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by Guy Windsor

All the best stories end with a sword fight, and there are usually many sword fights leading up to the climactic duel between the hero and the villain. It’s important to get these right because, if you kick your reader out of the world you’ve created for them with a confusing, unbelievable, or just plain wrong bit of fight description, you’ll lose the tension you’ve worked so hard to generate.

My top three tips for fantasy and historical fiction writers are:

1.  Do your research (or use other people’s).

2.  Avoid jargon.

3.  Run through the fight in the real world.

Do Your Research (or Use Other People’s)

Base your characters’ weapons and fighting styles on historical sources. Every culture has produced something sword-like for purposes of combat and status. We have archaeological and historical records of swords made from wood, glass, stone, copper, bronze, iron, and steel. The Aztec macuahuitl is a wooden sword with obsidian glass chips bonded to the edges. The ancient Egyptians fought with hooked bronze swords called khopesh. Australian Indigenous people made sharp-edged wooden swords. There are the Chinese dao and jian, the Japanese katana, the ancient Greek makhaira, the Roman gladius, Indian pata, Viking sword, arming sword, longsword, rapier, sidesword, smallsword, saber, backsword, and on and on.

Guy Windsor with a longsword. Photo by Simply C Photography.

Every culture that made swords had methods of using them that were at least as sophisticated as the weapon itself. We know this from archaeological finds, the historical record of descriptions of fights, and, starting in the 1300s, detailed treatises on sword fighting styles.

There is no need for you to be an expert in any of these weapons. But you can base your characters’ armory on existing weapons (the way the lightsaber is based on the knightly longsword) and find out how their weapons would have been used. There are legions of people figuring it out for you already and publishing their findings (like me and my colleagues).

There are two main approaches for figuring out the systems: reconstructive archaeology and historical research.

Reconstructive archaeology is the process of reconstructing the weapons (or other tools) and figuring out by trial and error how they were likely used. In the case of bronze swords, examining the notches on existing blades and comparing them to notches created on new blades by various cuts, parries, and so on, gives us an idea of how these weapons interacted with each other.

Historical research looks to the written record. From the 1300s onwards, we have manuscripts that go into extraordinary depth and detail about specific combat systems, such as Fiore dei Liberi’s Il Fior di Battaglia (ca. 1400), which tells you everything you could want to know about knightly combat, including the dastardly trick of filling your pollax head with blinding powder.

Image from Getty Manuscript Ludwig XV, folio 37, courtesy of the Getty Museum.

We have hundreds of sources from the 16th century onwards, and fencing masters kept writing new ones until the present day. Many of those sources and masters have students devoted to reconstructing their art. Pick a weapon for your character, modify it to suit your story, then find someone who is practicing with it and ask for advice.

Avoid Jargon

Most readers don’t know a macuahuitl from a makhaira, and they didn’t pick up your novel to be taught a lesson; they picked it up to be entertained. The pitfall of doing your research is that you let too much of it leak out onto the page. Any time your reader comes across a word they don’t know, their mind will skip over it, or they’ll get bogged down. Neither one is good. You have been immersed in this world for thousands of hours, so you know it better than they do. If you do have a special word for something (Lucas’s lightsaber, Tolkien’s Anduril, Bujold’s plasma arc), make it clear from the context what it is and how it works.

Most people know what a rapier is, more or less. But a makhaira? This sword is famous, but nobody has heard of it. Alexander the Great fought at Gaugamela with the makhaira given to him by Kition, King of Cyprus. When the Apostle Peter used a sword to cut the ear off poor Malchus in the Bible (John 18:10), it was, in the original Greek, “μάχαιρα”—“makhaira.” When it is written in the King James version of the Bible that Jesus said, “I came not to send peace, but a sword,” (Matthew 10:34), it is again “makhaira” in the original Greek.

A makhaira or falcata made by JT Pälikkö; a makhaira or kopis in the Deutches Klingenmuseum; and a makhaira in the Etruscan Museum, Villa Giulianni, Rome. Photos by JT Pälikkö.

But put that into a novel, and you are guaranteed to send 99% of readers out of the zone and off to a dictionary, where they will discover that the makhaira was popular from about 400 BCE, and was a forward-curving sword, good for cutting, that Xenophon recommended for use by cavalry in place of the straight-bladed xiphos.

Run Through the Fight in the Real World Guy Windsor with a rapier and dagger. Photo by Simply C Photography.

This does not have to be done at speed with sharp swords. You can do it with a pen in each hand, at your desk. But make sure that the scene you are describing works in practice, not just in your head. If you are avoiding jargon, you will find this easier because you can leave space for the reader to imagine the action.

“The villain attacked with a flurry of thrusts and cuts, beating our hero back against the castle wall” is better than listing the specific actions she used. When the specific action matters (if you want to use a dastardly technique to indicate a villainous character, for instance), then block it out move-by-move to make sure the sword doesn’t magically pass through a body part without hurting it. Be very sparing with this—most readers don’t want to work through the specifics.

It’s Your Book

I hope this advice is useful. Do your research, avoid jargon, and run through the fight in the real world. But it’s your book, not mine, so take my rules with a pinch of salt!

Explore more articles from WORLDBUILDING

Consulting Swordsman Dr. Guy Windsor is renowned as a teacher and researcher of medieval and Renaissance martial arts. He has been teaching professionally since founding Swordschool in Helsinki, Finland, in 2001. Awarded a PhD by Edinburgh University for his seminal work recreating historical combat systems, Guy has written numerous books on swordsmanship, such as The Medieval Longsword, The Medieval Dagger, Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers and Martial Artists, The Duellist’s Companion, and many others.

He has also created a huge range of online courses, covering medieval knightly combat, sword and buckler, rapier, and related topics. Now, Guy splits his time between researching historical martial arts, writing books, and creating online courses, teaching students all over the world. He hosts the popular historical martial arts podcast The Sword Guy, with guests including Steven Pressfield and Neal Stephenson. His latest book is Swordfighting for Writers. You can find him and his work online at swordschool.com.

The post Writing Sword Fights: Three Tips from a Professional Swordsman appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

The Massachusetts Center for the Book has announced the winners of the Massachusetts Book Awards, “celebrating the most outstanding books published in 2024 by Massachusetts authors, artists, and poets.” The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry (Tor) is the winner in Fiction, and Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear by Robin Wasley (Simon & Schuster) is the winner in Middle Grade.

The award will be presented at the Massachusetts Book ...Read More

The National Book Foundation has announced that it will present George Saunders with the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL) at this year’s National Book Awards Ceremony on November 19, 2025. Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, will present the award.

The DCAL Medal was created in 1988 “to recognize a lifetime of literary achievement.” Prior recipients of genre interest include Ursula K. Le Guin, ...Read More

A Good Day for Writers Class Action Settlement Values Anthropic Theft at $3,000 per Stolen Work

We are happy to share with you more details from the class action lawsuit against Anthropic.

TL;DR: $3,000 per work stolen by Anthropic.

Here is a short summary of the motion to approve the class settlement (more detail here):

• Subject to court approval, the principal terms are: Anthropic will pay the Class at least $1.5 billion dollars, plus interest.
• With around 500,000 works in the Class, this amounts to an estimated gross recovery of $3,000 per Class Work.
• Anthropic will destroy the LibGen and PiLiMi datasets after the expiration of any litigation preservation or other court orders.

Note that the final list of works affected, which will differ substantially from the list on the Atlantic website, will not be finalized and released until early October. Divisions of each award between author and publisher may be subject to minor variation based on original contract terms. In the case of self-published work, and wherever rights have fully reverted to the author, some award details remain to be clarified.

This is the beginning of a long process.

There are more details provided here and here, and many more coming soon. We will keep you updated on what’s next.

For now, make sure you fill out the author and publisher settlement form, located here, and make sure SFWA has your correct preferred email and mailing address.

This is a great way to end the week – with an acknowledgement of our labor and the possibility of more to come.

Stay tuned, and keep writing!

Your SFWA Advocacy Team

Ongoing Issues to Be Addressed

While this week’s announcement comes as a promising first step towards accountability and the protection of authors’ work for many, SFWA recognizes the persistence of deep uncertainties around this decision, and what it has revealed about our publishing ecosystem.

As noted recently on Writer Beware®, even traditional publishers do not always register an author’s copyright (a key component of eligibility for this Class Action). Indie-published writers, writers whose works are part of complex multi-author texts, and writers who operate outside the US also face challenges when it comes to next steps extending from this first settlement.

There are other lawsuits against other AI companies, some of which are or may become class actions. There are also four potential class action lawsuits starting in Canada.

Authors excluded over technicalities in this first Class Action are welcome to start their own, building on the preliminary success of this initiative.

Lastly, the aforementioned Anthropic settlement has not yet been approved by the court. If enough authors opt out of its terms, it will be stopped automatically.

So what is the best course of action for an author who was pirated by Anthropic but not included in the class at this juncture? Talk to a lawyer about your options. If there is uncertainty about if your work(s) will qualify, fill out the above settlement form. And spread the word, to keep up the pressure on companies that have stolen from literary creators.

This decision is only the beginning of a long struggle to better protect our work.

Let’s keep the conversation going.

The post Press Release – September 6, 2025 appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

Readercon 34 was held July 17-20, 2025, in Burlington MA at the Boston Marriott Burlington. Guests of honor were authors Cecilia Tan and P. Djèlí Clark; Charles R. Saunders was the memorial guest of honor. Readercon 34 had a total of 653 registrations with 510 warm bodies on Friday, 610 on Saturday, and 585 on Sunday, compared to 2024’s 700 members and peak of 596 warm bodies. The focus of ...Read More

By Matt Finch

Introduction

What does travel through time and space reveal about the body?

This essay is an invitation to think about bodies moving through time in a work of contemporary literature. What is exposed about a body when it is displaced in time and space? The concept of the territorial body, developed from the pioneering work of Verónica Gago (2020), serves as a lens through which we can understand “the body of the individual person in the context of its entanglement with questions of territory, incorporating the complex multidirectional dynamics which arise between the individual body, the collective, and the various territories they inhabit” (Finch and Mahon, 2025, p.163). I also consider the temporal dimension of how “institutionally and culturally enforced rhythms, or timings, shape flesh into legible, acceptable embodiment” (Freeman, 2010, p.40). In this framing, the body is always the body in context and contexts, in turn, are changed by the bodies which populate them.

This lens is trained, here, on Kaliane Bradley’s 2024 novel The Ministry of Time. Bradley uses a science fiction conceit to bring together bodies from the territories of Britain’s past, present, and future. They populate a narrative which is at once a romance with sophisticated queer dynamics, a techno-thriller, an “odd couple” comedy of cultural misunderstanding, and a meditation on race and national identity in the era of climate crisis.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Hodder and Stoughton, 2024)

The novel also provides the perfect opportunity for us to move Gago’s concept beyond the limits of “real world” plausibility; as one of Bradley’s characters puts it, “we are interested in the actual feasibility of taking a human body through time. Our concern is if the process of time-travel has major implications for the expat or the expat’s surroundings.” (p.37). From Bradley’s science-fictional vantage points, distinct interrogations of the territorial body can be made.

The territorial body in time

Gago’s original notion of the body-territory is “a practical concept that demonstrates how the exploitation of common, community (urban, suburban, campesino, and Indigenous) territories involves violating the body of each person and the collective body through dispossession” (Gago and Mason-Deese, 2019, p. 206). Expanded into the idea of “territorial bodies” (Sinclair and Spear, 2025), it is a frame through which to understand the individual body in dialogue with the territory in which it finds itself: who we are is always who we are in a given context.

Yet neither bodies nor the territories they inhabit are frozen, unchanging; as I have argued argued elsewhere, “The territorial body is to be understood not solely in terms of the conditions which have made its existence possible, but the ways in which it continues to become, and its capacity to move beyond its current form.” (Finch and Mahon, 2025, p.174).

Here we are in the realm of what Freeman (2010) calls “chronobiopolitics”, the study of how temporal schemae discipline and inform both individual bodies and entire populations:

In a chronobiological society, the state and other institutions, including representational apparatuses, link proper temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change […] personal histories become legible only within a state-sponsored timeline (p.40-41).

Our births, deaths, marriages, and other life events acquire not just bureaucratic certification, but also their wider meaning within the polity. As Freeman notes, even in “zones not fully reducible to the state” such as psychiatry, medicine, and law, frameworks are in place through which lives become legible (p.41). This collision of place, power, time, and the individual resonates with the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s observation that “[h]ow time and place are related is an intricate problem that invites different approaches” (1977, p.179). We may spatialise time as a direction or destination, or consider spaces as processes with duration – from the growth, travel, and melting of a glacier to the ways in which a place like “New York City of the 1980s” is evanescent, time-locked, leaving us with only nostalgia, the desire “to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (Boym, 2001, p. xv). 

Fantastical genre works have allowed us to “visit time like space” in many ways, from the geographically contiguous timezones of Hoyle’s October the First Is Too Late (1966), Doctor Who‘s “The War Games” (1969), Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), the TV show Dark (2017), Leiber’s “Big Time” (1961), the temporal distortions of Priest’s Inverted World (1974), the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic (1977), or the parallel dimensions of Russ’ The Female Man (1975), where the same woman’s alternate selves prove to be entirely different territorial bodies in the Earth of each timeline.

In Bradley’s novel, we are invited to consider territorial bodies from across British history, plucked from their context, displaced to a near-future London, and subjected to the actions and scrutiny of the British state. Doing so creates a novel opportunity for a critique of Britishness, empire, and concepts of linear progress.

Bodies beyond

In The Ministry of Time, an unnamed British-Cambodian narrator moves from work as a translator with the Ministry of Defence to a new role as a “bridge,” supporting people brought from the past into the present via a new and secret device, the “time-door.” 

These white Britons – knowingly labelled “expats” rather than “refugees” – are taken at what the historical record says was their moment of death or disappearance. The aim is to observe how they acclimatise to the present, and whether time-travel has any unexpected adverse effects on either the traveller or the world around them. 

The project’s sinister leader, Adela, assigns the narrator to Royal Navy commander Graham Gore, a real-life Arctic explorer of the mid-nineteenth century whose entire expedition died after their ships were trapped by polar ice. As the novel’s intrigues proceed, contemporary events are interspersed with flashbacks to the expedition, Gore and the narrator fall in love, a conspiracy is revealed at the heart of the Ministry and actors from other timelines are drawn into a deadly conflict.

Through this plot, Bradley offers us a number of distinct territorial bodies drawn from across time and space, some by science fictional means, some by more conventional forms of displacement, but in every case revealing the “permeable boundary between the individual and the world they’d entered” (p.107).

First, there are the expats, often referred to by their year of abduction and therefore the historic territorial context from which they have been abstracted: Lieutenant Cardingham, taken from the 1645 Battle of Naseby; Margaret Kemble, from the Great Plague of 1665; Anne Spencer, extracted from the midst of the French Revolution in 1793; Arthur Reginald-Smyth, a Captain from 1916’s Battle of the Somme; and Gore himself, from 1847.

Displacement across time reconfigures each of the expats’ territorial bodies, creating fresh opportunities and threats as they find themselves anew in the context of a future era. They are laid low by the common cold, which has evolved since their time and proves a gruelling condition to shake – but the opportunities for personal change provide some consolation. Margaret, who had been left to die in a plague house, flourishes as a 21st century queer woman, enjoys dating apps, has a two-week stint as a Swiftie, and asks, “But would we not look well in thigh-boots and tabards broidered with FEMINIST KILLJOY?” (p.81). 

Arthur adapts swiftly to swing dancing, performs mash-ups of Jackson 5 covers with a traditional hornpipe, and his search history encompasses “‘macarena,’ ‘brewdog,’ ‘clubbing,’ ‘ballroom,’ ‘vogue,’ ‘vogue dance,’ ‘madonna,’ ‘poppers,’ ‘rimming'” (p.161). Meanwhile Cardingham, veteran of the English Civil War, is “mainly interested in Minecraft and sex workers” (p.116) and resents his decline in relative privilege: “Where Margaret had gained ineffable ground, he had lost it. He burned with the anger of a child whose toys have been tidied away.” (p.141).

The expats discover era-spanning commonalities as well as differences, including a rueful observation by the narrator on their beverage preferences:

[…T]hey were more inclined to cooperate if they were given nice tea with a china cup and saucer – even Sixteen forty-five and Sixteen sixty-five, who didn’t have the manufactured appetite for it. Embarrassing stuff, something for a Punch cartoon about Englishness, but it worked. (p.54)

Some of the expats embrace change, while others seek to reassert the norms of the times from which they came. In doing so, the continuity of certain values becomes evident; the British state of the near-future finds as much use for Cardingham’s chauvinist violence as the seventeenth century did, recruiting him as an agent.

Gore, as the narrator’s principal love interest, inevitably becomes the focus of this exploration. In his own time, the naval commander “doesn’t like to think overmuch about his body, in case it remembers him and begins to make demands” (p.68), but the exigencies of Arctic territory have already intruded on him and his crew. Far from Blighty, the power and range of sailors embodying a global empire is reduced to the “wooden world” of their ships as microcosms. The expedition’s leader, representing the delegated power of the Crown, dies in a “desperately unhaunted room […] His avuncular ghost has failed to manifest.” (p.31). Men begin to waste away on short rations, and scurvy strikes, leaving their teeth “loose in the head as a blown rose’s petals” (p.67) and reopening once-healed wounds: in Gore’s case, a hand injury from a gun accident incurred elsewhere in the empire.

As conditions grow yet worse, the territory itself comes to define Gore. On solitary hunting expeditions, he

becomes, along the hallowing earth, a moving point of muscle and sinew, quite clean of thoughts. If he sees a quarry, he does not re-enter his body […] If there was someone with him, he’d have to remember he was fully inhabited by Graham Gore. (p.101).

Thanks to his extraction via the time-door, Gore ends up the “only one who still had a body to touch, to hurt, to yearn with” (p.262). By comparison, his future “plush-lined life” (p.58) offers little privation. He, too, becomes an agent of the Ministry; the narrator tells us “he was, above all things, a charming man. In every century, they make themselves at home.” (p.213) The disorientations of Gore’s temporally displaced body are rather different to those of the Arctic: he is troubled into compulsive handwashing by his introduction to germ theory, is bemused to be accosted as a “DILF”, and soon is “practically a native of the era:”

He wore button-ups and was clean-shaven to his cheekbones. He had a preferred washing machine cycle. Most mornings he rose – hours before me – and went for a run. (p.72)

An added wrinkle develops when it is discovered that the time-displaced expats must actively concentrate on their “hereness” to remain anchored in the present day. Spencer, an Englishwoman who has been taken from Revolutionary Paris, becomes “invisible in recorded time to all things but the naked eye” (p.118). Gore subsequently proves undetectable to airport body scanners; it is not mechanical recognition which is required to anchor the expats, but human acknowledgment within the territory they inhabit.

The need of the time travellers to maintain such connection dramatises the tension of accommodating oneself to, and sustaining oneself as, a displaced territorial body. The narrator muses that this might “bring a new facet to identity politics: ‘What time are you?’ ‘Are you multi-temporal or stuck in a time warp?'” (p.118).

As their stay lengthens, the expats are invited to travel throughout the British mainland, because the authorities

needed to see the expats move through broader geographical space without atomising into the scenery (or the scenery atomising around them) to know for sure that the twenty-first century had accepted their presence. (p.107).

The other antidote to the hazards of time travel proves to be music.  A theremin obtained by Arthur – which not all of the expats can play with ease, because of their relative invisibility to machines – becomes one of the means by which the expats investigate their temporal “hereness” and “thereness” (p.169). (Gore uses it to play ‘Greensleeves,’ a tune which has endured long enough for them all to recognise).

The more sympathetic expats also come together in dance, both at Arthur’s Jackson 5 recital and at a dinner party where Margaret tells Gore, “You will instruct me in the polka, or I will step on your toes.” (p.124). Dance is, of course, an activity in which different bodies move together in time, here serving the process of synchronising bodies from different time-spaces, creating moments of togetherness and delight – even if a few toes get trodden on along the way.

Climate change and the territorial body

Even without the hazards of time travel, not all is materially well for bodies inhabiting the novel’s near-future London. Storms have grown so bad that local government delivers sandbags and prepares for flooding, while the media scrabble in the past for a stirring historic parallel to infuse Britons with resolve in the face of physical jeopardy: “Blitz spirit, the newspapers called this sort of thing, as if either climate catastrophe or the Blitz was a national holiday” (p.164). Gore’s newfound fondness for the bathtub, garnished with ice cubes, is also an escape from a “hellheight heatwave” (p.83), albeit an escape restricted by water rationing. Even as Margaret from 1665 marvels at the “miracle” of drinking taps, the narrator notes, “The UN reckon we’re three years away from the first large-scale water war.” (p.80). Significantly, the heatwaves “make time go utterly Dalí clocks”, leaving minds disoriented and bodies “poaching in [their] own sweat” (p.84). Under the light of a newly “acerbic” sun, the narrator “missed the shadows and the long English rains” (p.109). Every body becomes unmoored in time, and the homeland’s territory itself is rendered unfamiliar, as a result of environmental crisis.

Juxtaposed with the Arctic flashbacks, these visions reveal Bradley’s book as, among other things, a climate change novel. The Ministry of Time emphasizes that the territorial bodies which inhabit the nation-state will be transformed by climatic shifts. Bradley’s work can be taken as one possible response to Ghosh (2016)’s contention that the mainstream novel is incapable of coping with the radical and pervasive uncertainties of climate change, bound as it is by the imperatives of capitalism and empire. Bradley shows us that who we are arises from the dialogue our bodies have with the territory we inhabit – the physical climate but also the politics, economics, and culture of the day – and creates a novel of fractured, kaleidoscopic temporalities to undo conventional literary linearity. As the narrator herself notes in the novel’s opening:

Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time-travel, and I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it. (p.5)

This is more than just conceit. It is necessary for storytelling under the radical uncertainty of a shifting climate. There is resonance here with Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), which is also a novel about climate catastrophe and one which, through its afterword, reveals itself to also be in dialogue with Britain’s historic polar explorers, attracted at once by their heroism and repelled by their complicity with empire. (In Lessing, an entire planet’s culture and memory ends up decanted into a single survivor, the ultimate territorial body). Lessing and Bradley’s novels both, 42 years apart, can be seen as a dramatic puzzling-through of how we, as embodied beings in a given context, live with a colonial past, a fraught present, and the prospect of future instability.

Doris Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Knopf, 1982)

Mutual recognition between the displaced

To protagonise this puzzling-through, Bradley grants The Ministry of Time’s narrator a biracial identity. She is a trusted servant of the Crown, a second-generation migrant from a non-Commonwealth country providing linguistic support to the Ministry of Defence. 

Her family members have survived and thrived as immigrants precisely by making their new territorial bodies incontrovertibly manifest before the state, indulging a mania for documentation, garbing themselves in the paperwork of their new jurisdiction: “My family lived inside proof of ourselves like crabs in shells […] But no one was going to tell us what we weren’t entitled to or had failed to file.” She acknowledges that this “made me an excellent civil servant.” (p.71), and that she has taken every possible step “in my career […] towards becoming the monitor rather than the monitored.” (p.106).

These steps, however, only take one so far. Her ethnic inheritance goes overlooked by many, to whom “you look like one of the late-entering forms of white – Spanish maybe” (p.4), though when people learn of her heritage, they set their “eyes on that distant horizon where the genocide took place” (p.145) and make comments ranging from “Pol Pot Noodle jokes on first dates […to…] we loved Angkor Wat” (p.178).

This experience, alongside her work as a translator, allows the narrator to recognise the temporal expats as “internally displaced persons,“a bureaucratic term she had previously struggled to render into another language but which captures the interiority of migrant experience. She realises it applies to the time-travellers as well as her own mother, who had fled Cambodia, and perhaps even to herself: “a person whose interiority was at odds with their exteriority, who was internally (in themselves) displaced.” (p.26).

Yet the experience of being at odds with one’s exterior self also allows moments of unanticipated and oblique connection. Much to the narrator’s surprise, Gore defies expectation and sympathetically identifies her as “not […] wholly an Englishwoman”:

‘Well done,’ I said, as neutrally as I could. ‘What gave it away? The shape of my eyes?’

‘The colour of your mouth.’

The ice hit the bottom of my glass with a frigid knock. I’d never heard that one before. (p.51)

Gore’s unexpected ability to recognise and respect the narrator’s difference comes, in turn, from a tragic encounter during his imperial career, brought on by the hypnotic effect of the Arctic territory. During a hunting expedition, half-starved, out of water, Gore mistakes an Inuit man for animal prey, shoots and kills him. The dead man’s wife demands to see Gore, and it is this moment of contact, “a look that puts him against the horizon” and which “will linger on his body”, in which he notices that her “mouth is very beautiful, a colour that Gore will remember and try to name for a long time afterwards” (p.179-80), that underpins the intimate bridge Gore will be able to construct with the narrator beyond the horizon of 1847. 

These characters are afforded new opportunities to see and be seen precisely through their displacement in time and space as territorial bodies: embodied beings awkwardly and incompletely disentangled from one context only to be enmeshed, equally messily, in another. Both Gore and the narrator accept this mess and find what is good in it.  

The sincerity of Gore’s impulse to explore – including self-critical reflection on whether he truly behaved with compassion towards African slaves he rescued with the Preventative Squadron – makes him capable of transcending the time and space of his origin. This is mirrored by the narrator’s own flexibility and curiosity, recognising that the novel’s near-future setting “was the natural evolution of [Gore’s] England. I was the natural evolution. I was his lens if only he would raise me and look with me.” (p.107). The narrator sees the common ground easily, and frames it in terms of territorial bodies:

It was not unusual for me to look at my face and think What on earth is that? It bored me not to look the same as whoever I was with – isn’t that the whole point of being mixed-race? Oh England, England! The thing you do best is to tell a story about yourself. Graham Gore went to the Arctic believing that a noble death is possible because of all those stories and then he became a story. Oh England, you wanted to make stories out of me. (p.176)

As befits a narrator who is a former translator, connection comes through talk as much as touch, the ability to name and recognise a body, reminding us that “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.” (Barthes, 1978, p.73).  She explicitly builds out the territory within which she wants to be understood: “Every time I told Graham something – about myself, about my family, about my experience of the world we shared – I was trying to occupy space in his head. I had ideas for the shape I should take in his imagination.” (p.176)

Throughout their journey to becoming lovers, their bodies affect one another no less powerfully than a jaunt through time – “the erotic charge of his bare forearms was giving me a headache” (p.108) the narrator tells us; Gore stutters over “your-your-funny little mouth” (p.174) which had initially given away her nonwhiteness to him; and the lovers even come to experience one another spatially (“He filled the room like a horizon”, p.108). This moves from idealization to a full recognition of the other’s embodiedness: “I was struck by the starkness of his crow’s feet. It unnerved me to see how human a body he inhabited.” (p.190).

Ultimately, the characters’ capacity to see and desire one another creates new possibilities for them as territorial bodies. In both, their sexuality incorporates elements of queerness. The narrator is fully beguiled by Margaret, finding even her pimples sexy and describing her physical beauty in woozy detail;  at one point after merely regarding her, the narrator becomes “confused” (p.152) and rushes off. Meanwhile, Gore alludes to same-sex experiences on his naval expeditions, and cultivates a friendly intimacy with Arthur, who is clearly attracted to him, although it is left ambiguous whether Gore just has the nature of “an explorer whose life had required flexibility and forbearance” (p.141). More directly, Arthur says, “You can’t imagine what it was like to be a man of – of my persuasion, in my time. Now it seems I’ve got another go of it in an era that suits me better.” (p.209).

This is apt to the concerns of Bradley’s novel and the present paper: time-displaced territorial bodies are also desiring and desired, and as Muñoz (2009) argued, queerness is always imbricated with questions of other times, being, “a mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (p.1) – precisely what happens to expats extracted from their own historic quagmires and flung into a new juxtaposition.

Collapsing fantasies of narrative control

Not only do the expats explore possibilities of desire and identity unavailable in their own time, but in Bradley’s novel, time travel itself is queered, in the sense put forward by Halberstam (2011): a failure to achieve instrumentalised goals, a deviation from the straight and narrow. The machine itself is a “door” which operates according to a bizarre logic, capable of only sustaining a certain number of time-displaced bodies at a given moment – and when an attempt is made to destroy it, it turns out that it cannot even be straightforwardly made to cease to function. It is a shift from the mechanical post-Wellsian model of time travel to something like the “arbitrariness of temporal pretexts” (Roberts, 2014, p.40) seen in older fantastic tales.

Further visions of the territorial body emerge when it is revealed that travellers from the future are also part of the plot. Impersonating present-day observers from the Ministry of Defence, the Brigadier and his compatriot Salese are agents from the 2200s, the era in which the time-door was created. In that time, a global conflict rages between a bloc incorporating the US, Brazil, and UK versus the “Tiger Territories”, an Asian alliance. The atmosphere is full of toxic waste from chemical weapons tests and London is no more. The time-door, an invention of their era, was built to fix the climate crisis through targeted assassinations of key figures, including those who “invested in weapons and manufacturing that were not what you probably still call ‘carbon neutral'” (p.300). However, these desperate, inventive, yet ill-resourced people are unable to rightly emulate the era to which they have travelled.

As a territorial body of the early 21st century, the Brigadier is a clumsy impersonation who refers to the BBC as “Auntie” and counter-terrorism police as “Special Branch”, and speaks with “an exquisite broadcaster plum I thought had died out in the seventies.” (p.58). His body marked by the privations of a desperate future, he turns “the white of used candlewax” (p.82) when he sees a generous tray of food. He and Salese have a “disturbingly makeshift” (p.118) vibe to them, but a keen understanding of how bodies experience pathology when displaced from their familiar context: “Oh, it’s not the century, it’s the soul […] Her ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ have no consistency, no continency, and she is beginning to slip out of time.” (p.117).

Ultimately, the project director Adela is revealed to also be a time-displaced figure, an alternate version of the narrator from the 2040s, her body made strange by the transfer to a new time and place. Her face is “pinched and hungry, and hauntingly as if her skin was held in place by a bulldog clip at the back of her skull” (p.75), the result of surgeries to address the side-effects of time travel.

Significantly, the main difference in Adela’s timeline and the narrator’s is the atrocity with which each of them motivates Gore to become a field agent of the Ministry. The narrator talks of Auschwitz, leading to Gore descending a bleak Google rabbithole. Adela had shared 9/11, stirring a fierce Islamophobic patriotism which makes Gore an unquestioning instrument of the future British state.

As the one who administers the time travel project on behalf of the state, Adela embodies what Roberts (2014) considers time travel as a fantasy of narrative control, noting that the time machine

makes dirigible something that had, hitherto, been imagined as beyond our capacity to control or steer. Dreams and magic happen to us, inflicting upon us a Scrooge-like passivity. Memory plagues us, or grants us wistful pleasure, but we can do nothing about the event that memory recalls. A time machine, on the other hand, is something we can control. (p.40).

“I had to make sure all this happened the right way” (p.301), Adela says of the events within which she is enmeshed, thinking not only of the state to which she has pledged her career, but her relationship with Gore, who commands the Ministry in her timeline and with whom she will have a son. She personifies Freeman’s contention that chronobiopolitics encompasses the individual lifetime as well as national history. As Adela fights to preserve the version of time she sees as “right”, events become increasingly bloody, ultimately costing the lives of several expats, the far-future agents, and others.

Rather than diverging timelines, the temporal intrigues of Bradley’s novel resemble a “thick present” (Sandford 2023), in which the dynamic here-and-now is always entangled with anticipation and remembrance. Seen in this light,

The future is always an aspect of the present. The future has not “taken place,” but the present always “holds” the future, and holds it as potential. Indeed, the future is never “later,” is it always (experienced, imagined) “now.” (Ramírez and Wilkinson, 2014, p.59).

Under such circumstances, time, far from being linear, is a messy, complex, endless immediacy. Time travel narratives thus become less about which “train track” of history we are riding, or the steering of destiny towards the “correct” trajectory, but rather about how we might shape the wet and ever-spinning clay of time itself.

As Adela says, history is merely “a narrative agreement about what has happened, and what is happening” (p.91) – here at the service of the interests of the British state. The past is tended to as “the familiar and collective legacy from which a group will draw a properly political future – be it national, ethnic, or something else.” (Freeman, 2010, p.41). Bradley’s narrator wryly confesses that this helps her to understand better “why the British history curriculum looks the way that it does.” (p.54). 

Bradley’s novel shows us that the British establishment has, at best, been reskinned with a new, superficially more respectful attitude, including a “Wellness team” and offices in contemporary decor which consist of “interminable rooms: pebble-coloured with lights embedded in the ceiling, modular in a way that suggested opening a door would lead to another identical space, and then another, and then another” (p.7). 

Such rooms imply an endlessness to contemporary British bureaucracy and its authority across time and space – although the chamber used to initially hand over the expats to the care of their bridges offers continuity to the past through its “air of antique ceremony: wood panels, oil paintings, high ceiling. It had rather more éclat than the modular rooms […] the room had probably remained unchanged since the nineteenth century.” (p.8)

This institutional design and control extends from decor to the realm of language. Post-imperial power saves its pomp for special occasions, but more fully permeates personal lives than ever before and even insists upon framing the narratives of those it has marginalized. At one point, the narrator and a Black British bridge, Simellia, are required to give pre-written presentations,

so didactic as to be oppressive. They made me read a lecture on multiculturalism, the bastards, leaving blanks for insert own experience here. I gave it in a monotone without lifting my eyes from the page then drank 250ml of white wine at a quaff; Simellia gently clinked her full glass against my empty, her jaw set (she’d been asked to deliver a lecture on post-war migration from former colonies and the Windrush generation). Control’s lectures were nakedly about getting the narrative right. (p.109).

This superficially less grandiose authority is no less rapacious, totalising, or cruel than any empire of the past. The bridges are repeatedly reminded that the ultimate purpose of the time travel project is above their pay grades; they are mere components of a wider apparatus, the Ministry itself, in service of a national hierarchy. 

To what ends are this apparatus and its unusual capabilities directed? The answer appears to be extraction, exploitation, and harm. Britain’s time-door turns out to be plunder from the distant future, rather than the result of ingenuity. That future, Britain’s own, is murderous and vengeful. Our own protagonist is forced to confront a future self who is morally and physically deformed by her choices. Both versions recognise the need to turn away from the path Adela embodies; “I’ve been a company woman all my life and look where it’s got me,” (p.304) says the older woman ruefully. 

At the novel’s climax, the narrator is held hostage by Simellia, who is revealed to be working with the far-future agents. Our protagonist manages to turn the tables, damaging the time-door in a way which dispels the far-future threat, condemning the Brigadier to a grisly cosmic fate. Her efforts in turn affect Adela, who is no longer guaranteed to come about in the narrator’s timeline and ends up on an autopsy table: “[I]t looked like she exploded, but in reverse, and with light instead of viscera.” (p.324). 

The narrator escapes the debacle of the novel’s denouement as a kind of bitter final gift; Simellia is blamed for the vandalism of the machine, and the narrator is let free on the basis that to do otherwise may damage the fragile timestream, as her fate is entwined with Adela’s. Gore, feeling betrayed by the narrator and Adela both, flees with Margaret, the other surviving expat. 

After much time has passed, the narrator receives a photograph of distinctive Alaskan spruces, a glimpse of what is likely Margaret’s arm in shot, and a handwritten, partly crossed-out message: “Of course I loved you.” (p.329). (It’s piquant and pertinent, in a tale of temporal displacement and uncertainties, that the crossing-out changes the tense of the verb). In the final pages of the book, after reflecting on this photograph, the narrator declares that she is planning to take a trip.

The hopeful, unresolved note on which the novel concludes reminds us that “time can produce new social relations and even new forms of justice” (Freeman, 2010, p.48). Three figures, displaced, paradoxical, have the chance to cultivate intimacy and affection which go beyond convention. Yet this is also the British past living on, beyond the moment at which the time-door, now damaged, should even be capable of sustaining the expats’ territorial bodies.

As Freeman has it, 

I thought the point of queer was to be always ahead of actually existing social possibilities […] Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless. (2010, p.13).

With the expats having become historical detritus and the Ministry of Time’s post-imperial project deemed a failure, new opportunities arrive at the “tail end of things.” The question of how the narrator, Gore, and Margaret will align, if they are fortunate enough to meet again, returns us to the matter of the novel’s queerness – with the narrator having expressed desire for both Gore and Margaret. One reading allows for a heterosexual pairing to lie beyond the novel’s final page, with Gore and the narrator pledged to one another in a conventional “happy ending.” Yet we have already seen what happens in the future where Adela and Gore pursued heteronormativity, monogamy, parenthood. Perhaps, Bradley’s novel quietly whispers in its final pages, something different will happen in the new timeline. 

After all, once conventional temporality has been disrupted, “a hiccup in sequential time has the capacity to connect a group of people beyond monogamous, enduring couplehood” (Freeman, 2010, p.39).

Memories of the future, memories of empire

The narrator, making a different choice to her alternate self Adela, finds hope in her situation. This takes the form of a possible flight – to Alaska, where it appears, at the novel’s conclusion, that Gore and Margaret have fled.

Their freedom is not complete, requiring as it does a visit to yet another colonised territory. Bradley’s open-ended conclusion reminds us that there is nowhere outside the system of historical responsibility, even if diagonal moves can create new possibilities – just as Gore and the narrator were able to find love and mutual recognition as an oblique byproduct of the Ministry’s machinations.

It’s a usefully ambiguous final note to a book which is at once a sophisticated and unflinching interrogation of contemporary British identity and one which sits comfortably as a transatlantic bestseller, acclaimed by the culture it critiques. Yet, as Freeman notes, artworks may usefully “collect and remobilize archaic or futuristic debris as signs that things have been and could be otherwise. That capitalism can always reappropriate this form of time is no reason to end with despair” (2010, p.18). Bradley doesn’t shy away from the fraught, complex, compromised question of the narrator’s loyalties – to Gore, to her family, to her heritage, to Britain – or, indeed, those of her novel.

At the climactic gunpoint confrontation, the far-future agents’ co-conspirator, the Black British bridge Simellia, justifies her action in terms of the bodies from the “wrong” territories who did not merit rescue in the cruelties of the climate crisis:

“Two hundred years from now. It’s finished. South America’s mostly gone, except Brazil and its satellites. Half of Britain’s underwater. Europe dropped bombs on any ship in the Mediterranean coming from North Africa. No refugees. They died there or they turned back and died of disease and starvation and the heat. Billions died, billions.[“] (p.310)

The far-future ocean is once more the place of historic racialised migratory trauma recognised by contemporary critics like Sharpe (2016); when the narrator questions the veracity of this far-future account, Simellia is only sad: “How hard did you try to be a white girl that you’re asking me whether racism exists?” (p.310). Her understanding of the narrator’s romance with Gore is even less charitable:

“You let him off the hook again and again. I watched you. He came up through the Empire. He believed in it. And you did too. I read your file. The things that happened to your family. That’s why you joined up. Getting behind the biggest bully in the playground.” (p.311)

Bradley rejects easy answers, does not give the narrator any privileged retort. The sourest version of the thick present is on display: “The war won’t stop […] History will repeat itself, literally. The door means we just keep going back and forth, back and forth, again and again and again – ” (p.314). So far as the narrator has an answer, it is her attempted, abortive destruction of the time-door. 

The novel thus refuses pat solutions, offering instead new iterations of the ambiguity under which all of us make decisions on our way to an uncertain future. Time-crossed lovers do not come to rest in each others’ arms, do not even guarantee to coincide again. There is only hope in the possibility of intersecting once more, outside of the confines of the time-travel project, and perhaps in a new configuration.

Conclusion: where next for the time-lost body?

Bradley’s novel leaves us on a path of ascent, however challenging, out of the lingering imperial mire. It uses the collision of past and future to open up ways of rethinking gendered and racialised bodies and minds.

This is important well beyond the field of science fiction criticism. In times of uncertainty, what we can imagine ahead of us matters. As Valenzuela and Lezaun have shown, visions such as “net zero” mobilise “active contestation not only over competing imaginaries of the future, but over what imagining a plausible climate future should mean in practice” (2024).

In the wake of the United Nations’ 2024 Pact for the Future, various governments are exploring legislation which obliges officials to take account of the needs of future generations. On the one hand, “there are reasons to anticipate real disruption in our current patterns of life, as we continue to see changes in the deep planetary systems on which life and society depend” (Sandford, 2023), what some commentators have called “the great unravelling” (Miller and Heinberg, 2023), and it is wise to act in anticipation. Yet it is very difficult to know what future generations will want or need or value, as they do not yet exist. It is hard to believe that civil servants tasked with such duties will avoid capture by whatever “officially plausible future” is designated by the powers that be (Finch, 2025). Part of what The Ministry of Time does is to remind us that what was considered a desirable future in the past – especially by those in power – might be quite different from what arrived, and that we may sometimes be grateful for this difference.

As the narrator puts it at the novel’s conclusion, revealing the book to be addressed to her past self:

I know how much you’ve longed for your future to lean down and cup your face, to whisper ‘don’t worry, it gets better‘. The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better. (p.331)

She discourages her past self against “believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that.” (p.331). The narrator finally breaks with her lifelong attempt to keep safe by aligning her territorial body fully with the service of the state which welcomed her family from Cambodia. She steps away from imperial loyalty, and new possibilities open up by virtue of this, including two which are most vital:

Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel. (p.331)

Simple truths, perhaps, but a simple truth is still a truth, and sometimes just the right tool to cut through all that is fraught, tangled, turbulent, and enmeshed with historical power. Bradley’s novel lays aside the stabilising comfort of “official” futures by demonstrating the nation-state’s continuity with its rapacious forebears. It proposes radical, oblique alternatives which do not erase the past but put diverse territorial bodies into new relations.

Freeman’s chronobiopolitics reminds us that “social change can be felt as well as cognitively apprehended” (2010, p.48) – and communicated through aesthetic forms. As a contribution to wider discussions of temporality and power, The Ministry of Time may help a broader public think differently about the future – showing how we can play with temporality in popular forms to think Britishness anew and think beyond Britishness, or national identity more generally.

Bradley, bringing to life a real-world Arctic explorer, fulfills Freeman’s “desire to enliven the dead and the understanding that this is never wholly possible” (2010, p.53). In doing so, she refuses jingoistic evocations of the imperial past – but allows for the possibility that this past might yet nourish something good in times to come. Her novel realises the “ethics of responsibility toward the other across time – toward the dead or toward that which was impossible in a given historical moment, each understood as calls for a different future to which we cannot but answer with imperfect and incomplete reparations” (Freeman, 2010, p.48). Bradley lets Gore, and the other, fictional, expats, and by extension, British territorial bodies more generally, move beyond the constraints of the past without effacing them.

A lot to ask of a bestselling science fiction romance? Perhaps not. We live in a time of broad science fiction literacy, when fantasies of time travel in popular culture have evolved beyond Wells’ mechanistic vision or even the period when Doc Brown had to carefully exposit parallel timelines with a chalkboard in Back to the Future II (1989).

In this, popular culture may be catching up with scholars of temporality, for whom a linear representation of time is only one framing, not always the most useful or even the most plausible; as Ramírez and Selin (2014) put it, with tongue in cheek, “For all we know in some situations the future is tetrahedral and in others it takes the form of a teddy bear.”

If we trade linear temporalities for the “thick present”, surrendering the separation of past and future, our actions may become a matter of “staying with the trouble” in Haraway’s sense: “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” (2016, p.1).

The viability of making this link via Bradley’s novel is evident in a flashback to the narrator’s childhood, almost perfectly aligned with Haraway’s notion:

When I was eight years old, I developed a keen awareness of the non-human world. Mai, Daddy, Sister, Home, School, Teacher, Bath, Plate, Chair, Crayon, Dress – these were not, as I had thought, the building blocks of the universe, but discrete entities in a world we shared with worms, mice, sparrows, woodlice, squirrels, moths, pigeons, cats, spiders. I had a wretched sense of fighting for space. They were everywhere, the non-human. They came from under things and out of shadows, they were higher than I could see in trees and deeper than I could penetrate in the soil […] A great, awful busyness was flourishing all around me. (p.142).

However fearfully, the narrator’s childhood self has recognised something which, in adulthood, she sought to suppress by accepting the authority of the state: our mutual critterhood in a thick present without hierarchy.

This lack of clear and hierarchical temporal logic is something which popular science fiction and its audiences are increasingly comfortable with. Cinema and television can now show us “everything everywhere all at once” (Kwan and Scheinert, 2023). In recent years, the big and small screen have given us temporalities that are “wibbly wobbly timey wimey” (“Blink”, Doctor Who, BBC, 2007) or whose trajectories resemble the arbitrary handwritten phrase “Jeremy Bearimy” (The Good Place, Fremulon, 2018), plus teen time travel movies which refuse unambiguous linear happy endings, surfacing the unspoken racial assumptions of Back to the Future and its ilk (See You Yesterday, 2019). In prose, we have El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s best-selling queer romance about rival agents interfering with time (2019), and Newitz (2019)’s depiction of time-travel interventions resembling a Wikipedia edit war between feminist “Daughters of Harriet” and incel-like male oppressors. 

In this context, Bradley’s novel is not alone in reminding us: if the past, present, and future are no longer authoritatively singular, they may be retold and reshaped more widely and more wildly – not only by malign and oppressive forces, but also by those who seek to liberate territorial bodies wherever and whenever they are found.

Newitz’s work, with its right-wing American Men’s Rights Activist villains, is particularly resonant here in an era when some political forces seek to “rewrite the history of racial justice in the United States while eliminating the institutions that make visible its historical roots” (Giroux, 2020). In its antipatriarchal, queer, and antiracist stance, a punkier and more abrasive cousin to Bradley’s, Newitz’s book reminds us that the move towards a more diverse and disparate set of time-travel mechanics is also an opportunity for “decolonization” of the future (Ramírez and Wilkinson, 2014, p.47; Inayatullah, 1998), in the sense of shifting who speaks, who is heeded, and who is represented on its terrain.1

Time travel in science fiction has, itself, a history and prehistory, a present, and presumably a future. It has the potential for new and emergent ideas of temporality – scientific, poetic, popular, expert – to succeed those currently held by researchers, philosophers, artists, authors, critics, and the general public of the day.

An earlier era of time travel narrative experienced “fits and starts of […] types of fictional and scientific thinking” (Wittenberg, 2016, p.48), only some of which would lead on to the dominant paradigm of modernist time travel narratives. Perhaps Bradley’s novel will also, in times to come, show itself to be one of the works that opened the door onto a new era of popular time travel fiction. This new era is one which, however fraught, creates new opportunities for us to face up to the uncertainties around us, and within those uncertainties to rethink identity and temporality, just as Gore and the narrator find hope and promise beyond the limits of their novel’s final page, as eternally displaced persons.

REFERENCES

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El-Mohtar, A., & Gladstone, M. (2019). This is how you lose the time war. Saga Press.

Finch, M. (2025). Looking beyond the ghost scenario. Issues in science and technology, XLI (3). 

Finch, M. and Mahon, M. (2025). The ghosts we see from the mountains: scenario planning and the territorial body in time. In M. Sinclair and C. Spear (Eds.) Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production (pp. 162-180). Routledge.

Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Duke University Press.

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Gago, V. and Mason-Deese, L. (2019). Rethinking situated knowledge from the perspective of Argentina’s feminist strike. Journal of Latin American Geography, 18(3).

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Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press.

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Inayatullah, S. (1998). Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method. Futures, 30 (8).

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Miller, A. and Heinberg, R. (2023). Welcome to the great unravelling: Navigating the polycrisis of environmental and social breakdown. Post Carbon Institute.

Moffat, S. (Writer), and Macdonald, H. (Director). (2007, June 9). Blink (Season 3, Episode 10) [TV series episode]. In R. T. Davies (Executive Producer), Doctor Who. BBC Studios.

Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. New York University Press.

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Priest, C. (1974). Inverted world. Faber and Faber.

Ramírez, R., & Selin, C. (2014). Plausibility and probability in scenario planning. Foresight, 16(1).

Ramírez, R. and Wilkinson, A. (2014). Strategic reframing: The Oxford scenario planning approach. Oxford University Press.

Roberts, A. (2014). A brief history of time-travel. In Bell, J. (ed.) Sci-fi: Days of fear and wonder. (pp. 40-44). BFI.

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Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: on blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Sinclair, M., & Spear, C. (2025). Introduction: Territorial Bodies in Crisis. In Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production (pp.162-180).

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1.  Note, however, the caveat of Tuck and Yang (2012): “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies […] As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. […] The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” 
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Matt Finch, a writer and researcher, is an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and an Associate of the SexTechLab at the New School for Social Research. See more at mechanicaldolphin.com

By Matt Finch

Introduction

What does travel through time and space reveal about the body?

This essay is an invitation to think about bodies moving through time in a work of contemporary literature. What is exposed about a body when it is displaced in time and space? The concept of the territorial body, developed from the pioneering work of Verónica Gago (2020), serves as a lens through which we can understand “the body of the individual person in the context of its entanglement with questions of territory, incorporating the complex multidirectional dynamics which arise between the individual body, the collective, and the various territories they inhabit” (Finch and Mahon, 2025, p.163). I also consider the temporal dimension of how “institutionally and culturally enforced rhythms, or timings, shape flesh into legible, acceptable embodiment” (Freeman, 2010, p.40). In this framing, the body is always the body in context and contexts, in turn, are changed by the bodies which populate them.

This lens is trained, here, on Kaliane Bradley’s 2024 novel The Ministry of Time. Bradley uses a science fiction conceit to bring together bodies from the territories of Britain’s past, present, and future. They populate a narrative which is at once a romance with sophisticated queer dynamics, a techno-thriller, an “odd couple” comedy of cultural misunderstanding, and a meditation on race and national identity in the era of climate crisis.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Hodder and Stoughton, 2024)

The novel also provides the perfect opportunity for us to move Gago’s concept beyond the limits of “real world” plausibility; as one of Bradley’s characters puts it, “we are interested in the actual feasibility of taking a human body through time. Our concern is if the process of time-travel has major implications for the expat or the expat’s surroundings.” (p.37). From Bradley’s science-fictional vantage points, distinct interrogations of the territorial body can be made.

The territorial body in time

Gago’s original notion of the body-territory is “a practical concept that demonstrates how the exploitation of common, community (urban, suburban, campesino, and Indigenous) territories involves violating the body of each person and the collective body through dispossession” (Gago and Mason-Deese, 2019, p. 206). Expanded into the idea of “territorial bodies” (Sinclair and Spear, 2025), it is a frame through which to understand the individual body in dialogue with the territory in which it finds itself: who we are is always who we are in a given context.

Yet neither bodies nor the territories they inhabit are frozen, unchanging; as I have argued argued elsewhere, “The territorial body is to be understood not solely in terms of the conditions which have made its existence possible, but the ways in which it continues to become, and its capacity to move beyond its current form.” (Finch and Mahon, 2025, p.174).

Here we are in the realm of what Freeman (2010) calls “chronobiopolitics”, the study of how temporal schemae discipline and inform both individual bodies and entire populations:

In a chronobiological society, the state and other institutions, including representational apparatuses, link proper temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change […] personal histories become legible only within a state-sponsored timeline (p.40-41).

Our births, deaths, marriages, and other life events acquire not just bureaucratic certification, but also their wider meaning within the polity. As Freeman notes, even in “zones not fully reducible to the state” such as psychiatry, medicine, and law, frameworks are in place through which lives become legible (p.41). This collision of place, power, time, and the individual resonates with the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s observation that “[h]ow time and place are related is an intricate problem that invites different approaches” (1977, p.179). We may spatialise time as a direction or destination, or consider spaces as processes with duration – from the growth, travel, and melting of a glacier to the ways in which a place like “New York City of the 1980s” is evanescent, time-locked, leaving us with only nostalgia, the desire “to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (Boym, 2001, p. xv). 

Fantastical genre works have allowed us to “visit time like space” in many ways, from the geographically contiguous timezones of Hoyle’s October the First Is Too Late (1966), Doctor Who‘s “The War Games” (1969), Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), the TV show Dark (2017), Leiber’s “Big Time” (1961), the temporal distortions of Priest’s Inverted World (1974), the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic (1977), or the parallel dimensions of Russ’ The Female Man (1975), where the same woman’s alternate selves prove to be entirely different territorial bodies in the Earth of each timeline.

In Bradley’s novel, we are invited to consider territorial bodies from across British history, plucked from their context, displaced to a near-future London, and subjected to the actions and scrutiny of the British state. Doing so creates a novel opportunity for a critique of Britishness, empire, and concepts of linear progress.

Bodies beyond

In The Ministry of Time, an unnamed British-Cambodian narrator moves from work as a translator with the Ministry of Defence to a new role as a “bridge,” supporting people brought from the past into the present via a new and secret device, the “time-door.” 

These white Britons – knowingly labelled “expats” rather than “refugees” – are taken at what the historical record says was their moment of death or disappearance. The aim is to observe how they acclimatise to the present, and whether time-travel has any unexpected adverse effects on either the traveller or the world around them. 

The project’s sinister leader, Adela, assigns the narrator to Royal Navy commander Graham Gore, a real-life Arctic explorer of the mid-nineteenth century whose entire expedition died after their ships were trapped by polar ice. As the novel’s intrigues proceed, contemporary events are interspersed with flashbacks to the expedition, Gore and the narrator fall in love, a conspiracy is revealed at the heart of the Ministry and actors from other timelines are drawn into a deadly conflict.

Through this plot, Bradley offers us a number of distinct territorial bodies drawn from across time and space, some by science fictional means, some by more conventional forms of displacement, but in every case revealing the “permeable boundary between the individual and the world they’d entered” (p.107).

First, there are the expats, often referred to by their year of abduction and therefore the historic territorial context from which they have been abstracted: Lieutenant Cardingham, taken from the 1645 Battle of Naseby; Margaret Kemble, from the Great Plague of 1665; Anne Spencer, extracted from the midst of the French Revolution in 1793; Arthur Reginald-Smyth, a Captain from 1916’s Battle of the Somme; and Gore himself, from 1847.

Displacement across time reconfigures each of the expats’ territorial bodies, creating fresh opportunities and threats as they find themselves anew in the context of a future era. They are laid low by the common cold, which has evolved since their time and proves a gruelling condition to shake – but the opportunities for personal change provide some consolation. Margaret, who had been left to die in a plague house, flourishes as a 21st century queer woman, enjoys dating apps, has a two-week stint as a Swiftie, and asks, “But would we not look well in thigh-boots and tabards broidered with FEMINIST KILLJOY?” (p.81). 

Arthur adapts swiftly to swing dancing, performs mash-ups of Jackson 5 covers with a traditional hornpipe, and his search history encompasses “‘macarena,’ ‘brewdog,’ ‘clubbing,’ ‘ballroom,’ ‘vogue,’ ‘vogue dance,’ ‘madonna,’ ‘poppers,’ ‘rimming'” (p.161). Meanwhile Cardingham, veteran of the English Civil War, is “mainly interested in Minecraft and sex workers” (p.116) and resents his decline in relative privilege: “Where Margaret had gained ineffable ground, he had lost it. He burned with the anger of a child whose toys have been tidied away.” (p.141).

The expats discover era-spanning commonalities as well as differences, including a rueful observation by the narrator on their beverage preferences:

[…T]hey were more inclined to cooperate if they were given nice tea with a china cup and saucer – even Sixteen forty-five and Sixteen sixty-five, who didn’t have the manufactured appetite for it. Embarrassing stuff, something for a Punch cartoon about Englishness, but it worked. (p.54)

Some of the expats embrace change, while others seek to reassert the norms of the times from which they came. In doing so, the continuity of certain values becomes evident; the British state of the near-future finds as much use for Cardingham’s chauvinist violence as the seventeenth century did, recruiting him as an agent.

Gore, as the narrator’s principal love interest, inevitably becomes the focus of this exploration. In his own time, the naval commander “doesn’t like to think overmuch about his body, in case it remembers him and begins to make demands” (p.68), but the exigencies of Arctic territory have already intruded on him and his crew. Far from Blighty, the power and range of sailors embodying a global empire is reduced to the “wooden world” of their ships as microcosms. The expedition’s leader, representing the delegated power of the Crown, dies in a “desperately unhaunted room […] His avuncular ghost has failed to manifest.” (p.31). Men begin to waste away on short rations, and scurvy strikes, leaving their teeth “loose in the head as a blown rose’s petals” (p.67) and reopening once-healed wounds: in Gore’s case, a hand injury from a gun accident incurred elsewhere in the empire.

As conditions grow yet worse, the territory itself comes to define Gore. On solitary hunting expeditions, he

becomes, along the hallowing earth, a moving point of muscle and sinew, quite clean of thoughts. If he sees a quarry, he does not re-enter his body […] If there was someone with him, he’d have to remember he was fully inhabited by Graham Gore. (p.101).

Thanks to his extraction via the time-door, Gore ends up the “only one who still had a body to touch, to hurt, to yearn with” (p.262). By comparison, his future “plush-lined life” (p.58) offers little privation. He, too, becomes an agent of the Ministry; the narrator tells us “he was, above all things, a charming man. In every century, they make themselves at home.” (p.213) The disorientations of Gore’s temporally displaced body are rather different to those of the Arctic: he is troubled into compulsive handwashing by his introduction to germ theory, is bemused to be accosted as a “DILF”, and soon is “practically a native of the era:”

He wore button-ups and was clean-shaven to his cheekbones. He had a preferred washing machine cycle. Most mornings he rose – hours before me – and went for a run. (p.72)

An added wrinkle develops when it is discovered that the time-displaced expats must actively concentrate on their “hereness” to remain anchored in the present day. Spencer, an Englishwoman who has been taken from Revolutionary Paris, becomes “invisible in recorded time to all things but the naked eye” (p.118). Gore subsequently proves undetectable to airport body scanners; it is not mechanical recognition which is required to anchor the expats, but human acknowledgment within the territory they inhabit.

The need of the time travellers to maintain such connection dramatises the tension of accommodating oneself to, and sustaining oneself as, a displaced territorial body. The narrator muses that this might “bring a new facet to identity politics: ‘What time are you?’ ‘Are you multi-temporal or stuck in a time warp?'” (p.118).

As their stay lengthens, the expats are invited to travel throughout the British mainland, because the authorities

needed to see the expats move through broader geographical space without atomising into the scenery (or the scenery atomising around them) to know for sure that the twenty-first century had accepted their presence. (p.107).

The other antidote to the hazards of time travel proves to be music.  A theremin obtained by Arthur – which not all of the expats can play with ease, because of their relative invisibility to machines – becomes one of the means by which the expats investigate their temporal “hereness” and “thereness” (p.169). (Gore uses it to play ‘Greensleeves,’ a tune which has endured long enough for them all to recognise).

The more sympathetic expats also come together in dance, both at Arthur’s Jackson 5 recital and at a dinner party where Margaret tells Gore, “You will instruct me in the polka, or I will step on your toes.” (p.124). Dance is, of course, an activity in which different bodies move together in time, here serving the process of synchronising bodies from different time-spaces, creating moments of togetherness and delight – even if a few toes get trodden on along the way.

Climate change and the territorial body

Even without the hazards of time travel, not all is materially well for bodies inhabiting the novel’s near-future London. Storms have grown so bad that local government delivers sandbags and prepares for flooding, while the media scrabble in the past for a stirring historic parallel to infuse Britons with resolve in the face of physical jeopardy: “Blitz spirit, the newspapers called this sort of thing, as if either climate catastrophe or the Blitz was a national holiday” (p.164). Gore’s newfound fondness for the bathtub, garnished with ice cubes, is also an escape from a “hellheight heatwave” (p.83), albeit an escape restricted by water rationing. Even as Margaret from 1665 marvels at the “miracle” of drinking taps, the narrator notes, “The UN reckon we’re three years away from the first large-scale water war.” (p.80). Significantly, the heatwaves “make time go utterly Dalí clocks”, leaving minds disoriented and bodies “poaching in [their] own sweat” (p.84). Under the light of a newly “acerbic” sun, the narrator “missed the shadows and the long English rains” (p.109). Every body becomes unmoored in time, and the homeland’s territory itself is rendered unfamiliar, as a result of environmental crisis.

Juxtaposed with the Arctic flashbacks, these visions reveal Bradley’s book as, among other things, a climate change novel. The Ministry of Time emphasizes that the territorial bodies which inhabit the nation-state will be transformed by climatic shifts. Bradley’s work can be taken as one possible response to Ghosh (2016)’s contention that the mainstream novel is incapable of coping with the radical and pervasive uncertainties of climate change, bound as it is by the imperatives of capitalism and empire. Bradley shows us that who we are arises from the dialogue our bodies have with the territory we inhabit – the physical climate but also the politics, economics, and culture of the day – and creates a novel of fractured, kaleidoscopic temporalities to undo conventional literary linearity. As the narrator herself notes in the novel’s opening:

Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time-travel, and I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it. (p.5)

This is more than just conceit. It is necessary for storytelling under the radical uncertainty of a shifting climate. There is resonance here with Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), which is also a novel about climate catastrophe and one which, through its afterword, reveals itself to also be in dialogue with Britain’s historic polar explorers, attracted at once by their heroism and repelled by their complicity with empire. (In Lessing, an entire planet’s culture and memory ends up decanted into a single survivor, the ultimate territorial body). Lessing and Bradley’s novels both, 42 years apart, can be seen as a dramatic puzzling-through of how we, as embodied beings in a given context, live with a colonial past, a fraught present, and the prospect of future instability.

Doris Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Knopf, 1982)

Mutual recognition between the displaced

To protagonise this puzzling-through, Bradley grants The Ministry of Time’s narrator a biracial identity. She is a trusted servant of the Crown, a second-generation migrant from a non-Commonwealth country providing linguistic support to the Ministry of Defence. 

Her family members have survived and thrived as immigrants precisely by making their new territorial bodies incontrovertibly manifest before the state, indulging a mania for documentation, garbing themselves in the paperwork of their new jurisdiction: “My family lived inside proof of ourselves like crabs in shells […] But no one was going to tell us what we weren’t entitled to or had failed to file.” She acknowledges that this “made me an excellent civil servant.” (p.71), and that she has taken every possible step “in my career […] towards becoming the monitor rather than the monitored.” (p.106).

These steps, however, only take one so far. Her ethnic inheritance goes overlooked by many, to whom “you look like one of the late-entering forms of white – Spanish maybe” (p.4), though when people learn of her heritage, they set their “eyes on that distant horizon where the genocide took place” (p.145) and make comments ranging from “Pol Pot Noodle jokes on first dates […to…] we loved Angkor Wat” (p.178).

This experience, alongside her work as a translator, allows the narrator to recognise the temporal expats as “internally displaced persons,“a bureaucratic term she had previously struggled to render into another language but which captures the interiority of migrant experience. She realises it applies to the time-travellers as well as her own mother, who had fled Cambodia, and perhaps even to herself: “a person whose interiority was at odds with their exteriority, who was internally (in themselves) displaced.” (p.26).

Yet the experience of being at odds with one’s exterior self also allows moments of unanticipated and oblique connection. Much to the narrator’s surprise, Gore defies expectation and sympathetically identifies her as “not […] wholly an Englishwoman”:

‘Well done,’ I said, as neutrally as I could. ‘What gave it away? The shape of my eyes?’

‘The colour of your mouth.’

The ice hit the bottom of my glass with a frigid knock. I’d never heard that one before. (p.51)

Gore’s unexpected ability to recognise and respect the narrator’s difference comes, in turn, from a tragic encounter during his imperial career, brought on by the hypnotic effect of the Arctic territory. During a hunting expedition, half-starved, out of water, Gore mistakes an Inuit man for animal prey, shoots and kills him. The dead man’s wife demands to see Gore, and it is this moment of contact, “a look that puts him against the horizon” and which “will linger on his body”, in which he notices that her “mouth is very beautiful, a colour that Gore will remember and try to name for a long time afterwards” (p.179-80), that underpins the intimate bridge Gore will be able to construct with the narrator beyond the horizon of 1847. 

These characters are afforded new opportunities to see and be seen precisely through their displacement in time and space as territorial bodies: embodied beings awkwardly and incompletely disentangled from one context only to be enmeshed, equally messily, in another. Both Gore and the narrator accept this mess and find what is good in it.  

The sincerity of Gore’s impulse to explore – including self-critical reflection on whether he truly behaved with compassion towards African slaves he rescued with the Preventative Squadron – makes him capable of transcending the time and space of his origin. This is mirrored by the narrator’s own flexibility and curiosity, recognising that the novel’s near-future setting “was the natural evolution of [Gore’s] England. I was the natural evolution. I was his lens if only he would raise me and look with me.” (p.107). The narrator sees the common ground easily, and frames it in terms of territorial bodies:

It was not unusual for me to look at my face and think What on earth is that? It bored me not to look the same as whoever I was with – isn’t that the whole point of being mixed-race? Oh England, England! The thing you do best is to tell a story about yourself. Graham Gore went to the Arctic believing that a noble death is possible because of all those stories and then he became a story. Oh England, you wanted to make stories out of me. (p.176)

As befits a narrator who is a former translator, connection comes through talk as much as touch, the ability to name and recognise a body, reminding us that “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.” (Barthes, 1978, p.73).  She explicitly builds out the territory within which she wants to be understood: “Every time I told Graham something – about myself, about my family, about my experience of the world we shared – I was trying to occupy space in his head. I had ideas for the shape I should take in his imagination.” (p.176)

Throughout their journey to becoming lovers, their bodies affect one another no less powerfully than a jaunt through time – “the erotic charge of his bare forearms was giving me a headache” (p.108) the narrator tells us; Gore stutters over “your-your-funny little mouth” (p.174) which had initially given away her nonwhiteness to him; and the lovers even come to experience one another spatially (“He filled the room like a horizon”, p.108). This moves from idealization to a full recognition of the other’s embodiedness: “I was struck by the starkness of his crow’s feet. It unnerved me to see how human a body he inhabited.” (p.190).

Ultimately, the characters’ capacity to see and desire one another creates new possibilities for them as territorial bodies. In both, their sexuality incorporates elements of queerness. The narrator is fully beguiled by Margaret, finding even her pimples sexy and describing her physical beauty in woozy detail;  at one point after merely regarding her, the narrator becomes “confused” (p.152) and rushes off. Meanwhile, Gore alludes to same-sex experiences on his naval expeditions, and cultivates a friendly intimacy with Arthur, who is clearly attracted to him, although it is left ambiguous whether Gore just has the nature of “an explorer whose life had required flexibility and forbearance” (p.141). More directly, Arthur says, “You can’t imagine what it was like to be a man of – of my persuasion, in my time. Now it seems I’ve got another go of it in an era that suits me better.” (p.209).

This is apt to the concerns of Bradley’s novel and the present paper: time-displaced territorial bodies are also desiring and desired, and as Muñoz (2009) argued, queerness is always imbricated with questions of other times, being, “a mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (p.1) – precisely what happens to expats extracted from their own historic quagmires and flung into a new juxtaposition.

Collapsing fantasies of narrative control

Not only do the expats explore possibilities of desire and identity unavailable in their own time, but in Bradley’s novel, time travel itself is queered, in the sense put forward by Halberstam (2011): a failure to achieve instrumentalised goals, a deviation from the straight and narrow. The machine itself is a “door” which operates according to a bizarre logic, capable of only sustaining a certain number of time-displaced bodies at a given moment – and when an attempt is made to destroy it, it turns out that it cannot even be straightforwardly made to cease to function. It is a shift from the mechanical post-Wellsian model of time travel to something like the “arbitrariness of temporal pretexts” (Roberts, 2014, p.40) seen in older fantastic tales.

Further visions of the territorial body emerge when it is revealed that travellers from the future are also part of the plot. Impersonating present-day observers from the Ministry of Defence, the Brigadier and his compatriot Salese are agents from the 2200s, the era in which the time-door was created. In that time, a global conflict rages between a bloc incorporating the US, Brazil, and UK versus the “Tiger Territories”, an Asian alliance. The atmosphere is full of toxic waste from chemical weapons tests and London is no more. The time-door, an invention of their era, was built to fix the climate crisis through targeted assassinations of key figures, including those who “invested in weapons and manufacturing that were not what you probably still call ‘carbon neutral'” (p.300). However, these desperate, inventive, yet ill-resourced people are unable to rightly emulate the era to which they have travelled.

As a territorial body of the early 21st century, the Brigadier is a clumsy impersonation who refers to the BBC as “Auntie” and counter-terrorism police as “Special Branch”, and speaks with “an exquisite broadcaster plum I thought had died out in the seventies.” (p.58). His body marked by the privations of a desperate future, he turns “the white of used candlewax” (p.82) when he sees a generous tray of food. He and Salese have a “disturbingly makeshift” (p.118) vibe to them, but a keen understanding of how bodies experience pathology when displaced from their familiar context: “Oh, it’s not the century, it’s the soul […] Her ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ have no consistency, no continency, and she is beginning to slip out of time.” (p.117).

Ultimately, the project director Adela is revealed to also be a time-displaced figure, an alternate version of the narrator from the 2040s, her body made strange by the transfer to a new time and place. Her face is “pinched and hungry, and hauntingly as if her skin was held in place by a bulldog clip at the back of her skull” (p.75), the result of surgeries to address the side-effects of time travel.

Significantly, the main difference in Adela’s timeline and the narrator’s is the atrocity with which each of them motivates Gore to become a field agent of the Ministry. The narrator talks of Auschwitz, leading to Gore descending a bleak Google rabbithole. Adela had shared 9/11, stirring a fierce Islamophobic patriotism which makes Gore an unquestioning instrument of the future British state.

As the one who administers the time travel project on behalf of the state, Adela embodies what Roberts (2014) considers time travel as a fantasy of narrative control, noting that the time machine

makes dirigible something that had, hitherto, been imagined as beyond our capacity to control or steer. Dreams and magic happen to us, inflicting upon us a Scrooge-like passivity. Memory plagues us, or grants us wistful pleasure, but we can do nothing about the event that memory recalls. A time machine, on the other hand, is something we can control. (p.40).

“I had to make sure all this happened the right way” (p.301), Adela says of the events within which she is enmeshed, thinking not only of the state to which she has pledged her career, but her relationship with Gore, who commands the Ministry in her timeline and with whom she will have a son. She personifies Freeman’s contention that chronobiopolitics encompasses the individual lifetime as well as national history. As Adela fights to preserve the version of time she sees as “right”, events become increasingly bloody, ultimately costing the lives of several expats, the far-future agents, and others.

Rather than diverging timelines, the temporal intrigues of Bradley’s novel resemble a “thick present” (Sandford 2023), in which the dynamic here-and-now is always entangled with anticipation and remembrance. Seen in this light,

The future is always an aspect of the present. The future has not “taken place,” but the present always “holds” the future, and holds it as potential. Indeed, the future is never “later,” is it always (experienced, imagined) “now.” (Ramírez and Wilkinson, 2014, p.59).

Under such circumstances, time, far from being linear, is a messy, complex, endless immediacy. Time travel narratives thus become less about which “train track” of history we are riding, or the steering of destiny towards the “correct” trajectory, but rather about how we might shape the wet and ever-spinning clay of time itself.

As Adela says, history is merely “a narrative agreement about what has happened, and what is happening” (p.91) – here at the service of the interests of the British state. The past is tended to as “the familiar and collective legacy from which a group will draw a properly political future – be it national, ethnic, or something else.” (Freeman, 2010, p.41). Bradley’s narrator wryly confesses that this helps her to understand better “why the British history curriculum looks the way that it does.” (p.54). 

Bradley’s novel shows us that the British establishment has, at best, been reskinned with a new, superficially more respectful attitude, including a “Wellness team” and offices in contemporary decor which consist of “interminable rooms: pebble-coloured with lights embedded in the ceiling, modular in a way that suggested opening a door would lead to another identical space, and then another, and then another” (p.7). 

Such rooms imply an endlessness to contemporary British bureaucracy and its authority across time and space – although the chamber used to initially hand over the expats to the care of their bridges offers continuity to the past through its “air of antique ceremony: wood panels, oil paintings, high ceiling. It had rather more éclat than the modular rooms […] the room had probably remained unchanged since the nineteenth century.” (p.8)

This institutional design and control extends from decor to the realm of language. Post-imperial power saves its pomp for special occasions, but more fully permeates personal lives than ever before and even insists upon framing the narratives of those it has marginalized. At one point, the narrator and a Black British bridge, Simellia, are required to give pre-written presentations,

so didactic as to be oppressive. They made me read a lecture on multiculturalism, the bastards, leaving blanks for insert own experience here. I gave it in a monotone without lifting my eyes from the page then drank 250ml of white wine at a quaff; Simellia gently clinked her full glass against my empty, her jaw set (she’d been asked to deliver a lecture on post-war migration from former colonies and the Windrush generation). Control’s lectures were nakedly about getting the narrative right. (p.109).

This superficially less grandiose authority is no less rapacious, totalising, or cruel than any empire of the past. The bridges are repeatedly reminded that the ultimate purpose of the time travel project is above their pay grades; they are mere components of a wider apparatus, the Ministry itself, in service of a national hierarchy. 

To what ends are this apparatus and its unusual capabilities directed? The answer appears to be extraction, exploitation, and harm. Britain’s time-door turns out to be plunder from the distant future, rather than the result of ingenuity. That future, Britain’s own, is murderous and vengeful. Our own protagonist is forced to confront a future self who is morally and physically deformed by her choices. Both versions recognise the need to turn away from the path Adela embodies; “I’ve been a company woman all my life and look where it’s got me,” (p.304) says the older woman ruefully. 

At the novel’s climax, the narrator is held hostage by Simellia, who is revealed to be working with the far-future agents. Our protagonist manages to turn the tables, damaging the time-door in a way which dispels the far-future threat, condemning the Brigadier to a grisly cosmic fate. Her efforts in turn affect Adela, who is no longer guaranteed to come about in the narrator’s timeline and ends up on an autopsy table: “[I]t looked like she exploded, but in reverse, and with light instead of viscera.” (p.324). 

The narrator escapes the debacle of the novel’s denouement as a kind of bitter final gift; Simellia is blamed for the vandalism of the machine, and the narrator is let free on the basis that to do otherwise may damage the fragile timestream, as her fate is entwined with Adela’s. Gore, feeling betrayed by the narrator and Adela both, flees with Margaret, the other surviving expat. 

After much time has passed, the narrator receives a photograph of distinctive Alaskan spruces, a glimpse of what is likely Margaret’s arm in shot, and a handwritten, partly crossed-out message: “Of course I loved you.” (p.329). (It’s piquant and pertinent, in a tale of temporal displacement and uncertainties, that the crossing-out changes the tense of the verb). In the final pages of the book, after reflecting on this photograph, the narrator declares that she is planning to take a trip.

The hopeful, unresolved note on which the novel concludes reminds us that “time can produce new social relations and even new forms of justice” (Freeman, 2010, p.48). Three figures, displaced, paradoxical, have the chance to cultivate intimacy and affection which go beyond convention. Yet this is also the British past living on, beyond the moment at which the time-door, now damaged, should even be capable of sustaining the expats’ territorial bodies.

As Freeman has it, 

I thought the point of queer was to be always ahead of actually existing social possibilities […] Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless. (2010, p.13).

With the expats having become historical detritus and the Ministry of Time’s post-imperial project deemed a failure, new opportunities arrive at the “tail end of things.” The question of how the narrator, Gore, and Margaret will align, if they are fortunate enough to meet again, returns us to the matter of the novel’s queerness – with the narrator having expressed desire for both Gore and Margaret. One reading allows for a heterosexual pairing to lie beyond the novel’s final page, with Gore and the narrator pledged to one another in a conventional “happy ending.” Yet we have already seen what happens in the future where Adela and Gore pursued heteronormativity, monogamy, parenthood. Perhaps, Bradley’s novel quietly whispers in its final pages, something different will happen in the new timeline. 

After all, once conventional temporality has been disrupted, “a hiccup in sequential time has the capacity to connect a group of people beyond monogamous, enduring couplehood” (Freeman, 2010, p.39).

Memories of the future, memories of empire

The narrator, making a different choice to her alternate self Adela, finds hope in her situation. This takes the form of a possible flight – to Alaska, where it appears, at the novel’s conclusion, that Gore and Margaret have fled.

Their freedom is not complete, requiring as it does a visit to yet another colonised territory. Bradley’s open-ended conclusion reminds us that there is nowhere outside the system of historical responsibility, even if diagonal moves can create new possibilities – just as Gore and the narrator were able to find love and mutual recognition as an oblique byproduct of the Ministry’s machinations.

It’s a usefully ambiguous final note to a book which is at once a sophisticated and unflinching interrogation of contemporary British identity and one which sits comfortably as a transatlantic bestseller, acclaimed by the culture it critiques. Yet, as Freeman notes, artworks may usefully “collect and remobilize archaic or futuristic debris as signs that things have been and could be otherwise. That capitalism can always reappropriate this form of time is no reason to end with despair” (2010, p.18). Bradley doesn’t shy away from the fraught, complex, compromised question of the narrator’s loyalties – to Gore, to her family, to her heritage, to Britain – or, indeed, those of her novel.

At the climactic gunpoint confrontation, the far-future agents’ co-conspirator, the Black British bridge Simellia, justifies her action in terms of the bodies from the “wrong” territories who did not merit rescue in the cruelties of the climate crisis:

“Two hundred years from now. It’s finished. South America’s mostly gone, except Brazil and its satellites. Half of Britain’s underwater. Europe dropped bombs on any ship in the Mediterranean coming from North Africa. No refugees. They died there or they turned back and died of disease and starvation and the heat. Billions died, billions.[“] (p.310)

The far-future ocean is once more the place of historic racialised migratory trauma recognised by contemporary critics like Sharpe (2016); when the narrator questions the veracity of this far-future account, Simellia is only sad: “How hard did you try to be a white girl that you’re asking me whether racism exists?” (p.310). Her understanding of the narrator’s romance with Gore is even less charitable:

“You let him off the hook again and again. I watched you. He came up through the Empire. He believed in it. And you did too. I read your file. The things that happened to your family. That’s why you joined up. Getting behind the biggest bully in the playground.” (p.311)

Bradley rejects easy answers, does not give the narrator any privileged retort. The sourest version of the thick present is on display: “The war won’t stop […] History will repeat itself, literally. The door means we just keep going back and forth, back and forth, again and again and again – ” (p.314). So far as the narrator has an answer, it is her attempted, abortive destruction of the time-door. 

The novel thus refuses pat solutions, offering instead new iterations of the ambiguity under which all of us make decisions on our way to an uncertain future. Time-crossed lovers do not come to rest in each others’ arms, do not even guarantee to coincide again. There is only hope in the possibility of intersecting once more, outside of the confines of the time-travel project, and perhaps in a new configuration.

Conclusion: where next for the time-lost body?

Bradley’s novel leaves us on a path of ascent, however challenging, out of the lingering imperial mire. It uses the collision of past and future to open up ways of rethinking gendered and racialised bodies and minds.

This is important well beyond the field of science fiction criticism. In times of uncertainty, what we can imagine ahead of us matters. As Valenzuela and Lezaun have shown, visions such as “net zero” mobilise “active contestation not only over competing imaginaries of the future, but over what imagining a plausible climate future should mean in practice” (2024).

In the wake of the United Nations’ 2024 Pact for the Future, various governments are exploring legislation which obliges officials to take account of the needs of future generations. On the one hand, “there are reasons to anticipate real disruption in our current patterns of life, as we continue to see changes in the deep planetary systems on which life and society depend” (Sandford, 2023), what some commentators have called “the great unravelling” (Miller and Heinberg, 2023), and it is wise to act in anticipation. Yet it is very difficult to know what future generations will want or need or value, as they do not yet exist. It is hard to believe that civil servants tasked with such duties will avoid capture by whatever “officially plausible future” is designated by the powers that be (Finch, 2025). Part of what The Ministry of Time does is to remind us that what was considered a desirable future in the past – especially by those in power – might be quite different from what arrived, and that we may sometimes be grateful for this difference.

As the narrator puts it at the novel’s conclusion, revealing the book to be addressed to her past self:

I know how much you’ve longed for your future to lean down and cup your face, to whisper ‘don’t worry, it gets better‘. The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better. (p.331)

She discourages her past self against “believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that.” (p.331). The narrator finally breaks with her lifelong attempt to keep safe by aligning her territorial body fully with the service of the state which welcomed her family from Cambodia. She steps away from imperial loyalty, and new possibilities open up by virtue of this, including two which are most vital:

Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel. (p.331)

Simple truths, perhaps, but a simple truth is still a truth, and sometimes just the right tool to cut through all that is fraught, tangled, turbulent, and enmeshed with historical power. Bradley’s novel lays aside the stabilising comfort of “official” futures by demonstrating the nation-state’s continuity with its rapacious forebears. It proposes radical, oblique alternatives which do not erase the past but put diverse territorial bodies into new relations.

Freeman’s chronobiopolitics reminds us that “social change can be felt as well as cognitively apprehended” (2010, p.48) – and communicated through aesthetic forms. As a contribution to wider discussions of temporality and power, The Ministry of Time may help a broader public think differently about the future – showing how we can play with temporality in popular forms to think Britishness anew and think beyond Britishness, or national identity more generally.

Bradley, bringing to life a real-world Arctic explorer, fulfills Freeman’s “desire to enliven the dead and the understanding that this is never wholly possible” (2010, p.53). In doing so, she refuses jingoistic evocations of the imperial past – but allows for the possibility that this past might yet nourish something good in times to come. Her novel realises the “ethics of responsibility toward the other across time – toward the dead or toward that which was impossible in a given historical moment, each understood as calls for a different future to which we cannot but answer with imperfect and incomplete reparations” (Freeman, 2010, p.48). Bradley lets Gore, and the other, fictional, expats, and by extension, British territorial bodies more generally, move beyond the constraints of the past without effacing them.

A lot to ask of a bestselling science fiction romance? Perhaps not. We live in a time of broad science fiction literacy, when fantasies of time travel in popular culture have evolved beyond Wells’ mechanistic vision or even the period when Doc Brown had to carefully exposit parallel timelines with a chalkboard in Back to the Future II (1989).

In this, popular culture may be catching up with scholars of temporality, for whom a linear representation of time is only one framing, not always the most useful or even the most plausible; as Ramírez and Selin (2014) put it, with tongue in cheek, “For all we know in some situations the future is tetrahedral and in others it takes the form of a teddy bear.”

If we trade linear temporalities for the “thick present”, surrendering the separation of past and future, our actions may become a matter of “staying with the trouble” in Haraway’s sense: “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” (2016, p.1).

The viability of making this link via Bradley’s novel is evident in a flashback to the narrator’s childhood, almost perfectly aligned with Haraway’s notion:

When I was eight years old, I developed a keen awareness of the non-human world. Mai, Daddy, Sister, Home, School, Teacher, Bath, Plate, Chair, Crayon, Dress – these were not, as I had thought, the building blocks of the universe, but discrete entities in a world we shared with worms, mice, sparrows, woodlice, squirrels, moths, pigeons, cats, spiders. I had a wretched sense of fighting for space. They were everywhere, the non-human. They came from under things and out of shadows, they were higher than I could see in trees and deeper than I could penetrate in the soil […] A great, awful busyness was flourishing all around me. (p.142).

However fearfully, the narrator’s childhood self has recognised something which, in adulthood, she sought to suppress by accepting the authority of the state: our mutual critterhood in a thick present without hierarchy.

This lack of clear and hierarchical temporal logic is something which popular science fiction and its audiences are increasingly comfortable with. Cinema and television can now show us “everything everywhere all at once” (Kwan and Scheinert, 2023). In recent years, the big and small screen have given us temporalities that are “wibbly wobbly timey wimey” (“Blink”, Doctor Who, BBC, 2007) or whose trajectories resemble the arbitrary handwritten phrase “Jeremy Bearimy” (The Good Place, Fremulon, 2018), plus teen time travel movies which refuse unambiguous linear happy endings, surfacing the unspoken racial assumptions of Back to the Future and its ilk (See You Yesterday, 2019). In prose, we have El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s best-selling queer romance about rival agents interfering with time (2019), and Newitz (2019)’s depiction of time-travel interventions resembling a Wikipedia edit war between feminist “Daughters of Harriet” and incel-like male oppressors. 

In this context, Bradley’s novel is not alone in reminding us: if the past, present, and future are no longer authoritatively singular, they may be retold and reshaped more widely and more wildly – not only by malign and oppressive forces, but also by those who seek to liberate territorial bodies wherever and whenever they are found.

Newitz’s work, with its right-wing American Men’s Rights Activist villains, is particularly resonant here in an era when some political forces seek to “rewrite the history of racial justice in the United States while eliminating the institutions that make visible its historical roots” (Giroux, 2020). In its antipatriarchal, queer, and antiracist stance, a punkier and more abrasive cousin to Bradley’s, Newitz’s book reminds us that the move towards a more diverse and disparate set of time-travel mechanics is also an opportunity for “decolonization” of the future (Ramírez and Wilkinson, 2014, p.47; Inayatullah, 1998), in the sense of shifting who speaks, who is heeded, and who is represented on its terrain.1

Time travel in science fiction has, itself, a history and prehistory, a present, and presumably a future. It has the potential for new and emergent ideas of temporality – scientific, poetic, popular, expert – to succeed those currently held by researchers, philosophers, artists, authors, critics, and the general public of the day.

An earlier era of time travel narrative experienced “fits and starts of […] types of fictional and scientific thinking” (Wittenberg, 2016, p.48), only some of which would lead on to the dominant paradigm of modernist time travel narratives. Perhaps Bradley’s novel will also, in times to come, show itself to be one of the works that opened the door onto a new era of popular time travel fiction. This new era is one which, however fraught, creates new opportunities for us to face up to the uncertainties around us, and within those uncertainties to rethink identity and temporality, just as Gore and the narrator find hope and promise beyond the limits of their novel’s final page, as eternally displaced persons.

REFERENCES

Bailey, F. and Bristol, S. (Writers) and Bristol, S. (Director). (2019). See you yesterday [Film]. Netflix.

Baran bo Odar (Executive Producer), & Jantje Friese (Executive Producer). (2017-2020). Dark [TV series]. Wiedemann & Berg Television.

Barthes, R. (1978). A lover’s discourse: Fragments. (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang. 

Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books.

Bradley, K. (2024). The Ministry of time. Hodder & Stoughton.

Dicks, T. and Hulke, M. (Writers) and Maloney, D. (Director). (1969). The war games. (Season 6) [TV series episode] in D. Sherwin (Producer), Doctor Who. BBC.

El-Mohtar, A., & Gladstone, M. (2019). This is how you lose the time war. Saga Press.

Finch, M. (2025). Looking beyond the ghost scenario. Issues in science and technology, XLI (3). 

Finch, M. and Mahon, M. (2025). The ghosts we see from the mountains: scenario planning and the territorial body in time. In M. Sinclair and C. Spear (Eds.) Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production (pp. 162-180). Routledge.

Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Duke University Press.

Gago, V. (2020). Feminist International: How To Change Everything. (G. Mason-Deese, Trans.) Verso.

Gago, V. and Mason-Deese, L. (2019). Rethinking situated knowledge from the perspective of Argentina’s feminist strike. Journal of Latin American Geography, 18(3).

Gale, B. (Writer) and Zemeckis, R. (Director). (1989). Back to the future part II. [Film].

Ghosh, A. (2016). The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. Penguin.

Giroux, H. (2020). Trump aligns ignorance with bigotry as he attempts to rewrite history. The Conversation.

Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press.

Hoyle, F. (1966). October the first is too late. Heinemann.

Inayatullah, S. (1998). Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method. Futures, 30 (8).

Kwan, D., & Scheinert, D. (Directors/Writers). (2022). Everything everywhere all at once. [Film].

Leiber, F. (1961). The big time. Ace.

Lessing, D. (1982). The making of the representative for Planet 8. Alfred A. Knopf.

Miller, A. and Heinberg, R. (2023). Welcome to the great unravelling: Navigating the polycrisis of environmental and social breakdown. Post Carbon Institute.

Moffat, S. (Writer), and Macdonald, H. (Director). (2007, June 9). Blink (Season 3, Episode 10) [TV series episode]. In R. T. Davies (Executive Producer), Doctor Who. BBC Studios.

Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. New York University Press.

Newitz, A. (2019). The future of another timeline. Tor. 

Priest, C. (1974). Inverted world. Faber and Faber.

Ramírez, R., & Selin, C. (2014). Plausibility and probability in scenario planning. Foresight, 16(1).

Ramírez, R. and Wilkinson, A. (2014). Strategic reframing: The Oxford scenario planning approach. Oxford University Press.

Roberts, A. (2014). A brief history of time-travel. In Bell, J. (ed.) Sci-fi: Days of fear and wonder. (pp. 40-44). BFI.

Russ, J. (1975). The female man. Bantam Books.

Sandford, R. (2023). Reparative futures in a thick, virtuous present. Futures, 154.

Schur, M. (Writer), and Goddard, D. (Director). (2018, October 18). Chapter 31: Jeremy Bearimy (Season 3, Episode 5) [TV series episode]. In M. Schur, D. Miner, M. Sackett, & D. Goddard (Executive Producers), The good place. Fremulon; 3 Arts Entertainment; Universal Television. 

Sciamma, C. (Writer and director). (2023). Petite maman. [Film]. 

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: on blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Sinclair, M., & Spear, C. (2025). Introduction: Territorial Bodies in Crisis. In Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production (pp.162-180).

Strugatsky, A., & Strugatsky, B. (1977). Roadside picnic. Macmillan.

Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Tuck, E. and Wayne Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education, & society. 1(1).

Valenzuela, J. M., and Lezaun, J. (2024). Publics and counter-publics of net-zero. Futures, 156.

Waldron, M. (Writer) and Raimi, S. (Director). (2022) Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness. Marvel Studios.

Wittenberg, D. (2016). Time travel: The popular philosophy of narrative. Fordham University Press.

1.  Note, however, the caveat of Tuck and Yang (2012): “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies […] As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. […] The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” 
   ︎

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Matt Finch, a writer and researcher, is an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and an Associate of the SexTechLab at the New School for Social Research. See more at mechanicaldolphin.com

The winner for the 12th annual Baen Fantasy Adventure Award has been announced:

• WINNER: “Traitor to the Wolfguard’s Creed”, Gideon P. Smith
• SECOND PLACE: “Guilded Dead”, April Pereira
• THIRD PLACE: “A Game with Death”, Kathleen Powell
• HONORABLE MENTION: “The Void Within”, Tyler Bourassa
• HONORABLE MENTION: “Staying Afloat”, Arthur H. Manners

Other finalists were:

• “A Good Demon Hunter is Hard to Find”, Martina Anders
• “The Teacher”, Sarah Hozumi
• “Personal Demons”, Alex

...Read More

Worldcon 2025 issued a formal apology from the Seattle WorldCon chair, Kathy Bond, on behalf of the organization, for the Hugo Awards ceremony, in response to a larger conversation happening in social media regarding the ceremony. Items being called out included finalists’ names and works mispronounced by the hosts, Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford; author of So Let Them Burn, Kamilah Cole, initially skipped being named in her category ...Read More

“Elsewhere” by Anaïs Godard was announced as the winner of the annual Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Short Fiction.

Other finalists were:

• “A Pixel Story”, Jason Boyd
• “Tales From the Sub-Ocean: Or, Video Game as Metaphor for Mental Illness”, Ian P. Johnson
• “Child at the End of the World”, Tara McKee
• “Sunset Bridge”, Diane Schwebs
• “Kill the Art Monster Before It Kills You”, C.E. Singer

The award, sponsored by Galaxy’s ...Read More

The winners of the 2025 Dragon Awards were presented at Dragon Con, held August 28 – September 1, 2025 in Atlanta GA.

Best Science Fiction Novel

• WINNER: This Inevitable Ruin, Matt Dinniman (Ace)

• Nether Station, Kevin J. Anderson (Blackstone)
• The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear (Saga)
• Alliance Unbound, C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher (DAW)
• The Mercy of Gods, James S.A. Corey (Orbit)
• Extremophile, Ian

...Read More

“Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Uncanny 1-2/24) is the winner of the 2025 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction for “stories that are irreplaceable, that inspire, enlighten, and entertain.”

Other finalists were:

• “After We Kill Our Father and Before We Reach the Mainland”, Max Franciscovich (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 9/19/24)
• “The Midnight Commuter”, Tammy Komoff (Abyss & Apex 1/1/24)
• “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being”, A.W. Prihandita (Clarkesworld 

...Read More

by Monica Cross

There is a pervasive sentiment that science fiction and fantasy “don’t work” on stage. So let’s put that to the test. Take Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, since it is commonly put forth as the beginning of the science fiction genre. Within five years of its initial publication, Frankenstein had been adapted for the stage. By that metric, science fiction has been on the stage almost as long as science fiction has been around. As for fantasy, we see elements of the fantastical entwined much further back. So while we can debate whether the appearance of literal gods in the Greek plays or mischief-making fairies in Shakespeare’s writing constitutes fantasy or if it was simply a reflection of their world view at the time they were written, I would argue that the modern productions of The Bacchae by Euripides or A Midsummer Night’s Dream must be viewed as productions of fantasy today.

The fact that certain types of SFF theater get staged while others are rarely seen comes down to those who make the choices about what sorts of plays to produce. It is producers, theaters, and season selection committees that make those decisions, and it is my experience that many feel like they cannot or should not program SFF plays in their theaters. 

I must add here that I am not talking about all producers. There is a growing number of theaters and producers who not only program SFF plays but go so far as to champion them. Still, the reservations I am discussing here seem prevalent across the industry, and to this day I field questions from industry professionals about the viability of SFF theater.

Common Assumptions About SFF Theater

The primary assumption that producers seem to make is that there isn’t an audience for SFF plays. They assume (and they may or may not be right, depending on their particular audience demographic) that SFF plays won’t sell tickets. This may stem from assumptions about the literary nature of theater versus the pulp nature of genre fiction, which I believe is a false dichotomy, as seen by the popularity of musicals such as Wicked or Into the Woods. I once worked at a Shakespeare company that staged a wildly popular production of The Return to the Forbidden Planet, a sci-fi musical parody that combines the 1956 film Forbidden Planet with its Shakespearean inspiration The Tempest. The fact that the top three examples that come to mind are musicals may be worth noting, but that may also be that (in my experience) musicals attract a wider audience than non-musical plays. The point is that I have seen audiences show up for SFF plays in ways that challenge this assumption about genre plays.

Emily Brown, center as Miranda, from left, Lee Fitzpatrick as Gloria, Allison Glenzer as Petty Officer Anne Arkey, and John Harrell as Ariel in Return to the Forbidden Planet by Bob Carlton at the American Shakespeare Center in 2013. Directed by Jim Warren. Costumes by Erin M. West. Photo by Pat Jarrett.

The other major assumption producers make is that SFF plays are too difficult to stage. And certainly there are elements common to science fiction and fantasy that would be difficult to put on stage. However, those who universally write off SFF theater as unstageable are generally overlooking several key details. 

Several Realities of SFF Theater

To start, it is important to realize that certain types of SFF stories rely less on effects than others. While I love seeing high-concept, high SFF plays on stage (and I’ve perhaps seen more than most because I seek them out at every opportunity), the unfortunate reality is that plays taking place in the near future or sprinkling fabulist elements through an otherwise naturalistic plot are in fact seen as being easier to stage and have more of an audience. These plays often have the side effect of not even registering to audiences (or perhaps even the theaters producing them) as science fiction or fantasy.

Branching out beyond SFF that does not require effects are plays that work within established theatrical conventions. On stage, there are often ways to convey SFF elements without special effects. My go-to example of this is Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The lovers run on stage and Oberon says, “But who comes here? I am invisible; / And I will overhear their conference.” (AMND 2.1) He can accompany this with a gesture or a swish of a cloak, but that is wholly unnecessary. By simply saying that he is invisible and having the other characters walk right past him, we know he is invisible. On stage, so much can be conveyed simply through action and dialogue.

Corrie Green as Helena, Philip Orazio as Demetrius, Aidan O’Reilly as Oberon, invisible while observing the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare at the American Shakespeare Center in 2024. Photo by October Grace Media.

While so much can be done without special effects or with minimal effects, special effects are cool, and that’s one of the things most SFF people love about the genres. And that does happen on stage and can be done effectively. Just look at what Broadway has been able to do with Frozen: the use of projections, fog, and a fly system bring Elsa’s magic to life in a spectacular fashion. Now, most theaters don’t have a Broadway budget, and certainly Broadway hasn’t always been able to create special effects in a captivating manner (for that, I direct you to the pitfalls of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark). So there is certainly a trick, and often a lot of money, to effectively staging the impossible. If producers aren’t daunted by the ingenuity needed to develop such stage tricks, they often are by the money required to successfully pull it off.

The Future of SFF Theater

Despite these perceived obstacles to production, the field of science fiction and fantasy theater continues to grow. New Play Exchange, which describes itself as “the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers,” reports that across the 61,630 scripts their website boasts (ranging from one-minute plays and monologues to full-length plays and musicals), there are 3,499 scripts tagged with the science fiction genre and 6,438 scripts tagged with the fantasy genre. Their tagging system allows for multiple genres per play, so there is likely some overlap between those two categories. Even assuming maximum overlap, over 10% of the (mostly unpublished) plays listed in that repository are considered by the playwrights to be SFF. So, when producers are ready to put SFF plays into their seasons, the plays are already waiting for them.

This article is the first of three pieces I’ve written as part of a series exploring SFF theater. In the forthcoming articles, I will provide further information on the history of SFF plays and offer advice to authors who are interested in writing for the stage.

Explore more articles from SFF on Screen and Stage

Monica Cross is a playwright based out of Wisconsin. She has an extensive background in theater, including acting, directing, dramaturgy, and design.

Monica has taught at New College of Florida, Ringling College of Art and Design, and University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She has worked at the American Shakespeare Center, Urbanite Theatre, and Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival.

Monica’s plays have been produced by Silk Moth Stage, Whiskey Theatre Factory, The Sarasota Players, MadLab, Theatre Odyssey, The Hippodrome, and various Fringe Festivals across the United States. Her work has been a semifinalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries, and a finalist for Wisconsin Wrights. Her writing has been published in The Best 10-Minute Plays 2023, The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2024, The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2025, and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2025 (all through Smith & Kraus), as well as Ten-Minute Play Festival, Volume Four: 2018 – 2021 by Theatre Odyssey.

Monica holds an M.Litt. and MFA from Mary Baldwin College and has most recently trained at the Kennedy Center Summer Playwright Intensive. In addition to being a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, she is also a member of the Dramatists Guild. For more, visit her website at www.monicacross.com and her portfolio on NPX.

The post Where Is All the SFF Theater? appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

The Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) has announced in a press release it is accepting applications for its $1,000 Working Class Writers Grant, “awarded annually to speculative fiction writers who are working class, blue-collar, financially disadvantaged, or homeless, who have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction due to financial barriers which make it hard to access the writing world.”

Applications are open September 1 until September 30, 2025.

For more information, ...Read More

Author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 82, died August 31, 2025. She was a prolific author who wrote more than 80 books, most in the horror, SF, and mystery genres, and was best known for her sprawling Saint-Germain historical vampire series.

Yarbro was born September 15, 1942 in Berkeley CA, and attended San Francisco State College for three years. She married Donald Simpson in 1969; they divorced in 1982. Yarbro was an ...Read More

Paul Graham Raven

Column/Vector “Community” Special Issue 300

The longer I’ve sat with the assignment to write a column themed on community, the more daunting it has come to seem. This is, ironically, a personal problem: put very simply—and thus avoiding autobiographical sidequests—community is not something with which I am very well acquainted, and what acquaintance I have with it is tainted with distrust. Community has always shown itself to me as being concerned with who’s out as much as who’s in, if not perhaps more so; I thus tend to position community, from which one may be expelled, in contrast to the admittedly more abstract notion of society, of which one is a member by default (though one may of course be an unwilling and/or disenfranchised member of society).

Those who work with language face a perpetual dilemma in what we sometimes still call the ‘information age ’: on the one hand, words have meanings; on the other hand, meanings change with usage, and this process of semantic alteration (or evacuation) seems only to accelerate. In this particular case, I am rather stuck with “community,” but I can surface my discontent by suggesting a fresh distinction between community considered as a noun—a thing which one has or does not have—and community as a verb—a thing which one does, or in which one partakes.

(Readers who detect a Heraclitean distinction between being and becoming, respectively, are not imagining things; those whose philosophy tends more to the vernacular may prefer to think in terms of product and process.)

To be clear, I’m not out to position one or the other of these terms as being “the bad community;” indeed, that’s exactly the sort of monochromatic thinking that I’m trying to get away from in this piece. But I do want to highlight the way in which community-as-noun tends ineluctibly toward in-group-out-group dynamics, while community-as-verb puts the focus instead upon choices and compromises made in the face of constraints whose very commonality might conjure up the spectre of society which Margaret Thatcher once so successfully banished. More plainly, it seems to me that by paying more attention to what we are obliged to do, in the process of making, unmaking and remaking community through our actions, we might better recognise the greater societal ideal that community reproduces at a smaller and more limited scale.

#

I’m going to start with the novel Everything for Everyone by M E O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. I’m more than a little late to this particular party, but now understand how this obscure novel from an anarchist press has had such impressive word-of-mouth reach. It’s a very good book—a landmark title, in fact, both in terms of the utopia as a literary form, and of its specific utopian politics. However, while it represents a vanguard with regard to the former, I feel it may represent the end of an era to the latter. 

Put another way, Everything for Everyone (E4E hereafter) is flawed, as all works of art invariably are—but those flaws are all the more disappointing, aesthetically and politically, given the power and timeliness of the whole. It feels reasonable to suggest that one metric of success for a utopia might be the extent to which it depicts its most central social reconfigurations as having been normalised. In many dimensions, E4E achieves this goal, but it fails in the dimension which we can reasonably infer to be the dearest to its authors’ hearts—and by way of that failure, I would argue, highlights the onrushing dead-end of a fundamentally identitarian leftism.

As the subtitle suggests, E4E recounts the establishment, via gradual and cumulative (and at times very violent) revolution, of what is repeatedly referred to as “the New York commune,” and does so through the medium of oral history interview transcripts, which have been recorded by two characters who bear the same names as the book’s authors. The city of New York is the focus, with some side-trips into other parts of the former United States, but thanks to the backstories of some of the interviewees we also learn about the path of the revolution (or perhaps of many different revolutions?) elsewhere, notably China and—heartbreakingly, in the context of real-world events since the publication of this book—the occupied territories of Palestine. Europe is notable by its absence, which I take to be a deliberate and not unreasonable decision, given the political orientation of the project as a whole; we do hear a little about Australia, though only by way of its being mentioned as the last bastion of an otherwise conquered capitalist-patriarchal hegemony.

The dominant aspect of the commune is that of pluralism around gender and sexuality. Or, rather, it isn’t—or perhaps it’s not supposed to be? But it feels like the dominant theme is gender and sexuality, despite an almost total reconfiguration of the social, economic and political fabric of the place, because gender and sexuality is what most of the interviewee characters spend a great deal of time talking about: they are at great pains to tell us how totally normal and acceptable it is to be non-cis and non-het in this world, but the exhausting regularity of this claim starts quickly to undermine it. It’s rather like hearing your friend tell you for the tenth time over the same evening out that they haven’t thought about their ex at all, or hearing Keir Starmer announce yet again that he has decisively laid to rest the ghost of Corbynism in the Labour party; in all such cases, one cannot help but feel that the character doth protest too much.

Sociologically speaking, the ‘normal’ is precisely that which is not discussed, and this is where E4E fails as a utopia: if you want to normalise something in a work of worldbuilding, you show it as being normal and everyday, and you do so in as offhand a way as possible, while still making it clear enough to let the reader catch it. This, as I understand it, is a big part of what Samuel R. Delany (1981) meant when he talked about “reading protocols:” the experienced reader of sf has an eye for this stuff, so someone writing for such an audience can be a little less on-the-nose with the local norms.

It is tempting to blame the formal strategy that makes E4E such a landmark. The interview transcript as a form has very little narratological bandwidth on the “show” side, but a whole lot of “tell”—and if you’ve only got an hour with someone you’ve not met before, it’s hard to capture the fullness of a convincing character (even from real live humans) unless you push quite deliberately for biographical facts and clear statements of identity and affiliation. In this sense, at least, the interviews feel plausibly true to life—and given O’Brien’s work for the New York City Trans Oral History project, it is fairly easy to imagine why.

But the formalist defence doesn’t hold, because we can find much of a more subtle and “show-”based worldbuilding approach throughout E4E—in accounts of the functioning of the communes themselves, for example, and in the very casual and off-hand introduction of a military brain-implant technology as a crucial element of the global socioeconomic and cultural framework—and the book is long enough that the same effect could easily have been achieved with regard to gender and sexuality.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that we’ve made much more of a monster of the intentional fallacy than we ever needed to, but nonetheless, I would prefer to avoid bringing the non-fictional O’Brien and Abdelhadi into the spotlight because I think the book deserves to be treated on its own terms rather than in the terms of its authors and their fields of work and interest. I expect they would prefer that, too—but their insertion of themselves into the story (albeit as pre-revolutionary academic fossils, asking questions about the brave new world which they saw take form around them) means that they’re perhaps even more directly implicated in the politics of their fictional future than are most authors of utopia. Which is to say: while the emphasis on gender is at times eye-rollingly tedious, it’s also understandable. It’s a colossal part of who they are in the present, as researchers, activists, writers, people. (My own fiction, such as it is, burgeons with obsessive attention to the infrastructural; it would be more surprising if it didn’t! And I’ve been reviewed enough to know that such matters are far from being of universal interest, to put it mildly.)

Nonetheless, I like to think I’m a generous enough reader to make allowances in situations where a thematic isn’t as important for me as it is for the author(s). My issue here is not a simple recoil from “too much gender stuff”; for the avoidance of doubt, let me state unambiguously that I am in favour of the full emancipation of all genders and sexualities, and would very much like to live in a world in which it had occurred. The point is that I don’t think such a world would look like this; I am unconvinced by this aspect of what is otherwise quite often a very convincing utopia.

The theme of family abolition, for instance, is much more effectively portrayed as a hegemonic success: it’s mentioned directly a few times, certainly, but what’s far more effective in terms of normalisation is that we are repeatedly shown post-nuclear family relations, and only ever shown pre-revolutionary family relations as being unusual, obsolete, or even actively loathsome to members of this society. (In one of the early chapters, for instance, the interviewee responds with disgust and contempt to the interviewer’s positive depiction of “that couple shit.”)

Rather naively, perhaps, I had long assumed that the “abolition” in family abolition was to be an abolishment of the enforcement of the default, rather than a wholesale eradication of the default itself. E4E certainly provides plenty of plausibly monstrous patriarchies from which people were keen to escape. But I nonetheless found myself thinking often of the many friends I have whose nuclear and/or blood family are their strongest and most dear exemplars of community, in a time when such can be hard to find; likewise, while monogamous “couple shit” doesn’t net many longread thinkpieces, it seems enduringly popular nonetheless. I was left with the sense that the missing bathwater of E4E may have had a number of healthy and well cared-for babies in it.

The resulting set-up is undeniably a communism of sorts, but it’s an intensely identitarian communism, in which everyone seems to have sought out the people most like themselves to live with. By way of example, the young trans character of the penultimate interview—who, as a teenager just setting out on their “sojourn”, has grown up entirely after the revolution—not only identifies primarily with their transness (which seems a little odd in a world where, we’re told, approximately 40% of people are now non-cis) but also spends a huge amount of their social time in exclusively trans social groups. Which, to be clear, seems like a fine and reasonable thing to do, when considered in the context of the world in which we currently live: stick with your people, right? But it massively contradicts the repeated claim that gender and sexual diversity have been normalised in this future; they are very clearly normal, in the sense of being statistically commonplace, but they are far from normalised, in the afore-mentioned sense of being a tacit part of the discursive furniture.

This seems sad to me. I would like to think that a utopian future would be one in which those differences no longer mattered, rather than one in which they have apparently become definitive and all-consuming. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein puts forward an understanding of contemporary leftism as defining itself almost exclusively in terms of its opposition to “them” on the right, which results in a sort of uncanny mirroring: a position which is, in its own way, just as reactionary, and offers no alternative to a politics of exclusion and aggrievement other than an alternative set of exclusions and grievances. This dynamic is far from being unique to the United States, though I think it fair to suggest that it’s particularly stark there—and so there is a sense, too, that E4E is a particularly USian utopia. (Other contributing factors include: an uncritical import of the transhumanist memeplex, a handwavey rehabilitation of space colonisation, and the casual assumption—admittedly hard to refute—that any revolution in that country will necessarily involve extensive, bloody combat between heavily-armed factions.) 

This is why I think E4E may also stand as a marker in the timeline of identitarian politics, by merit of its having extrapolated the paradigm to its illogical conclusion: if you’re trying to imagine life after patriarchy and capitalism, and you end up with a fun-house mirror image of the gated communities of neoliberalism, something has gone wrong. To be blunt, E4E feels like a future that would much rather I wasn’t in it—and perhaps you could say that it would do me good, as a white mostly-straight cis-male Anglo, to know how that feels. I write “feels like” quite deliberately: I do not see people like me in this story. And, to be clear, there’s no reason I should! Not all books need to be for (or to represent) people like me. But to find yourself feeling left out of a utopian vision is an uncomfortable thing: non-white folks, non-cishet folks, have all experienced that many times over. If you knew me well, however, you’d know that I’ve known exactly how that feels for my entire life (albeit for very different reasons), and you’d also know that this is why I’ve become increasingly sceptical of the idea of community in recent times.

Community, it seems to me, has become a group-discount affinity-driven rebranding of libertarian self-reliance for the era of social media—an ersatz replacement for society, spat forth by a system which knows instinctively that the formation of any society worthy of the label would spell its doom. The tension between community-as-product and the loosely implied wider society of E4E’s utopian future is the paradox at the heart of this brilliant, frustrating book, just as it is the paradox at the heart of identity-based politics.

I heartily recommend the former, but dare to hope we are done with the latter.

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Community-as-process, meanwhile, was recently brought to life for me by Citizen Sleeper, an indie-studio science fiction video game which, despite garnering a slew of awards in the last few years, seems mostly to have gone unnoticed by the more literary end of sf fandom and scholarship.

The set-up of Citizen Sleeper (CS hereafter) is pretty tropey stuff. You play the titular sleeper, from the moment of your waking up in a salvage workshop on an annular space-station known as Erlin’s Eye (or just The Eye to locals). You’re not the first of your like to arrive there: runaway indentured workers who sold their original bodies to the Essen-Arp corporation in exchange for a place in the off-world colonies they were being hired to construct. You’re still rare enough to be an outcast, however, thanks to your artificial replacement body. It’s effective enough, but some way off the local baseline and, as you soon discover, prone to breaking down if not treated with the drugs that Essen-Arp assumed would discourage you from doing a runner with what they consider to be their property. That’s what you went and did anyway, because the job was hell and you were basically disposable: more effective than a full robot, more cheaply replaced when damaged in the line of duty. So you slipped into a freight pod and got yourself flung across the cold depths of space to The Eye, where you now need to decide what you want to do with your life—or, indeed, whether what you have should even be called by that name—all while hustling along on the local scene as best you can.

By comparison to the reported retrospective first-person interviews of E4E, the second-person perspective of this (unusually literary and lo-fi) sci-fi RPG makes the player directly feel the choices and compromises involved in finding and keeping community—choices which must be made sense of in the moment, by you, without any benefit of hindsight (at least on your first play-through). Here you will encounter tensions between, for instance, maintaining a hold on your squatted apartment, or helping out a guy with a babbling toddler so he can secure a place on the colony ship that’s supposed to be leaving the station soon. It may very well turn out you can’t do both, and joining or supporting one faction or individual will quite likely involve rejecting or offending another, which in turn may mean that getting your drugs or an affordable meal becomes harder a few cycles down the line. 

Decisions and stakes of this scale might seem pretty trivial when set against a big, noble project like the communisation of New York and beyond. However, I suspect that such choices are also much more relatable to an audience which hasn’t spent decades immersed in radical political theory, but which probably has spent a number of years making decisions of exactly that more mundane magnitude. Maybe years after the events of the game, your character will look back on them and see there an arc of inevitability, an expression of who they were destined to be, their eventual identity always-already implicit in their past actions… but right now, they’re just trying to stay afloat and stay true in chaotic times, just like everyone else. 

(Well, OK: not everyone else on the Eye has a synthetic body that spontaneously starts falling apart unless dosed with the appropriate designer chemicals! But as advocates often point out, disability is the one minority of which any of us might very suddenly—and maybe even irrevocably—find ourselves a member. CS doesn’t belabour that comparison with the plight of your character, or indeed make it explicit at all, and I think it’s all the more powerful for that decision. This is partly an instrumentalist argument, in that I suspect that playing on the widespread fear of injury, or of loss of access to medicines and treatments that afford independence, is more likely to result in an empathetic response than emphasising the label of ‘disability. It is also an aesthetic argument, in that I increasingly feel that games, and art in general, are diminished when they become primarily vehicles for a message.)

What I find particularly compelling about CS, however, is the way it achieves a thematic unification of its ludic and narrative dimensions. When it comes to mechanics, the closest comparison I have available to me is the timers-and-tokens dynamic of crafting games like Weather Factory’s excellent Cultist Simulator or Book of Hours: your character has a constantly declining amount of bodily condition, which must be topped up with the aforementioned hard-to-find cocktail of chemicals; your condition dictates the number of D6 action dice you have rolled for you at the start of each cycle/turn/day-equivalent; you spend down those dice on doing various forms of work, the difficulty and risk of which is related (in part) to your skills; working may get you credits, or stuff, or a mix of the two. Every cycle, you click your way around the map of The Eye, selecting the locations and actions you’re going to do, and waiting to see what the outcome will be. Some options are always available, some are more periodic; who you know counts for a lot, but so does what you’ve done for them. Meanwhile, you’ve debts to pay off (and collectors to placate), and tasks outside of work aimed at getting yourself some sort of life—or maybe a ticket to somewhere else, if that’s more your speed.

Which is to say: CS is not at all a hard game in the button-mashing ludic sense of that adjective, but it is hard in the way that life at the bottom of the stack of late-late neoliberal capitalism is hard—which is, again, less about the difficulty of any individual task (which may in fact be almost insultingly easy) and more about the difficulty of scheduling half a dozen such tasks in parallel without dropping any commitments or missing any repayments; more abstractly, it’s the difficulty of trying to keep your longer-term existential goals in view through the numbing fog of tedious repetitions and rise-and-grind hoop-jumping. Which is also to say, while such a real-life routine may not be exactly difficult, it’s still exhausting, because the lack of difficulty combines with the lack of compensation to produce a life largely devoid of stimulus. 

The big difference from reality—and the thing that makes CS a pleasure that you’ll find yourself returning to—is that it does provide you with stimulus beyond the light dopamine cycle of gamification: you are rewarded for (some of) your efforts with connections to new friends, and with the stories those friends share with you. Indeed, the mechanics of CS are so uncanny a model of precariat life that one could easily imagine a different version of the game, played for Charlie Brooker-grade black humour: mostly unchanged in the ludic sense, but just a few notches more satirical in the storytelling. What keeps CS from becoming that game is the writing—and despite my relative inexperience of the field, I’m nonetheless going to go right ahead and say that the writing here, from a literary point of view, is so far out in front of even some of the biggest RPG titles on the market that it almost seems impossible. 

Once you think about it, though, it makes a lot of sense: for starters, the complete aesthetic control afforded to what is in essence a one-person studio, in which said person just happens to have a postgraduate qualification in experimental writing from Goldsmiths, may have something to do with it! So might the fact that the story is not subservient to the mechanics of the game, as it might more necessarily be in a big franchise title laden not only with expectations around canonicity and value-for-money “replayability,” but also hemmed in by a Greek chorus of always-online adolescents for whom the label “incel” appears to be the only community to which they aspire unironically, eternally ready to pontificate on the “wokeness” and/or project-managerial ineptitude of professionals who they’d likely never dare approach if actually confronted by them in the same physical space. In a title like CS, meanwhile—made for the people who inhabit the flared (and expanding) edges of gaming’s demographic bell-curve—the story can come to the fore a bit more, precisely because it’s “indie” enough to avoid the made-by-committee constraints internalised by a big-studio project: by going its own way, worldbuilding-wise, it can attract those with a taste for originality and nuance. Perhaps, in this way, an audience may be built more organically, structured around various narrative and ludic ‘invitations in’ to identify with, or feel for, or feel through the game’s world. 

(All of which is to say, I suppose, that big-ticket “triple-A” games are also simulations of late-late neoliberal capitalism, and of the experience of trying to maintain a sense of self in the face of a relentless hegemonising force… but that they are predominantly experienced in this way by their makers, rather than by their players. And so it goes.)

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I find myself drawn to the idea that there’s something in the medium of video games that has allowed CS to portray community-as-process in a more relatable and welcoming way than the interviews-as-novel of E4E… but I suspect that, in being so drawn, I’m falling for the claims of empathy through interactivity which have become a popular (if increasingly hard to credit) promotional riff in the industry—one which, somewhat ironically perhaps, mirrors the inflated claims made not so long ago for the impact of climate fiction.

Besides, there’s probably more evidence for an argument that draws entirely on the stories themselves. So how about this: E4E is a landmark of radical utopian fiction, taking the polyphonic approach to the utmost and thus providing a depth of detail and perspective which is rare indeed: it feels like a world, not a manifesto. But it also exemplifies the old saw wherein a work of sf is actually about the time in which it is written, rather than the time in which it is ostensibly set. As a cry for defiance and mutual aid from various identity-based groups currently suffering the epochal stupidities of USian politics in the early C21st, it should stand for decades to come as a document of the dreams of sorely subjected people. As a propositional future, however—as a blueprint for the preferable—it already feels like a relic of the pandemic period: closed in, cabin-fevered.

CS, meanwhile, not only represents an all-thrown-together social fabric in which muddling through with people radically different to yourself is both necessary and redemptive for both parties, but in so doing also invites you to (re)experience the nigh-universal subjection that justifies—no, necessitates—such small, non-judgemental solidarities and, ultimately, makes of them a form of resistance very different to the one that grows from the barrel of a gun. CS is also a product of its moment of production, of course, but to me it feels transcendant of it: a canny use (or maybe just a lucky choice) of the estrangement afforded by the skiffy setting. Its utopian horizon is clearly visible from the vantage of the present, no matter where we may be stood, no matter who or what we may take ourselves to be—and that’s a rare achievement, regardless of medium, that may stand the test of time.

DR. PAUL GRAHAM RAVEN IS A WRITER, RESEARCHER AND CRITICAL FUTURES CONSULTANT, WHOSE WORK IS CONCERNED WITH HOW THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT TIMES TO COME CAN SHAPE THE LIVES WE END UP LIVING. PAUL IS ALSO AN AUTHOR AND CRITIC OF SCIENCE FICTION, AN OCCASIONAL JOURNALIST AND ESSAYIST, AND A COLLABORATOR WITH DESIGNERS AND ARTISTS. HE CURRENTLY LIVES IN MALMÖ WITH A CAT, SOME GUITARS, AND TOO MANY BOOKS. YOU CAN FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HIM AT PAULGRAHAMRAVEN.COM, OR SUBSCRIBE TO THE RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HIS FUTURES PRACTICE AT WORLDBUILDING.AGENCY

Paul Graham Raven

Column/Vector “Community” Special Issue 300

The longer I’ve sat with the assignment to write a column themed on community, the more daunting it has come to seem. This is, ironically, a personal problem: put very simply—and thus avoiding autobiographical sidequests—community is not something with which I am very well acquainted, and what acquaintance I have with it is tainted with distrust. Community has always shown itself to me as being concerned with who’s out as much as who’s in, if not perhaps more so; I thus tend to position community, from which one may be expelled, in contrast to the admittedly more abstract notion of society, of which one is a member by default (though one may of course be an unwilling and/or disenfranchised member of society).

Those who work with language face a perpetual dilemma in what we sometimes still call the ‘information age ’: on the one hand, words have meanings; on the other hand, meanings change with usage, and this process of semantic alteration (or evacuation) seems only to accelerate. In this particular case, I am rather stuck with “community,” but I can surface my discontent by suggesting a fresh distinction between community considered as a noun—a thing which one has or does not have—and community as a verb—a thing which one does, or in which one partakes.

(Readers who detect a Heraclitean distinction between being and becoming, respectively, are not imagining things; those whose philosophy tends more to the vernacular may prefer to think in terms of product and process.)

To be clear, I’m not out to position one or the other of these terms as being “the bad community;” indeed, that’s exactly the sort of monochromatic thinking that I’m trying to get away from in this piece. But I do want to highlight the way in which community-as-noun tends ineluctibly toward in-group-out-group dynamics, while community-as-verb puts the focus instead upon choices and compromises made in the face of constraints whose very commonality might conjure up the spectre of society which Margaret Thatcher once so successfully banished. More plainly, it seems to me that by paying more attention to what we are obliged to do, in the process of making, unmaking and remaking community through our actions, we might better recognise the greater societal ideal that community reproduces at a smaller and more limited scale.

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I’m going to start with the novel Everything for Everyone by M E O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. I’m more than a little late to this particular party, but now understand how this obscure novel from an anarchist press has had such impressive word-of-mouth reach. It’s a very good book—a landmark title, in fact, both in terms of the utopia as a literary form, and of its specific utopian politics. However, while it represents a vanguard with regard to the former, I feel it may represent the end of an era to the latter. 

Put another way, Everything for Everyone (E4E hereafter) is flawed, as all works of art invariably are—but those flaws are all the more disappointing, aesthetically and politically, given the power and timeliness of the whole. It feels reasonable to suggest that one metric of success for a utopia might be the extent to which it depicts its most central social reconfigurations as having been normalised. In many dimensions, E4E achieves this goal, but it fails in the dimension which we can reasonably infer to be the dearest to its authors’ hearts—and by way of that failure, I would argue, highlights the onrushing dead-end of a fundamentally identitarian leftism.

As the subtitle suggests, E4E recounts the establishment, via gradual and cumulative (and at times very violent) revolution, of what is repeatedly referred to as “the New York commune,” and does so through the medium of oral history interview transcripts, which have been recorded by two characters who bear the same names as the book’s authors. The city of New York is the focus, with some side-trips into other parts of the former United States, but thanks to the backstories of some of the interviewees we also learn about the path of the revolution (or perhaps of many different revolutions?) elsewhere, notably China and—heartbreakingly, in the context of real-world events since the publication of this book—the occupied territories of Palestine. Europe is notable by its absence, which I take to be a deliberate and not unreasonable decision, given the political orientation of the project as a whole; we do hear a little about Australia, though only by way of its being mentioned as the last bastion of an otherwise conquered capitalist-patriarchal hegemony.

The dominant aspect of the commune is that of pluralism around gender and sexuality. Or, rather, it isn’t—or perhaps it’s not supposed to be? But it feels like the dominant theme is gender and sexuality, despite an almost total reconfiguration of the social, economic and political fabric of the place, because gender and sexuality is what most of the interviewee characters spend a great deal of time talking about: they are at great pains to tell us how totally normal and acceptable it is to be non-cis and non-het in this world, but the exhausting regularity of this claim starts quickly to undermine it. It’s rather like hearing your friend tell you for the tenth time over the same evening out that they haven’t thought about their ex at all, or hearing Keir Starmer announce yet again that he has decisively laid to rest the ghost of Corbynism in the Labour party; in all such cases, one cannot help but feel that the character doth protest too much.

Sociologically speaking, the ‘normal’ is precisely that which is not discussed, and this is where E4E fails as a utopia: if you want to normalise something in a work of worldbuilding, you show it as being normal and everyday, and you do so in as offhand a way as possible, while still making it clear enough to let the reader catch it. This, as I understand it, is a big part of what Samuel R. Delany (1981) meant when he talked about “reading protocols:” the experienced reader of sf has an eye for this stuff, so someone writing for such an audience can be a little less on-the-nose with the local norms.

It is tempting to blame the formal strategy that makes E4E such a landmark. The interview transcript as a form has very little narratological bandwidth on the “show” side, but a whole lot of “tell”—and if you’ve only got an hour with someone you’ve not met before, it’s hard to capture the fullness of a convincing character (even from real live humans) unless you push quite deliberately for biographical facts and clear statements of identity and affiliation. In this sense, at least, the interviews feel plausibly true to life—and given O’Brien’s work for the New York City Trans Oral History project, it is fairly easy to imagine why.

But the formalist defence doesn’t hold, because we can find much of a more subtle and “show-”based worldbuilding approach throughout E4E—in accounts of the functioning of the communes themselves, for example, and in the very casual and off-hand introduction of a military brain-implant technology as a crucial element of the global socioeconomic and cultural framework—and the book is long enough that the same effect could easily have been achieved with regard to gender and sexuality.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that we’ve made much more of a monster of the intentional fallacy than we ever needed to, but nonetheless, I would prefer to avoid bringing the non-fictional O’Brien and Abdelhadi into the spotlight because I think the book deserves to be treated on its own terms rather than in the terms of its authors and their fields of work and interest. I expect they would prefer that, too—but their insertion of themselves into the story (albeit as pre-revolutionary academic fossils, asking questions about the brave new world which they saw take form around them) means that they’re perhaps even more directly implicated in the politics of their fictional future than are most authors of utopia. Which is to say: while the emphasis on gender is at times eye-rollingly tedious, it’s also understandable. It’s a colossal part of who they are in the present, as researchers, activists, writers, people. (My own fiction, such as it is, burgeons with obsessive attention to the infrastructural; it would be more surprising if it didn’t! And I’ve been reviewed enough to know that such matters are far from being of universal interest, to put it mildly.)

Nonetheless, I like to think I’m a generous enough reader to make allowances in situations where a thematic isn’t as important for me as it is for the author(s). My issue here is not a simple recoil from “too much gender stuff”; for the avoidance of doubt, let me state unambiguously that I am in favour of the full emancipation of all genders and sexualities, and would very much like to live in a world in which it had occurred. The point is that I don’t think such a world would look like this; I am unconvinced by this aspect of what is otherwise quite often a very convincing utopia.

The theme of family abolition, for instance, is much more effectively portrayed as a hegemonic success: it’s mentioned directly a few times, certainly, but what’s far more effective in terms of normalisation is that we are repeatedly shown post-nuclear family relations, and only ever shown pre-revolutionary family relations as being unusual, obsolete, or even actively loathsome to members of this society. (In one of the early chapters, for instance, the interviewee responds with disgust and contempt to the interviewer’s positive depiction of “that couple shit.”)

Rather naively, perhaps, I had long assumed that the “abolition” in family abolition was to be an abolishment of the enforcement of the default, rather than a wholesale eradication of the default itself. E4E certainly provides plenty of plausibly monstrous patriarchies from which people were keen to escape. But I nonetheless found myself thinking often of the many friends I have whose nuclear and/or blood family are their strongest and most dear exemplars of community, in a time when such can be hard to find; likewise, while monogamous “couple shit” doesn’t net many longread thinkpieces, it seems enduringly popular nonetheless. I was left with the sense that the missing bathwater of E4E may have had a number of healthy and well cared-for babies in it.

The resulting set-up is undeniably a communism of sorts, but it’s an intensely identitarian communism, in which everyone seems to have sought out the people most like themselves to live with. By way of example, the young trans character of the penultimate interview—who, as a teenager just setting out on their “sojourn”, has grown up entirely after the revolution—not only identifies primarily with their transness (which seems a little odd in a world where, we’re told, approximately 40% of people are now non-cis) but also spends a huge amount of their social time in exclusively trans social groups. Which, to be clear, seems like a fine and reasonable thing to do, when considered in the context of the world in which we currently live: stick with your people, right? But it massively contradicts the repeated claim that gender and sexual diversity have been normalised in this future; they are very clearly normal, in the sense of being statistically commonplace, but they are far from normalised, in the afore-mentioned sense of being a tacit part of the discursive furniture.

This seems sad to me. I would like to think that a utopian future would be one in which those differences no longer mattered, rather than one in which they have apparently become definitive and all-consuming. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein puts forward an understanding of contemporary leftism as defining itself almost exclusively in terms of its opposition to “them” on the right, which results in a sort of uncanny mirroring: a position which is, in its own way, just as reactionary, and offers no alternative to a politics of exclusion and aggrievement other than an alternative set of exclusions and grievances. This dynamic is far from being unique to the United States, though I think it fair to suggest that it’s particularly stark there—and so there is a sense, too, that E4E is a particularly USian utopia. (Other contributing factors include: an uncritical import of the transhumanist memeplex, a handwavey rehabilitation of space colonisation, and the casual assumption—admittedly hard to refute—that any revolution in that country will necessarily involve extensive, bloody combat between heavily-armed factions.) 

This is why I think E4E may also stand as a marker in the timeline of identitarian politics, by merit of its having extrapolated the paradigm to its illogical conclusion: if you’re trying to imagine life after patriarchy and capitalism, and you end up with a fun-house mirror image of the gated communities of neoliberalism, something has gone wrong. To be blunt, E4E feels like a future that would much rather I wasn’t in it—and perhaps you could say that it would do me good, as a white mostly-straight cis-male Anglo, to know how that feels. I write “feels like” quite deliberately: I do not see people like me in this story. And, to be clear, there’s no reason I should! Not all books need to be for (or to represent) people like me. But to find yourself feeling left out of a utopian vision is an uncomfortable thing: non-white folks, non-cishet folks, have all experienced that many times over. If you knew me well, however, you’d know that I’ve known exactly how that feels for my entire life (albeit for very different reasons), and you’d also know that this is why I’ve become increasingly sceptical of the idea of community in recent times.

Community, it seems to me, has become a group-discount affinity-driven rebranding of libertarian self-reliance for the era of social media—an ersatz replacement for society, spat forth by a system which knows instinctively that the formation of any society worthy of the label would spell its doom. The tension between community-as-product and the loosely implied wider society of E4E’s utopian future is the paradox at the heart of this brilliant, frustrating book, just as it is the paradox at the heart of identity-based politics.

I heartily recommend the former, but dare to hope we are done with the latter.

#

Community-as-process, meanwhile, was recently brought to life for me by Citizen Sleeper, an indie-studio science fiction video game which, despite garnering a slew of awards in the last few years, seems mostly to have gone unnoticed by the more literary end of sf fandom and scholarship.

The set-up of Citizen Sleeper (CS hereafter) is pretty tropey stuff. You play the titular sleeper, from the moment of your waking up in a salvage workshop on an annular space-station known as Erlin’s Eye (or just The Eye to locals). You’re not the first of your like to arrive there: runaway indentured workers who sold their original bodies to the Essen-Arp corporation in exchange for a place in the off-world colonies they were being hired to construct. You’re still rare enough to be an outcast, however, thanks to your artificial replacement body. It’s effective enough, but some way off the local baseline and, as you soon discover, prone to breaking down if not treated with the drugs that Essen-Arp assumed would discourage you from doing a runner with what they consider to be their property. That’s what you went and did anyway, because the job was hell and you were basically disposable: more effective than a full robot, more cheaply replaced when damaged in the line of duty. So you slipped into a freight pod and got yourself flung across the cold depths of space to The Eye, where you now need to decide what you want to do with your life—or, indeed, whether what you have should even be called by that name—all while hustling along on the local scene as best you can.

By comparison to the reported retrospective first-person interviews of E4E, the second-person perspective of this (unusually literary and lo-fi) sci-fi RPG makes the player directly feel the choices and compromises involved in finding and keeping community—choices which must be made sense of in the moment, by you, without any benefit of hindsight (at least on your first play-through). Here you will encounter tensions between, for instance, maintaining a hold on your squatted apartment, or helping out a guy with a babbling toddler so he can secure a place on the colony ship that’s supposed to be leaving the station soon. It may very well turn out you can’t do both, and joining or supporting one faction or individual will quite likely involve rejecting or offending another, which in turn may mean that getting your drugs or an affordable meal becomes harder a few cycles down the line. 

Decisions and stakes of this scale might seem pretty trivial when set against a big, noble project like the communisation of New York and beyond. However, I suspect that such choices are also much more relatable to an audience which hasn’t spent decades immersed in radical political theory, but which probably has spent a number of years making decisions of exactly that more mundane magnitude. Maybe years after the events of the game, your character will look back on them and see there an arc of inevitability, an expression of who they were destined to be, their eventual identity always-already implicit in their past actions… but right now, they’re just trying to stay afloat and stay true in chaotic times, just like everyone else. 

(Well, OK: not everyone else on the Eye has a synthetic body that spontaneously starts falling apart unless dosed with the appropriate designer chemicals! But as advocates often point out, disability is the one minority of which any of us might very suddenly—and maybe even irrevocably—find ourselves a member. CS doesn’t belabour that comparison with the plight of your character, or indeed make it explicit at all, and I think it’s all the more powerful for that decision. This is partly an instrumentalist argument, in that I suspect that playing on the widespread fear of injury, or of loss of access to medicines and treatments that afford independence, is more likely to result in an empathetic response than emphasising the label of ‘disability. It is also an aesthetic argument, in that I increasingly feel that games, and art in general, are diminished when they become primarily vehicles for a message.)

What I find particularly compelling about CS, however, is the way it achieves a thematic unification of its ludic and narrative dimensions. When it comes to mechanics, the closest comparison I have available to me is the timers-and-tokens dynamic of crafting games like Weather Factory’s excellent Cultist Simulator or Book of Hours: your character has a constantly declining amount of bodily condition, which must be topped up with the aforementioned hard-to-find cocktail of chemicals; your condition dictates the number of D6 action dice you have rolled for you at the start of each cycle/turn/day-equivalent; you spend down those dice on doing various forms of work, the difficulty and risk of which is related (in part) to your skills; working may get you credits, or stuff, or a mix of the two. Every cycle, you click your way around the map of The Eye, selecting the locations and actions you’re going to do, and waiting to see what the outcome will be. Some options are always available, some are more periodic; who you know counts for a lot, but so does what you’ve done for them. Meanwhile, you’ve debts to pay off (and collectors to placate), and tasks outside of work aimed at getting yourself some sort of life—or maybe a ticket to somewhere else, if that’s more your speed.

Which is to say: CS is not at all a hard game in the button-mashing ludic sense of that adjective, but it is hard in the way that life at the bottom of the stack of late-late neoliberal capitalism is hard—which is, again, less about the difficulty of any individual task (which may in fact be almost insultingly easy) and more about the difficulty of scheduling half a dozen such tasks in parallel without dropping any commitments or missing any repayments; more abstractly, it’s the difficulty of trying to keep your longer-term existential goals in view through the numbing fog of tedious repetitions and rise-and-grind hoop-jumping. Which is also to say, while such a real-life routine may not be exactly difficult, it’s still exhausting, because the lack of difficulty combines with the lack of compensation to produce a life largely devoid of stimulus. 

The big difference from reality—and the thing that makes CS a pleasure that you’ll find yourself returning to—is that it does provide you with stimulus beyond the light dopamine cycle of gamification: you are rewarded for (some of) your efforts with connections to new friends, and with the stories those friends share with you. Indeed, the mechanics of CS are so uncanny a model of precariat life that one could easily imagine a different version of the game, played for Charlie Brooker-grade black humour: mostly unchanged in the ludic sense, but just a few notches more satirical in the storytelling. What keeps CS from becoming that game is the writing—and despite my relative inexperience of the field, I’m nonetheless going to go right ahead and say that the writing here, from a literary point of view, is so far out in front of even some of the biggest RPG titles on the market that it almost seems impossible. 

Once you think about it, though, it makes a lot of sense: for starters, the complete aesthetic control afforded to what is in essence a one-person studio, in which said person just happens to have a postgraduate qualification in experimental writing from Goldsmiths, may have something to do with it! So might the fact that the story is not subservient to the mechanics of the game, as it might more necessarily be in a big franchise title laden not only with expectations around canonicity and value-for-money “replayability,” but also hemmed in by a Greek chorus of always-online adolescents for whom the label “incel” appears to be the only community to which they aspire unironically, eternally ready to pontificate on the “wokeness” and/or project-managerial ineptitude of professionals who they’d likely never dare approach if actually confronted by them in the same physical space. In a title like CS, meanwhile—made for the people who inhabit the flared (and expanding) edges of gaming’s demographic bell-curve—the story can come to the fore a bit more, precisely because it’s “indie” enough to avoid the made-by-committee constraints internalised by a big-studio project: by going its own way, worldbuilding-wise, it can attract those with a taste for originality and nuance. Perhaps, in this way, an audience may be built more organically, structured around various narrative and ludic ‘invitations in’ to identify with, or feel for, or feel through the game’s world. 

(All of which is to say, I suppose, that big-ticket “triple-A” games are also simulations of late-late neoliberal capitalism, and of the experience of trying to maintain a sense of self in the face of a relentless hegemonising force… but that they are predominantly experienced in this way by their makers, rather than by their players. And so it goes.)

#

I find myself drawn to the idea that there’s something in the medium of video games that has allowed CS to portray community-as-process in a more relatable and welcoming way than the interviews-as-novel of E4E… but I suspect that, in being so drawn, I’m falling for the claims of empathy through interactivity which have become a popular (if increasingly hard to credit) promotional riff in the industry—one which, somewhat ironically perhaps, mirrors the inflated claims made not so long ago for the impact of climate fiction.

Besides, there’s probably more evidence for an argument that draws entirely on the stories themselves. So how about this: E4E is a landmark of radical utopian fiction, taking the polyphonic approach to the utmost and thus providing a depth of detail and perspective which is rare indeed: it feels like a world, not a manifesto. But it also exemplifies the old saw wherein a work of sf is actually about the time in which it is written, rather than the time in which it is ostensibly set. As a cry for defiance and mutual aid from various identity-based groups currently suffering the epochal stupidities of USian politics in the early C21st, it should stand for decades to come as a document of the dreams of sorely subjected people. As a propositional future, however—as a blueprint for the preferable—it already feels like a relic of the pandemic period: closed in, cabin-fevered.

CS, meanwhile, not only represents an all-thrown-together social fabric in which muddling through with people radically different to yourself is both necessary and redemptive for both parties, but in so doing also invites you to (re)experience the nigh-universal subjection that justifies—no, necessitates—such small, non-judgemental solidarities and, ultimately, makes of them a form of resistance very different to the one that grows from the barrel of a gun. CS is also a product of its moment of production, of course, but to me it feels transcendant of it: a canny use (or maybe just a lucky choice) of the estrangement afforded by the skiffy setting. Its utopian horizon is clearly visible from the vantage of the present, no matter where we may be stood, no matter who or what we may take ourselves to be—and that’s a rare achievement, regardless of medium, that may stand the test of time.

DR. PAUL GRAHAM RAVEN IS A WRITER, RESEARCHER AND CRITICAL FUTURES CONSULTANT, WHOSE WORK IS CONCERNED WITH HOW THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT TIMES TO COME CAN SHAPE THE LIVES WE END UP LIVING. PAUL IS ALSO AN AUTHOR AND CRITIC OF SCIENCE FICTION, AN OCCASIONAL JOURNALIST AND ESSAYIST, AND A COLLABORATOR WITH DESIGNERS AND ARTISTS. HE CURRENTLY LIVES IN MALMÖ WITH A CAT, SOME GUITARS, AND TOO MANY BOOKS. YOU CAN FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HIM AT PAULGRAHAMRAVEN.COM, OR SUBSCRIBE TO THE RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HIS FUTURES PRACTICE AT WORLDBUILDING.AGENCY

Definition: Applied science fiction is “science fiction that is trying to do something, to not only glimpse but also shape the future.” Jo Lindsay Walton

Vector 297 Futures is now available to download. Vector297Download

The ‘Futures’ issue of Vector is a collaboration between the British Science Fiction Association and the Institute for Development Studies, guest-edited by Stephen Oram. Our biggest issue to date, it explores how the opportunities, risks and limitations of harnessing science fiction all depend on who is applying it and how. Vector: Futures is a treasure trove of projects that aim to use science fiction to change the real world, showcasing interventions from fields as diverse as statistics, military intelligence, social activism, climate policy, decision science, technology and art.

Several pieces consider milestones for artificial intelligence and creativity, including SF writer Fiona Moore interviewing AI scientist Hod Lipson, and AI scientist Mackenzie Jorgensen interviewing SF writer Eli Lee, while Paul March-Russell and Dilman Dila both reflect on positive examples of AI/artist collaborations. Other interviewees include Andrew Merrie and Pat Keys, two of the leaders of the Radical Ocean Futures project, and Shanice Da Costa, art director for UNHCR’s Innovation Service’s Project Unsung. Interventions by SF writers in environment, science and policy domains are the subject of several articles, including those by Allen Stroud, Emma Johanna Puranen, Benjamin Greenaway, Dillon & Craig, Finch & Mahon, Fredström et al. and Pereira et al. Sara Stoudt reflects on statistics as a kind of science fictional thinking. Articles by Seeger and Davison-Vecchione and by Will Slocombe gives the issue’s theme a further twist, exploring science fictional representations of forecasting and prediction, and how science fiction itself might shape our applied science fiction imaginaries. Vector: Futures also features regular BSFA favourites, including Kincaid in Short, and Vector Recommends (selections from The BSFA Review).

The editorial, ‘Torque Control: Apply Science Fiction Here’ scopes the ground for this issue, and for applied science fiction as a whole. Whether you’re a longtime science fiction fan or writer, or a policymaker, practitioner, researcher or organiser interested in the power of arts and culture, there should be something in this issue for you.

Definition: Applied science fiction is “science fiction that is trying to do something, to not only glimpse but also shape the future.” Jo Lindsay Walton

Vector 297 Futures is now available to download. Vector297Download

The ‘Futures’ issue of Vector is a collaboration between the British Science Fiction Association and the Institute for Development Studies, guest-edited by Stephen Oram. Our biggest issue to date, it explores how the opportunities, risks and limitations of harnessing science fiction all depend on who is applying it and how. Vector: Futures is a treasure trove of projects that aim to use science fiction to change the real world, showcasing interventions from fields as diverse as statistics, military intelligence, social activism, climate policy, decision science, technology and art.

Several pieces consider milestones for artificial intelligence and creativity, including SF writer Fiona Moore interviewing AI scientist Hod Lipson, and AI scientist Mackenzie Jorgensen interviewing SF writer Eli Lee, while Paul March-Russell and Dilman Dila both reflect on positive examples of AI/artist collaborations. Other interviewees include Andrew Merrie and Pat Keys, two of the leaders of the Radical Ocean Futures project, and Shanice Da Costa, art director for UNHCR’s Innovation Service’s Project Unsung. Interventions by SF writers in environment, science and policy domains are the subject of several articles, including those by Allen Stroud, Emma Johanna Puranen, Benjamin Greenaway, Dillon & Craig, Finch & Mahon, Fredström et al. and Pereira et al. Sara Stoudt reflects on statistics as a kind of science fictional thinking. Articles by Seeger and Davison-Vecchione and by Will Slocombe gives the issue’s theme a further twist, exploring science fictional representations of forecasting and prediction, and how science fiction itself might shape our applied science fiction imaginaries. Vector: Futures also features regular BSFA favourites, including Kincaid in Short, and Vector Recommends (selections from The BSFA Review).

The editorial, ‘Torque Control: Apply Science Fiction Here’ scopes the ground for this issue, and for applied science fiction as a whole. Whether you’re a longtime science fiction fan or writer, or a policymaker, practitioner, researcher or organiser interested in the power of arts and culture, there should be something in this issue for you.

By Cyril Simsa

My late father, the Czech composer and broadcaster, Karel Janovický – born Bohuš František Šimsa in Pilsen in 1930, but better known under the pseudonym he adopted in the 1950s to protect his parents, whom he had left behind in Communist Czechoslovakia, when he skipped the border during the Cold War – died in January 2024. He left behind a four-storey Victorian terrace in North London, crammed with music, books, and papers, including 250 or so classical compositions and a not inconsiderable personal archive. 

It was in his papers that I found a booklet with the libretto of his one-act opera, The Utmost Sail, which he wrote in 1958 to an English-language text by another Czech émigré, Karel Brušák (1913-2004). The booklet is mimeographed, fanzine-style, so it is not a professional publication; but to anyone familiar with the history of fanzines or sf fandom, the format will be immediately recognisable, and I assume this is something that he or Brušák must have had printed for the benefit of future producers and performers at around the same time they were finishing the work itself.

Karel Janovický, Ludwigsburg refugee camp, Germany, ca. 1950

I had been long aware that my father had written an opera, and back in my teenage years, when I was at the height of my initial involvement with science fiction, he had even told me it was set on a spaceship. However, in the way children have of ignoring their parents, I had never actually seen a copy or read the text. And while I have still not seen a performance, the libretto can stand on its own as an interesting example of mid-20th Century European sf theatre. 

So how did this peculiar artefact come to be? From my father’s side, the motivation was primarily musical. After emigrating from Czechoslovakia by illegally crossing the line of the future border fence on foot at night (a family history fictionalised in my story, “Queen of Šumava”), and a sojourn in various refugee camps in Bavaria, he came to Britain on a music scholarship in 1951. By the mid-1950s he was established as a freelance pianist, music teacher, and composer with occasional gigs at the BBC World Service as part of his performance circuit. 

Karel Brušák (1913-2004) was an émigré of an earlier generation. Having completed a Master’s degree at Charles University in Prague in 1937, with a thesis under the supervision of Jan Mukařovský of the famous Prague Linguistic Circle, he was in Paris, continuing his studies, when war broke out. Following an adventurous escape from occupied France via Gibraltar, he ended up in Britain, where he worked in civil defence (specifically as one of those ARP wardens so lovingly mocked by classic TV sitcoms), alongside more substantial engagements with the Czechoslovak Government-in-exile and the BBC. After the War, he became a key employee of the BBC World Service, and that was where the two men met (Slobodová 2009, 219-221; Pynsent 2004). 

Karel Brušák, London, 1956

My father, in a memoir written after Brušák’s death, describes it thus: 

The Czechoslovak Section of the BBC World Service – devoted routinely and almost exclusively to current affairs – used to let its hair down at Christmas by putting on a Nativity play written and produced more often than not by Karel Brušák. The beginnings of my own broadcasting career date from one such occasion. It was, I think, a week or two before Christmas 1955. I had been brought in to play the piano, but an unforeseen shortage of shepherds discovered during rehearsal led to me being asked additionally to voice one. Further jobs followed (Janovický 2004).

The specific impulse that led to them attempting an opera was a competition that had been announced by the Italian music publisher, Ricordi: 

When the Italian publisher Ricordi posted up a competition for a one-act opera to be delivered in 1958, I had no difficulty in persuading [Brušák] to write a libretto for me. He chose a science fiction subject: an idealistic scientist sends a four-man spaceship he calls Messenger into the cosmos; soldiers try too late to have the mission aborted; the crew watch helplessly from space as Earth is consumed in a nuclear holocaust… 

There are two scenes, one on Earth, the other on board the spaceship; the stage set is identical: a control room (Janovický 2004). 

Given the limitations imposed by the one-act structure and the single set, the writers were not able to incorporate a lot of action; instead, they used their two groups of players (on deck and at mission control) to relate the wider story of the controversial launch and its repercussions second-hand. This tendency to describe what is going on in the outside world, rather than making any attempt to show it, is reinforced by the fact that Brušák’s interest is evidently philosophical, not technological. He wants to consider the implications of humanity breaking free of Earth, the planet on which it has its roots, rather than the mechanics of any such action. In both scenes, Brušák thus interpolates the kind of discursive interventions on science and philosophy that are characteristic of so much Central European sf writing of the mid-20th Century – the “philo-dump”, if you like – rather than following on-stage character interactions of heroics. (Think Lem, or Nesvadba, or further East, the Brothers Strugatsky.) Indeed, Brušák’s characters are never named, just given symbolic roles – “Captain”, “Scientist”, etc. – so their identities are defined entirely by their functions, not their personal characteristics. 

The Utmost Sail: first page of mimeographed libretto 

The two scenes of the bare-bones plot are then used to present two different examples of social breakdown. On Earth, the chief scientist strives to defend the noble aims of his visionary, well-intentioned project, even as a party of rogue military officers take over the control room and declare that the peaceful rocket programme is dead, while the monitors in the background start to show traces of other, more lethal launches. Meanwhile, in space, the astronauts try to fill the endless hours by debating the point and purpose of their mission, but their underlying unease and rising personal tensions eventually lead to violence. In both locations, the inability of (at least some of) Brušák’s protagonists to maintain their sense of a separate identity in the face of epoch-making events ends in destruction and death. This is humanity’s Achilles heel, suggests Brušák. “[Brušák’s] choice of the subject was weirdly prophetic, for as we were feverishly working on the opera, the first Sputnik flew on 4th October 1957,” commented my father (Janovický 2004). 

In its overall tone and structure, the libretto of The Utmost Sail is nothing like the genre sf with which modern audiences are familiar. One can see that Brušák’s sources were not the genre writers of the 1940s and ’50s, who had been trying to imagine what real-world space flight might actually be like, based on contemporary science, but the more speculative genre-adjacent writers of an earlier generation. (The title of the opera is taken from the last act of Shakespeare’s Othello, ca. 1603: “Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt,/And very sea-mark of my utmost sail”; and the text also incorporates a quotation from William Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell”, 1819, which shows how far outside the genre Brušák went for his points of reference.) Space flight, for Brušák, is not a technological proposition, but a thought experiment, and his rockets and control panels are set dressing. He is thinking about the psychological impact of radical scientific change on human society and psychology, what would today be called a “paradigm shift,” not the nuts and bolts; he is clearly more than a little sceptical about the ability of individuals to absorb change that happens too quickly. To paraphrase: if you move fast, you break things. 

Possibly because of its theatrical structure, the most obvious antecedents that springs to mind for the way the libretto is written are the sf plays of Karel Čapek (1890-1938), in particular R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), (written 1920, first performed 1921), which dramatises the effects of another world-changing technological innovation on humanity. The parallels are evident in the way Brušák’s text uses its sf elements as a hook on which to hang more general philosophical considerations; in its basic insight that the collision of runaway technology with the self-interest of human elites can be disastrous; but also in the way the restrictions of the physical set led both writers to tell so much of their story off stage, narrating outside events by passing them through the closed circle of the somewhat clinical command and control centres they both chose as their focus, rather than the wide-screen dramatics that would have been possible in cinema. Interestingly, Čapek himself wrote an early essay on the differences between theatre and film for the dramatic artist, which pointed out this precise difference in the opportunities offered by the visual image and the spoken word (Čapek 1927, 111-113). 

The Utmost Sail: first page of vocal score

Brušák was not a big fan of Čapek’s work. In fact, it is a matter of record that he considered Čapek a “bad writer” (Slobodová 2009, 225, translation mine) and from my own limited social contacts with him in the 1980s, this is also something I heard him say myself. Nonetheless, when it came to writing an sf play, his solutions to depicting a sweeping sf scenario in the limited space of the theatre are quite similar to Čapek’s. It is impossible now to be sure how deliberate this was, but Brušák was enormously well read and was also of the generation that would have had the opportunity to see at least some of Čapek’s plays in their original Prague productions. (Not R.U.R., which would have had its premiere when Brušák was seven, but quite possibly the later sf plays, like The White Plague [1937], and any number of revivals.)  One assumes Brušák must have been aware of this similarity and perhaps enjoyed a sense of amusement that his text had ended up paralleling the work of a writer, of whom he disapproved, though it is notable he did not follow Čapek in tacking on the crowd-pleasing, saccharine happy end that so undermines R.U.R. 

Unfortunately, Brušák and my father did not succeed in the Ricordi competition, and the opera was never published: “We didn’t get the first prize, but it was quite an exciting project” (Vaughan 2007). However, a Czech translation of the libretto did eventually appear in a posthumous collection of Brušák’s poetry and prose (Brušák 2009) and a limited number of the fanzine-style edition of the English text is still in circulation. Unlike my father’s chamber music, which is performed periodically in both the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom, the opera remains unproduced, presumably because of the expense and the investment of time that would be required… Which surely must present an opportunity to some enterprising opera company. 

In later life, my father became a full-time BBC World Service producer, rising eventually to be the head of their Czechoslovak Section, while continuing to write music. Brušák was hired by the University of Cambridge to teach Czech and Slovak in 1962, and remained in that role till 1999, thereby becoming one of the founders of contemporary Czech and Slovak studies in the UK. His pupils included Prof. Robert Pynsent, later at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and Prof. James Naughton of Oxford (Pynsent 2004). He collaborated with my father on one further song cycle in 1981. 

A scan of the full score of the opera is available on request.

Sources

Brušák, Karel. 2009. “Nejzazší plavba”. Translated by Zdeněk Hron. In Karel Brušák: Básnické a prozaické dílo, edited by Vlasta Skalická. Cherm. 

Čapek, Karel. 1927. “Hranice filmu.” Lidové noviny, November 18. Reprinted in Karel Čapek, O umění a kultuře III. Spisy XIX. [On Art and Culture III. Collected Works XIX.] Československý spisovatel, 1986, and cited from the reprint. The title of the essay translates as “The Limits of Film”. 

Janovický, Karel. 2004. “Karel Brušák, the BBC and Music”. Manuscript sent to the author by e-mail, July 11. Draft contribution to an unidentified newsletter; I have not been able to establish where this was published. 

[Pynsent, Robert]. 2004. “Karel Brusak: BBC’s voice of hope for Czechs and Slovaks during the Nazi tyranny” [obituary]. The Times, June 17. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/karel-brusak-5ggdx9k6pxf [accessed 1 May 2025]. Although unsigned, this is widely attributed to Pynsent: see, for example, Slobodová 2009, 228. 

Slobodová, Zuzana. 2009. “Karel Brušák” [afterword]. In Karel Brušák: Básnické a prozaické dílo, edited by Vlasta Skalická. Cherm. 

Vaughan, David. 2007. “Karel Janovický – Czech sputniks in suburban London”. Radio Prague International, February 25. https://english.radio.cz/karel-janovicky-czech-sputniks-suburban-london-8610693 [accessed 1 May 2025].

Karel Janovický in his studio, London, ca. 2005

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