Vector [BSFA] Blog

Reviewed by Nkereuwem Albert

They Made Us Blood and Fury is a nightmare brought to life, dripping with characters that will drive a dagger into your very being. An epic fantasy novel that does not shirk from its gritty bits and moral ambiguity, Ntumy’s world is relentless and well put together, with layers within layers to consider. 

One of the things I enjoy most in fantasy is worldbuilding that never feels like too much information; it is a difficult thing to execute, but in this novel, we’re given all we need to engage with the world without it ever feeling superfluous or inadequate, a line walked beautifully. Anyi is a beacon of glory to the Countless Clans, led by a council of elders and queens that provide lifeblood, a magical substance that can be moulded into anything, from medicine to weapons. Anyi has so much lifeblood that they give it away to the neighbouring kingdoms and cities, from Ka to Bediaku, Gbota and Xose.  From believable history, to enthralling magic, to commerce and social structure, the world presented feels full and ready for a great story to be told within.

As the novel opens, we are thrown into an Anyi on the edge. The queen is dying and none of her heirs, the Divewe, can produce it. Reservoirs run dry and gods stay silent, leaving the Anyi with too little of the substance they once gave away in excess. Across the continent, in the empire of Ka, we meet Aseye, an Anyi native working with lifeblood in the imperial armoury. Setting her sights on starting her own practice, her life is complicated by the death of the Anyi queen and the secrets it unearths. There’s also the issue of Kwame–beautiful Kwame–an imperial courtier with a hidden heritage and conflicting loyalties. 

Ntumy’s magic system is especially cool and inventive, with seers and blood-as-power done in ways that I’ve never seen. A culture where magic is embedded in the history, geography and economics of the world, we see the impact of lifeblood excesses and shortages play out both in the present and contextually. Spirit possessions and gods’ whisperings come at a terrible price. The creatures that manifest across the novel are beautiful, visceral and terrifying! 

For all its detailed worldbuilding, They Made Us Blood and Fury is also an education in heart-rending character development. Aseye and Kwame are very compelling protagonists. Aseye’s past is shrouded in mystery that unravels with massive implications for the countless clans, and with Kwame, a character with conflicting loyalties and motivations that are unclear, we have an intriguing pair, written with raw intensity and unyielding prose that is very compelling to read. 

The supporting cast—spread out across the Countless Clans—deliver, filling out the necessary points in this story beautifully and disturbingly as the novel progresses. In They Made Us Blood and Fury, you sense the threads that link the cast, but Ntumy still delivers excellent character arcs, in both positive and antagonistic directions. Fafa, Fia Kofi, and Mamiga are an excellent investigation into the choices we make to sustain life as we know it, even when we know better. The Divewe’s choices are driven by their need to survive and their thirst for the power they were destined for, now a destiny denied. The Kahene and the politics of his empire ask the necessary questions about imperialism and its swallowing of cultures and people alike. In the sandlands and the spaces between, the nomads offer Aseye philosophy that is antithetical to what is the norm in the countless clans, and the entirety of the supporting cast feel real and fleshed out, to the betterment of the novel. 

All these elements come together to make a world in which the truth is always lurking, and this novel captures that eerie feeling perfectly. With a story told in journeys through the Countless Clans,  there were many moments that shocked me and broke my heart, and pivots that grabbed my attention and made me perk up and hope, all ending with a flawless landing that leaves me wanting more of the Countless. Cheryl S. Ntumy delivers a very inventive fantasy novel on so many fronts, and I know this is not the end, so I will wait impatiently for the next book. 

By Christine Aicardi

Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).

But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.

Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.

From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).

What was Beer’s goal? This work on biological computing was part and parcel of his thinking on management cybernetics and complex systems. All along, he aimed to improve industrial management, and through his cybernetic factory designs, to replace the factory’s human manager with a (better performing) ‘cybernetic brain.’ Would a pond be cleverer than a human? He thought that factories were embedded in economic environments that were exceedingly complex systems, posing problems beyond human representational cognitive abilities. In contrast, some biological systems had the performative ability to solve such problems as they could adapt to unexpected and unforeseeable changes (Pickering, 2010: 234-37). In biological computers, Beer’s hope was that “solutions to problems simply grow” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 237).

There is a strong whiff of zoefuturism to the idea of handing over the running of our industry and economy to pond life. Yet the conditions of its enrolment, or its abandonment when it does not do the job, should give us pause. What happened to Beer’s experiments with Euglena? Or, what happened to Euglena in Beer’s experiments? Beer was trying to exploit Euglena’s sensitivity to light for creating optical couplings to tanks full of the microalgae’s colonies. “However, the culturing difficulties proved enormous. Euglena showed a distressing tendency to lie doggo, and attempts to isolate a more motile strain failed” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234). Did Beer think that Euglena were trying to avoid detection, as implied by his use of ‘lying doggo’? Who knows. But he must have thrown away the content of the tanks, hopefully in a pond rather than in a sink. So, when Euglena refused to behave as expected, refused to play the role they were assigned in Beer’s game, they were discarded. The wonders of self-organization and autonomous behaviour had their limits: biological systems had to be useful to their human ‘carer.’ Beer’s ‘care’ for Euglena was predicated on their usefulness to his personal goals. It was not a dis-interested, open-ended, performative dance of agency. In Norris’ story, Euglena loved Beer’s, their captor’s, brain. But this could be interpreted as textbook Stockholm syndrome.

These reflections led me to revisit “Euglena”. But I read a different story this time. It is certainly an homage to Beer and British cybernetics. However, there is much more to it when read through a situated (feminist STS) filtering of zoefuturism. Above all, Norris gives Euglena, the lowly pond life, a new lease on life out of its (en)forced confinement in a tank. This could be read as liberation from detention and from a form of slavery, although Euglena does not complain much about it. Crucially, Euglena’s freeing brings with it a heightened capacity for self-respect, agency, autonomy, and altruism.

“Euglena” has been a thought-provoking (and affecting) object to think with about zoefuturism and its potentially problematic kinship to cybernetics. It has left me with unanswered questions for aspiring zoefuturist writers: where to place the cursor in the murky borderlands between freely consented multispecies collaboration and reciprocal care on the one side, and unidirectional exploitation through more or less forceful nudging on the other side? And for those who like me have been bathed from birth in Western culture, like the British cyberneticists – are we capable, or willing, to entirely avoid reproducing colonial and exploitative styles of thinking and acting in the world, which have been so tightly woven into the fabric of modernity since the Enlightenment?

References

Ames, R. T. (2023). ‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 93, 81-98. doi:10.1017/S1358246123000012

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Medina, E. (2006). Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(3), 571-606. doi:10.1017/S0022216X06001179

Norris, J. (2024). Euglena. In B. Greenaway & S. Oram (Eds.), All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions That Disrupt (pp. 265-271). London: CyberSalon Press.

Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press.

Rosenhead, J. (2006). IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer. International Transactions in Operational Research, 13(6), 577-581. doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3995.2006.00565.x

Christine Aicardi is a Senior Research Fellow working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Futures Studies, with special interest in theorising and developing the use of applied science fiction for participatory foresight. She has extensive experience in multidisciplinary collaborations to facilitate Responsible (Research and) Innovation for future technologies.

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix).  This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.  

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection.  This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way.  Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text. 

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.  

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.  

The content of this book follows a similar pattern as its writers explore what an inclusive future means, starting with the first story in the collection, “Three-World Cantata” by Vandana Singh. The story explores this theme and shows that futurism should not become mere progressivism, but should include both human and nonhuman elements and be led by ordinary citizens rather than corporations. The character Chingari (the story doesn’t mention their gender) and their team creates IntMRI, which allows them to take a person’s consciousness into a preexisting climatic scenario with the intention of convincing the person to adopt positive attitudes that will lead to climatic justice. Their initial targets are people in power who can influence climate policy. Manny, the CEO of UltraCorp, holds such power and is pimped into the project. Manny is exposed to different climate situations, including the importance of human interconnection with nonhumans such as elephants. Manny prefers managing the system rather than pursuing structural change.  So, what Chingari realises is that in a world charged by personal interest, to know what is good does not necessarily equate to doing what is right. Plato suggested otherwise in The Republic where he equates knowing good to doing good. However, sustainable change, Chingari discovered, starts with the collaboration of ordinary people: ‘If you looked closely at the time axis by yourself, it remained a long, thin line stretching from past through present and into the future— nothing changed. But look at it, engage with it along with other people, other beings, and you would see it thicken, acquire structure’ (Singh 2026:34). It is through community collaboration that real change emerges.

“Death is Not an Ornament” by Hannah Onoguwe echoes a similar sentiment and shows such societal change when there is a collaboration between human and nonhuman. In my book, “Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution,” I argue that recurring theme in Nigerian speculative fiction is the entanglement between human and nonhuman “which it draws from the indigenous Nigerian cosmology of co-existence between human and nonhuman in a symbiotic relationship” (2025:17). The protagonist in Onoguwe’s story is a hybrid of human and nonhuman who fights to eradicate dependence on the petro-economy by teaming with nonhuman whose inhabitant is the ocean. 

In “Robots & Insects & Languages & Other Living Things” by Libia Brenda, Brenda projects this interconnection to also include machines, through the process of language. The mediator here is the IA, known as mycorrhizae, whose encoding and decoding of various means of communication between humans and other nonhumans breaks down the barrier between humans and nonhumans. Once this is accomplished, the wall between nature and culture, is broken.

In “Mina’s Dream” by Vandana Singh, activism takes a different shape, not the usual workaday protest of placard carrying (Fisher, 2014, will argue that the capitalist system has already contained this method) but from the tiny ray of hope of the ethics of the protagonist Mina. Mina’s tenderness to her garden mirrors the tenderness of her heart to her community as the protagonist says “Remember that we are entangled, all of us, with each other and other life- forms (86).” It is that love that transforms not just her community’s ecology but also spreads into a political act, which is to say that what spurred political activism here is a change in the value system.  

  

In “Climate Action Dialogue: From Liner to Fractal”, a discussion among Nigel Topping, Farhana Yamin, and Ed Finn, among other things, carries on this discourse on ethical and societal values. It is this changing of value systems that Yamin argues is the key to unlocking a better climatic future: “I’m very excited about this shift to working at the level of values, whereas before we were just trying to tinker with a policy here, or a program there, or a bit of funding here, a few fiscal reforms here and there…. Changing values allows us to see things moving differently, and to reshape our relationships (235).” It is this stand of orientation transformation that Anna Pigott takes in “Flights of Fancy” by arguing that if over-tourism is scaled down, places like Corfu currently frequented by tourists, an activity that destroys its bioforms, will have a better, more diverse ecosystem. 

Where it can be argued that value/attitude change originates from the oil companies who pushed the concept of carbon footprint, attempting to shift the conversation about infrastructure and systems into the scale of travel, gardens, and personal actions, the diversity in the views in the anthology, gives room to varied perspectives towards climate action. For instance, in the dialogue between Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Kim Stanley Robinson, argues ‘that nation- states could force international finance to give up some of their ill- gotten or artificially gotten gains to pay for [climate] justice itself” (2026:300). Here, Robinson is foregrounding system change and not just individual attitudinal change.

Chinelo Onwualu shares a similar sentiment about the importance of value change in her essay, “The Case for Reckless Climate Optimism”. In a world marred with discrimination and racism, hope for the future is possible due to the value of openness and interconnectedness adopted by the younger generation born during the pandemic. Onwualu is optimistic that this new value adopted by the generation will lead to a better future because “working with hope is very different from working with fear. One leads upward, opening us up to innovations and experimentation (41).”

 It is this hopeful attitude shared by Claire Armitstead in “The Robin, The Wolves, and The Library” as she waits for Robin to appear in her garden during a summer whose heat led to the decline of the species. 

Pippa Goldschmidt feels a similar optimism with the city of Berlin in “A Walk in Berlin”. A city with a dark history of fascism, colonialism, and genocide, the community emerged from this “physical and moral abyss (203).” It is this resilience that gives hope.

In the “Introduction”,  Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich argue for a hopeful future but add that in the collection, the hopeful futures imagined are “inspired by practical, everyday writing about climate—weather forecasts, almanacs, rainfall indexes— to try to create a user’s guide to the real world, rather than a magic eight ball revealing all of the answers” (xv). Utility is foregrounded here to counter the fantasy argument levelled against utopian unconsciousness, as utopia is “thought to be a mere fantasy” (Kloeg 2016:451) which is why Immanuel Wallerstein calls utopian unconsciousness as, “breeders of illusions and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions” (quoted in Lancaster, 2000:109) This collection exposes the weakness in such a stand. For instance, in “Climate Action Dialogue: Becoming Better Humans”, a conversation between  Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Robinson suggests practical ways to mitigate the climate crisis, such as the: 

notion of slowing down the melting and sliding of the glaciers in Antarctica to preserve sea level, which is being pursued by glaciologists. It’s a minor expense compared to what we’ve been talking about so far, really a matter of just a few billion a year to drill through those glaciers and suck the water out from underneath them. You would need a navy like the US Navy. You would need people repurposed from the oil industry to aid the glacial slowdown project. It’s exactly the same expertise, and even the same equipment (294). 

Here, Robinson gives a scalable solution to mitigate the climate crisis. Similarly, in a different location, the essay by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, “The Unwalkable City” provides practical guides in which Sri Lankan architecture could be improved for climate sustainability. All these points show that the utopia in this collection aims for one whose foundation is built on an actionable framework.

While I found this book both informative and entertaining, the only weakness I see is its framing, which makes it look ahistorical by failing to situate itself explicitly in the utopian tradition, and tends to present itself as if it had emerged without precedent. Perhaps it is from the capitalist unconscious which currently governs the academic environment, where research is constantly forced to model itself in the language of newness. Capitalism seeks expansion and imbues an unconsciousness of seeking something new in perpetuity: new market, new brand, new technology (a company like Apple tweaks its phone every other year to announce its newness). To be relevant in a capitalist political economy, the notion of newness that signals its expansion is repetitive.  This criticism, notwithstanding, the book broadens my horizon about climate futures and it is a worthwhile read. 

Selected References

Bould, M. (2021). The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. London: Verso.

Ezeiyoke, C. (2025). Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution. London: Routledge

Fisher, F. (2014).  Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hampshire: Zero Books. 

Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London and New York: Verso.

Kloeg, J. (2016). ‘Utopianism and its discontents: A conceptual history’. Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 108(3). 451-468 

Marx, K. and F. Engels (2007). Manifesto of the Communist Party. New York: International Publishers Co.

Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Simon, M (2023). Why Deleting Carbon From the Atmosphere Is So Controversial. https://www.wired.com/story/why-deleting-carbon-from-the-atmosphere-is-so-controversial/

Taylor, T. J (2024). Introduction to Cofuturisms. The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturism. Edited by Taylor, T.J, Lavender III, I, Dillon, G.L and Chattopadhyay, B. London: Routledge 

Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke’s PhD is from Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the impact of postcolonial theory on the evolution of African SF. His recent publications include a monograph Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution and a collection of his short stories, Haunted Grave and Other Stories.

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix).  This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.  

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection.  This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way.  Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text. 

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.  

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.  

The content of this book follows a similar pattern as its writers explore what an inclusive future means, starting with the first story in the collection, “Three-World Cantata” by Vandana Singh. The story explores this theme and shows that futurism should not become mere progressivism, but should include both human and nonhuman elements and be led by ordinary citizens rather than corporations. The character Chingari (the story doesn’t mention their gender) and their team creates IntMRI, which allows them to take a person’s consciousness into a preexisting climatic scenario with the intention of convincing the person to adopt positive attitudes that will lead to climatic justice. Their initial targets are people in power who can influence climate policy. Manny, the CEO of UltraCorp, holds such power and is pimped into the project. Manny is exposed to different climate situations, including the importance of human interconnection with nonhumans such as elephants. Manny prefers managing the system rather than pursuing structural change.  So, what Chingari realises is that in a world charged by personal interest, to know what is good does not necessarily equate to doing what is right. Plato suggested otherwise in The Republic where he equates knowing good to doing good. However, sustainable change, Chingari discovered, starts with the collaboration of ordinary people: ‘If you looked closely at the time axis by yourself, it remained a long, thin line stretching from past through present and into the future— nothing changed. But look at it, engage with it along with other people, other beings, and you would see it thicken, acquire structure’ (Singh 2026:34). It is through community collaboration that real change emerges.

“Death is Not an Ornament” by Hannah Onoguwe echoes a similar sentiment and shows such societal change when there is a collaboration between human and nonhuman. In my book, “Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution,” I argue that recurring theme in Nigerian speculative fiction is the entanglement between human and nonhuman “which it draws from the indigenous Nigerian cosmology of co-existence between human and nonhuman in a symbiotic relationship” (2025:17). The protagonist in Onoguwe’s story is a hybrid of human and nonhuman who fights to eradicate dependence on the petro-economy by teaming with nonhuman whose inhabitant is the ocean. 

In “Robots & Insects & Languages & Other Living Things” by Libia Brenda, Brenda projects this interconnection to also include machines, through the process of language. The mediator here is the IA, known as mycorrhizae, whose encoding and decoding of various means of communication between humans and other nonhumans breaks down the barrier between humans and nonhumans. Once this is accomplished, the wall between nature and culture, is broken.

In “Mina’s Dream” by Vandana Singh, activism takes a different shape, not the usual workaday protest of placard carrying (Fisher, 2014, will argue that the capitalist system has already contained this method) but from the tiny ray of hope of the ethics of the protagonist Mina. Mina’s tenderness to her garden mirrors the tenderness of her heart to her community as the protagonist says “Remember that we are entangled, all of us, with each other and other life- forms (86).” It is that love that transforms not just her community’s ecology but also spreads into a political act, which is to say that what spurred political activism here is a change in the value system.  

  

In “Climate Action Dialogue: From Liner to Fractal”, a discussion among Nigel Topping, Farhana Yamin, and Ed Finn, among other things, carries on this discourse on ethical and societal values. It is this changing of value systems that Yamin argues is the key to unlocking a better climatic future: “I’m very excited about this shift to working at the level of values, whereas before we were just trying to tinker with a policy here, or a program there, or a bit of funding here, a few fiscal reforms here and there…. Changing values allows us to see things moving differently, and to reshape our relationships (235).” It is this stand of orientation transformation that Anna Pigott takes in “Flights of Fancy” by arguing that if over-tourism is scaled down, places like Corfu currently frequented by tourists, an activity that destroys its bioforms, will have a better, more diverse ecosystem. 

Where it can be argued that value/attitude change originates from the oil companies who pushed the concept of carbon footprint, attempting to shift the conversation about infrastructure and systems into the scale of travel, gardens, and personal actions, the diversity in the views in the anthology, gives room to varied perspectives towards climate action. For instance, in the dialogue between Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Kim Stanley Robinson, argues ‘that nation- states could force international finance to give up some of their ill- gotten or artificially gotten gains to pay for [climate] justice itself” (2026:300). Here, Robinson is foregrounding system change and not just individual attitudinal change.

Chinelo Onwualu shares a similar sentiment about the importance of value change in her essay, “The Case for Reckless Climate Optimism”. In a world marred with discrimination and racism, hope for the future is possible due to the value of openness and interconnectedness adopted by the younger generation born during the pandemic. Onwualu is optimistic that this new value adopted by the generation will lead to a better future because “working with hope is very different from working with fear. One leads upward, opening us up to innovations and experimentation (41).”

 It is this hopeful attitude shared by Claire Armitstead in “The Robin, The Wolves, and The Library” as she waits for Robin to appear in her garden during a summer whose heat led to the decline of the species. 

Pippa Goldschmidt feels a similar optimism with the city of Berlin in “A Walk in Berlin”. A city with a dark history of fascism, colonialism, and genocide, the community emerged from this “physical and moral abyss (203).” It is this resilience that gives hope.

In the “Introduction”,  Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich argue for a hopeful future but add that in the collection, the hopeful futures imagined are “inspired by practical, everyday writing about climate—weather forecasts, almanacs, rainfall indexes— to try to create a user’s guide to the real world, rather than a magic eight ball revealing all of the answers” (xv). Utility is foregrounded here to counter the fantasy argument levelled against utopian unconsciousness, as utopia is “thought to be a mere fantasy” (Kloeg 2016:451) which is why Immanuel Wallerstein calls utopian unconsciousness as, “breeders of illusions and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions” (quoted in Lancaster, 2000:109) This collection exposes the weakness in such a stand. For instance, in “Climate Action Dialogue: Becoming Better Humans”, a conversation between  Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Robinson suggests practical ways to mitigate the climate crisis, such as the: 

notion of slowing down the melting and sliding of the glaciers in Antarctica to preserve sea level, which is being pursued by glaciologists. It’s a minor expense compared to what we’ve been talking about so far, really a matter of just a few billion a year to drill through those glaciers and suck the water out from underneath them. You would need a navy like the US Navy. You would need people repurposed from the oil industry to aid the glacial slowdown project. It’s exactly the same expertise, and even the same equipment (294). 

Here, Robinson gives a scalable solution to mitigate the climate crisis. Similarly, in a different location, the essay by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, “The Unwalkable City” provides practical guides in which Sri Lankan architecture could be improved for climate sustainability. All these points show that the utopia in this collection aims for one whose foundation is built on an actionable framework.

While I found this book both informative and entertaining, the only weakness I see is its framing, which makes it look ahistorical by failing to situate itself explicitly in the utopian tradition, and tends to present itself as if it had emerged without precedent. Perhaps it is from the capitalist unconscious which currently governs the academic environment, where research is constantly forced to model itself in the language of newness. Capitalism seeks expansion and imbues an unconsciousness of seeking something new in perpetuity: new market, new brand, new technology (a company like Apple tweaks its phone every other year to announce its newness). To be relevant in a capitalist political economy, the notion of newness that signals its expansion is repetitive.  This criticism, notwithstanding, the book broadens my horizon about climate futures and it is a worthwhile read. 

Selected References

Bould, M. (2021). The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. London: Verso.

Ezeiyoke, C. (2025). Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution. London: Routledge

Fisher, F. (2014).  Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hampshire: Zero Books. 

Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London and New York: Verso.

Kloeg, J. (2016). ‘Utopianism and its discontents: A conceptual history’. Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 108(3). 451-468 

Marx, K. and F. Engels (2007). Manifesto of the Communist Party. New York: International Publishers Co.

Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Simon, M (2023). Why Deleting Carbon From the Atmosphere Is So Controversial. https://www.wired.com/story/why-deleting-carbon-from-the-atmosphere-is-so-controversial/

Taylor, T. J (2024). Introduction to Cofuturisms. The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturism. Edited by Taylor, T.J, Lavender III, I, Dillon, G.L and Chattopadhyay, B. London: Routledge 

Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke’s PhD is from Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the impact of postcolonial theory on the evolution of African SF. His recent publications include a monograph Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution and a collection of his short stories, Haunted Grave and Other Stories.

By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn  Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University 

At the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, we’ve edited and published more than a dozen collections of speculative fiction, along with various and sundry series and one-off narrative projects, since our founding in 2012. Although the first we’ve heard of zoetology or zoefuturism is in connection with this special issue ofVector, we’ve found it to be a helpful lens for reframing some of the stories we’ve had the good luck to work on, and for considering what has made some of these projects tick. It turns out that, perhaps, we’ve often been encouraging writers to approach the intersection of science, technology, and society in ways that could be described as zoefuturistic. This aesthetic’s focus on relationality, on complexity and emergence, and on the entanglement of the processes that give rise to life and living have helped us see the provocations and challenges we’ve issued to authors in new ways. Through the lens of zoefuturism, the project of inviting people to imagine hopeful futures—and practicing this relationship of hope to the future ourselves—is really an exercise in cultivating a different matrix of relationships that give our actions new meaning and consequence.

Roger Ames’s account of zoetology presents a contrast with what he defines as a “substance ontology” that dominates the Western philosophical tradition—it’s evident in Plato and much of Aristotle, with earlier roots in works like Parmenides’s The Way of Truth. In this ontology, existence is a matter of “being per se” (Ames 2023, 87) and reality is composed of discrete entities that embody immutable essences. If things have unique or particular attributes, those are layered onto the essential identity of an entity as “properties that are borne” (Ames 2023, 87). Ames describes this in terms of an “ontological intuition” that any individual thing—a household object, animal (human or otherwise), feature of the landscape, or celestial body—comprises “a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that” (Ames 2023, 88). 

Drawing on the Book of Changes—but also unearthing strands in Western philosophy, from Dewey to Whitehead, and using a linguistic construction from Ancient Greek—Ames describes zoetology as a “process worldview” that captures the Chinese “shengshenglun” (蛺蛺紶), or “art of living” (Ames 2023, 90). This approach to life and the cosmos trades the Western tradition’s “beings” for “becomings,” insisting that “everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (Ames 2023, 90). In a zoetological view, flux is a constant, and we exist enmeshed in “unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies” (Ames 2023, 90). We’re always being constituted and reconstituted by these ever-shifting relationships—with other people, with our natural and built environments, with social forces—and our thoughts and actions are reciprocally contributing to the perpetual reconstitution of those environments and systems. Zoetology also represents an anticipatory view, in the spirit of Dewey’s perspective on imagination or reflexivity in second-order cybernetics: we are all continuously changing and reaching towards the present moment and the future.

With zoefuturism, the shape of the future is determined neither by a transformation in “what it means to be human,” which was never static or knowable in the first place, nor by the introduction of a technological novum (à la Suvin, 1972) that redefines identity, or social forms, or the operations of the natural world. Rather, the futures we envision are shaped by open-ended, labile assemblages of relations, in fluid ecologies—by vast webs of connectedness, causality, shared responsibility, and care. It’s a sensibility that lends itself to tolerance for uncertainty, to embracing mutuality, and to appreciating complex systems and emergent behaviors. To invoke a precept from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “God is Change.”

The CSI Approach

Many of CSI’s books take the form of collections of speculative fiction short stories, presented alongside essays and artwork. The books frequently address a challenge at the nexus of technology and society: we’ve published on models for climate action rooted in local community realities; on possibilities for human activity in space, with particular attention to off-world economies; on how a transition to solar energy could reshape politics, governance, and culture; on devising ways to manage nuclear waste that are respectful of the people and lands that host storage facilities; and more. Some of these books have been funded by private philanthropies, or created in partnership with nongovernmental organizations with expertise in a particular field; others are supported by grants from U.S. government agencies, including NASA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Department of Energy; we’ve funded the occasional small fiction project ourselves. 

All of these projects involve a synchronous collaborative component, which usually takes the form of an in-person workshop wherein contributors work in small groups to co-create visions of the future in response to prompts, provocations, and creative constraints designed by our team, usually in consultation with one or more co-editors with expertise in a related area. In these small groups, we intentionally bring together people from different backgrounds, with diverse perspectives on and experiences with a topic: in Cities of Light, a book exploring the transition to clean renewable energy sources, one small group included a professional speculative fiction author, an energy-systems researcher with a background in electrical engineering, a painter, a geographer who works on transportation and mobility issues, an artist who works mainly in public art and architecture, and an engineer who specializes in the design of batteries. In a few cases, this collaborative work has been done virtually, and sometimes in a more distributed fashion—for instance, a series of shorter virtual working sessions that unfold over the course of several months, rather than a multi-day in-person convening. 

In the rest of this essay, we’ll discuss two stories that have been created through this process, then published by CSI. Applying a zoefuturistic perspective to each story has sensitized us to new ways of thinking along with the narrative, emphasizing elements of relationality and an open-ended, processural approach to meaning, power, and identity. We’ll conclude by stepping back to consider how the method through which these stories are created might help to account for some of their zoetological traits. 

Entanglement

As CSI was founded in 2012, we embarked upon our first major book project: a collaboration with 17 top science fiction authors to explore hopeful, technically grounded visions of the future. Inspired by ideas formulated by author Neal Stephenson in the wake of his 2011 World Policy Journal article “Innovation Starvation,” the stories in what became the 2014 anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future were intended to center technology-aided visions of the near future that engineers, scientists, and others could take up and act upon within a single professional lifetime: approximately 50 years from graduation to retirement. 

https://csi.asu.edu/books/

Working in close consultation with scientists and engineers across a variety of fields, from learning science and structural engineering to biology, astronomy, ecology, and architecture, the science fiction authors envisioned futures shaped by great feats of engineering and thrilling acts of human ingenuity. Several stories in the volume, though, focused more on triumphs of human coordination and collaboration than on gadgets or earth-shattering insights. Upon reevaluation, Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement” seems characteristically zoefuturistic in its emphasis on a porous, shifting, contingent global network as the driver for change. Its cast of characters find themselves in states of crisis and transition, and Singh masterfully captures moments of articulation between different registers of meaning: the fleeting connections among these geographically distant humans; the abstract, protean, terribly present specter of climate change; and an array of nonhuman ecologies, natural phenomena, and life forms that inhabit the planet together. 

The story links together a small group of strangers strewn across the world: an Inuit scientist working to combat methane emissions in the Arctic, a recently widowed Texan homemaker who stumbles into anti-fracking activism, an environmental scientist who crosses paths with an anonymous Banksy-esque muralist in the Amazonian city of Manaus, a young Dalit man struggling with brutal caste politics in a village in western India, and a technologist from Shanghai who journeys to a remote monastery, where he meets a solitary monk living in the ruins of an avalanche caused by a melting glacier. All of these characters are in an unsettled state: discouraged by the anomie of an industrial world hurtling itself heedlessly toward destruction, set adrift from their families and communities, coping with grief and loss, grappling with prejudice and structural violence. They’re linked by an experimental network of devices that connect people serendipitously to one another when they’re feeling lonely, or abandoned, or in extremis; the connections last only a moment, and are patchy and buggy, but each character in the story experiences some kind of transformation as a result of this transitory intervention. 

“Entanglement” is obsessed with networks, network effects, and the emergent properties of complex systems. Irene, the Arctic scientist, is creating a collective of self-organizing robots called “brollys” to identify and prevent methane leaks and melting sea ice, and is beginning to realize that the bots are becoming surprisingly sophisticated. In the Amazon and Texas vignettes, small political acts catalyze nascent local movements for climate action; a possibly numinous connection with a deceased relative may contribute to Irene being saved by a beluga whale when she nearly drowns in icy water; Dr. Ismail, a Nigerian computer science professor who inspires Yuan, the Shanghai-born inventor of the serendipity-connection devices, lectures about the dangers of knowledge silos and the need for transdisciplinary thinking about complex world systems. 

Intrinsically tied to this network theme is the notion of the “butterfly effect,” from the famous observation by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz; the story features both a butterfly, in the form of a drawing passed clandestinely from the street artist to the environmental scientist in Manaus, and a tornado in the western Indian village. In a gesture towards zoefuturistic open-endedness, Singh begins the story with a set of ellipses, “…flapping its wings…,” and ends with a rhymed phrase enclosed in ellipses, “…a butterfly…,” demonstrating that all of these hyperlocal and seemingly individual actions are linked in a global system. Describing zoetology, Ames calls this “holography—literally, the whole as it is implicated in each thing… [a] way of understanding things that begins from the notion that everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (2023, 90). 

Everything in Singh’s story is entangled: these strangers, by Yuan’s networked devices, but also the entire biosphere, which can be pushed towards healing or collapse by a repertoire of small actions whose effects radiate out. “Entanglement” blossoms in a zoefuturistic reading: we can see clearly that people and climate phenomena alike are not discrete beings but, as in the Book of Changes, “events” that are happening, in complex dynamic relation, always poised for transformation.

Take Three

Almost ten years after the publication of Hieroglyph,in the spring of 2023, CSI brought together classical musicians, arts leaders, and music educators with speculative fiction authors and a few others with expertise from further afield—civil engineering, public health, and learning science—to consider the future of an institution that is drenched in symbolism and laden with historical baggage: the symphony orchestra. From the legacy of the Western European Enlightenment to cultural elitism, from rarefied aesthetic experiences to the primacy of a calcified canon, these institutions carry incredible cultural weight, and are often positioned by orchestra professionals, donors, and political figures as purveyors of a rich, unassailable, and largely unchanging tradition of artistic excellence, exacting rigor, and spiritual nourishment. But orchestras are facing existential challenges of relevance, representation, and sustainability. We can readily imagine orchestras riven: they find themselves increasingly ill-suited to the needs, tastes, and values of the communities in which they are situated, but any deviation from the status quo can feel like a negation, a compromise, or a dereliction of their duty to protect and promulgate their values. In this gathering, we collectively imagined these institutions reshaped as vibrant spaces for building community, as models for learning and human coordination, and as providers of resources to aid in health, resilience, and social cohesion. 

Each of our four working groups considered the future of the orchestra through a different thematic lens, designed to bring into focus different social functions and roles that a future orchestra might play in connection with the communities that host and sustain it. Sound Systems, the resulting book, is accordingly divided into four sections:Orchestra as Game, Orchestra as Public Good, Orchestra as Network, and Orchestra as Infrastructure. In response to the final lens, Karen Lord’s short story “Take Three” provokes us to radically reframe our expectations of orchestras and classical music by projecting into the far future, placing orchestras in a moment where humans are new entrants in a larger interplanetary community with other intelligent life forms.

In “Take Three,” music provides the foundation—an infrastructure—for interspecies communication in a world where humans interact regularly with extraterrestrials. The Shining Ones communicate with humans (and presumably other species throughout the cosmos) using the Official Speech, a musically complex and demanding universal language. In this future, orchestras as we know them are well-nigh extinct, but we do see two very different infrastructures in which music is deployed. One is the House of Music, an increasingly outmoded haven for tranquil, elevated aesthetic experiences for a dwindling clientele of aesthetes, where classical music is paired with haute cuisine and artful, soothing décor. The other is the Earth Ethnomusicology Project, one of a number of hybrid endeavors wherein humans collaborate with the Shining Ones. This boundary-breaking program researches, performs, archives, and mashes up all kinds of musics, classical and otherwise, in settings virtual and physical, indoor and outdoor, on Earth and off-world. As Sara, a student and adherent of the project, explains: “Our locations are real and virtual, permanent and ephemeral. Part historical museum, part educational center. Recording, performing, teaching, learning, creating the new, reviving the old. We are working to develop our own approved vernacular, equal in dignity and complexity to the Official Speech of the Shining Ones.” 

Pierre, our main character, is an accomplished cellist from a storied musical family, but after the collapse of the traditional ecosystem of orchestras, he finds himself running a House of Music, aging past his musical prime and fading into obscurity. He hasn’t been discovered by a sponsor and invited to join the Shining Ones and learn the Official Speech, which has become “the common language of law, diplomacy, and trade,” but he’s also wary and resentful of the hegemony of the Shining Ones and wishes ardently to turn back the clock and claim his rightful place in a vaunted symphony orchestra. Pierre is a finicky type, a perfectionist and a bit of a prig, intolerant of momentary failings and creative licenses taken by his fellow players. When Sara visits his House of Music, she reveals that she and one of the Shining Ones had observed Pierre playing in a quartet years earlier; his inflexibility and exacting standards of artistic precision made him seem ill-suited to study the Official Speech or help to develop an Earthly corollary to it. As she shares, “The music of the Official Speech is not a recitation. It’s a conversation.” 

So far, so zoefuturistic, right? Through this encounter between Pierre and Sara, author Karen Lord pits slavish devotion to a narrowly defined, stagnant, inherently elitist definition of excellence against something more fluid and relational. We don’t get to see much of the Shining Ones in the story, and whenever Pierre looks at one of them, they exude a painfully brilliant light that makes them celestial, but also murky and aloof. So, it’s left to the reader to speculate about what kind of interplanetary community humans have joined, or been induced to join. But galactic power relations aside, we’re encouraged to imagine the Official Speech as offering harmony, connection, cohesion, as opposed to a traditional classical music paradigm built on hierarchy and a sharp division between speakers (players) and listeners. The Earth Ethnomusicology Project model that Sara describes to Pierre blends the intensive skill development and human coordination of the classical ensemble with sounds, practices, and vibes from a broad array of Earth’s musical cultures: “modern panyards with professional steel orchestras performing, teaching, and passing on their distinctive legacies. … New schools dedicated solely to percussion, building on centuries-old traditions of multiple cultures. Choirs of vocal and bodily instruments—tapping feet, clapping hands, hooting and trilling and clicks and whispers.”

In a virtuosic turn, Lord encloses Pierre’s entire journey in a metatextual frame. Just before the story’s end, we learn that we have been reading through a rendition of Pierre Doit Choisir, an experimental symphonic piece that is a beloved artwork in this future of humans and Shining Ones, which Lord terms “the Extraterrestrial Age,” the successor to our current “Information Age.” We learn that Pierre is a fictional character, perhaps inspired by one of three historical Pierres, or perhaps a composite figure, or a purely metaphorical construct. Pierre Doit Choisir has three different endings, and the orchestra and conductor for each performance select which ending to play. In some renditions, the orchestra plays all three denouements, or has the audience vote; and “One version, adapted with permission from the creators by the Night Crew Collective, has three orchestras playing the three concluding movements at the same time in stormy yet harmonious cooperation.” There is a universally adhered-to norm that performances of Pierre Doit Choisir should not be recorded, meaning that “the question of what Pierre will choose to do remains in a state of suspended anticipation, never to be resolved until the hour of performance.”

None of the three paths available to Pierre work out perfectly. In the first, he briefly joins the Earth Ethnomusicology Project but cannot find his place in this nonhierarchical milieu. He returns to the House of Music, “growing more and more eccentric as he clings to unreliable memories of the idealized past when there were no Shining Ones, when his lineage and vocation made him more than ordinary.” In the second, he joins up and is subjected to myriad therapies and trainings to try to undo his performance style, which is perceived by his new collaborators as “over-rehearsed and lacking in sincerity.” He stays with the project but retreats to its periphery, where he works on perfecting the Vibrational Aesthetic, which was his vocation at the House of Music. In the third, he joins up and while he is ruffled by the lack of hierarchy (“frustrated that there are no higher rungs to rise to, no lower rungs to look down on”), and while he never quite overcomes the “taint of stiffness” in his playing, he is able to find some contentment, particularly in brief moments of fascination and joy that make “his blood beat faster under his cultured, crystalline shell.” 

In “Take Three,” we see an approach that resonates with a zoefuturistic aesthetic on several levels: Pierre’s struggles to shift from a fixed, hierarchical, insular lifeway to one characterized by interchange, relationality, improvisation, and continual reinvention; the nebulous, adaptable model for creative exploration and interspecies thriving pursued by the Earth Ethnomusicology Project; the refusal of closure in Pierre Doit Choisir, which leaves the fate of Pierre, who stands in for humanity’s atavistic strains in this newly expansive interplanetary future, continually open for revision and interpretation. Likewise, Lord’s story itself slyly divulges and withholds information in a way that leaves much about Pierre and the fate of humanity unwritten. Do we prefer this future where music and language meld together? How much do we sympathize with Pierre? Are Sara and her cohorts shedding their humanity in joining the Shining Ones, and if they are, is that ultimately a good thing? 

Zoefuturism and the Conditions of Literary Production

When we combed through the Center for Science and the Imagination archives with a zoefuturistic lens, we easily stacked up a dozen candidates, across several books and collections, before settling on “Entanglement” and “Take Three” to focus on here. This raises the question: Is there something about the way we’re producing these stories that’s inclining them towards a zoetological sensibility? 

Though this is just speculation (and we’ll once again disclaim that zoefuturism is a new concept for us), we’d like to suggest that perhaps the collaborative, socially intensive methods by which CSI stories are produced might tend to generate more relational, open, polyvocal narratives. These stories, perhaps, key on process rather than closure, and on the dynamic interactions among a plurality of systems instead of discrete, bounded singularities. 

The process of literary production is often mythologized as an act of heroic individual creativity—think Jack Kerouac perched in his fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains—but for most writers and most books, it involves intensive sociality as much as focused solitude. This might take any number of forms: authors visit physical locations, talk with informants on the ground in the places or communities about which they are writing, participate in writers’ groups, read works-in-progress at public events, attend virtual sessions on topics related to their work, join fellowships at universities, or work closely with editors or other advisors. This social process is often hidden, or absorbed into a text, only to be found on acknowledgements pages or in interviews with authors around a book’s publication; sometimes it’s entirely submerged, unspoken. And of course the texts themselves are always talking to one another, communicating through the intersections of language, style, homage, adaptation, and dialog.

At CSI, we make the social process around the creation of a vision of the future, and a story that wends its way through that future, explicit. We foreground it in project descriptions, in editors’ introductions, in “About this Book” sections and author’s notes at the end of a story, in detailed “Credits” pages that describe each contributor’s precise role in a book. We write about the process in scholarly articles and, when we discuss our publications in popular media, the workshop that gives rise to the book is often given equal airtime as the content of the book itself. The book, and the short fiction in it, are artifacts of a process of collaborative imagination. They document a set of enthusiastic, complex, and searching conversations whose essence, with luck, is captured in some way in the stories, essays, art, and other materials that comprise the eventual book. 

This social process doesn’t end in publication, either; in the case of Hieroglyph, for instance, we used the book’s launch to stand up dozens of conversations about the power of imagination and storytelling for helping us to come to grips with possible futures, and to deliberate about the roles that a wide variety of technologies could play in society. Those conversations spanned venues ranging from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to New America, a think tank in Washington, DC, to the headquarters of technology companies like Tumblr and Google, to the venerable civic events series Town Hall Seattle, to bookstores in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Phoenix, and other cities, to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate magazine, MIT Technology Review, and more. It was precisely the post-launch sociality around Hieroglyph that created the energy necessary for us to continue publishing stories created in this manner—conversations stemming from that book led to us establishing the Future Tense Fiction series (now published in Issues in Science and Technology, the house magazine of the National Academy of Sciences); to the book Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, supported by a grant from NASA; and to smaller-scale endeavors like Us in Flux, a series of flash fiction stories published during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that imagined futures shaped by community resilience and mutual aid. 

This mode of literary production necessarily captures the flow and flux of an ongoing conversation. These stories are provisional, and they exist as dotted-line paths towards many possible futures, rather than a prediction or an endorsement of a particular route ahead. Fiction authors who work with us are inundated with ideas and angles from diverse perspectives, through the workshops and convenings that inaugurate these projects and throughout the process of consultation, editing, publishing, and post-publication conversation. An author might easily start a project with deep discussions with a half-dozen people—they might confer with a visual artist, an engineer or technologist, a historian or literary scholar, a policy wonk, and a graduate student just starting their career in a specific field. Each of these people imparts not just information, but a perspective, a stance, a set of priorities and values, moral and ethical concerns, anxieties and uncertainties. Collecting, filtering, and condensing all of this input and transforming it into a story can lead to narratives that are richly layered, engaging with many voices and different registers of reality, like Singh’s “Entanglement” and Lord’s “Take Three.” These stories reflect the complex social worlds that underpin their conception and production. 

Now that we have access to zoefuturism and zoetology as lenses for thinking about and around our work, we’re excited to see what new ideas and possibilities they bring into focus. If we’ve been scattering zoetological seeds all along, what if we set our minds to intentionally planting and growing a garden of them? Zoefuturism taps into what science fiction stories can do best: helping us to dwell with the complexity that characterizes our experience of the universe, rather than trying to winnow it down into something flatter and more manageable. One of the persistent joys in our work at CSI has been to see the futures we cultivate blossom and take on vibrant new lives of their own. 

Works Referenced

Ames, Roger T. 2023. “‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 93: 81–98. doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000012. 

Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Eschrich, Joey, and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2021. Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/cities-of-light. 

Finn, Ed, and Joey Eschrich, eds. 2017. Visions, Ventures, Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/vvev.

Lord, Karen. 2025. “Take Three.” In Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra, edited by Alex Laing, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/soundsystems. 

Singh, Vandana. 2014. “Entanglement.” In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. William Morrow.

Stephenson, Neal. 2011. “Innovation Starvation.” World Policy Journal 28 (3): 11–16. doi.org/10.1177/0740277511425349.

Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34 (3): 372–382. doi.org/10.2307/375141. 

Joey Eschrich is the managing editor for the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America. He has coedited a number of collections of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Climate Imagination (MIT Press, 2025).  

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the GAME School and academic director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America.

By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn  Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University 

At the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, we’ve edited and published more than a dozen collections of speculative fiction, along with various and sundry series and one-off narrative projects, since our founding in 2012. Although the first we’ve heard of zoetology or zoefuturism is in connection with this special issue ofVector, we’ve found it to be a helpful lens for reframing some of the stories we’ve had the good luck to work on, and for considering what has made some of these projects tick. It turns out that, perhaps, we’ve often been encouraging writers to approach the intersection of science, technology, and society in ways that could be described as zoefuturistic. This aesthetic’s focus on relationality, on complexity and emergence, and on the entanglement of the processes that give rise to life and living have helped us see the provocations and challenges we’ve issued to authors in new ways. Through the lens of zoefuturism, the project of inviting people to imagine hopeful futures—and practicing this relationship of hope to the future ourselves—is really an exercise in cultivating a different matrix of relationships that give our actions new meaning and consequence.

Roger Ames’s account of zoetology presents a contrast with what he defines as a “substance ontology” that dominates the Western philosophical tradition—it’s evident in Plato and much of Aristotle, with earlier roots in works like Parmenides’s The Way of Truth. In this ontology, existence is a matter of “being per se” (Ames 2023, 87) and reality is composed of discrete entities that embody immutable essences. If things have unique or particular attributes, those are layered onto the essential identity of an entity as “properties that are borne” (Ames 2023, 87). Ames describes this in terms of an “ontological intuition” that any individual thing—a household object, animal (human or otherwise), feature of the landscape, or celestial body—comprises “a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that” (Ames 2023, 88). 

Drawing on the Book of Changes—but also unearthing strands in Western philosophy, from Dewey to Whitehead, and using a linguistic construction from Ancient Greek—Ames describes zoetology as a “process worldview” that captures the Chinese “shengshenglun” (蛺蛺紶), or “art of living” (Ames 2023, 90). This approach to life and the cosmos trades the Western tradition’s “beings” for “becomings,” insisting that “everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (Ames 2023, 90). In a zoetological view, flux is a constant, and we exist enmeshed in “unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies” (Ames 2023, 90). We’re always being constituted and reconstituted by these ever-shifting relationships—with other people, with our natural and built environments, with social forces—and our thoughts and actions are reciprocally contributing to the perpetual reconstitution of those environments and systems. Zoetology also represents an anticipatory view, in the spirit of Dewey’s perspective on imagination or reflexivity in second-order cybernetics: we are all continuously changing and reaching towards the present moment and the future.

With zoefuturism, the shape of the future is determined neither by a transformation in “what it means to be human,” which was never static or knowable in the first place, nor by the introduction of a technological novum (à la Suvin, 1972) that redefines identity, or social forms, or the operations of the natural world. Rather, the futures we envision are shaped by open-ended, labile assemblages of relations, in fluid ecologies—by vast webs of connectedness, causality, shared responsibility, and care. It’s a sensibility that lends itself to tolerance for uncertainty, to embracing mutuality, and to appreciating complex systems and emergent behaviors. To invoke a precept from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “God is Change.”

The CSI Approach

Many of CSI’s books take the form of collections of speculative fiction short stories, presented alongside essays and artwork. The books frequently address a challenge at the nexus of technology and society: we’ve published on models for climate action rooted in local community realities; on possibilities for human activity in space, with particular attention to off-world economies; on how a transition to solar energy could reshape politics, governance, and culture; on devising ways to manage nuclear waste that are respectful of the people and lands that host storage facilities; and more. Some of these books have been funded by private philanthropies, or created in partnership with nongovernmental organizations with expertise in a particular field; others are supported by grants from U.S. government agencies, including NASA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Department of Energy; we’ve funded the occasional small fiction project ourselves. 

All of these projects involve a synchronous collaborative component, which usually takes the form of an in-person workshop wherein contributors work in small groups to co-create visions of the future in response to prompts, provocations, and creative constraints designed by our team, usually in consultation with one or more co-editors with expertise in a related area. In these small groups, we intentionally bring together people from different backgrounds, with diverse perspectives on and experiences with a topic: in Cities of Light, a book exploring the transition to clean renewable energy sources, one small group included a professional speculative fiction author, an energy-systems researcher with a background in electrical engineering, a painter, a geographer who works on transportation and mobility issues, an artist who works mainly in public art and architecture, and an engineer who specializes in the design of batteries. In a few cases, this collaborative work has been done virtually, and sometimes in a more distributed fashion—for instance, a series of shorter virtual working sessions that unfold over the course of several months, rather than a multi-day in-person convening. 

In the rest of this essay, we’ll discuss two stories that have been created through this process, then published by CSI. Applying a zoefuturistic perspective to each story has sensitized us to new ways of thinking along with the narrative, emphasizing elements of relationality and an open-ended, processural approach to meaning, power, and identity. We’ll conclude by stepping back to consider how the method through which these stories are created might help to account for some of their zoetological traits. 

Entanglement

As CSI was founded in 2012, we embarked upon our first major book project: a collaboration with 17 top science fiction authors to explore hopeful, technically grounded visions of the future. Inspired by ideas formulated by author Neal Stephenson in the wake of his 2011 World Policy Journal article “Innovation Starvation,” the stories in what became the 2014 anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future were intended to center technology-aided visions of the near future that engineers, scientists, and others could take up and act upon within a single professional lifetime: approximately 50 years from graduation to retirement. 

https://csi.asu.edu/books/

Working in close consultation with scientists and engineers across a variety of fields, from learning science and structural engineering to biology, astronomy, ecology, and architecture, the science fiction authors envisioned futures shaped by great feats of engineering and thrilling acts of human ingenuity. Several stories in the volume, though, focused more on triumphs of human coordination and collaboration than on gadgets or earth-shattering insights. Upon reevaluation, Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement” seems characteristically zoefuturistic in its emphasis on a porous, shifting, contingent global network as the driver for change. Its cast of characters find themselves in states of crisis and transition, and Singh masterfully captures moments of articulation between different registers of meaning: the fleeting connections among these geographically distant humans; the abstract, protean, terribly present specter of climate change; and an array of nonhuman ecologies, natural phenomena, and life forms that inhabit the planet together. 

The story links together a small group of strangers strewn across the world: an Inuit scientist working to combat methane emissions in the Arctic, a recently widowed Texan homemaker who stumbles into anti-fracking activism, an environmental scientist who crosses paths with an anonymous Banksy-esque muralist in the Amazonian city of Manaus, a young Dalit man struggling with brutal caste politics in a village in western India, and a technologist from Shanghai who journeys to a remote monastery, where he meets a solitary monk living in the ruins of an avalanche caused by a melting glacier. All of these characters are in an unsettled state: discouraged by the anomie of an industrial world hurtling itself heedlessly toward destruction, set adrift from their families and communities, coping with grief and loss, grappling with prejudice and structural violence. They’re linked by an experimental network of devices that connect people serendipitously to one another when they’re feeling lonely, or abandoned, or in extremis; the connections last only a moment, and are patchy and buggy, but each character in the story experiences some kind of transformation as a result of this transitory intervention. 

“Entanglement” is obsessed with networks, network effects, and the emergent properties of complex systems. Irene, the Arctic scientist, is creating a collective of self-organizing robots called “brollys” to identify and prevent methane leaks and melting sea ice, and is beginning to realize that the bots are becoming surprisingly sophisticated. In the Amazon and Texas vignettes, small political acts catalyze nascent local movements for climate action; a possibly numinous connection with a deceased relative may contribute to Irene being saved by a beluga whale when she nearly drowns in icy water; Dr. Ismail, a Nigerian computer science professor who inspires Yuan, the Shanghai-born inventor of the serendipity-connection devices, lectures about the dangers of knowledge silos and the need for transdisciplinary thinking about complex world systems. 

Intrinsically tied to this network theme is the notion of the “butterfly effect,” from the famous observation by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz; the story features both a butterfly, in the form of a drawing passed clandestinely from the street artist to the environmental scientist in Manaus, and a tornado in the western Indian village. In a gesture towards zoefuturistic open-endedness, Singh begins the story with a set of ellipses, “…flapping its wings…,” and ends with a rhymed phrase enclosed in ellipses, “…a butterfly…,” demonstrating that all of these hyperlocal and seemingly individual actions are linked in a global system. Describing zoetology, Ames calls this “holography—literally, the whole as it is implicated in each thing… [a] way of understanding things that begins from the notion that everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (2023, 90). 

Everything in Singh’s story is entangled: these strangers, by Yuan’s networked devices, but also the entire biosphere, which can be pushed towards healing or collapse by a repertoire of small actions whose effects radiate out. “Entanglement” blossoms in a zoefuturistic reading: we can see clearly that people and climate phenomena alike are not discrete beings but, as in the Book of Changes, “events” that are happening, in complex dynamic relation, always poised for transformation.

Take Three

Almost ten years after the publication of Hieroglyph,in the spring of 2023, CSI brought together classical musicians, arts leaders, and music educators with speculative fiction authors and a few others with expertise from further afield—civil engineering, public health, and learning science—to consider the future of an institution that is drenched in symbolism and laden with historical baggage: the symphony orchestra. From the legacy of the Western European Enlightenment to cultural elitism, from rarefied aesthetic experiences to the primacy of a calcified canon, these institutions carry incredible cultural weight, and are often positioned by orchestra professionals, donors, and political figures as purveyors of a rich, unassailable, and largely unchanging tradition of artistic excellence, exacting rigor, and spiritual nourishment. But orchestras are facing existential challenges of relevance, representation, and sustainability. We can readily imagine orchestras riven: they find themselves increasingly ill-suited to the needs, tastes, and values of the communities in which they are situated, but any deviation from the status quo can feel like a negation, a compromise, or a dereliction of their duty to protect and promulgate their values. In this gathering, we collectively imagined these institutions reshaped as vibrant spaces for building community, as models for learning and human coordination, and as providers of resources to aid in health, resilience, and social cohesion. 

Each of our four working groups considered the future of the orchestra through a different thematic lens, designed to bring into focus different social functions and roles that a future orchestra might play in connection with the communities that host and sustain it. Sound Systems, the resulting book, is accordingly divided into four sections:Orchestra as Game, Orchestra as Public Good, Orchestra as Network, and Orchestra as Infrastructure. In response to the final lens, Karen Lord’s short story “Take Three” provokes us to radically reframe our expectations of orchestras and classical music by projecting into the far future, placing orchestras in a moment where humans are new entrants in a larger interplanetary community with other intelligent life forms.

In “Take Three,” music provides the foundation—an infrastructure—for interspecies communication in a world where humans interact regularly with extraterrestrials. The Shining Ones communicate with humans (and presumably other species throughout the cosmos) using the Official Speech, a musically complex and demanding universal language. In this future, orchestras as we know them are well-nigh extinct, but we do see two very different infrastructures in which music is deployed. One is the House of Music, an increasingly outmoded haven for tranquil, elevated aesthetic experiences for a dwindling clientele of aesthetes, where classical music is paired with haute cuisine and artful, soothing décor. The other is the Earth Ethnomusicology Project, one of a number of hybrid endeavors wherein humans collaborate with the Shining Ones. This boundary-breaking program researches, performs, archives, and mashes up all kinds of musics, classical and otherwise, in settings virtual and physical, indoor and outdoor, on Earth and off-world. As Sara, a student and adherent of the project, explains: “Our locations are real and virtual, permanent and ephemeral. Part historical museum, part educational center. Recording, performing, teaching, learning, creating the new, reviving the old. We are working to develop our own approved vernacular, equal in dignity and complexity to the Official Speech of the Shining Ones.” 

Pierre, our main character, is an accomplished cellist from a storied musical family, but after the collapse of the traditional ecosystem of orchestras, he finds himself running a House of Music, aging past his musical prime and fading into obscurity. He hasn’t been discovered by a sponsor and invited to join the Shining Ones and learn the Official Speech, which has become “the common language of law, diplomacy, and trade,” but he’s also wary and resentful of the hegemony of the Shining Ones and wishes ardently to turn back the clock and claim his rightful place in a vaunted symphony orchestra. Pierre is a finicky type, a perfectionist and a bit of a prig, intolerant of momentary failings and creative licenses taken by his fellow players. When Sara visits his House of Music, she reveals that she and one of the Shining Ones had observed Pierre playing in a quartet years earlier; his inflexibility and exacting standards of artistic precision made him seem ill-suited to study the Official Speech or help to develop an Earthly corollary to it. As she shares, “The music of the Official Speech is not a recitation. It’s a conversation.” 

So far, so zoefuturistic, right? Through this encounter between Pierre and Sara, author Karen Lord pits slavish devotion to a narrowly defined, stagnant, inherently elitist definition of excellence against something more fluid and relational. We don’t get to see much of the Shining Ones in the story, and whenever Pierre looks at one of them, they exude a painfully brilliant light that makes them celestial, but also murky and aloof. So, it’s left to the reader to speculate about what kind of interplanetary community humans have joined, or been induced to join. But galactic power relations aside, we’re encouraged to imagine the Official Speech as offering harmony, connection, cohesion, as opposed to a traditional classical music paradigm built on hierarchy and a sharp division between speakers (players) and listeners. The Earth Ethnomusicology Project model that Sara describes to Pierre blends the intensive skill development and human coordination of the classical ensemble with sounds, practices, and vibes from a broad array of Earth’s musical cultures: “modern panyards with professional steel orchestras performing, teaching, and passing on their distinctive legacies. … New schools dedicated solely to percussion, building on centuries-old traditions of multiple cultures. Choirs of vocal and bodily instruments—tapping feet, clapping hands, hooting and trilling and clicks and whispers.”

In a virtuosic turn, Lord encloses Pierre’s entire journey in a metatextual frame. Just before the story’s end, we learn that we have been reading through a rendition of Pierre Doit Choisir, an experimental symphonic piece that is a beloved artwork in this future of humans and Shining Ones, which Lord terms “the Extraterrestrial Age,” the successor to our current “Information Age.” We learn that Pierre is a fictional character, perhaps inspired by one of three historical Pierres, or perhaps a composite figure, or a purely metaphorical construct. Pierre Doit Choisir has three different endings, and the orchestra and conductor for each performance select which ending to play. In some renditions, the orchestra plays all three denouements, or has the audience vote; and “One version, adapted with permission from the creators by the Night Crew Collective, has three orchestras playing the three concluding movements at the same time in stormy yet harmonious cooperation.” There is a universally adhered-to norm that performances of Pierre Doit Choisir should not be recorded, meaning that “the question of what Pierre will choose to do remains in a state of suspended anticipation, never to be resolved until the hour of performance.”

None of the three paths available to Pierre work out perfectly. In the first, he briefly joins the Earth Ethnomusicology Project but cannot find his place in this nonhierarchical milieu. He returns to the House of Music, “growing more and more eccentric as he clings to unreliable memories of the idealized past when there were no Shining Ones, when his lineage and vocation made him more than ordinary.” In the second, he joins up and is subjected to myriad therapies and trainings to try to undo his performance style, which is perceived by his new collaborators as “over-rehearsed and lacking in sincerity.” He stays with the project but retreats to its periphery, where he works on perfecting the Vibrational Aesthetic, which was his vocation at the House of Music. In the third, he joins up and while he is ruffled by the lack of hierarchy (“frustrated that there are no higher rungs to rise to, no lower rungs to look down on”), and while he never quite overcomes the “taint of stiffness” in his playing, he is able to find some contentment, particularly in brief moments of fascination and joy that make “his blood beat faster under his cultured, crystalline shell.” 

In “Take Three,” we see an approach that resonates with a zoefuturistic aesthetic on several levels: Pierre’s struggles to shift from a fixed, hierarchical, insular lifeway to one characterized by interchange, relationality, improvisation, and continual reinvention; the nebulous, adaptable model for creative exploration and interspecies thriving pursued by the Earth Ethnomusicology Project; the refusal of closure in Pierre Doit Choisir, which leaves the fate of Pierre, who stands in for humanity’s atavistic strains in this newly expansive interplanetary future, continually open for revision and interpretation. Likewise, Lord’s story itself slyly divulges and withholds information in a way that leaves much about Pierre and the fate of humanity unwritten. Do we prefer this future where music and language meld together? How much do we sympathize with Pierre? Are Sara and her cohorts shedding their humanity in joining the Shining Ones, and if they are, is that ultimately a good thing? 

Zoefuturism and the Conditions of Literary Production

When we combed through the Center for Science and the Imagination archives with a zoefuturistic lens, we easily stacked up a dozen candidates, across several books and collections, before settling on “Entanglement” and “Take Three” to focus on here. This raises the question: Is there something about the way we’re producing these stories that’s inclining them towards a zoetological sensibility? 

Though this is just speculation (and we’ll once again disclaim that zoefuturism is a new concept for us), we’d like to suggest that perhaps the collaborative, socially intensive methods by which CSI stories are produced might tend to generate more relational, open, polyvocal narratives. These stories, perhaps, key on process rather than closure, and on the dynamic interactions among a plurality of systems instead of discrete, bounded singularities. 

The process of literary production is often mythologized as an act of heroic individual creativity—think Jack Kerouac perched in his fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains—but for most writers and most books, it involves intensive sociality as much as focused solitude. This might take any number of forms: authors visit physical locations, talk with informants on the ground in the places or communities about which they are writing, participate in writers’ groups, read works-in-progress at public events, attend virtual sessions on topics related to their work, join fellowships at universities, or work closely with editors or other advisors. This social process is often hidden, or absorbed into a text, only to be found on acknowledgements pages or in interviews with authors around a book’s publication; sometimes it’s entirely submerged, unspoken. And of course the texts themselves are always talking to one another, communicating through the intersections of language, style, homage, adaptation, and dialog.

At CSI, we make the social process around the creation of a vision of the future, and a story that wends its way through that future, explicit. We foreground it in project descriptions, in editors’ introductions, in “About this Book” sections and author’s notes at the end of a story, in detailed “Credits” pages that describe each contributor’s precise role in a book. We write about the process in scholarly articles and, when we discuss our publications in popular media, the workshop that gives rise to the book is often given equal airtime as the content of the book itself. The book, and the short fiction in it, are artifacts of a process of collaborative imagination. They document a set of enthusiastic, complex, and searching conversations whose essence, with luck, is captured in some way in the stories, essays, art, and other materials that comprise the eventual book. 

This social process doesn’t end in publication, either; in the case of Hieroglyph, for instance, we used the book’s launch to stand up dozens of conversations about the power of imagination and storytelling for helping us to come to grips with possible futures, and to deliberate about the roles that a wide variety of technologies could play in society. Those conversations spanned venues ranging from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to New America, a think tank in Washington, DC, to the headquarters of technology companies like Tumblr and Google, to the venerable civic events series Town Hall Seattle, to bookstores in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Phoenix, and other cities, to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate magazine, MIT Technology Review, and more. It was precisely the post-launch sociality around Hieroglyph that created the energy necessary for us to continue publishing stories created in this manner—conversations stemming from that book led to us establishing the Future Tense Fiction series (now published in Issues in Science and Technology, the house magazine of the National Academy of Sciences); to the book Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, supported by a grant from NASA; and to smaller-scale endeavors like Us in Flux, a series of flash fiction stories published during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that imagined futures shaped by community resilience and mutual aid. 

This mode of literary production necessarily captures the flow and flux of an ongoing conversation. These stories are provisional, and they exist as dotted-line paths towards many possible futures, rather than a prediction or an endorsement of a particular route ahead. Fiction authors who work with us are inundated with ideas and angles from diverse perspectives, through the workshops and convenings that inaugurate these projects and throughout the process of consultation, editing, publishing, and post-publication conversation. An author might easily start a project with deep discussions with a half-dozen people—they might confer with a visual artist, an engineer or technologist, a historian or literary scholar, a policy wonk, and a graduate student just starting their career in a specific field. Each of these people imparts not just information, but a perspective, a stance, a set of priorities and values, moral and ethical concerns, anxieties and uncertainties. Collecting, filtering, and condensing all of this input and transforming it into a story can lead to narratives that are richly layered, engaging with many voices and different registers of reality, like Singh’s “Entanglement” and Lord’s “Take Three.” These stories reflect the complex social worlds that underpin their conception and production. 

Now that we have access to zoefuturism and zoetology as lenses for thinking about and around our work, we’re excited to see what new ideas and possibilities they bring into focus. If we’ve been scattering zoetological seeds all along, what if we set our minds to intentionally planting and growing a garden of them? Zoefuturism taps into what science fiction stories can do best: helping us to dwell with the complexity that characterizes our experience of the universe, rather than trying to winnow it down into something flatter and more manageable. One of the persistent joys in our work at CSI has been to see the futures we cultivate blossom and take on vibrant new lives of their own. 

Works Referenced

Ames, Roger T. 2023. “‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 93: 81–98. doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000012. 

Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Eschrich, Joey, and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2021. Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/cities-of-light. 

Finn, Ed, and Joey Eschrich, eds. 2017. Visions, Ventures, Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/vvev.

Lord, Karen. 2025. “Take Three.” In Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra, edited by Alex Laing, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/soundsystems. 

Singh, Vandana. 2014. “Entanglement.” In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. William Morrow.

Stephenson, Neal. 2011. “Innovation Starvation.” World Policy Journal 28 (3): 11–16. doi.org/10.1177/0740277511425349.

Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34 (3): 372–382. doi.org/10.2307/375141. 

Joey Eschrich is the managing editor for the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America. He has coedited a number of collections of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Climate Imagination (MIT Press, 2025).  

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the GAME School and academic director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America.

The Resistance/ Vector 302

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Resistance/ Vector 302

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

By James C. Bassett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By James C. Bassett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

Works cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

Yen Ooi: When I first came across Professor Roger Ames’s lecture on Zoetology, I felt a surge of relief alongside excitement, as finally, there was language to explain my “rationality” – the foundational thought-structure that I had grown up with. This applied easily onto science fiction, since it is literature that is grounded in “rational science,” allowing me to understand and explore why “rationality” in speculative fiction can differ so much from culture to culture, subgenre to subgenre. 

As I discovered Zoetology alongside a depth of other theories (like convergence culture, participation revolution, techno-Orientalism, tabula plena, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, polymedia, and more), and amidst all the distressing news in the world today (of wars, the climate crisis, the AI bubble, etc.), while my life kept “becoming” (through motherhood, researching and practising Zen, and lots of writing!), everything came together to become Zoefuturism in an organic discovery. Zoefuturism isn’t a new idea inasmuch as zoetology is what Ames calls “a new name for an old way of thinking.”

Stephen Oram: Talking with Yen over coffee about her theories behind Zoefuturism, the phrase she coined, was more than an insight into a new way of approaching science fiction, it chimed beautifully with some of my own thinking.

My cultural background is not one of eastern religions or philosophy, quite the opposite. However, since my teenage years I’ve been sceptical of absolutes, developing a keenness for seeing life as directional. By that I mean keeping an eye on whether things are going in the right direction towards a “notion” rather than setting absolute goals or end-points. More recently, I’ve been actively attempting to hold knowledge and ideology lightly, passionately but with the understanding that both will change and develop. This focus on change is reflected in a lot of my writing.

Since talking with Yen, I’ve begun to understand the idea of change differently, as a constant rather than a way of getting to a pre-defined place. It has also shifted my perspective on legacy, especially around not having children. I wouldn’t say that I have completely digested this way of viewing the world, far from it, but I would say that it has begun something profound which is now spilling over into my work – “Brain Fruit” being the first manifestation.

Which is why I was honoured when she suggested I co-edit Vector with her, bringing my western cultural eye to reflect as best I can on Zoefuturism.

YO: Having the full support of Vector on our Zoefuturistic approach to editing the issues meant that we could be more open and allow more explorative ideas. We wanted to gather organic responses to Zoefuturism in a way that was relevant to a diversity of interests, and we were not disappointed with the submissions received. We have articles exploring applications of Zoefuturism in processes, fiction, philosophy, policy, genres, and more. But more importantly, I am feeling proud and inspired by the fact that we have planted the seeds of Zoefuturism and are keenly watching it grow and become. 

SO: Reading these wide range of contributions has broadened my perspective; discussing them with Yen has broadened my understanding of Zoefuturism.

As a result, I have taken a fresh look at existing speculative fiction, and at my applied science fiction work with communities, so I’m pleased we have articles on these topics. I like the metaphysical aspects that are covered, whether they’re on time, the power of perception on reality, or simply on a non-binary nature of technology. 

Given the disruption to my own writing this has sparked and the challenge it represents to the destructive ideas of domination, this quote from Jasper Kang is worth pondering: “alternative narratives might be the best tool we have to repair our future.”

YO: Zoefuturism assumes relationality and constant “becomings” in all things, and crucial to this understanding is that opposites (as we know it in the English language) are not binaries or separate from each other, rather, they are correlative aspects of change, of a whole, as represented in yin and yang. Black and white are descriptors of colour, encompassing the myriad of colours in its whole, feminine and masculine are descriptors of people, encompassing the diversity of communities in its whole, and so forth. 

Applying this to science fiction, we can look to disabled, queer, Korean-American scholar Seo-Yeong Chu’s informal new definition of science fiction as “a representational technology powered by a combination of lyric and narrative forces that enable SF to generate mimetic accounts of cognitively estranging referents” (Chu 2010, 73). Chu notes that “all representation is to some degree science-fictional because all reality is to some degree cognitively estranging” (Chu 2010, 7). She presents this as a range – a slider – between “realism” which designates “low-intensity mimesis,” and “science fiction,” which designates “high-intensity mimesis” (Chu 2010, 7). She notes that there is “no such thing as the opposite of science fiction. Likewise, there is no such thing as the opposite of realism” (Chu 2010, 8). In this way, realism and science fiction can be presented as yin and yang, correlative aspects within the process of change in science fiction. Realism-science fiction (yin-yang) is the focal identity that makes SF uniquely what it is by virtue of its vital relations, what SF is becoming.

Allowing Zoefuturism to become, while we gently notice as much as we can that’s relational to it, we’re excited for you to explore the discoveries with us through this issue, the forthcoming articles online, and in the second issue looking at different narrative structures and how other sub-genres fit with Zoefuturism. Do look out for those in the coming months.

Ames, Roger, ‘Zoetology: A new name for an old way of thinking,’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 93 (2023), 81-98.

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

Stephen Oram writes speculative novels and short stories, often exploring the intersection of messy humans and imperfect technology. He is also a leading proponent of applied science fiction, using bespoke fiction to explore possible futures for different communities. His latest fiction is the near-future novel, We Are Not Anonymous and the futuristic fable, Brain Fruit. (stephenoram.net).

Yen Ooi is a Hugo Award finalist narrative designer, writer, editor, and researcher with a diverse portfolio of work from short stories to books, poetry to computer games, academic papers to non-fiction books. Her interests lie in the connections between storytelling and the real world, delving into culture and philosophy—most recently culminating in zoefuturism. Her latest projects include The Zen Parent (non-fiction), Tales of Seikyu (game) and Ab Terra 2024. When she’s not got her head in a book, she lectures, mentors, and plays the viola. (yenooi.com).

Yen Ooi: When I first came across Professor Roger Ames’s lecture on Zoetology, I felt a surge of relief alongside excitement, as finally, there was language to explain my “rationality” – the foundational thought-structure that I had grown up with. This applied easily onto science fiction, since it is literature that is grounded in “rational science,” allowing me to understand and explore why “rationality” in speculative fiction can differ so much from culture to culture, subgenre to subgenre. 

As I discovered Zoetology alongside a depth of other theories (like convergence culture, participation revolution, techno-Orientalism, tabula plena, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, polymedia, and more), and amidst all the distressing news in the world today (of wars, the climate crisis, the AI bubble, etc.), while my life kept “becoming” (through motherhood, researching and practising Zen, and lots of writing!), everything came together to become Zoefuturism in an organic discovery. Zoefuturism isn’t a new idea inasmuch as zoetology is what Ames calls “a new name for an old way of thinking.”

Stephen Oram: Talking with Yen over coffee about her theories behind Zoefuturism, the phrase she coined, was more than an insight into a new way of approaching science fiction, it chimed beautifully with some of my own thinking.

My cultural background is not one of eastern religions or philosophy, quite the opposite. However, since my teenage years I’ve been sceptical of absolutes, developing a keenness for seeing life as directional. By that I mean keeping an eye on whether things are going in the right direction towards a “notion” rather than setting absolute goals or end-points. More recently, I’ve been actively attempting to hold knowledge and ideology lightly, passionately but with the understanding that both will change and develop. This focus on change is reflected in a lot of my writing.

Since talking with Yen, I’ve begun to understand the idea of change differently, as a constant rather than a way of getting to a pre-defined place. It has also shifted my perspective on legacy, especially around not having children. I wouldn’t say that I have completely digested this way of viewing the world, far from it, but I would say that it has begun something profound which is now spilling over into my work – “Brain Fruit” being the first manifestation.

Which is why I was honoured when she suggested I co-edit Vector with her, bringing my western cultural eye to reflect as best I can on Zoefuturism.

YO: Having the full support of Vector on our Zoefuturistic approach to editing the issues meant that we could be more open and allow more explorative ideas. We wanted to gather organic responses to Zoefuturism in a way that was relevant to a diversity of interests, and we were not disappointed with the submissions received. We have articles exploring applications of Zoefuturism in processes, fiction, philosophy, policy, genres, and more. But more importantly, I am feeling proud and inspired by the fact that we have planted the seeds of Zoefuturism and are keenly watching it grow and become. 

SO: Reading these wide range of contributions has broadened my perspective; discussing them with Yen has broadened my understanding of Zoefuturism.

As a result, I have taken a fresh look at existing speculative fiction, and at my applied science fiction work with communities, so I’m pleased we have articles on these topics. I like the metaphysical aspects that are covered, whether they’re on time, the power of perception on reality, or simply on a non-binary nature of technology. 

Given the disruption to my own writing this has sparked and the challenge it represents to the destructive ideas of domination, this quote from Jasper Kang is worth pondering: “alternative narratives might be the best tool we have to repair our future.”

YO: Zoefuturism assumes relationality and constant “becomings” in all things, and crucial to this understanding is that opposites (as we know it in the English language) are not binaries or separate from each other, rather, they are correlative aspects of change, of a whole, as represented in yin and yang. Black and white are descriptors of colour, encompassing the myriad of colours in its whole, feminine and masculine are descriptors of people, encompassing the diversity of communities in its whole, and so forth. 

Applying this to science fiction, we can look to disabled, queer, Korean-American scholar Seo-Yeong Chu’s informal new definition of science fiction as “a representational technology powered by a combination of lyric and narrative forces that enable SF to generate mimetic accounts of cognitively estranging referents” (Chu 2010, 73). Chu notes that “all representation is to some degree science-fictional because all reality is to some degree cognitively estranging” (Chu 2010, 7). She presents this as a range – a slider – between “realism” which designates “low-intensity mimesis,” and “science fiction,” which designates “high-intensity mimesis” (Chu 2010, 7). She notes that there is “no such thing as the opposite of science fiction. Likewise, there is no such thing as the opposite of realism” (Chu 2010, 8). In this way, realism and science fiction can be presented as yin and yang, correlative aspects within the process of change in science fiction. Realism-science fiction (yin-yang) is the focal identity that makes SF uniquely what it is by virtue of its vital relations, what SF is becoming.

Allowing Zoefuturism to become, while we gently notice as much as we can that’s relational to it, we’re excited for you to explore the discoveries with us through this issue, the forthcoming articles online, and in the second issue looking at different narrative structures and how other sub-genres fit with Zoefuturism. Do look out for those in the coming months.

Ames, Roger, ‘Zoetology: A new name for an old way of thinking,’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 93 (2023), 81-98.

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

Stephen Oram writes speculative novels and short stories, often exploring the intersection of messy humans and imperfect technology. He is also a leading proponent of applied science fiction, using bespoke fiction to explore possible futures for different communities. His latest fiction is the near-future novel, We Are Not Anonymous and the futuristic fable, Brain Fruit. (stephenoram.net).

Yen Ooi is a Hugo Award finalist narrative designer, writer, editor, and researcher with a diverse portfolio of work from short stories to books, poetry to computer games, academic papers to non-fiction books. Her interests lie in the connections between storytelling and the real world, delving into culture and philosophy—most recently culminating in zoefuturism. Her latest projects include The Zen Parent (non-fiction), Tales of Seikyu (game) and Ab Terra 2024. When she’s not got her head in a book, she lectures, mentors, and plays the viola. (yenooi.com).

By Alex Harasymiw

Promotional poster for The Death Ray (1924)

Introduction

There, squatting beside a bush, projecting from the field, like a tilted spotlight precariously balanced atop a porcelain beehive, we behold the death ray, its tentacle-like power cables snaking across the English countryside to somewhere off-frame. Invented in 1923 during the interwar period as the ultimate deterrent to the enemies of England, Harry Grindell-Matthews’ device sits mercifully unused, mysteriously untested, a mere testament to the destructive potential of the modern scientific mind. From the surviving photographs and the rare newsreel footage of the death ray, we can see an eerily thin beam, sweeping across an assortment of objects, a motorcycle engine, a lump of gunpowder, a quivering mouse, like that of a handheld flashlight, only, instead of illuminating each of the objects, the beam slices them like a pair of scissors, severing them from the sense of continuity between one moment and the next. First, there is light and the object, a rupture, and then an explosion to splice the two parts together. In the end, Grindell-Matthews would destroy the device, along with all the related plans, notes, and records, leaving behind only anecdotes, rumours, and film strips as evidence of this great realization of science fiction in the past.

Apart from its strange imagery, like some untimely precursor to the independent exploitation films that would appear decades later, the death ray is fascinating for the way it lingers  in the popular imaginary. Despite the lack of conclusive demonstrations of the device, the way descriptions of it change from one account to another, and Grindell-Matthews’ reticence about its materials and operation, there appears to have been a widespread faith in the real possibility of the invention’s existence, and even today something like a pious agnosticism surrounds the death ray. When we consider the efforts of early silent cinema scholars to confront the often irreparable degeneration or complete loss of the films of so many marginalized filmmakers, and the implications of such loss for our understanding of the history of silent cinema, the persistence of the death ray as the lost work of a modern inventor-genius seems especially questionable. Where the absence of marginalized films and filmmakers from the official canon of silent film history is often attributed to the real material loss of their films in the present, the death ray highlights one of the central ironies of historical writing about this period: namely, that if a narrative is compelling enough to be believed, there is no problem inventing evidence to suit its ends.

Illumination and Destruction

For the archetypal figure of this form of historiography, we need look no further than Harry Grindell-Matthews. According to his faithful biographer, Ernest Barwell, who holds Grindell-Matthews in such high regard as to refer to him in the preface of his biography as the Winston Churchill of science (Barwell 7), it is the total loss of Grindell-Matthews’ inventions that ends up being his most valuable legacy. Barwell credits Grindell-Matthews with an almost prophetic awareness of the threat the then-rising Nazi Germany would pose to Britain in the future, which he claims inspired many of his dubious inventions. The British government never did purchase any of his creations, let alone the fabled death ray. According to Barwell, however, this sense of personal failure as an inventor is overshadowed by the significance of his decision to destroy every trace of his inventions:

That is the tragedy of Grindell Matthews. It is also his triumph. In the closing days of his life, when every man’ hand was against him, and even those who had pledged themselves to remain steadfast had left his side, he rose to far greater heights than when he was front-page news in every newspaper in the world. Anyone can refuse to barter his patriotism when he is wealthy and in good health, but when poor and suffering greatly from heart trouble it is not so easy to refuse a life of ease and comfort. That was G.M.’s achievement, and those who criticized, misunderstood, and under-estimated his genius may well ask themselves whether their patriotism would have stood the strain so well. (Barwell 10)

In an interesting reversal, Grindell-Matthews earns his place in British national history through the absolute secrecy of his inventions. His virtuous poverty and suffering make him seem more akin to our image of the modern artist than that of the scientist; his genius is in leaving nothing behind but the vague menace of his inventions’ capacity for destruction. 

M. Grindell Matthews, inventeur du rayon mortel. 1924. Wikimedia

However, in 1924, the menace of the death ray seemed for many as real as its appearance on a projector screen. One editor for Time magazine recorded his impressions of the death ray in the somewhat bathetically titled, “What Use to Write Books, Poems?” After viewing a filmed demonstration of the death ray, privately exhibited for an audience of reporters in Grindell-Matthews’ laboratory, the shaken editor connects this invention to the general state of modern life, in which “Death, whether by death-ray or automobile accident, [is] just as cruel, kind and inevitable as ever—just as inevitable as bad novels and good novels coming in a steady stream across my desk” (Time). The death ray in this context is not a novelty in the modern context, but one more ambiguous development, like the dangers of the modern city, and the uneven quality of modern cultural production. The unusual comparison between death in modernity and the state of the modern novel suggests something of the editor’s effort to restore a sense of narrative cohesion to a life often headed for a meaningless, depersonalized end. Just like the senseless plot developments in a poorly conceived story, the arbitrary nature of a modern death wrecks the effort to reconcile the individual’s psychological development with their destiny in the world. In this sense, the editor’s skepticism seems to center more on the ethical dilemma posed by the death ray. Would the death ray succeed as a deterrent to Britain’s enemies or bring about the destruction of the planet and the end of human civilization? The scientific soundness of the experiment represented in the film, however, is curiously absent from the article. The existence of the death ray seems to be inevitable, even if it is not in fact possible.

Here, it is worth pausing over this effort to not only connect the invention of the death ray to more general observations about the texture of modern life, but also show how it exemplifies a particular aesthetic sensibility. Drawing on the works of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, American silent cinema scholar Ben Singer notes how the developments of modern life in the early twentieth century saw the emergence of a corresponding aesthetic sensibility, that of sensationalism (Singer 91). In both cinema and commercial entertainment in general, the new shocks, ruptures, and perils of modern urban experience demanded a counterpart in cultural production, with “the commercialization of the thrill as a reflection and symptom (as well as an agent or catalyst) of neurological modernity” an almost inevitable consequence (Singer). The Time article above further reflects just such a sensationalist aesthetic. In an effort to relate the destructive potential of the death ray, its invention is somewhat puzzlingly compared to the proliferation of the automobile and the fear of being run down in the street. The pose struck in the article is that of the pompous, self-gratifying indignation of the literati, for whom the death ray becomes a catalyst for both bemoaning the death of high art at the hands of commercial cinema, as well as the lost narrative cohesion in a life where the plodding rumination on great ideals and values can be suddenly cut short by a random distracted motorist. The cinematic nature of the ‘modern’ death was merely thrilling and sensational, unlike in literature, where texts seem to promise that the ultimate fate of individuals is a more or less intelligible consequence of their own way of living. The death ray is at once seen as a logical consequence of modernity, and yet remains utterly, and perhaps deliberately, unintelligible within the narrative framework of the modern novel. The paradoxical fictionality of the death ray thus illuminates a shadowy gap between the anxieties of modern life and the explanatory power of literature, one which calls into question the hegemony of the author the more it commands and empowers the curiosity of the general public.   

After being repeatedly spurned by the British government, who refused to purchase his invention, Grindell-Matthews approved the public release of an 8-minute film, Death Ray (1924), which purported to demonstrate the power of his device. Directed by French special effects and trick cinematographer, Gaston Quiribet, much of the film’s runtime is taken up with listing unrelated inventions of modern science, Grindell-Matthews’ credentials as a prototypical inventor-genius, and the media sensation surrounding the death ray. A little over two minutes of the film is devoted to scientific experiments, with the death ray shown illuminating some coiled wire and igniting a pile of gunpowder at a distance. The film’s intertitles do most of the heavy lifting and there is very little sense of continuity due to the frequent cuts. A close-up of the Eiffel Tower’s electrical wires reminds us that “history can repeat itself and the seemingly impossible become a reality” (1:16); shots of newspaper headlines stand in for the inventions of “one of the boldest thinkers of Modern Times” (2:54); the image of Grindell-Matthews as a prophetic scientist-genius reinforced by shots of him sitting pensively behind a desk and flying in an airplane (3:00, 3:54). The experiment itself shows Grindell-Matthews fiddling with some switches, then a cut to a close-up of a glowing wire held between two of his lab assistants (5:07). Grendell-Matthews pulls a lever, and then there is a sudden cut to a close-up, and then an over-the-shoulder shot of the pile of gunpowder igniting (6:34). At the end of the film, even the intertitles appear to confuse the speculative and the concrete with the claim: “The destruction the Death Ray may be able to accomplish with its power to Illuminate or Burn, at great distances, would be unlimited” (7:02). The destructive potential of the death ray remains a possibility, for it “may” have this power, and yet we can still be certain that such power “would be unlimited.”

Still from Gaston Quiribet’s The Death Ray (Pathé, 1924)

Despite its relatively late production in the history of silent cinema, the showmanship of Death Ray shares a number of similarities with films often associated with the ‘cinema of attractions.’ Film scholar Tom Gunning characterizes this period of silent cinema as one that “directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle – a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself” (Gunning 384). With its emphasis on tricks and novelties rather than narrative, and its efforts to directly address the spectator through sensory and psychological impressions, the cinema of attractions inspires audience participation in its spectacles and thus stimulates a more direct involvement with the medium than the passivity demanded of audiences in theatrical productions or narrative films (385). In this sense, the cinema of attractions does not designate a particular set of images, tricks, or effects, but rather something more like a “primal power” latent within cinema, and moreover one not confined to a given time period (387). Much as Singer emphasizes the neurological impacts cinema simulated in its appeals to the modern spectator, Gunning’s cinema of attractions highlights the way film addresses, and in so doing, actively constructs and shapes, its spectator.

Much as in Gunning’s definition of the cinema of attractions, Death Ray complicates a strict division between spectacle and narrative. Although the film contains a loose narrative arc, building from the early history of wireless communication up to a speculative future in which the death ray dominates the battlefield, the effect of Death Ray on the spectator comes from a sort of simulacral exhibition of scientific rigor and authority. Just as Gunning calls attention to how “[t]he Hollywood advertising policy of enumerating the features of a film, each emblazoned with the command, “See!” shows this primal power of the attraction running beneath the armature of narrative regulation” (387), the splicing of intertitles together with otherwise unrelated fragments of the Eiffel Tower and Grindell-Matthews getting into an airplane likewise evokes the power of the attraction in the service of its narrative. Diagrams and headlines taken from a few newspapers stand in for footage of Grindell-Matthews’ remote control submarine and a radio capable of communicating with airplanes. In this conspiracy of spectacle and narrative, Death Ray mobilizes the indexicality of film to produce the effect of evidence for inventions that do not exist. Here, the figure of the scientist is transformed into that of a showman, with allusions to the positivism of science providing the spectator with the inspiration and illusory sense of continuity necessary to stitch together otherwise disparate fragments into a cohesive whole.

Still from Gaston Quiribet’s The Death Ray (Pathé, 1924)

In a field such as early silent cinema, where so many of the films, personalities, and communities of the historical record are apparently missing, the revelation of a film claiming to possess an abundance of evidence for things that never existed to promote a man of no importance looking to defraud the British government is somewhat farcical. The irony of this situation is especially pronounced after reading Alyson Nadia Field’s introduction to the spring issue of Feminist Media Histories, “Sites of Speculative Encounter,” where she characterizes the early silent cinema studies as a “history of survivors:”

To an overwhelming extent, the field of cinema and media studies has been organized around extant material, with histories closely tethered to surviving evidence. Film history is a history of survivors, written at the expense of alternative voices and practices that risk being dismissed or marginalized if we can’t readily access them. When scholars aim at a broader and more inclusive film history, we often hit a wall. Instead of working with archival abundance we are faced with degrees of archival silence; what survives is often fragmentary at best and deliberately elided or effaced at worst. (Field 3)

For Field, the dependence of film historians on the surviving films from the silent era leads to the construction of historical narratives that at least implicitly exclude alternative perspectives and communities from the imagination of the history of early silent cinema and its canon. Instead, if the historian looks to unearth these forgotten memories, they must grapple with “archival silence” in the form of fragments, omissions, and the destruction of past films. Instances of fragmentation, elision, and obliteration represent obstacles to the historian’s effort to realize alternative narratives as cohesive wholes. The historical irony of the death ray and the survival of the Death Ray newsreel is in how it deliberately fragments an existing archive of stock footage, newspaper articles, and exhibitions to smuggle Grindell-Matthews into a canon predisposed to hero worship and the retrospective celebration of the isolated, misunderstood genius.

The persuasiveness of this fragmentation in Death Ray comes from the effort to reconstruct the spectator as the privileged witness of a scientific process. Again, Ernest Barwell’s 1943 biography of Grindell-Matthews offers some insight into this reimagination of the spectator. Having been trusted with access to the Grindell-Matthews lab at Harewood Place, Barwell recounts the initial death ray experiments:

Further experiments revealed that vermin which had been subjected to tests were killed instantly, and G.M. knew the possibilities of the ray he was seeking to harness. Each of us was pledged to secrecy, and the inventor took the precaution of ordering his apparatus from firms spread all over the country, thus hoping to keep any gossip from developing. But whispers of the things going on behind the walls of Harewood Place reached the ears of the news-gatherers of Fleet Street, who had got into the habit of associating the name of Grindell Matthews with anything which savoured of mystery or magic. (Barwell 91)

Here, the biographer offers his eyewitness testimony of the death ray’s ability to kill, but due to his participation in the conspiracy is unable to provide details about the construction of the device or the origin of its materials. The secrecy surrounding the death ray is justified by speculation as to its potential for destruction, on the one hand, and the presence of enemies waiting to co-opt it, on the other. To the initiated, the experiments are rigorous and methodical, but to those on the outside, they suppose, it can only be experienced as “mystery or magic.” What is especially interesting about the construction of the death ray witness is the way they remain, with respect to the construction of the device, just as much on the outside as the rest of the variously curious or dismissive public. That is, the witness does not actually possess any special knowledge of the death ray, how or whether it works, but merely an initiation into a particular narrative, one which reframes their ignorance as an informed and virtuous ignorance. 

  Were the death ray of Gaston Quiribet’s Death Ray newsreel confined to the realm of fiction, the effort to unmask the processes involved in persuading the spectator to suspend their disbelief would be a little pedantic. Rather, I argue that what makes Death Ray compelling is the way it illuminates the artifice of historical narratives and canonization. Throughout the newsreel, the primal power of the attraction Gunning associates with the spectacles of early silent cinema is co-opted in the name of positivism and the scientific process. The newsreel stitches together otherwise disparate fragments as evidence of causal relations between an inert device and combustible material. The sense of narrative cohesion in the film comes from the initiation of the spectator into the mystery of the device, an initiation that works not as a revelation of how it operates, but rather a strong desire for it to work. In so doing, the death ray reveals the circular process in which the persuasiveness of a particular historical narrative can invent a death ray, and the invention of a death ray can in turn help construct a particular historical narrative. Here, the death ray appears as both cause and effect of history, with its power over the spectator deriving as much from the evocation of a narrative as from the experience of a spectacle.

In the Hands of the Enemy

Contrary to the wishes of Grindell-Matthews, the death ray would leave Britain’s shores just a year later and arrive, not in Nazi Germany, but in the Soviet Union. When Soviet director and film theorist Lev Kuleshov’s silent science fiction film, The Death Ray (Луч смерти,1925) arrived on the scene, the film was considered ideologically suspect by Soviet film critics. In the realm of fiction, this cheap exploitation film, apparently cashing in on the sensationalism surrounding Grindell-Matthews’ death ray, represented an inexcusable departure from the aesthetic and thematic demands of Socialist Realism (Kovacs 38-9). Kuleshov’s own defense of The Death Ray reflects something of Grindell-Matthews’ own aloofness towards the ethical implications of his death ray, arguing that he had merely been experimenting with the possibility of reproducing the production quality and formal characteristics of American films on a much smaller budget: a pursuit which, he admits, may have distracted him from a more careful consideration of the thematic content of the film (Kovacs 39). For both the inventor and the director, there is an effort to position the death ray outside of history as the logical outcome of formal experimentation. However, while Grindell-Matthews’ death ray is caught up in a cycle of incessant invention and production in its own historical context, the tension between narrative and spectacle in Kuleshov’s Death Ray represents an instance of historical rupture, with the orientation of the collective towards scientific discovery offering the possibility of alternative organizations of the social order.

Lev Kuleshov, The Death Ray (Луч смерти, Goskino, 1925)

Notably, both the first and last reels of Kuleshov’s Death Ray are lost, which invites speculation into the literal framing of the film. The remainder of the film begins with the camera panning across a village littered with the bodies of massacred workers following a failed protest, and then a somewhat non sequitur transition to the actors’ credits. Afterwards, we see the manager of Edith, a world-famous gunslinger played by Soviet actress, Aleksandra Khokhlova, propose to her. She puts off his proposal until a later date, a plotline that is never resolved due perhaps to the loss of the final reel of the film. The rest of the surviving film involves the invention of a death ray and the conflict between two parties, the fascists of some unidentified Western country and the workers of the Soviet Union, who jostle for control over the invention. Much of the action comes in the form of impromptu slapstick spectacles, such as when a woman chases away a gang of fascist spies by throwing a gratuitous number of plates at them (9:00), or in scenes of these same fascists slapping each other around in mutual recognition of their incompetence (17:00). The surviving film ends as an army of workers races to confront a squadron of fascist bombers with their newly acquired death ray, with no apparent resolution.

In terms of both its material and formal composition, the fragmentary Death Ray resists narrative integration into a cohesive whole. Writing on the relationship between spectacle and narrative in “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle, and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” Donald Crafton offers the following definition of the revolutionary potential of gags in the slapstick genre:

One way to look at narrative is to see it as a system for providing the spectator with sufficient knowledge to make causal links between represented events. According to this view, the gag’s status as an irreconcilable difference becomes clear. Its purpose is to misdirect the viewer’s attention, to obfuscate the linearity of cause-effect relations. Gags provide the opposite of epistemological comprehension by the spectator. They are atemporal bursts of violence and/or hedonism that are as ephemeral and as gratifying as the sight of someone’s pie-smitten face. (Crafton 363)

According to Crafton, the power of the gag lies in its ability to not only destabilize narrative frameworks, but also to frustrate the spectator’s ability to apprehend the narrative in a film as such. The spectacle of a gag, as much within the film as at the expense of its narrative, offers the spectator a sense of pleasure in the experience of the illegibility of the film. In this way, the narrative fragmentation within a slapstick film works to disrupt the meaning-making process of narrativization, and instead reorients the spectator towards the radical energy animating the growth of digressions at the expense of ostensibly causal relations.

Throughout Kuleshov’s Death Ray, this tension between spectacle and narrative plays out in the slapstick treatment of the invention itself. Just like Grindell-Matthews’ Death Ray, Kuleshov’s film contains a scene exhibiting the power of the death ray in a laboratory setting. The editing in the fictional exhibition of the death ray almost perfectly mirrors that of the Grindell-Matthews experiment, with first a group of scientists crowded around a glowing apparatus, followed by a sudden cut to a beaker exploding (18:00). Not long after this demonstration, fascist goons break into the lab and attempt to steal the device. After one of the fascists trips over an electrical cord and starts a fire in the lab, a protracted fight scene ensues, with the goons running around the house, accidentally shooting each other, and engaging in a prolonged shootout with the scientists in the dark, after which they eventually manage to steal the device (23:30-26:00). This at times bumbling, at times sinister contest for control of the device complicates the representation of the death ray in the Grindell-Matthews experiments. Where the spectacle of these experiments becomes bound up with a narrative of the ambiguous celebration of the aloof scientist-hero as a historical agent and the impotence of the modern spectator, spectacle in Kuleshov’s Death Ray disrupts the device’s narrative function, distracting from its allegorical potential or sensationalized aestheticization. Just as the death ray in this scene remains shrouded in darkness, illuminated only by the momentary muzzle flashes from the gunshots, the rest of Kuleshov’s Death Ray represents the device as a mere prop in a protracted and often farcical contest between competing historical agents. The spectacle of their competition, replete with elements from the slapstick genre, emphasizes the ambivalence of the formation and contestation of historical discourses, the violence and comedy of this process, at the expense of a celebration of a single, cohesive narrative construct.

The material fragmentation of the film further draws attention to the process of narrativization itself at the expense of cohesion. At the climatic moment of the film, a team of workers speeds along a country road, rushing to intercept a squadron of fascist bombers, with the death ray balanced precariously on the roof of their car and a mob of villagers trailing in their wake. One of the protagonists, Engineer Podobed, shouts above the crowd, “Comrades, victory is in our hands! Let’s restore order!” and is immediately set upon by the jostling mob, whereupon the film cuts off, the final reel lost to time (1:15:35-1:15:55). This new ending illuminates the central irony of the death ray throughout the film: namely that as much as it is taken to be an instrument for determining the course of history, once it is firmly in the hands of one party, it ceases to have any power. As soon as the death ray is poised to make some decisive intervention in the plot, apart from breaking hapless beakers in a laboratory, the film comes to an end without resolution. In this sense, the fragmentation of Kuleshov’s Death Ray proves to be itself a dramatic spectacle at the expense of narrative cohesion, where even the promise of narrative resolution offered by the device of the death ray results in the material destruction of the film itself.

Conclusion

The death ray has a long and varied history within the science fiction imagination. It is certainly beyond the scope of this brief article to fully capture the significance of death ray imagery across the genre e. What I hope to have demonstrated with this article are some of the ways in which the death ray illuminates the relationship between filmmaking, archival loss, and the historiography of early silent cinema. In the case of Grindell-Matthews, the conjecture surrounding the invention of a death ray moves from the realm of speculative fiction to historical necessity as the anomalous byproduct of modern hero worship and canonization. For Kuleshov and what remains of his film, the death ray not only destabilizes historical narratives but, once activated, seems to destroy the very materiality of the text that served as fodder for these competing ideological constructions of reality. Historically speaking, the death ray is almost by design the object of conspiracy and espionage with an apocalyptic potential that we ignore at our peril and to our detriment. Who knows what discursive powers the death ray might unleash for the maniacal historian or film scholar? I say, we need only look to the past for a taste of how the world might yet be remade.  

Bibliography

Barwell, Ernest Haydn Garnet. The Death Ray Man. Hutchinson & co., ltd., 1943.

Berlant, Lauren, Sianne Ngai, Alenka Zupančič. “Sustaining Alternative Worlds: On 

Comedy and the Politics of Representation.” Texte zur Kunst, no. 121, 2021, pp. 

64-85.

Crafton, Donald. “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy.” 

The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp. 355-365.

Field, Alyson Nadia. “Sites of Speculative Encounter.” Feminist Media Histories 8.2, 

2022, 1-13.

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-

Garde.” The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam UP, 2006, 381-388.

Kovacs, Steven. “Kuleshov’s Aesthetics.” Film Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3, 1976, pp. 34–

40, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.1976.29.3.04a00070. 

Singer, Ben. “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism.” 

Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, University of California Press, 2020, pp. 72–100, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520916425-005.

The Death Ray (Луч смерти). Directed by Lev Kuleshov, Goskino, 1925. 

The Death Ray. Directed by Gaston Quiribet, Pathé, 1924. https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=qbNgvHfK4wI.

Vago, Mike. “This inventor’s death ray was totally real, but no one was allowed to see 

it.” AV Club, 25 August 2019, https://www.avclub.com/this-inventor-s-death-ray-was-

totally-real-but-no-one-1837447697. Accessed 19 January 2026.

“What Use to Write Books, Poems?” Time, 25 Aug.1924, https://web.archive.org/web/

20101121074507/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,846539,00.html. Accessed 19 January 2026.

~

Alex Harasymiw is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on representations of climate collapse and apocalyptic discourse in Chinese science fiction films and literature. He is also interested in speculative historiography and Soviet science fiction. 

By Alex Harasymiw

Promotional poster for The Death Ray (1924)

Introduction

There, squatting beside a bush, projecting from the field, like a tilted spotlight precariously balanced atop a porcelain beehive, we behold the death ray, its tentacle-like power cables snaking across the English countryside to somewhere off-frame. Invented in 1923 during the interwar period as the ultimate deterrent to the enemies of England, Harry Grindell-Matthews’ device sits mercifully unused, mysteriously untested, a mere testament to the destructive potential of the modern scientific mind. From the surviving photographs and the rare newsreel footage of the death ray, we can see an eerily thin beam, sweeping across an assortment of objects, a motorcycle engine, a lump of gunpowder, a quivering mouse, like that of a handheld flashlight, only, instead of illuminating each of the objects, the beam slices them like a pair of scissors, severing them from the sense of continuity between one moment and the next. First, there is light and the object, a rupture, and then an explosion to splice the two parts together. In the end, Grindell-Matthews would destroy the device, along with all the related plans, notes, and records, leaving behind only anecdotes, rumours, and film strips as evidence of this great realization of science fiction in the past.

Apart from its strange imagery, like some untimely precursor to the independent exploitation films that would appear decades later, the death ray is fascinating for the way it lingers  in the popular imaginary. Despite the lack of conclusive demonstrations of the device, the way descriptions of it change from one account to another, and Grindell-Matthews’ reticence about its materials and operation, there appears to have been a widespread faith in the real possibility of the invention’s existence, and even today something like a pious agnosticism surrounds the death ray. When we consider the efforts of early silent cinema scholars to confront the often irreparable degeneration or complete loss of the films of so many marginalized filmmakers, and the implications of such loss for our understanding of the history of silent cinema, the persistence of the death ray as the lost work of a modern inventor-genius seems especially questionable. Where the absence of marginalized films and filmmakers from the official canon of silent film history is often attributed to the real material loss of their films in the present, the death ray highlights one of the central ironies of historical writing about this period: namely, that if a narrative is compelling enough to be believed, there is no problem inventing evidence to suit its ends.

Illumination and Destruction

For the archetypal figure of this form of historiography, we need look no further than Harry Grindell-Matthews. According to his faithful biographer, Ernest Barwell, who holds Grindell-Matthews in such high regard as to refer to him in the preface of his biography as the Winston Churchill of science (Barwell 7), it is the total loss of Grindell-Matthews’ inventions that ends up being his most valuable legacy. Barwell credits Grindell-Matthews with an almost prophetic awareness of the threat the then-rising Nazi Germany would pose to Britain in the future, which he claims inspired many of his dubious inventions. The British government never did purchase any of his creations, let alone the fabled death ray. According to Barwell, however, this sense of personal failure as an inventor is overshadowed by the significance of his decision to destroy every trace of his inventions:

That is the tragedy of Grindell Matthews. It is also his triumph. In the closing days of his life, when every man’ hand was against him, and even those who had pledged themselves to remain steadfast had left his side, he rose to far greater heights than when he was front-page news in every newspaper in the world. Anyone can refuse to barter his patriotism when he is wealthy and in good health, but when poor and suffering greatly from heart trouble it is not so easy to refuse a life of ease and comfort. That was G.M.’s achievement, and those who criticized, misunderstood, and under-estimated his genius may well ask themselves whether their patriotism would have stood the strain so well. (Barwell 10)

In an interesting reversal, Grindell-Matthews earns his place in British national history through the absolute secrecy of his inventions. His virtuous poverty and suffering make him seem more akin to our image of the modern artist than that of the scientist; his genius is in leaving nothing behind but the vague menace of his inventions’ capacity for destruction. 

M. Grindell Matthews, inventeur du rayon mortel. 1924. Wikimedia

However, in 1924, the menace of the death ray seemed for many as real as its appearance on a projector screen. One editor for Time magazine recorded his impressions of the death ray in the somewhat bathetically titled, “What Use to Write Books, Poems?” After viewing a filmed demonstration of the death ray, privately exhibited for an audience of reporters in Grindell-Matthews’ laboratory, the shaken editor connects this invention to the general state of modern life, in which “Death, whether by death-ray or automobile accident, [is] just as cruel, kind and inevitable as ever—just as inevitable as bad novels and good novels coming in a steady stream across my desk” (Time). The death ray in this context is not a novelty in the modern context, but one more ambiguous development, like the dangers of the modern city, and the uneven quality of modern cultural production. The unusual comparison between death in modernity and the state of the modern novel suggests something of the editor’s effort to restore a sense of narrative cohesion to a life often headed for a meaningless, depersonalized end. Just like the senseless plot developments in a poorly conceived story, the arbitrary nature of a modern death wrecks the effort to reconcile the individual’s psychological development with their destiny in the world. In this sense, the editor’s skepticism seems to center more on the ethical dilemma posed by the death ray. Would the death ray succeed as a deterrent to Britain’s enemies or bring about the destruction of the planet and the end of human civilization? The scientific soundness of the experiment represented in the film, however, is curiously absent from the article. The existence of the death ray seems to be inevitable, even if it is not in fact possible.

Here, it is worth pausing over this effort to not only connect the invention of the death ray to more general observations about the texture of modern life, but also show how it exemplifies a particular aesthetic sensibility. Drawing on the works of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, American silent cinema scholar Ben Singer notes how the developments of modern life in the early twentieth century saw the emergence of a corresponding aesthetic sensibility, that of sensationalism (Singer 91). In both cinema and commercial entertainment in general, the new shocks, ruptures, and perils of modern urban experience demanded a counterpart in cultural production, with “the commercialization of the thrill as a reflection and symptom (as well as an agent or catalyst) of neurological modernity” an almost inevitable consequence (Singer). The Time article above further reflects just such a sensationalist aesthetic. In an effort to relate the destructive potential of the death ray, its invention is somewhat puzzlingly compared to the proliferation of the automobile and the fear of being run down in the street. The pose struck in the article is that of the pompous, self-gratifying indignation of the literati, for whom the death ray becomes a catalyst for both bemoaning the death of high art at the hands of commercial cinema, as well as the lost narrative cohesion in a life where the plodding rumination on great ideals and values can be suddenly cut short by a random distracted motorist. The cinematic nature of the ‘modern’ death was merely thrilling and sensational, unlike in literature, where texts seem to promise that the ultimate fate of individuals is a more or less intelligible consequence of their own way of living. The death ray is at once seen as a logical consequence of modernity, and yet remains utterly, and perhaps deliberately, unintelligible within the narrative framework of the modern novel. The paradoxical fictionality of the death ray thus illuminates a shadowy gap between the anxieties of modern life and the explanatory power of literature, one which calls into question the hegemony of the author the more it commands and empowers the curiosity of the general public.   

After being repeatedly spurned by the British government, who refused to purchase his invention, Grindell-Matthews approved the public release of an 8-minute film, Death Ray (1924), which purported to demonstrate the power of his device. Directed by French special effects and trick cinematographer, Gaston Quiribet, much of the film’s runtime is taken up with listing unrelated inventions of modern science, Grindell-Matthews’ credentials as a prototypical inventor-genius, and the media sensation surrounding the death ray. A little over two minutes of the film is devoted to scientific experiments, with the death ray shown illuminating some coiled wire and igniting a pile of gunpowder at a distance. The film’s intertitles do most of the heavy lifting and there is very little sense of continuity due to the frequent cuts. A close-up of the Eiffel Tower’s electrical wires reminds us that “history can repeat itself and the seemingly impossible become a reality” (1:16); shots of newspaper headlines stand in for the inventions of “one of the boldest thinkers of Modern Times” (2:54); the image of Grindell-Matthews as a prophetic scientist-genius reinforced by shots of him sitting pensively behind a desk and flying in an airplane (3:00, 3:54). The experiment itself shows Grindell-Matthews fiddling with some switches, then a cut to a close-up of a glowing wire held between two of his lab assistants (5:07). Grendell-Matthews pulls a lever, and then there is a sudden cut to a close-up, and then an over-the-shoulder shot of the pile of gunpowder igniting (6:34). At the end of the film, even the intertitles appear to confuse the speculative and the concrete with the claim: “The destruction the Death Ray may be able to accomplish with its power to Illuminate or Burn, at great distances, would be unlimited” (7:02). The destructive potential of the death ray remains a possibility, for it “may” have this power, and yet we can still be certain that such power “would be unlimited.”

Still from Gaston Quiribet’s The Death Ray (Pathé, 1924)

Despite its relatively late production in the history of silent cinema, the showmanship of Death Ray shares a number of similarities with films often associated with the ‘cinema of attractions.’ Film scholar Tom Gunning characterizes this period of silent cinema as one that “directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle – a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself” (Gunning 384). With its emphasis on tricks and novelties rather than narrative, and its efforts to directly address the spectator through sensory and psychological impressions, the cinema of attractions inspires audience participation in its spectacles and thus stimulates a more direct involvement with the medium than the passivity demanded of audiences in theatrical productions or narrative films (385). In this sense, the cinema of attractions does not designate a particular set of images, tricks, or effects, but rather something more like a “primal power” latent within cinema, and moreover one not confined to a given time period (387). Much as Singer emphasizes the neurological impacts cinema simulated in its appeals to the modern spectator, Gunning’s cinema of attractions highlights the way film addresses, and in so doing, actively constructs and shapes, its spectator.

Much as in Gunning’s definition of the cinema of attractions, Death Ray complicates a strict division between spectacle and narrative. Although the film contains a loose narrative arc, building from the early history of wireless communication up to a speculative future in which the death ray dominates the battlefield, the effect of Death Ray on the spectator comes from a sort of simulacral exhibition of scientific rigor and authority. Just as Gunning calls attention to how “[t]he Hollywood advertising policy of enumerating the features of a film, each emblazoned with the command, “See!” shows this primal power of the attraction running beneath the armature of narrative regulation” (387), the splicing of intertitles together with otherwise unrelated fragments of the Eiffel Tower and Grindell-Matthews getting into an airplane likewise evokes the power of the attraction in the service of its narrative. Diagrams and headlines taken from a few newspapers stand in for footage of Grindell-Matthews’ remote control submarine and a radio capable of communicating with airplanes. In this conspiracy of spectacle and narrative, Death Ray mobilizes the indexicality of film to produce the effect of evidence for inventions that do not exist. Here, the figure of the scientist is transformed into that of a showman, with allusions to the positivism of science providing the spectator with the inspiration and illusory sense of continuity necessary to stitch together otherwise disparate fragments into a cohesive whole.

Still from Gaston Quiribet’s The Death Ray (Pathé, 1924)

In a field such as early silent cinema, where so many of the films, personalities, and communities of the historical record are apparently missing, the revelation of a film claiming to possess an abundance of evidence for things that never existed to promote a man of no importance looking to defraud the British government is somewhat farcical. The irony of this situation is especially pronounced after reading Alyson Nadia Field’s introduction to the spring issue of Feminist Media Histories, “Sites of Speculative Encounter,” where she characterizes the early silent cinema studies as a “history of survivors:”

To an overwhelming extent, the field of cinema and media studies has been organized around extant material, with histories closely tethered to surviving evidence. Film history is a history of survivors, written at the expense of alternative voices and practices that risk being dismissed or marginalized if we can’t readily access them. When scholars aim at a broader and more inclusive film history, we often hit a wall. Instead of working with archival abundance we are faced with degrees of archival silence; what survives is often fragmentary at best and deliberately elided or effaced at worst. (Field 3)

For Field, the dependence of film historians on the surviving films from the silent era leads to the construction of historical narratives that at least implicitly exclude alternative perspectives and communities from the imagination of the history of early silent cinema and its canon. Instead, if the historian looks to unearth these forgotten memories, they must grapple with “archival silence” in the form of fragments, omissions, and the destruction of past films. Instances of fragmentation, elision, and obliteration represent obstacles to the historian’s effort to realize alternative narratives as cohesive wholes. The historical irony of the death ray and the survival of the Death Ray newsreel is in how it deliberately fragments an existing archive of stock footage, newspaper articles, and exhibitions to smuggle Grindell-Matthews into a canon predisposed to hero worship and the retrospective celebration of the isolated, misunderstood genius.

The persuasiveness of this fragmentation in Death Ray comes from the effort to reconstruct the spectator as the privileged witness of a scientific process. Again, Ernest Barwell’s 1943 biography of Grindell-Matthews offers some insight into this reimagination of the spectator. Having been trusted with access to the Grindell-Matthews lab at Harewood Place, Barwell recounts the initial death ray experiments:

Further experiments revealed that vermin which had been subjected to tests were killed instantly, and G.M. knew the possibilities of the ray he was seeking to harness. Each of us was pledged to secrecy, and the inventor took the precaution of ordering his apparatus from firms spread all over the country, thus hoping to keep any gossip from developing. But whispers of the things going on behind the walls of Harewood Place reached the ears of the news-gatherers of Fleet Street, who had got into the habit of associating the name of Grindell Matthews with anything which savoured of mystery or magic. (Barwell 91)

Here, the biographer offers his eyewitness testimony of the death ray’s ability to kill, but due to his participation in the conspiracy is unable to provide details about the construction of the device or the origin of its materials. The secrecy surrounding the death ray is justified by speculation as to its potential for destruction, on the one hand, and the presence of enemies waiting to co-opt it, on the other. To the initiated, the experiments are rigorous and methodical, but to those on the outside, they suppose, it can only be experienced as “mystery or magic.” What is especially interesting about the construction of the death ray witness is the way they remain, with respect to the construction of the device, just as much on the outside as the rest of the variously curious or dismissive public. That is, the witness does not actually possess any special knowledge of the death ray, how or whether it works, but merely an initiation into a particular narrative, one which reframes their ignorance as an informed and virtuous ignorance. 

  Were the death ray of Gaston Quiribet’s Death Ray newsreel confined to the realm of fiction, the effort to unmask the processes involved in persuading the spectator to suspend their disbelief would be a little pedantic. Rather, I argue that what makes Death Ray compelling is the way it illuminates the artifice of historical narratives and canonization. Throughout the newsreel, the primal power of the attraction Gunning associates with the spectacles of early silent cinema is co-opted in the name of positivism and the scientific process. The newsreel stitches together otherwise disparate fragments as evidence of causal relations between an inert device and combustible material. The sense of narrative cohesion in the film comes from the initiation of the spectator into the mystery of the device, an initiation that works not as a revelation of how it operates, but rather a strong desire for it to work. In so doing, the death ray reveals the circular process in which the persuasiveness of a particular historical narrative can invent a death ray, and the invention of a death ray can in turn help construct a particular historical narrative. Here, the death ray appears as both cause and effect of history, with its power over the spectator deriving as much from the evocation of a narrative as from the experience of a spectacle.

In the Hands of the Enemy

Contrary to the wishes of Grindell-Matthews, the death ray would leave Britain’s shores just a year later and arrive, not in Nazi Germany, but in the Soviet Union. When Soviet director and film theorist Lev Kuleshov’s silent science fiction film, The Death Ray (Луч смерти,1925) arrived on the scene, the film was considered ideologically suspect by Soviet film critics. In the realm of fiction, this cheap exploitation film, apparently cashing in on the sensationalism surrounding Grindell-Matthews’ death ray, represented an inexcusable departure from the aesthetic and thematic demands of Socialist Realism (Kovacs 38-9). Kuleshov’s own defense of The Death Ray reflects something of Grindell-Matthews’ own aloofness towards the ethical implications of his death ray, arguing that he had merely been experimenting with the possibility of reproducing the production quality and formal characteristics of American films on a much smaller budget: a pursuit which, he admits, may have distracted him from a more careful consideration of the thematic content of the film (Kovacs 39). For both the inventor and the director, there is an effort to position the death ray outside of history as the logical outcome of formal experimentation. However, while Grindell-Matthews’ death ray is caught up in a cycle of incessant invention and production in its own historical context, the tension between narrative and spectacle in Kuleshov’s Death Ray represents an instance of historical rupture, with the orientation of the collective towards scientific discovery offering the possibility of alternative organizations of the social order.

Lev Kuleshov, The Death Ray (Луч смерти, Goskino, 1925)

Notably, both the first and last reels of Kuleshov’s Death Ray are lost, which invites speculation into the literal framing of the film. The remainder of the film begins with the camera panning across a village littered with the bodies of massacred workers following a failed protest, and then a somewhat non sequitur transition to the actors’ credits. Afterwards, we see the manager of Edith, a world-famous gunslinger played by Soviet actress, Aleksandra Khokhlova, propose to her. She puts off his proposal until a later date, a plotline that is never resolved due perhaps to the loss of the final reel of the film. The rest of the surviving film involves the invention of a death ray and the conflict between two parties, the fascists of some unidentified Western country and the workers of the Soviet Union, who jostle for control over the invention. Much of the action comes in the form of impromptu slapstick spectacles, such as when a woman chases away a gang of fascist spies by throwing a gratuitous number of plates at them (9:00), or in scenes of these same fascists slapping each other around in mutual recognition of their incompetence (17:00). The surviving film ends as an army of workers races to confront a squadron of fascist bombers with their newly acquired death ray, with no apparent resolution.

In terms of both its material and formal composition, the fragmentary Death Ray resists narrative integration into a cohesive whole. Writing on the relationship between spectacle and narrative in “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle, and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” Donald Crafton offers the following definition of the revolutionary potential of gags in the slapstick genre:

One way to look at narrative is to see it as a system for providing the spectator with sufficient knowledge to make causal links between represented events. According to this view, the gag’s status as an irreconcilable difference becomes clear. Its purpose is to misdirect the viewer’s attention, to obfuscate the linearity of cause-effect relations. Gags provide the opposite of epistemological comprehension by the spectator. They are atemporal bursts of violence and/or hedonism that are as ephemeral and as gratifying as the sight of someone’s pie-smitten face. (Crafton 363)

According to Crafton, the power of the gag lies in its ability to not only destabilize narrative frameworks, but also to frustrate the spectator’s ability to apprehend the narrative in a film as such. The spectacle of a gag, as much within the film as at the expense of its narrative, offers the spectator a sense of pleasure in the experience of the illegibility of the film. In this way, the narrative fragmentation within a slapstick film works to disrupt the meaning-making process of narrativization, and instead reorients the spectator towards the radical energy animating the growth of digressions at the expense of ostensibly causal relations.

Throughout Kuleshov’s Death Ray, this tension between spectacle and narrative plays out in the slapstick treatment of the invention itself. Just like Grindell-Matthews’ Death Ray, Kuleshov’s film contains a scene exhibiting the power of the death ray in a laboratory setting. The editing in the fictional exhibition of the death ray almost perfectly mirrors that of the Grindell-Matthews experiment, with first a group of scientists crowded around a glowing apparatus, followed by a sudden cut to a beaker exploding (18:00). Not long after this demonstration, fascist goons break into the lab and attempt to steal the device. After one of the fascists trips over an electrical cord and starts a fire in the lab, a protracted fight scene ensues, with the goons running around the house, accidentally shooting each other, and engaging in a prolonged shootout with the scientists in the dark, after which they eventually manage to steal the device (23:30-26:00). This at times bumbling, at times sinister contest for control of the device complicates the representation of the death ray in the Grindell-Matthews experiments. Where the spectacle of these experiments becomes bound up with a narrative of the ambiguous celebration of the aloof scientist-hero as a historical agent and the impotence of the modern spectator, spectacle in Kuleshov’s Death Ray disrupts the device’s narrative function, distracting from its allegorical potential or sensationalized aestheticization. Just as the death ray in this scene remains shrouded in darkness, illuminated only by the momentary muzzle flashes from the gunshots, the rest of Kuleshov’s Death Ray represents the device as a mere prop in a protracted and often farcical contest between competing historical agents. The spectacle of their competition, replete with elements from the slapstick genre, emphasizes the ambivalence of the formation and contestation of historical discourses, the violence and comedy of this process, at the expense of a celebration of a single, cohesive narrative construct.

The material fragmentation of the film further draws attention to the process of narrativization itself at the expense of cohesion. At the climatic moment of the film, a team of workers speeds along a country road, rushing to intercept a squadron of fascist bombers, with the death ray balanced precariously on the roof of their car and a mob of villagers trailing in their wake. One of the protagonists, Engineer Podobed, shouts above the crowd, “Comrades, victory is in our hands! Let’s restore order!” and is immediately set upon by the jostling mob, whereupon the film cuts off, the final reel lost to time (1:15:35-1:15:55). This new ending illuminates the central irony of the death ray throughout the film: namely that as much as it is taken to be an instrument for determining the course of history, once it is firmly in the hands of one party, it ceases to have any power. As soon as the death ray is poised to make some decisive intervention in the plot, apart from breaking hapless beakers in a laboratory, the film comes to an end without resolution. In this sense, the fragmentation of Kuleshov’s Death Ray proves to be itself a dramatic spectacle at the expense of narrative cohesion, where even the promise of narrative resolution offered by the device of the death ray results in the material destruction of the film itself.

Conclusion

The death ray has a long and varied history within the science fiction imagination. It is certainly beyond the scope of this brief article to fully capture the significance of death ray imagery across the genre e. What I hope to have demonstrated with this article are some of the ways in which the death ray illuminates the relationship between filmmaking, archival loss, and the historiography of early silent cinema. In the case of Grindell-Matthews, the conjecture surrounding the invention of a death ray moves from the realm of speculative fiction to historical necessity as the anomalous byproduct of modern hero worship and canonization. For Kuleshov and what remains of his film, the death ray not only destabilizes historical narratives but, once activated, seems to destroy the very materiality of the text that served as fodder for these competing ideological constructions of reality. Historically speaking, the death ray is almost by design the object of conspiracy and espionage with an apocalyptic potential that we ignore at our peril and to our detriment. Who knows what discursive powers the death ray might unleash for the maniacal historian or film scholar? I say, we need only look to the past for a taste of how the world might yet be remade.  

Bibliography

Barwell, Ernest Haydn Garnet. The Death Ray Man. Hutchinson & co., ltd., 1943.

Berlant, Lauren, Sianne Ngai, Alenka Zupančič. “Sustaining Alternative Worlds: On 

Comedy and the Politics of Representation.” Texte zur Kunst, no. 121, 2021, pp. 

64-85.

Crafton, Donald. “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy.” 

The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp. 355-365.

Field, Alyson Nadia. “Sites of Speculative Encounter.” Feminist Media Histories 8.2, 

2022, 1-13.

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-

Garde.” The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam UP, 2006, 381-388.

Kovacs, Steven. “Kuleshov’s Aesthetics.” Film Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3, 1976, pp. 34–

40, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.1976.29.3.04a00070. 

Singer, Ben. “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism.” 

Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, University of California Press, 2020, pp. 72–100, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520916425-005.

The Death Ray (Луч смерти). Directed by Lev Kuleshov, Goskino, 1925. 

The Death Ray. Directed by Gaston Quiribet, Pathé, 1924. https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=qbNgvHfK4wI.

Vago, Mike. “This inventor’s death ray was totally real, but no one was allowed to see 

it.” AV Club, 25 August 2019, https://www.avclub.com/this-inventor-s-death-ray-was-

totally-real-but-no-one-1837447697. Accessed 19 January 2026.

“What Use to Write Books, Poems?” Time, 25 Aug.1924, https://web.archive.org/web/

20101121074507/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,846539,00.html. Accessed 19 January 2026.

~

Alex Harasymiw is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on representations of climate collapse and apocalyptic discourse in Chinese science fiction films and literature. He is also interested in speculative historiography and Soviet science fiction. 

Vector 298 (Nov 2023) is now unsealed: bit.ly/Vector298

As the guest editors Stewart Baker and Phoenix Alexander write in their editorial:

The articles in this issue of Vector work in both directions, teasing out the ways archives and libraries can be informed by SFF works while also exploring the assumptions SFF works make about libraries and archives.

In “The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data,” Nichole Nomura and Quinn Dombrowski ask the question of whether librarians exist in the future of Star Trek—certainly a topic of relevance to today’s “AI search” upheavals. In “The Queen a Librarian Dreams of,” Kathryn Yelinek examines the connection between information literacy and restorative justice in the fantasy world of Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue. 

Next up are a pair of trips through fictional archives. In “Archives, Information, and Fandom,” Tom Ue and James Munday consider how the Halliday Journals from the world of Ready Player One present the impacts of (mis)direction and information surplus on researchers. Grace Catherine Greiner’s “Finding Nothing Can be Finding Something” explores the capital-A Archives in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, with its interest in medievalisms, access, and “simultaneous bookishness and orality.”

Hopping back to libraries, Guangzhou Lyu’s “Library of Disassembled Past” takes a look at a floating library in China Mieville’s The Scar, exploring how libraries can serve as places of “deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.” In “Magic and Critical Librarianship,” Ellie Campbell interrogates the ways libraries and other memory institutions can institutionalise racism, colonialism, misogyny, and homophobia, as shown in three fantasy short stories. And the last article in the issue, Monica Evans’s “You Are the Library,”considers how digital games can engage players in “library-like mechanics,” drawing on the long history of the value of information and exploration in game design.

Whether you’re a librarian thinking about installing a science fiction reading room, a fantasy novelist looking for worldbuilding nuggets for your next doorstopper about nautical librarians, a SFF academic who’s intrigued by archives concepts in games, or just someone who’s stopped by the information desk of this editorial to ask where the metaphorical toilets are, we hope you’ll enjoy your time with the insightful explorations of libraries, archives, and the future of information that make up this issue of Vector!

Cover by Kalina Winska. Original artwork title: The ethereal and eternal contest, with no winners and no losers, occasional bursts of anger, frustration, and perhaps…shame; waves of humility are often too weak to reach the edge of the world. (graphite, acrylic paint, gouache, and ink on wood panel, 36 x 48 inches, 2020).

Vector 298 (Nov 2023) is now unsealed: bit.ly/Vector298

As the guest editors Stewart Baker and Phoenix Alexander write in their editorial:

The articles in this issue of Vector work in both directions, teasing out the ways archives and libraries can be informed by SFF works while also exploring the assumptions SFF works make about libraries and archives.

In “The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data,” Nichole Nomura and Quinn Dombrowski ask the question of whether librarians exist in the future of Star Trek—certainly a topic of relevance to today’s “AI search” upheavals. In “The Queen a Librarian Dreams of,” Kathryn Yelinek examines the connection between information literacy and restorative justice in the fantasy world of Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue. 

Next up are a pair of trips through fictional archives. In “Archives, Information, and Fandom,” Tom Ue and James Munday consider how the Halliday Journals from the world of Ready Player One present the impacts of (mis)direction and information surplus on researchers. Grace Catherine Greiner’s “Finding Nothing Can be Finding Something” explores the capital-A Archives in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, with its interest in medievalisms, access, and “simultaneous bookishness and orality.”

Hopping back to libraries, Guangzhou Lyu’s “Library of Disassembled Past” takes a look at a floating library in China Mieville’s The Scar, exploring how libraries can serve as places of “deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.” In “Magic and Critical Librarianship,” Ellie Campbell interrogates the ways libraries and other memory institutions can institutionalise racism, colonialism, misogyny, and homophobia, as shown in three fantasy short stories. And the last article in the issue, Monica Evans’s “You Are the Library,”considers how digital games can engage players in “library-like mechanics,” drawing on the long history of the value of information and exploration in game design.

Whether you’re a librarian thinking about installing a science fiction reading room, a fantasy novelist looking for worldbuilding nuggets for your next doorstopper about nautical librarians, a SFF academic who’s intrigued by archives concepts in games, or just someone who’s stopped by the information desk of this editorial to ask where the metaphorical toilets are, we hope you’ll enjoy your time with the insightful explorations of libraries, archives, and the future of information that make up this issue of Vector!

Cover by Kalina Winska. Original artwork title: The ethereal and eternal contest, with no winners and no losers, occasional bursts of anger, frustration, and perhaps…shame; waves of humility are often too weak to reach the edge of the world. (graphite, acrylic paint, gouache, and ink on wood panel, 36 x 48 inches, 2020).

By Chisom Umeh

My first direct encounter with the Sauútiverse was in 2022 when, at the Ake Books and Arts Festival in Lagos, panellists Wole Talabi, Dare Segun Falowo, Stephen Embleton, and Cheryl Ntumy, members of the Sauúti Collective, introduced the shared world project. I sat there in the audience, watching as the lights dimmed and a video of the Sauúti creation myth was played to us. Over the animated visuals was an echoing voice apparently merged from the real voices of the Sauúti founding members. This voice, supposedly that of the Mother, the chief deity of Sauúti lore, told the story of the universe’s birth from a single Word.

The two-minute clip entranced me, and, long after the lights had been turned back on and the applause had faded, I was still transfixed by its power. There, on stage, the panellists introduced several aspects of this vast, sprawling secondary world featuring a two-star system, five planets, and three moons. Since then, the Sauútiverse has exploded, birthing two anthologies, three novellas, numerous short stories and poems, a novel, and additional works in the pipeline, all set in and exploring the diverse cultures, science, belief systems, and history of this intricately built shared world inspired by Africa. It has also been picked up and nominated for various awards, including the Nommos and the BSFA.

In this latest anthology, we’re shown a dark and terrible aspect of this world, not as a mere scare tactic, but to remind us that a universe this wide and sprawling wouldn’t be remotely realistic if it didn’t possess a horrific underbelly. Stories here do not shy away from the unsettling, the bone-chilling, the hair-raising, and the blood-curdling. The writers are super inventive in the ways they describe horror and fright. Across 18 short stories and poems, they boldly unleash all manner of terror. The writers commit strongly to Sauúti lore, which includes new words and Sauúti-specific terminologies. This, of course, can be a bit difficult for a new reader to grasp. But if they endure and get beyond that, they’d see that it adds to the overall uniqueness and beauty of the Sauútiverse. 

The anthology opens with a poem from Linda D. Addison that has haunting implications for the planet Órino-Rin, then follows immediately with an absolute screamer of a story by T.L. Huchu. I know this anthology explores the darkness and terror that lurks in the crevices of the Sauútiverse, and I was indeed horrified by many elements in The Temple of the Weeping Drum, yet, the more this opening story unfolded, the more I found myself yielding to another emotion: awe. Huchu’s writing has a certain vividness to it that lends realism to whatever world he creates. The story, which is about a fearsome cult of men that steals and sacrifices girls to gain power, speaks to the horrors of subjugation and the evil that can emerge when people who hold the most twisted beliefs about the world are left to their own devices for long enough.

In “The Rawness of You,” Eugen Bacon tells a dreamlike tale that almost seduces you with its lyricism, only for it (like the unnamed protagonist in the story discovers) to reveal that its true shape is jagged and hungry and ready to swallow you whole.

Cheryl Ntumy’s Where Daylight Meets Darkness, is calm and speaks to a different kind of unsettlement, one that emerges when you realize all the things you’ve ever believed and trusted are lies.  It asks how you can carry on amidst the fear that plagues you when you know you’re living with a fundamental falsehood that grants you undue privilege. Would you tell the truth and doom your people? Or keep the lie and doom your soul?

In the poem The Exorcism of Mofoyefomo, Ishola Abdulwasiu Ayodele thrusts us into a frightening ritual that attempts to free a woman of her demons, and it reads like those chilling stories we were told as children that still have a grip on us even as adults.

What might be perhaps the most terrifying of the stories for me is ironically one of the shortest. Wole Talabi’s flash fiction piece The Final Flight of the Ungu-ugnu has the ingredients of a proper space horror/mystery, and it held my attention from start to finish. It’s a report of a spaceship, Ungu-ugnu, that unknowingly ventures into a Bermuda Triangle-like area of space and has gone missing. No one is sure of what happened to it, but the descriptions of the final moments of its crew are bone-chilling. It leaves you with that adventurous taste of a mystery left unsolved, but, being well acquainted with Sauútiverse lore, I think I have an idea what happened. But I’ll be keeping that to myself.

Kofi Nyameye’s magisterial piece, The Unspoken, is reality-shattering and my favorite of all the stories. As in Wole’s story, something mysterious has happened and a doctor has been called in to help untangle the knot, but what they find in this dark tale is something that stretches back to the very creation of the universe itself, setting the stage for an ageless, all-encompassing horror to emerge. This is one of those stories that echoes in your mind long after you’ve read the final word. Mother have mercy!

Dare Segun Falowo doesn’t drop the ball, suffusing the air Kofi ignited with a dreadful poem, The Whirring of Anu’tu, about a boy who kills his sibling and the frightening consequences that ensue.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda swoops in just after with a complex and moving story of grief and the horrors of trauma when it becomes a tangible thing wrapping itself around your neck. Mma’riama in The Wound Asks for Air experiences memories of people who have lived before her as if they are her own. Their pains and grief torment her as though she caused them, and she must learn to learn from this and live with it. A summary can hardly do this story any sort of justice. Its many layers need to be experienced to be grasped, much like the foreign memories of Mma’rioma herself.

In Moustapha Mbacké Diop’s story, Naguu-Àll, Echoed in Moonlight, the danger is two-pronged. The main character, a girl with the ability to see into the spirit world, faces imminent harm both from the ancestral beast she’s searching for and the ruthless hunters also seeking it out. While she wants to find it in hopes of learning deep secrets about herself from it, the hunters have more sinister motivations, and one must give way to the other.

Stephen Embleton’s Separation is nightmarish. The monster that lurks within the story is imposing yet very silent, slowly eating at the psyche of the protagonist, who’s trapped mid-air in a cave on one of the harshest planets in the Sauútiverse, Órino-Rin. There’s also an undercurrent of grief that adds to the dire situation the main character is in, as he longs to be rejoined once again with his wife and child who may or may no longer be alive.

As you may have already noticed, I had a good time journeying through this anthology (and glad to know that there will be book two). Each story was self-contained and packed with enough intrigue to carry me onto the next. The writers all brought their ‘A’ game, approaching the subject matter with varying and unique perspectives, some of which speak to the present, real-life issues we face in our world. Demagogues with twisted beliefs about how the world works have actually taken over power and are dictating who should live or die, so we might as well be living in The Temple of the Weeping Drum. The horrors don’t just live on the page, but hit pretty close to home because, like in Cheryl’s story, we have to keep choosing where our loyalties lie, either to the truth or the lies our countries have told the world to get to where it is today. 

BIO: Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

By Chisom Umeh

My first direct encounter with the Sauútiverse was in 2022 when, at the Ake Books and Arts Festival in Lagos, panellists Wole Talabi, Dare Segun Falowo, Stephen Embleton, and Cheryl Ntumy, members of the Sauúti Collective, introduced the shared world project. I sat there in the audience, watching as the lights dimmed and a video of the Sauúti creation myth was played to us. Over the animated visuals was an echoing voice apparently merged from the real voices of the Sauúti founding members. This voice, supposedly that of the Mother, the chief deity of Sauúti lore, told the story of the universe’s birth from a single Word.

The two-minute clip entranced me, and, long after the lights had been turned back on and the applause had faded, I was still transfixed by its power. There, on stage, the panellists introduced several aspects of this vast, sprawling secondary world featuring a two-star system, five planets, and three moons. Since then, the Sauútiverse has exploded, birthing two anthologies, three novellas, numerous short stories and poems, a novel, and additional works in the pipeline, all set in and exploring the diverse cultures, science, belief systems, and history of this intricately built shared world inspired by Africa. It has also been picked up and nominated for various awards, including the Nommos and the BSFA.

In this latest anthology, we’re shown a dark and terrible aspect of this world, not as a mere scare tactic, but to remind us that a universe this wide and sprawling wouldn’t be remotely realistic if it didn’t possess a horrific underbelly. Stories here do not shy away from the unsettling, the bone-chilling, the hair-raising, and the blood-curdling. The writers are super inventive in the ways they describe horror and fright. Across 18 short stories and poems, they boldly unleash all manner of terror. The writers commit strongly to Sauúti lore, which includes new words and Sauúti-specific terminologies. This, of course, can be a bit difficult for a new reader to grasp. But if they endure and get beyond that, they’d see that it adds to the overall uniqueness and beauty of the Sauútiverse. 

The anthology opens with a poem from Linda D. Addison that has haunting implications for the planet Órino-Rin, then follows immediately with an absolute screamer of a story by T.L. Huchu. I know this anthology explores the darkness and terror that lurks in the crevices of the Sauútiverse, and I was indeed horrified by many elements in The Temple of the Weeping Drum, yet, the more this opening story unfolded, the more I found myself yielding to another emotion: awe. Huchu’s writing has a certain vividness to it that lends realism to whatever world he creates. The story, which is about a fearsome cult of men that steals and sacrifices girls to gain power, speaks to the horrors of subjugation and the evil that can emerge when people who hold the most twisted beliefs about the world are left to their own devices for long enough.

In “The Rawness of You,” Eugen Bacon tells a dreamlike tale that almost seduces you with its lyricism, only for it (like the unnamed protagonist in the story discovers) to reveal that its true shape is jagged and hungry and ready to swallow you whole.

Cheryl Ntumy’s Where Daylight Meets Darkness, is calm and speaks to a different kind of unsettlement, one that emerges when you realize all the things you’ve ever believed and trusted are lies.  It asks how you can carry on amidst the fear that plagues you when you know you’re living with a fundamental falsehood that grants you undue privilege. Would you tell the truth and doom your people? Or keep the lie and doom your soul?

In the poem The Exorcism of Mofoyefomo, Ishola Abdulwasiu Ayodele thrusts us into a frightening ritual that attempts to free a woman of her demons, and it reads like those chilling stories we were told as children that still have a grip on us even as adults.

What might be perhaps the most terrifying of the stories for me is ironically one of the shortest. Wole Talabi’s flash fiction piece The Final Flight of the Ungu-ugnu has the ingredients of a proper space horror/mystery, and it held my attention from start to finish. It’s a report of a spaceship, Ungu-ugnu, that unknowingly ventures into a Bermuda Triangle-like area of space and has gone missing. No one is sure of what happened to it, but the descriptions of the final moments of its crew are bone-chilling. It leaves you with that adventurous taste of a mystery left unsolved, but, being well acquainted with Sauútiverse lore, I think I have an idea what happened. But I’ll be keeping that to myself.

Kofi Nyameye’s magisterial piece, The Unspoken, is reality-shattering and my favorite of all the stories. As in Wole’s story, something mysterious has happened and a doctor has been called in to help untangle the knot, but what they find in this dark tale is something that stretches back to the very creation of the universe itself, setting the stage for an ageless, all-encompassing horror to emerge. This is one of those stories that echoes in your mind long after you’ve read the final word. Mother have mercy!

Dare Segun Falowo doesn’t drop the ball, suffusing the air Kofi ignited with a dreadful poem, The Whirring of Anu’tu, about a boy who kills his sibling and the frightening consequences that ensue.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda swoops in just after with a complex and moving story of grief and the horrors of trauma when it becomes a tangible thing wrapping itself around your neck. Mma’riama in The Wound Asks for Air experiences memories of people who have lived before her as if they are her own. Their pains and grief torment her as though she caused them, and she must learn to learn from this and live with it. A summary can hardly do this story any sort of justice. Its many layers need to be experienced to be grasped, much like the foreign memories of Mma’rioma herself.

In Moustapha Mbacké Diop’s story, Naguu-Àll, Echoed in Moonlight, the danger is two-pronged. The main character, a girl with the ability to see into the spirit world, faces imminent harm both from the ancestral beast she’s searching for and the ruthless hunters also seeking it out. While she wants to find it in hopes of learning deep secrets about herself from it, the hunters have more sinister motivations, and one must give way to the other.

Stephen Embleton’s Separation is nightmarish. The monster that lurks within the story is imposing yet very silent, slowly eating at the psyche of the protagonist, who’s trapped mid-air in a cave on one of the harshest planets in the Sauútiverse, Órino-Rin. There’s also an undercurrent of grief that adds to the dire situation the main character is in, as he longs to be rejoined once again with his wife and child who may or may no longer be alive.

As you may have already noticed, I had a good time journeying through this anthology (and glad to know that there will be book two). Each story was self-contained and packed with enough intrigue to carry me onto the next. The writers all brought their ‘A’ game, approaching the subject matter with varying and unique perspectives, some of which speak to the present, real-life issues we face in our world. Demagogues with twisted beliefs about how the world works have actually taken over power and are dictating who should live or die, so we might as well be living in The Temple of the Weeping Drum. The horrors don’t just live on the page, but hit pretty close to home because, like in Cheryl’s story, we have to keep choosing where our loyalties lie, either to the truth or the lies our countries have told the world to get to where it is today. 

BIO: Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.