? Perhaps other animals which are hard to farm traditionally have characteristics better suited to ‘cellular agriculture’ or cultivated meat farming, for example large carnivores such as lions, or species which take a long time to reach maturity, such as tortoises. Perhaps there are species that can provide even better food products when just their cells are cultured, leading to truly unique foods that could not be produced through traditional livestock farming (Kateman, 2022). H. Beam Piper presents this idea in the novel Four-Day Planet (1961), in which not only familiar livestock was available through carniculture, but also exotic alien species and unconventional food formats.

 ‘…the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue we wanted was grown – Terran pork and beef and poultry, Freyan zhoumy meat, Zarathustran veldtbeest…. “You can get all the paté de foie gras you want here,” I said. “We have a chunk of goose liver about fifty feet in diameter growing in one of our vats.”

• Four-Day Planet (1961) by H. Beam Piper

There has been a notable divergence in industry approaches to this concept. Whilst many have noted that consumer acceptance of cultivated meat relies on engaging a level of familiarity, others have sought to create a distinct boundary and develop cultivated meats which do not immediately meet preconceptions. The thinking goes that since most meat-eaters already have firmly established ideas of the ‘perfect’ steak, or even an emotive childhood memory of a beef burger, people will naturally compare novel foods to these core expectations, often unfavourably (Baum et al, 2021). In contrast, a tender cultivated crocodile medallion, for instance, doesn’t have the same high bar for comparison, and in many respects the cultivated version might generate a more palatable product than anything cut from a gristly wild animal.

With this change in mindset comes a surge in unlocked potential, opening 65,000 species of vertebrates for cellular cultivation. Are there species that have uniquely appealing properties, yet aren’t conventionally farmable? The African wild antelope kudu and the domesticated donkey have been identified as uniquely delicious, and yet for very different reasons are unlikely to make mainstream supermarket aisles as culled meats – yet cellular cultivation makes these a viable prospect (Pang, 2018). Companies such as Wild Bio in South Africa are developing a catalogued cell bank of native antelope and wildlife species, prized as rural bush meat but generally unavailable elsewhere in the world. 

With improved genomic sequencing it may even be possible to resurrect (or engineer) cells from extinct species, as trialled by Australian cultivated meat company Vow with their ‘Mammoth Meatball’ in 2022 containing a short sequence of mammoth DNA (Carrington, 2023). Even some dinosaur structural proteins have been sequenced, not quite enough yet to make Jurassic Park (1993) a reality, but perhaps enough to introduce Tyrannosaurus collagen into chicken cell cultures (Asara et al, 2007). 

Nurturing life in vitro

Regardless of the cell type chosen to form the cultivated meat, all cells require similar environments to grow – a warm, germ-free space with fresh nutrients and a method to remove metabolic waste. In living organisms, systems throughout the entire body provide these functions: the stomach and intestines turn food into simpler building blocks for new tissue growth, and the liver and kidneys filter out and excrete waste. Everything is connected by a vascular system of arteries, veins, and capillaries such that virtually no cell is more than a few millimetres from a source of nutrient-rich, oxygenated blood.

In lab-grown meat, each of these physiological processes must be provided artificially. This seemingly overwhelming task presents another opportunity for reflection – how can the many complex processes of biology be reduced to generate the ‘meat’ we want without re-creating a synthetic life support system as complex as a whole body? It is useful here to consider which systems we almost certainly don’t need to grow muscle. Firstly, although muscle has nerves running through it that provide a stimulus for contraction, we probably don’t need a whole nervous system or a brain. Sensory organs such as eyes and ears are also totally redundant. Basic nutrients such as glucose, vitamins and amino acids can be produced chemically (often at huge scale for our dietary food supplements) and provided directly in growth media, so a gastrointestinal system for digestion isn’t needed either. Waste can be controlled by simply discarding old growth media and replacing it with fresh solution, obviating the need for filtration by the liver and kidneys.

In fact, when reduced to the basic requirements for muscle growth, much of the body’s physiological processes can be eliminated or replaced. Essential requirements to sustain life still include an oxygen supply and an ever-refreshing nutrient fluid, but beyond that there is the potential to reinvent the artificial growth environment in any way that can be imagined. 

‘He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.

It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.

Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak.

• The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

The bioreactor

Artificial growth environments, or bioreactors, have existed for millennia. Since humans first determined that foods could be fermented to preserve them, improve their qualities, and generate alcohol, civilisations have experimented with vessels in which complex biological growth can be controlled. These first bioreactors were entirely for microbial cells and required fairly simple technology, but many of the fundamental principles still underpin modern bioreactor technology. Indeed, many bioreactor designs for cultivated meat are effectively identical to those used for microbial fermentation due to the simple fact that specialised ‘meat bioreactors’ have not yet been invented. Much of the bioreactor infrastructure that exists at the scale needed to produce cultivated meat has simply been taken from the biopharmaceutical industry by cultivated meat companies desperate to upscale their manufacturing process.

Inevitably, this necessitates some compromises. Biopharma doesn’t produce complex structured muscle tissue and hasn’t ever needed to develop the technology to do so. Therefore, currently only single cells or very small aggregates of tissue can be produced using these bioreactors. 

Nevertheless, this ‘fermentation tank’ approach to growing cellular biomass has enabled the cultivated meat industry to unblock a series of scaling challenges that were widely considered impossible even a decade ago. The cost of cell culture media used to be eye-wateringly expensive, since all previous applications were small scale and generally for high-value biomedical research. Rationalisation has resulted in culture media costs decreasing by several orders of magnitude, from over £1,000 per litre to a few pence. A decade ago, it took $325,000 and a team of scientists to grow a 100g beef burger, whereas some modern companies are producing kilograms of biomass daily for a fraction of the cost.

However, this biomass is still harvested as a cell paste, and prompts a question that divides opinion: is this meat? Can a pâté-like product with no tissue structure, whilst entirely made from animal cells, satisfy consumer expectations for cultivated meat?

Cut and paste

‘I’m a goo man. I have factories all over the country. I have trucks right now loaded with goo that can be here within the week. The goo I speak of can be made into anything.’

• Let Them Eat Goo, South Park S23E04

Many people think not. In fact, the typically pejorative term ‘ultra-processed food’ seems to perfectly describe cultivated meat in its current form – a manufactured paste. A 2019 episode of South Park (‘Let them eat goo’) satirises the concept of meat-alternatives, albeit in this example as a plant-based substitute, yet with striking similarities to the harvested cultivated meat cell paste. Other parallels within the cultural zeitgeist may be drawn, notably with the film Soylent Green (1973), infamously featuring the mass public consumption of an amorphous meat-alternative that is ultimately revealed to be produced from dead human bodies. There are many other examples in dystopian science fiction of pastes, slimes, and slurries as either a government-issued basic staple food, or as the basic nutritional option for a post-apocalyptic human race. For example, in The Matrix (1999), food in the Real World is described as ‘a single-celled protein, vitamin, mineral, and amino acid colloid’, which the characters compare to runny eggs at best and a bowl of snot or puke at worst. In the same movie, it is described how dead humans are recycled post-mortem by the machines into a liquid food that is intravenously infused into the unwitting living, whilst even the simulation of a real beef steak is considered to be worth fatally betraying your friends and humanity for. This commentary on the negative associations of untextured, formless foodstuffs for humans is almost universal throughout speculative fiction, and a significant consideration for unstructured cultivated meat entering the market.

The ’form factor’ that novel foods are presented in is therefore important. It has been found that a majority of people have varying degrees of food neophobia – an aversion to entirely new types of food. When given the choice people’s selection habits gravitate to the familiar (Bryant & Barnett, 2018). This is perhaps biologically understandable, since our evolutionary ancestors would have faced significant risks of poisoning or disease by the uninhibited consumption of foods which deviate from the established diet. 

There may also be an underlying belief that non-solid foods are for infants, the elderly, or the very ill, whereas healthy adults predominantly consume solid foods that require chewing. There are notable exceptions to this general trend, such as soups, stews, and pâté such as foie gras at the luxury end of consumption. So not all pastes are unpalatable, but to change dietary habits en masse and encourage widespread uptake of cultivated meat, it seems that structured solid formats are preferred.

‘The food slot gave him flat reddish-brown bricks. Six times he dialled a brick, took a bite and dropped the brick into the intake hopper. Each brick tasted different, and they all tasted good.

At least he would not get bored with eating. Not soon, anyway.’

• Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven

Tissue engineering

‘“These clumps of cells are spaced evenly — or, as we call it, seeded — throughout the culture medium. The solution is very carefully controlled; it changes from hour to hour as various enzymes, activators, charges of oxygen and so forth are added. The result is that in some six days the isolated clumps of cells grow to a solid, delicious mass, weighing many tons, of Juicimeet. And incidentally, when you leave each of you will be given a neat cellophane wrapped package of Juicibeef so that you can experience for yourselves, if you haven’t already done so, how delicious it is. We recommended it for broiling, grilling, roasting, or as kebabs.

“Juicimeet is subject to a continuous process of selection. In each batch, some cells respond better to the nutrient solution than do others. It is from these superior cells that the new batch is grown. Juicimeet — ” under the gauze mask he beamed at them — “becomes better all the time.” 

• Lazarus (1955) Margaret St. Clair

Cultivated meat is an industry only a decade old and has moved with surprising speed to develop food products using technology never intended for this purpose. Innovators have entered this field from a wide range of disciplines, but from a technological perspective they can be separated into two distinct camps: bioprocess scientists and tissue engineers.

Bioprocess scientists have so far led much of the initiative for cultivated meat, rapidly converting technologies from their original applications in biopharmaceutical synthesis, microbial fermentation, and ultra-processed food manufacturing into strategies for producing animal cells at unprecedented scales. None of these technologies has ever developed the need to create a meat-like tissue, however, so there is a natural limit to how far these existing bioprocess-based solutions alone can engineer a compelling meat-like tissue.

Tissue engineering began as a field within biomedicine in the mid-1980’s when scientific researchers began considering the future of human organ transplantation and tissue grafts. It was reasoned that our knowledge of cell biology and materials science was becoming sufficiently advanced that replacement body parts could be grown in the laboratory to reduce the reliance on donor tissues. Whilst the full potential of tissue engineering has yet to be realised as a widespread alternative to organ donation, substantial progress has been made in constructing simple 3D living tissues that are commonly used to study biological and pathological processes in the laboratory.

In tissue engineering, cells are cultured in a biomaterial scaffold which provides the basic structure over which cells can lay down a secreted protein matrix and form a realistic version of a natural piece of tissue. For biomedical applications this approach works well, but for cultivated meat there are significant challenges, particularly around the suitability of scaffolds, which must be edible and compatible with the end goal of providing a desirable food product (Bomkamp et al, 2022).

For many applications, these functions are served by hydrogels – gelatinous and highly hydrated substances derived from natural sources such as algae. Common hydrogels include ingredients familiar to many home cooks, such as agar and carrageenan, which are used as thickeners and to make vegan jellies. When mixed with animal cells they can be used to create three-dimensional spheres, strands, and sheets that gradually fill up with living, growing muscle tissue. Hydrogels are very versatile and can even be mixed with cells and extruded through a fine nozzle to ‘print’ complex 3D structures (Soleymani et al, 2024). Aleph Farms (Israel) have been developing this process for several years and have shown they are able to dual print beef muscle and fat into marbled steak-like products (Ianovici et al, 2022).

Very advanced bioprinting has several representational instances in science fiction, for example the restoration of Leeloo’s body from a single cell and a ‘tissue processor’ in Fifth Element (1997). Food prepared in this way has some similarities to the types of synthesised meat seen in science fiction. Before the Star Trek replicator (first seen in The Next Generation), original episodes made inferences to a ‘food synthesizer’ which, although making limited appearances in the series, appears to make food in coloured cubes and other shapes (‘The Conscience of the King’, 1966). 

Above and beyond: Extraterrestrial cultivated meat 

One of the greatest potential markets for cultivated meat may be in space. Several space agencies have dedicated research and funding to the challenges of growing food in flight in an effort to mitigate the problems of uploading full crew provisions. The upload mass cost and inflight storage requirements for long duration spaceflight missions and the establishment of colonies on the moon and Mars are considerable. The nutritional deterioration of food over time, the risks of spoilage, and crew psychology are additional considerations that become more severe with increasing mission duration. Substantial progress has been made in hydroponic plant agriculture in microgravity, suggesting that astronauts will in future be able to grow much of their own food in-flight, providing freshly synthesised vitamins and micronutrients to supplement their otherwise monotonous diet of freeze-dried rations (NASA). But will all astronauts become vegan?

‘”Where would they get a real steer?”

“There are some around for story props in the various entertainment media, that sort of thing. A few of the outback planets where they haven’t the technology for pseudoflesh still raise cattle for food.”’

• Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert

It is highly unlikely that we will be sending livestock on any upcoming spaceflight missions. Mars will not be stocked with cows, pigs, and chickens. Aquaculture might be economically realistic off Earth, and potentially mycoculture could produce textured mushrooms and fermented mycoproteins (such as Quorn), but for freshly synthesised animal protein the only real option appears to be some form of cultivated meat.

Science fiction has identified this as a rich source of material for speculating on how spacefaring humanity will grow food. In The Expanse series of Novels (2011-21) by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing as James S. A. Corey), vat-grown meat is specifically mentioned as being consumed as a general staple, particularly in resource-poor regions of the solar system such as the (asteroid) Belt. In the novel series vat-grown meat is depicted as a supplement to basic dried food (plant-based kibble), yet inferior to authentic animal-derived meat (associated with the bourgeois inner planets). In the TV series adaptation ‘okra-infused tank-grown ribs’ (Episode S01E08 “Salvage”) are mentioned, indicating a curious level of consideration for restaurant marketing language to make the cultivated meat appealing to a consumer. In contrast to much science fiction, The Expanse is generally considered to present food of the future in relatively appealing ways, with home-style family recipes being cherished and served with eagerness.

The cultural negotiation of Alternative Meat

The term ‘cultivated meat’ was proposed in 2015 by Isha Datar and an online community consultation at US-based New Harvest. The online poll for a new umbrella term was in response to intense pushback from the livestock farming community against the use of ‘clean meat’, which was deemed derogatory to ‘dirty’ farmed animal meat. Other terms, such as cultured meat, lab-grown meat, even immaculate meat have been proposed and interchangeably used, but always with a sizeable degree of public rejection. 

There has also been some regulatory rejection of these terms, particularly around the conserved use of meat in these labels. Should cultivated and farmed products both carry the same name? Several companies have sought to avoid the m-word entirely, launching products as a brand such as Qualia and Forged Gras (Vow, Australia 2024), and Chick Bites (Meatly, UK 2025), whilst others are more embracing of non-traditional labelling, for example GOOD Meat 3 (Good Meat USA, 2022). There is an opportunity for speculative writers to help with this cultural navigation and develop new terms that surmount the word meat.

ChickieNobs, presented by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake (2003) goes some way to showing how parallels in branding and marketing can be made between cultivated meat and retail strategies for processed meats by fast food companies. Chicken ‘nuggets’ were invented (but never patented) in the 1950s by Robert C. Baker as a way to maximise the untextured meat reclaimed from a carcass (Baker et al, 1966). Much like cultivated meat, consumers overlook the process (which can be off-putting) and focus instead on the taste and marketing, leading to the estimated global consumption of 34 million McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets per day.

“What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.

“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one.”

• Oryx and Crake (2003) Margaret Atwood

Cultivating the appeal

Speculative fiction typically presents cultivated meat as an inferior alternative to animal meat -either as a cheaper substitute for the poorer classes, or as the only option in dystopian society (Castle, 2022). 

The origin of real cultivated meat in biomedicine, tissue engineering and pharmaceuticals manufacturing has given us a technological legacy of stainless steel, chemical reagents, clean rooms, and lab-coats that is perhaps not entirely appealing as a food-producing system. Much of our relationship with food comes from heritage – relishing the foods of our childhood, proudly defending regional specialities, and embarking on gastronomic tours of foreign cultures. Our emotional responses to food are also fed by the evocative traditional methods used to create them. Cured meats, yeasted breads and cultured cheeses involve carefully controlled microbial monoculture and significant amounts of chemistry, yet the culinary storytelling around artisanal foods is markedly different to the biotechnology-produced cultivated meat.  

Modern factories for cured meats, cheese, and bread are now of course mainly stainless-steel clean rooms, but this is probably not the image that consumers associate with a product, and is certainly not evident in the heritage-centred branding of most commercial producers. With a growing rejection of mass-produced, ultra-processed food and the migration of middle-class shoppers to the ‘slow food’ movement, there is an opportunity for cultivated meat to embrace shifting consumer attitudes and represent cultivated meat scientists as artisans. 

Direct domestic production of cultivated meat may also be possible in the near future. Could involving the consumer as central to the production process make cultivated meat as emotionally appealing as other home-grown produce?

‘…large laboratories in every city had produced synthetic food and meats, grown in large test tubes. The method was adequate in every way to the needs of the populace, but the manner of distribution was still antiquated. Hubler perfected a small but complete production laboratory, not much larger than the electric refrigerators of the past century. His product in its preparation was entirely automatic and practically foolproof. It would generate, day by day, and year by year, a complete and attractive food supply for a family of two. It not only created the food, but there was an auxiliary machine which prepared it for the table in any form desired by the consumer. All that was necessary was the selection of one of the twenty-five menus and the pressing of the proper buttons.’

• Unto us a Child is Born (1933) by David H. Kelle

Collaborative projects between scientists and designers are helping to navigate the cultural landscape of novel foods. These interdisciplinary projects provide both groups the opportunity to approach their research from a very different perspective. 

For example, the ‘Acre cure’ design project explores a conceptual product set 10–15 years in the future, imagining how lab-grown meat might be introduced and accepted in our daily lives. Through design, branding, and cultural familiarity, the project aims to normalise lab-grown meat as part of everyday life (Tom Darwin, University of Northumbria). The concept has similarities with the domestic ‘meat makers’ in the Terra Ignota quartet by Ada Palmer (2016-21) which grow 3D printed meat from stored genetic patterns fed by nutrient pouches purchased by the consumer. The overall process is described as something like a bread maker appliance, requiring several hours (although more realistically days) to grow the food.

In some instances then it seems that cultivated meat can be acceptable if it is a product that can be nurtured, personalised, and perhaps even be personified. Our agrarian heritage has led us to embrace domestication and husbandry to the point that we anthropomorphise farmyard animals and name our sourdough starters. In The End of the Line by James Schmitz (1951) the three biologists in the crew tend to Albert II, ‘as close a thing to a self-restoring six-foot sirloin steak as ever had been developed’. Albert II is personified and carefully nurtured. ‘He’ is seemingly appreciated by the crew who recognise the nutritive value but accept the limitations as an unoriginal staple ingredient by this point in their lives, but potentially improved with local accompaniments. Despite the 1951 publication date, the depiction of cultivated meat personified as Albert II is strikingly similar to our current biomanufacturing processes.

‘Chemical balances, temperatures, radiations, flows of stimulant, and nutritive currents—all had to be just so; and his notions of what was just so were subject to change without notice. If they weren’t catered to regardless, he languished and within the week perversely died. …At Cusat’s suggestion, [they] trimmed Albert around the edges. Finding himself growing lighter, he suddenly began to absorb nourishment again at a very satisfactory rate.

“That did it, I guess,” Cusat said, pleased. He glanced at the small pile of filets they’d sliced off. “Might as well have a barbecue now.”’

– The End of the Line (1951) by James Schmitz

Conclusions: Food of the Future

The progress of cultivated meat from proof of concept in 2013 to commercial reality in 2025 has been rapid, fuelled by the desire for a sustainable global protein revolution. Adapting pre-existing biomedical technology has enabled this nascent industry to rapidly bootstrap itself to Minimal Viable Product stage, but it is clear that whole new areas of science and engineering need to be created to realise the true authentic vision of cultivated meat. 

What these technologies will look like and the food formats they will produce is still unclear, yet it is evident that storytelling will be equally crucial in their gaining widespread consumer acceptance. Throughout the examples used in this article in may be observed that embedding the cultivation of meat at the centre of the story correlates with a more positive representation. The nurturing of the cultivated meat by characters in the story is reminiscent of the bond between nomadic herders and their livestock – a mutual (if imbalanced) life-sustaining partnership. 

Humans are a farming species. We are often happiest when actively involved with cultivating our own food and caring for the animals that give us sustenance. This central human desire to nurture life perhaps provides a useful lens for exploring how science and fiction can come together to navigate the growing impact of cultivated meat.

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James Henstock is Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom. His research involves creating lab-grown tissues for research in regenerative medicine. Between 2021-2023 he was also senior scientist at cultivated meat company Vow in Australia. James also works with the European Space Agency to design the in-flight bioscience equipment needed to enable crewed exploration of the solar system.

The Huntington has acquired the personal library and papers of Kim Stanley Robinson, including drafts of novels, annotated works, photographs, and more. All told, The Huntington describes the collection as 50 linear feet of papers, photographs, and manuscripts as well as thousands of digital files. The Huntington stated that their goal is to make the material available to researchers by 2027.Robinson said the acquisition was a deep pleasure... I've known …Read More