Vector [BSFA] Blog

By Cyril Simsa

Eva Hauserová promoting her non-fiction title Na koštěti se dá i lítat [Broomsticks can also be used for flying], 1995

Of the many contemporary subgenres of sf that can claim they originated as a reaction to the cyberpunk revolution of the 1980s, one of the oldest is certainly “biopunk”, especially if one counts the mini-genre of “ribofunk” – shouted into existence by the American writer Paul Di Filippo (1954-) in 1990, and just as quickly extinguished – as a legitimate precursor (Di Filippo 1990).  Probably only “steampunk”, coined by K.W. Jeter (1950-) in 1987, is older (Nicholls and Langford 2025). 

“Biopunk”, as it is used today, refers to a subgenre of sf that adopts many of the stylistic and narrative tropes of cyberpunk – a focus on stories built around an ensemble cast of petty criminals, (gene) hackers and chancers, urban subcultures, and a “revolt into style” (if the reader will pardon the throwback to the cultural criticism of an earlier era) (Melly 1970) – while sourcing its McGuffins from biotechnology, rather than cybernetics. In this contemporary sense, biopunk has its origins in the American genre writing of the 1990s, with the first documented use (from two different, and almost certainly unconnected sources) in 1992, and the subsequent attempt to identify precursors in earlier genre history.1

Di Filippo takes this as far back as H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); of more recent antecedents, Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) are frequently cited (Di Filippo 1990; Schmeink 2014b, 32).  From these American genre roots, biopunk has spread around the world and into other media, film and TV in particular. The hit TV show, Orphan Black (2013-2017), with its saga of a shadowy organisation trying to direct the future of human evolution through gene hacking and the complications that arise when some of its human clones escape, would be a good example. All of which makes a neat teleological narrative of exactly the kind that, in theory, every self-respecting punk of whatever persuasion is supposed to abhor; and none of which quite holds together when examined in a broader framework. 

Because there is a catch – of course, there is – and in a European context, this neat timeline is disrupted by the Czech writer Eva Hauserová (1954-2023), also known as Eva Hauser, who in 1988 independently came up with a literary intervention she called “biopunk,” and her coinage pre-dates the American one. This sits uncomfortably with the official chronicle, making her something later critics have had to explain away, though there are also those who have simply ignored her. (For the former, see Schmeink, who will be discussed below; for the latter, a simple Google search will reveal any number of biopunk, or biopunk-adjacent websites that have no idea of Eva’s existence.)  

Eva was living behind the Iron Curtain at the time she came up with the notion of “biopunk,” with limited access to American sources and no contact with her American contemporaries. However, like the American writers who later dreamt up their version of biopunk in the 1990s, her ideas were formed in reaction to cyberpunk – or rather, her vague impression of what she imagined cyberpunk to be, in the absence of any direct experience of the foundational texts – but with a change of focus to genetics and biology, rather than information technology and computer programming. (No doubt her educational background as a microbiologist played a role in that.)   There are, then, some parallels between Eva’s initial impulse towards biopunk and that of the writers who later adopted the same term in America, though there are also significant differences. 

In the 1980s, there was a common consensus in Czechoslovak fandom that cyberpunk was not really a viable literary genre in the conditions of latter-day Communism. As the Czech writer Ondřej Neff (1945-) argued in a classic lecture at Parcon, the Czechoslovak national sf convention, in June 1987: “It’s difficult to develop cyberpunk in a country, where one can’t even find a working telephone box.” (Neff 1987, cited from Hauser 1993, 15) 

In devising her concept of biopunk, Eva took this insight one step further, arguing that the differences between East and West in relation to cyberpunk were not just a question of technology, but also of social conditioning: 

The heroes of cyberpunk, in spite of all the novelty and colour of cyberpunk narrative, are at heart the same, familiar American boys – optimistic, active, greedy for money and longing for success. The heroes of biopunk, similarly to the people that I saw each day in my surroundings, couldn’t be nearly so straightforward.

When the disintegration and paralysis of society reaches a certain level, people lose their motivation to do anything at all. This is what we experienced in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s: people became extremely sceptical and passive as they realised, time and time again, that no matter what they tried, they couldn’t bring about any results, that no revolt, no expression of anger was capable of changing anything… (Hauser 1993, 15) 

Worse, in Eva’s view, people living under totalitarianism become so accustomed to the limitations imposed on them that they come to consider them normal: 

For example, the heroes of my stories often consider their situation to be marvellous and pleasant, even though by any rational analysis it is in actual fact frightening or utterly repulsive: this reflects totalitarian society with its grotesque voluntarism, its newspapers which continually declared that we, the people, were extremely happy, that we were living in a highly developed society, and that if we still had a few problems, they weren’t really so serious… (Hauser 1993, 15)2

Biopunk, then, was a literary device that allowed Eva to express the inner deformations of life under totalitarianism by externalising them into speculative biological traits. Her societies become the playground of “mutants, genetic diseases and deformations, chimaeric organisms,” (Hauser 1993, 15), and her protagonists are unable to imagine another state of being. Under the pressures of totalitarianism, her protagonists literally become monsters. 

Eva Hauserová: Self-portrait (2020)

American biopunk clearly comes from a very different impulse: the exploration of how biotechnology is going to impact society in the framework of a more-or-less corporate future. Its extrapolated biotechnology is based on real science, not metaphor.3 Its social assumptions are those of capitalism, not the sunset years of Soviet-style Communism and the collapsing economy of a failed experiment in centrally-planned socialism, based on nineteenth-century notions of industrial development and twentieth-century surveillance technology.

There is no question that the “biopunk” of contemporary film and fiction is not the same animal as Eva’s, and that her coinage of an earlier Central-East European homonym is an inconvenience to the people who take the contemporary, “Western” variant seriously. It therefore makes perfect sense that they should seek to sideline Eva’s rogue intervention, though the ways they do so are sometimes quite problematic. 

The most detailed attempt I have found to date is that of Lars Schmeink (1975-) in his article “Biopunk 101,” which was published in two slightly different versions in 2014 (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b).  Schmeink is today a respected independent scholar, based in Hamburg, with an impressive CV and a long publications list, but in 2014 he was just finishing his Ph.D. at Humboldt University Berlin , which two years later yielded his monograph Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, published by Liverpool University Press (Schmeink 2016).  The monograph itself makes no mention of Eva or her Czech biopunk – justifiably so, as it has no relevance to his argument – but one assumes that one of the reasons for his earlier essay was to tidy away this awkward forerunner, so as to avoid cluttering up his later book. 

As far as I have been able to reconstruct the publishing history, the two versions of “Biopunk 101” appeared within a couple of months of each other. The first, longer version appeared on Schmeink’s personal blog in May 2014 and is now accessible only on the Wayback Machine; the second, more formal (and shorter) variant appeared as an essay in SFRA Review in Summer 2014 (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b).  The discussion of Eva’s work in both versions is based on a mini-feature about biopunk, which appeared in the BSFA’s critical journal Vector in 1993, and which was curated by the present author. 

This comprised of three items: 

1. A slightly edited and polished version of Eva’s English-language essay, “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes”, first published under a slightly variant title in her personal fanzine, Wild Sharkaah, in 1990 (Hauser 1990; Hauser 1993). 

2. An English translation of “A Few Notes About Biopunk”, by Miroslav Fišer (1965-), first published in Czech in 1991, to illustrate how Eva’s biopunk had been received in Czech critical circles (Fišer 1993). 

3. An introduction by myself to set the context (Simsa 1993).  

Given the relatively late date of these publications (1991 for the first Czech appearance of Fišer, 1993 for Vector), both Fišer and I make the point that biopunk – which Eva herself declared to be a response to the experience of living under totalitarianism (see above) – was no longer a going concern by the time Vector appeared, because the fall of Communism had done away with the conditions that gave rise to it. This in turn leads Schmeink, whose account of Eva’s biopunk seems mostly intended to demonstrate its discontinuity from his own research, to base his discussion almost entirely on Fišer’s essay. We thus have the paradoxical situation, where Schmeink talks about biopunk as if it was some kind of impersonal movement from Eastern Europe, with Fišer as its spokesman, rather than the personal project of one individual (Eva Hauserová), supported by a couple of her acolytes (Simsa, Fišer), who essentially contributed nothing, except as a kind of all-singing, all-dancing team of bespoke fanboy cheer leaders. 

Eva is cited by Schmeink only in support of Fišer’s arguments: “Eva Hauser, another writer of Czech biopunk, in a manifest[o] from 1990 […]  translated into English in Vector, underlines some of Fišer’s statements and adds to the definition” (Schmeink 2014a, a passage that is found only in the web version of the article; it has been deleted from the abridged version published as Schmeink 2014b).  In the longer version of the essay on his blog, Schmeink does at least quote a few words from Eva herself, but in the shorter (and more official) version in SFRA Review, he quotes only Fišer and myself. Eva is named, but not allowed to speak, and one can only conclude that Schmeink has completely misunderstood the distribution of roles between Eva, Fišer and the present author; and in particular, the fact that biopunk was Eva’s invention, not ours. 

The original fanzine publication of “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement Specific for Post-Totalitarian Regimes”.  Wild Sharkaaah, No.2, December 1990. 

In fairness to Schmeink, Eva’s Wild Sharkaah was not available online at the time he was writing (it was not posted on efanzines.com till 2018), and paper copies would have been hard to find in 2014. It is therefore likely he had had no opportunity to verify the provenance of Eva’s article for himself, which might have helped clarify the pivotal nature of Eva’s contribution. The handwritten heading, the hand-drawn illustrations, and the way the article is integrated into the free-flowing text of Eva’s personal fanzine can leave little doubt about how individual this project was for her. Certainly, anyone who has read the original fanzine version of “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes” would find it hard to claim that “it remains unclear who originally coined the term,” as Schmeink does in both versions of his text (Schmeink 2014a; Schmeink 2014b, 33).  That being said, I did include details of the article’s earlier publication in the bibliographic notes in Vector and a simple comparison of Eva’s author bio to Fišer’s should have been enough to show which of the two was the more significant writer. (By the time the Vector feature appeared, Eva had professionally published one novel and a short story collection, had been working as a professional editor for three years and her bio listed multiple publication credits. Fišer had gafiated. This is stated explicitly. Simsa 1993, 18.)  One, therefore, cannot help wondering whether gender bias may also have played a role. 

Another factor may have been how much time had elapsed since Eva first published her biopunk manifesto. In the early 1990s, immediately after the fall of Communism, the world was swept by a wave of interest in the post-Communist societies that had newly reopened to direct contacts with “the West,” and this was no less true of sf and sf fandom than it was of the rest of society. Eva was a known quantity in English-speaking fandom in the 1990s: she had worked as a professional editor at Ikárie magazine in Prague, which was newly publishing so many British and American writers, and had contributed stories and articles to a range of English-language publications, including a previous issue of Vector (Hauser 1992b). (Other English-language genre publications in which she appeared around this time included Matrix, BBR, Shards of Babel and Science-Fiction Studies: see Hauser 1991a, Hauser 1992a, Hauser 1992d, and Hauser 1994.)  She was also publishing her own English-language fanzine; attending multiple international conventions, including the Chicago Worldcon in 1991, and Syncon 92 in Australia as the official European GUFF delegate, the first fan from post-Communist Central Europe to be selected for one of the major international fan funds (convention reports available in Hauser 1991b for Chicago and Hauser 1992c for Australia); and she had become one of the regular ports of call for Western writers visiting Prague, including Bruce Sterling, who wrote about her in a travelogue for Wired (Sterling 1995, 155-156 plus photo on 103). 

In other words, at the time the Vector feature was published, anyone with at least a passing interest in European sf would have had an idea of who Eva was, and the editors did not see any need to emphasise this; but twenty years later, when Schmeink came to write his piece, this was evidently no longer the case and his discussion misses the context. 

In his focus on contemporary forms of biopunk, Schmeink does his best to locate Eva’s Central-East European biopunk in the past, to contain it in a bubble of late-totalitarian DIY punk subculture that has long ceased to be of anything but historical interest. In essence, he tries to present it as something like a dead language, leaving her mutants and chimaeric organisms to wander the margins of the post-Communist genre landscape, like hopeful monsters – another species of the weird zombies of Communism that are still endemic to the culture over here… 

The problem with all this is that contemporary genre scholarship is not the only possible frame of reference for studying Eva’s oeuvre, and if one takes a step back to look at her work in the framework of Gender Studies or Slavic Studies, she is still considered an appropriate topic of research. Indeed, there has been a marked upswing of interest in her work in recent years. University theses have been written about her sf of the 1980s and her involvement in fandom (Praženková 2007; Czechaczek 2015); essays have been published about the overlap between her science fiction and her involvement in the Czech women’s movement of the 1990s (Blažková 2025); at least one conference paper has been devoted specifically to her version of biopunk (Czechaczek 2018); and the Polish Scholar Joanna Czaplińska has drawn heavily on Eva’s stories in her recent study of gender aspects of Czech science fiction (Czaplińska 2022).  The donation of Eva’s literary archive to the Czech Literature Museum (Muzeum literatury–Památník národního písemnictví), after her untimely death in 2023, has also opened up new opportunities for study, as detailed by her son in an upcoming essay for the journal, Literární archiv (Hauser J. 2026). 

In short, Eva’s work is not going away and there are fields of scholarship in which it is her version of biopunk that is seen as the genuine article and the global version is the distraction. In fact, to be slightly provocative about this, from a Central European perspective, the globalised biopunk that has dominated cultural discourse for the last thirty-odd years looks increasingly like the vision of a dying corporate Utopia – a “localized referent” for a historically specific, culturally limited moment, to paraphrase Schmeink (Schmeink 2014b, 33) – while it is Eva’s biopunk and its raw engagement with the structures of totalitarianism that is once again becoming alarmingly relevant in the face of the new, post-democratic social order that seems to be sweeping our way from Airstrip Two, on the far side of the water. 

“Dystopia is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

~

FULL DISCLOSURE: Eva Hauserová was my partner. We lived together from 1994 until her death in 2023. We were not yet partners in 1991, at the time I prepared the biopunk feature that was eventually published in Vector. 

Eva Hauserová (1954-2023)

Eva Hauserová was born in Prague and originally planned to become a research scientist, receiving a Master’s degree in microbiology in 1978 and later starting an unfinished doctorate.  However, in parallel to her scientific activities, she had always had an interest in creative writing and in the 1980s this began to dominate. 

She discovered fandom in 1985 and rapidly began to produce the stories that became the basis of her idea of biopunk and her first short story collection, Hostina mutagenů [A Feast of Mutagens, 1992].  In 1988, she also won the prestigious Karel Čapek Award for her story “U nás v Agónii” [“Here, in Agony”, where Agony is the name of a planet].  

She narrowly missed becoming one of the founding editors of the premier Czech sf magazine, Ikárie, in 1990, joining the editorial staff from the second issue.  She went on to work as an editor for a range of Prague publishers, as well as a freelance translator, eventually producing somewhere in the region of a hundred book-length translations from English (she herself lost count), starting with The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas in 1993.  Her other translations included genre-adjacent work by Fay Weldon, Ruth Ozeki and Eve Ensler, and a host of Harlequin romances under various pseudonyms.  Her last translation, Clive King’s classic children’s fantasy, Stig of the Dump, is being published in 2026.  

In her own writing, she published an sf novel, Cvokyně [The Madwoman] in 1992, and continued to write genre-inflected stories throughout her career, such as those collected in Když se sudičky spletou [When the Fates Make a Mistake, 2000].  However, her later novels moved into the mainstream.  She also wrote several volumes of non-fiction, initially in relation to her voluntary work at the Prague Gender Studies Center, perhaps most notably Na koštěti se dá i lítát aneb Nemožné ženy dokažou i nemožné [Broomsticks can also be Used for Flying, or Impossible Women can Achieve the Impossible, 1995], one of the very first attempts to provide an overview of what would today be called second-wave feminism for Czech readers.  The book was an unexpected hit. 

It was also around this time that she was most active internationally, attending multiple sf conventions, contributing to English-language publications (both within the genre and in Gender Studies), and publishing her own fanzine.  Much of her English-language work from this period is signed Eva Hauser. 

Later in life, her focus shifted to environmental issues.  She was chair of the Czech Permaculture Association for several years and her last major publication was the gigantic three-volume Encyklopedie soběstačnosti pro 21. století [Encylopedia of Self-sufficiency for the 21st Century, 2016-2022], which she edited and co-wrote.  

She died in 2023.  Her final, posthumous novel, based on her experiences in the environmental movement, is forthcoming. 

Cyril Simsa

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

~

SOURCES

Blažková, Hana. 2025. “Pozapomenutá sci-fi tradice českého feminismu. Emancipace Evy Hauserové a Caroly Biedermannové v 80. a 90. letech 20. století”. Gender a výzkum/Gender and Research online: https://doi.org/10.13060/gav.2025.004 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Czaplińska, Joanna. 2022. “Does Czech Science Fiction Have a (Feminine) Gender?” Revista Hélice, 8 (1), whole no. 32, 9-20. Translated by Carleton Bulkin. Online at https://w ww.revistahelice.com/en/book/helice-32-2/ [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 2015. 

Czechaczek, Jan. 2015. “Cena Karla Čapka ve fanzinech.” Master’s thesis, Masaryk University, Brno.

Czechaczek, Jan. 2018. “Biopunk Evy Hauserové.” Paper presented at the conference Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene/Fantastika a mýtus v antropocénu, Masaryk University, Brno, October 5, 2018. One-page abstract available at: https://ceska-literatura.phil.muni.cz/fantastika/en/fantasy-and-myth-in-the-anthropocene/conference-program [accessed 29 Mar 2026]

Di Filippo, Paul. 1990. “Ribofunk.” Boing-Boing, Winter 1990, 24. Republished online as “Ribofunk: the Manifesto”, currently at https://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/Ribofunk.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Print version not seen. 

Fišer, Miroslav. 1993. “A Few Notes about Biopunk.” Vector, 174, 17-18. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva. 1990. “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement Specific for Post-Totalitarian Regimes.” Wild Sharkaaah, 2, 1-2. Online at https://efanzines.com/WildSharkaah/WildSharkaah-02.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. The spelling of the fanzine title is inconsistent. 

Hauser Eva. 1991a. “The Changing Face of Europe.” Matrix, 94, 23-24. Online at: https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Matrix/Matrix94.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1991b. “A Czech Fan in America: Chicago WorldCon Impressions.” Shards of Babel, 34, 6-7. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Shards_of_Babel/Shards_of_Babel34-06.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992a. “Will People in Czechoslovakia Read SF in the Future?” Shards of Babel, 35, 7. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Shards_of_Babel/Shards_of_Babel35-07.html [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992b. “The View from Olympus.” Vector, 166, 14-16. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at: https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector166.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992c. “My Australian Diary: Syncon ’92 – and Something More.” Wild Shaarkah, 8, 1-12 [whole issue]. Online at https://efanzines.com/WildSharkaah/WildSharkaah-08.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Reprinted with corrections in GUFF: The Incomplete Chronicles, edited by David Langford. Ansible Editions, 2025. Online at https://taff.org.uk/ebooks.php?x=guffanth [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. The spelling of the fanzine title is inconsistent. 

Hauser, Eva. 1992d. “A Toothsome Smile, an Artificial Death.” Back Brain Recluse, 21, 21-23. Translated by Cyril Simsa. Online at: https://archive.org/details/back-brain-recluse-no.-21-1992 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Previously published in Czech in 1991. 

Hauser, Eva,  1993. “Biopunk: A New Literary Movement for Post-Totalitarian Regimes.” Vector, 174, 15-16. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. Slightly revised version of Hauser 1990. 

Hauser, Eva. 1994. “Science Fiction in the Czech Republic and the Former Czechoslovakia: The Pleasures and the Disappointments of the New Cosmopolitanism.” Science-Fiction Studies 21 (2), whole no. 63, 133-140. https://doi.org/10.1525/sfs.21.2.0133 

Hauser, Jakub. [2026]. “‘Svůj ženský úděl ponesu mužně.’ Zpráva o literární pozůstalosti Evy Hauserové (1954–2023) v Literárním archivu PNP.” Literární archiv, 58, 2026 [in press].  

McHale, Brian. 1992. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge. Cited from Schmeink 2014b. Original not seen. 

Melly, George. 1970. Revolt into Style: the Pop Arts in Britain. Allen Lane. Cited from the Kindle edition: Faber, 2012. 

Neff, Ondřej. 1987. “Nová vlná v SF a kyberpunk.” Lecture delivered at Parcon, the Czechoslovak national sf convention, June 13, 1987. Noted in the convention programme in Interkom, 6/1987 [online at https://interkom.vecnost.cz/1987/19870654.htm; accessed 29 Mar 2026], and commonly referenced by other writers of the period, but I have not been able to find a published text of the lecture itself. 

Nicholls, Peter, and David Langford. [2025]. “Steampunk.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 4th edn., edited by John Clute, David Langford et al. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/steampunk [accessed 4 Apr 2026]. Entry last updated 7 Apr 2025. 

Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg. Cited from pdf e-book at https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120511 [accessed 4 Apr 2026]. 

Praženková, Monika. 2007. “Světy feministické fikce v díle Evy Hauserové.” Bachelor thesis, Masaryk University, Brno.

Prucher, Jeff, ed.  2007. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford University Press. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2014a. “Biopunk 101” [blog post], May 1, 2014, http://larsschmeink.de/?p=2548 [accessed 10 Nov 2016]. No longer available at this address but cached at https://web.archive.org/web/20150214054235/http:/larsschmeink.de/?p=2548 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2014b. “Biopunk 101”, SFRA Review, 309, 31-36. Web version not accessible as of 29 Mar 2026. 

Schmeink, Lars. 2016. Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction. (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies.)  Liverpool University Press. Online at https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781781383766 [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Simsa, Cyril. 1993. “Two Short Articles about Biopunk.” Vector, 174, 12-14, 18. Online at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector174.pdf [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

Sterling, Bruce. 1995. “Triumph of the Plastic People”. Wired, 3.01, 100-107, 154-158. Plain text (minus photos) archived at https://www.wired.com/1995/01/prague/ [partially pay-walled] [accessed 29 Mar 2026]. 

1. Prucher 2007, 16, attributes the first appearance to a Usenet post relating to the role-playing game GURPS on 17 May 1992; Schmeink 2014b, 33, cites the literary theorist Brian McHale (1952-2025), who uses the term in his monograph, Constructing Postmodernism (McHale 1992), 255. The two sources appeared in rapid succession, and the chances of them being related seem close to zero. ︎
2. Cf. Winston Smith’s declaration at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “[T]he struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother”. Orwell 1949, 361. ︎
3. Cf. Di Filippo 1990: “Ribofunk is speculative fiction which acknowledges, is informed by and illustrates the tenet that the next revolution – the only one that really matters – will be in the field of biology.” ︎

Aware of other sub-genres that might sit alongside, overlap or appear to be similar to Zoefuturism, we welcomed contributions about them, to help shape our understanding of Zoefuturism relationally.

Below, Manda Scott and Denise Baden set out strong cases for Thrutopia.

This is interesting from a zoefuturist perspective because Thrutopia is about change and the journey; imagining positive futures and the practicalities of getting there has to be a good approach.

However, Zoefuturism does not presuppose an end point or a goal, more that there is a distinct need to fundamentally alter our world-view, of how we interact and fit in with the world in the broadest sense. It also does not delve in binarisms like positivity/negativity inasmuch as binaries are composites of a holistic purview of life.

We need healthy relationships between all of ‘life’ and ‘non-life’ in the now, acknowledging the diversities while engaging in the nuanced relationships that encompass nature, technology, and more. We need to understand that change is constant and how we live is what affects the possible futures that it is becoming.

We hope that celebrating other sub-genres while encouraging a Zoefuturist approach to reading and writing them will make them more impactful.

Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram (guest-editors, Zoefuturism) Read more: Thrutopia with Manda Scott and Denise Baden Thrutopian Road Maps An essay by Manda Scott (August 2025)

“At times, a single fluctuation … may become so powerful … that it shatters the preexisting organization. At this revolutionary moment … it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take: whether the system will disintegrate into ‘chaos’ or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of ‘order.’” – Alvin Toffler

If we who write can craft clear routes from a recognisable present, mapping towards a future that engages people at the limbic level, we can help tip the balance to a future where a critical mass of us begins to yearn for the outcomes offered, and change will happen. 

This is the explicit foundation of the Thrutopian genre: offering route maps—of which there are, self-evidently, an almost infinite number—towards a future we would be proud to leave to the generations that will follow us. 

If we can imagine forward seven generations and look into the eyes of a young person living in the world for which we have laid the foundations, if they feel safe, confident, fully connected to all parts of themselves, each other and the Web of Life, then we’re on the road to the emergent edge of inter-becoming from which an entirely new system can potentially arise.

As writers, we can gather the building blocks that are already emerging and make of them stepping stones across the river. Stretching the metaphor to breaking point, the narratives we thereby shape must at least offer a glimpse of a reason to cross (motivation), the means to make the crossing (agency), the route to take (direction) and the freedom to take it (empowerment).

This is the heart of behavioural change:  MADE: 

Motivation: with all my heart, I yearn for a future I can glimpse but not yet embrace; 

Agency: I have the tools to take the first steps towards this future; 

Direction: I know the routes away from my present state that will lead me towards the future I yearn for;

Empowerment: I am free of constraint in the present moment enabling me to take the steps and wield the tools in ways that will be effective.

Each of these belongs squarely in the realms of creative imagination. I am not pretending that crafting these is easy; it’s not. One of the many reasons there are so many dystopias and so few genuine Thrutopias is that it’s mind-bendingly hard to find peaceful routes to an equitable world in which humanity flourishes in concert with – even in service to – Life. 

But it isn’t impossible and frankly, if the hardest thing we have to do in the next decade is get our heads around the thinking that already exists at the emergent edge of possibility, then we will be supremely lucky. 

And this is the single most important point. If you take nothing else away, please believe me that there are people already working at the emergent edge of wide boundary systems thinking, of food and farming systems (we have to abandon industrial agriculture as a matter of urgency), of biomimicry, doughnut/ecological/degrowth economics, distributed governance systems, regenerative use of AI, urban and rural planning based on fully regenerative principles…

Every one of these is actively being pursued, it’s just that our legacy media runs with the old style mindset of ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ and they’re not up to speed (yet) with the idea that the existing system is disintegrating and a new one is already emerging from the ashes.

This is part of the Thrutopian narrative shift of which we are an integral part: building routes through, from a recognisable present towards a future we’d all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.

Writing a future we’d like to see, the thrutopian approach.  By Denise Baden (April 2026)

Science fiction often envisions not just technological innovations but societal ones. For example, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed imagines an anarchic/communist society that is broadly utopian in its ideals and has distinctly different arrangements and values surrounding ownership. However, there are few novels that show the process by which we might get from where we are now to such a future. Kevin Kelly coined the term ‘protopia,’ which describes the process of improvement over time. Rupert Read similarly talks about ‘thrutopia’: how we get from where we are now to where we’d like to be, i.e. a flourishing, sustainable society. The idea was so powerful that bestselling author Manda Scott set up a Thrutopia masterclass for writers: “writing our way to a future we’d be proud to leave to the coming generations.” She moved from writing historical fiction to a novel set in the near future, Any Human Power, which adopts the thrutopian approach. 

In this article I discuss some of the books published by Habitat Press, an indie publisher with a niche interest in stories that showcase thrutopian or protopian pathways. There are numerous ‘cli-fi’ stories that present dystopian visions of what will happen if we don’t act. These can be unexpectedly problematic, as research has highlighted the dangers of trying to ‘scare people green.’ Dystopian stories run the risk of fear-driven counterproductive responses, such as the blaming of marginalised groups or buying up all the toilet rolls. There are also numerous eco-fiction stories that persuade us to love nature and plant trees but get us no nearer to understanding what the really effective solutions are and, even more importantly, how we might get there from where we are today. This is a gap that I haven’t seen any fiction (other than Ministry for the Future) fulfil.

Steve Willis, a climate engineer and author (Fairhaven, Defying Futility) has allowed me to share his diagram of films, books etc., which plots dystopian/utopian visions of the future against plausibility. It’s clear that there’s little that is both positive and plausible. 

Habitat Press has published several books that write into this space. Many emerged from the Green Stories project which I founded with the goal of embedding climate solutions into mainstream fiction. It has run 21 competitions since 2018, resulting in numerous publications. One of these is the anthology of 24 stories: No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet, where we teamed experienced writers with climate experts to come up with stories that had solutions at their heart. 

Stories range from technical solutions relating to carbon dioxide removal projects to more systemic aspects such as switching from GDP to a well-being index, sharing economy, personal carbon allowances, giving citizen assemblies legislative power – all of which would allow for a more sustainable long-term mindset conducive to directing investment towards sustainable technologies, practices, and decisions. 

This anthology uses fiction as a testing ground to explore the more radical transformative ideas necessary for a truly sustainable society: ideas that are hard for politicians to talk about for fear of misunderstanding as they can’t easily fit into a soundbite. For example, an essential step is to upgrade our democracy to a form that allows us to think beyond short-term electoral cycles so that we can make more sustainable decisions. Citizens’ Assemblies are a positive step here. 

One story from this anthology was adapted as a play called ‘Murder in the Citizens’ Jury.’ It’s a fun whodunit, set in a citizens’ assembly, where eight participants meet to deliberate upon climate solutions—and then there’s a murder! 

Caption: flyer for theatre production by amateur theatre group, The Maskers.

The play also has an interactive element. A voting app and pullout voting and comment sheet in the programmes allows the audience to share their views on their favourite policies, so they feel like they are part of the citizen’s jury themselves. You can see a brief video of the first production by a local amateur theatre group here. The play is available to purchase from LazyBee, but if you approach me directly, I’m happy to allow amateur and student theatre groups to stage it royalty free. 

The play is also available as a novella and audio book, ‘The Assassin’ of 16,000 words:

Eight people in a citizen’s jury, discussing the most important challenge in the history of humanity – how to save ourselves from the looming climate crisis. Exciting new solutions are proposed, each with their own champions and detractors. What they decide will affect us all. But they all have their own issues to deal with, and one of them has a hidden agenda. Who is the assassin and who are they there to kill?

Such storytelling is a great way to showcase new ideas. Usually in business or government, one would use a stakeholder analysis to see who is benefitted/harmed by any policy and how. These can be dry, and it’s hard to engage with the impacts emotionally as the groups affected seem distant. This story allows stakeholders to become characters and as such we identify with them and their needs more easily. We can then view any climate policy from the perspective of a variety of people, all of whom have a unique relationship to the proposal.

The Assassin also acts as a story within a story in a full-length novel The Philosopher and the Assassin. It’s rather different – think campus novel meets moral philosophy meets whodunnit. 

There’s no more important job than educator, and no subject as necessary as moral philosophy. The trick is getting the students to turn up. So, when the Dean proposes the controversial concept of education entertainment, Professor Iris Tate goes all in with a moral philosophy course based on a whodunnit that all assume is hypothetical – a murder in a citizens’ assembly on climate. A variety of characters provide an entertaining source of ethical dilemmas, but what the students don’t know is that the ultimate dilemma is very real, and their conclusions will have far-reaching consequences.

An adaptation for TV won the Writing Climate Pitchfest, 2024. The book lays out in fiction format a roadmap to a sustainable future. It focuses on social science innovations in democratic, economic, financial, and social institutions. 

 No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet features three short stories that explore the idea of giving the ocean a nation status. One is about the seed of the idea; another is set when the Ocean as Nation has begun and is facing its first challenge, and the final story is set decades in the future outlining what the new Ocean Nation looks like and how it has progressed. It was expanded into a properly thrutopian full-length novel, Fairhaven, written by engineer Steve Willis and writer Jan Lee. 

Visco won the 2020 Green Stories novel competition. The story imagines a giant music festival which allows free access to those who need care and their carers too. What emerges is a care-based mini-society. Those who attend love it so much, no one wants to go home when the music stops. So they don’t! This novel adopts the ‘protopian’ approach of imagining a quite plausible scenario whereby a mini community develops in stages. The characters face and overcome various challenges. David Fell brings to this novel all the knowledge he has gained in his years working as a sustainability consultant, using the novel to showcase alternative approaches such as the sharing economy and how a society based on care might work in practice. 

Fiction, and science fiction in particular, is a great way to reach audiences beyond the environmental echo chamber, but to finish, I’ll talk about my next book, which is non-fiction but with a twist! It’s tentatively called A Jigsaw to Save the World. The twist – you guessed it – is that I plan to make it available also as a jigsaw. 

I like the idea of a jigsaw as on the front cover is a picture which you are trying to get to. I read many books that do an excellent job of pinpointing the many problems society faces, and it’s usually not until the final chapter that any attempt is made at suggesting possible solutions. The news and pundits far and wide are keen to point out the problems we face. But it’s rare we take time to imagine what it might all look like if we did things better. 

Rob Hopkins, in his book From What Is to What If, believes that when we take the time to immerse ourselves fully in imagining what kind of future we’d like to see, this creates a longing for it to happen. This in turn can galvanise action to make that dream come true. In his podcast From What Is to What Next, he asked guests to step into a virtual time machine, and to imagine themselves to be several years into the future and that we’ve done everything right and turned our society round. He then asked them to visualise what they see and hear around them. It’s a surprisingly powerful exercise when you do it yourself. Rob is right; it creates a yearning in the heart, a longing that almost makes you cry. 

I do a lot of talks and workshops and often use this exercise myself. It’s remarkable that, in my experience, whatever the audience, the society people hunger for is always the same. First is always more nature. A close second is a sense of community, after that it’s more varied, but local food is often part of the picture, being outdoors more, less traffic. Public transport that is cheap, convenient and goes where you want, whenever you want. A more equal society, clean air and water. Access to health care and to feel hope for the future, or our children’s future. This is the picture on the front of the jigsaw. In every chapter, I will remind the reader of the society we are aiming towards.

Another reason I like the jigsaw metaphor is that we can see what pieces we may be part of in our own lives. It’s not just about building castles in the air for fun. The stakes are too high for that. We must work out how we get to our desired society. No one person or element can do it by themselves. We need every part of society to be working together to create this new picture. Whether we be in education, business, politics, members of our community, artists, journalists, or just as employees or voters with a voice, you can see where you fit in. At the end of every chapter, if you like what it’s proposing, I will suggest how you can make a difference.

I have an idea of the many pieces that will make up the jigsaw, and am working on the corners. The criteria for a policy to be a corner piece is that without that, all the other wonderful ideas or policies would not be as effective. Contenders for the corner pieces include citizens assemblies as our current democracy is constitutionally incapable of prioritising existential threats such as climate change over short-term issues. Another might be personal carbon allowances/tradeable energy quotas – also known as personal carbon trading. This would transform the decisions that are made by consumers and by businesses by incentivising us to choose low-carbon alternatives. Business purpose justifies a corner but it’s tricky. The current legal form of corporations makes it impossible for even well-meaning CEOs to prioritise societal welfare when it conflicts with profit maximisation for shareholders. What if all businesses were Benefit Corporations/social enterprises where their aim was sufficient profit to supply necessary goods and services rather than profit maximisation? What would happen to markets and pensions? It’s easy to imagine distant futures but the process of getting there without triggering collapse is harder. Yet the alternative could be human extinction. I’m running events to get people together to puzzle out these sticky problems. Details are available here.

While I’m writing the book I’m releasing abridged chapters as a fortnightly LinkedIn newsletter. Each edition focuses on one piece of the puzzle. Subscribe for free to feedback on the ideas and share your view on what the corner pieces should be. I’d love to know your thoughts! 

https://www.dabaden.com/

Denise Baden | LinkedIn

https://bsky.app/profile/dabaden.bsky.social

Aware of other sub-genres that might sit alongside, overlap or appear to be similar to Zoefuturism, we welcomed contributions about them, to help shape our understanding of Zoefuturism relationally.

Below, Manda Scott and Denise Baden set out strong cases for Thrutopia.

This is interesting from a zoefuturist perspective because Thrutopia is about change and the journey; imagining positive futures and the practicalities of getting there has to be a good approach.

However, Zoefuturism does not presuppose an end point or a goal, more that there is a distinct need to fundamentally alter our world-view, of how we interact and fit in with the world in the broadest sense. It also does not delve in binarisms like positivity/negativity inasmuch as binaries are composites of a holistic purview of life.

We need healthy relationships between all of ‘life’ and ‘non-life’ in the now, acknowledging the diversities while engaging in the nuanced relationships that encompass nature, technology, and more. We need to understand that change is constant and how we live is what affects the possible futures that it is becoming.

We hope that celebrating other sub-genres while encouraging a Zoefuturist approach to reading and writing them will make them more impactful.

Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram (guest-editors, Zoefuturism) Read more: Thrutopia with Manda Scott and Denise Baden Thrutopian Road Maps An essay by Manda Scott (August 2025)

“At times, a single fluctuation … may become so powerful … that it shatters the preexisting organization. At this revolutionary moment … it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take: whether the system will disintegrate into ‘chaos’ or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of ‘order.’” – Alvin Toffler

If we who write can craft clear routes from a recognisable present, mapping towards a future that engages people at the limbic level, we can help tip the balance to a future where a critical mass of us begins to yearn for the outcomes offered, and change will happen. 

This is the explicit foundation of the Thrutopian genre: offering route maps—of which there are, self-evidently, an almost infinite number—towards a future we would be proud to leave to the generations that will follow us. 

If we can imagine forward seven generations and look into the eyes of a young person living in the world for which we have laid the foundations, if they feel safe, confident, fully connected to all parts of themselves, each other and the Web of Life, then we’re on the road to the emergent edge of inter-becoming from which an entirely new system can potentially arise.

As writers, we can gather the building blocks that are already emerging and make of them stepping stones across the river. Stretching the metaphor to breaking point, the narratives we thereby shape must at least offer a glimpse of a reason to cross (motivation), the means to make the crossing (agency), the route to take (direction) and the freedom to take it (empowerment).

This is the heart of behavioural change:  MADE: 

Motivation: with all my heart, I yearn for a future I can glimpse but not yet embrace; 

Agency: I have the tools to take the first steps towards this future; 

Direction: I know the routes away from my present state that will lead me towards the future I yearn for;

Empowerment: I am free of constraint in the present moment enabling me to take the steps and wield the tools in ways that will be effective.

Each of these belongs squarely in the realms of creative imagination. I am not pretending that crafting these is easy; it’s not. One of the many reasons there are so many dystopias and so few genuine Thrutopias is that it’s mind-bendingly hard to find peaceful routes to an equitable world in which humanity flourishes in concert with – even in service to – Life. 

But it isn’t impossible and frankly, if the hardest thing we have to do in the next decade is get our heads around the thinking that already exists at the emergent edge of possibility, then we will be supremely lucky. 

And this is the single most important point. If you take nothing else away, please believe me that there are people already working at the emergent edge of wide boundary systems thinking, of food and farming systems (we have to abandon industrial agriculture as a matter of urgency), of biomimicry, doughnut/ecological/degrowth economics, distributed governance systems, regenerative use of AI, urban and rural planning based on fully regenerative principles…

Every one of these is actively being pursued, it’s just that our legacy media runs with the old style mindset of ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ and they’re not up to speed (yet) with the idea that the existing system is disintegrating and a new one is already emerging from the ashes.

This is part of the Thrutopian narrative shift of which we are an integral part: building routes through, from a recognisable present towards a future we’d all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.

Writing a future we’d like to see, the thrutopian approach.  By Denise Baden (April 2026)

Science fiction often envisions not just technological innovations but societal ones. For example, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed imagines an anarchic/communist society that is broadly utopian in its ideals and has distinctly different arrangements and values surrounding ownership. However, there are few novels that show the process by which we might get from where we are now to such a future. Kevin Kelly coined the term ‘protopia,’ which describes the process of improvement over time. Rupert Read similarly talks about ‘thrutopia’: how we get from where we are now to where we’d like to be, i.e. a flourishing, sustainable society. The idea was so powerful that bestselling author Manda Scott set up a Thrutopia masterclass for writers: “writing our way to a future we’d be proud to leave to the coming generations.” She moved from writing historical fiction to a novel set in the near future, Any Human Power, which adopts the thrutopian approach. 

In this article I discuss some of the books published by Habitat Press, an indie publisher with a niche interest in stories that showcase thrutopian or protopian pathways. There are numerous ‘cli-fi’ stories that present dystopian visions of what will happen if we don’t act. These can be unexpectedly problematic, as research has highlighted the dangers of trying to ‘scare people green.’ Dystopian stories run the risk of fear-driven counterproductive responses, such as the blaming of marginalised groups or buying up all the toilet rolls. There are also numerous eco-fiction stories that persuade us to love nature and plant trees but get us no nearer to understanding what the really effective solutions are and, even more importantly, how we might get there from where we are today. This is a gap that I haven’t seen any fiction (other than Ministry for the Future) fulfil.

Steve Willis, a climate engineer and author (Fairhaven, Defying Futility) has allowed me to share his diagram of films, books etc., which plots dystopian/utopian visions of the future against plausibility. It’s clear that there’s little that is both positive and plausible. 

Habitat Press has published several books that write into this space. Many emerged from the Green Stories project which I founded with the goal of embedding climate solutions into mainstream fiction. It has run 21 competitions since 2018, resulting in numerous publications. One of these is the anthology of 24 stories: No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet, where we teamed experienced writers with climate experts to come up with stories that had solutions at their heart. 

Stories range from technical solutions relating to carbon dioxide removal projects to more systemic aspects such as switching from GDP to a well-being index, sharing economy, personal carbon allowances, giving citizen assemblies legislative power – all of which would allow for a more sustainable long-term mindset conducive to directing investment towards sustainable technologies, practices, and decisions. 

This anthology uses fiction as a testing ground to explore the more radical transformative ideas necessary for a truly sustainable society: ideas that are hard for politicians to talk about for fear of misunderstanding as they can’t easily fit into a soundbite. For example, an essential step is to upgrade our democracy to a form that allows us to think beyond short-term electoral cycles so that we can make more sustainable decisions. Citizens’ Assemblies are a positive step here. 

One story from this anthology was adapted as a play called ‘Murder in the Citizens’ Jury.’ It’s a fun whodunit, set in a citizens’ assembly, where eight participants meet to deliberate upon climate solutions—and then there’s a murder! 

Caption: flyer for theatre production by amateur theatre group, The Maskers.

The play also has an interactive element. A voting app and pullout voting and comment sheet in the programmes allows the audience to share their views on their favourite policies, so they feel like they are part of the citizen’s jury themselves. You can see a brief video of the first production by a local amateur theatre group here. The play is available to purchase from LazyBee, but if you approach me directly, I’m happy to allow amateur and student theatre groups to stage it royalty free. 

The play is also available as a novella and audio book, ‘The Assassin’ of 16,000 words:

Eight people in a citizen’s jury, discussing the most important challenge in the history of humanity – how to save ourselves from the looming climate crisis. Exciting new solutions are proposed, each with their own champions and detractors. What they decide will affect us all. But they all have their own issues to deal with, and one of them has a hidden agenda. Who is the assassin and who are they there to kill?

Such storytelling is a great way to showcase new ideas. Usually in business or government, one would use a stakeholder analysis to see who is benefitted/harmed by any policy and how. These can be dry, and it’s hard to engage with the impacts emotionally as the groups affected seem distant. This story allows stakeholders to become characters and as such we identify with them and their needs more easily. We can then view any climate policy from the perspective of a variety of people, all of whom have a unique relationship to the proposal.

The Assassin also acts as a story within a story in a full-length novel The Philosopher and the Assassin. It’s rather different – think campus novel meets moral philosophy meets whodunnit. 

There’s no more important job than educator, and no subject as necessary as moral philosophy. The trick is getting the students to turn up. So, when the Dean proposes the controversial concept of education entertainment, Professor Iris Tate goes all in with a moral philosophy course based on a whodunnit that all assume is hypothetical – a murder in a citizens’ assembly on climate. A variety of characters provide an entertaining source of ethical dilemmas, but what the students don’t know is that the ultimate dilemma is very real, and their conclusions will have far-reaching consequences.

An adaptation for TV won the Writing Climate Pitchfest, 2024. The book lays out in fiction format a roadmap to a sustainable future. It focuses on social science innovations in democratic, economic, financial, and social institutions. 

 No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet features three short stories that explore the idea of giving the ocean a nation status. One is about the seed of the idea; another is set when the Ocean as Nation has begun and is facing its first challenge, and the final story is set decades in the future outlining what the new Ocean Nation looks like and how it has progressed. It was expanded into a properly thrutopian full-length novel, Fairhaven, written by engineer Steve Willis and writer Jan Lee. 

Visco won the 2020 Green Stories novel competition. The story imagines a giant music festival which allows free access to those who need care and their carers too. What emerges is a care-based mini-society. Those who attend love it so much, no one wants to go home when the music stops. So they don’t! This novel adopts the ‘protopian’ approach of imagining a quite plausible scenario whereby a mini community develops in stages. The characters face and overcome various challenges. David Fell brings to this novel all the knowledge he has gained in his years working as a sustainability consultant, using the novel to showcase alternative approaches such as the sharing economy and how a society based on care might work in practice. 

Fiction, and science fiction in particular, is a great way to reach audiences beyond the environmental echo chamber, but to finish, I’ll talk about my next book, which is non-fiction but with a twist! It’s tentatively called A Jigsaw to Save the World. The twist – you guessed it – is that I plan to make it available also as a jigsaw. 

I like the idea of a jigsaw as on the front cover is a picture which you are trying to get to. I read many books that do an excellent job of pinpointing the many problems society faces, and it’s usually not until the final chapter that any attempt is made at suggesting possible solutions. The news and pundits far and wide are keen to point out the problems we face. But it’s rare we take time to imagine what it might all look like if we did things better. 

Rob Hopkins, in his book From What Is to What If, believes that when we take the time to immerse ourselves fully in imagining what kind of future we’d like to see, this creates a longing for it to happen. This in turn can galvanise action to make that dream come true. In his podcast From What Is to What Next, he asked guests to step into a virtual time machine, and to imagine themselves to be several years into the future and that we’ve done everything right and turned our society round. He then asked them to visualise what they see and hear around them. It’s a surprisingly powerful exercise when you do it yourself. Rob is right; it creates a yearning in the heart, a longing that almost makes you cry. 

I do a lot of talks and workshops and often use this exercise myself. It’s remarkable that, in my experience, whatever the audience, the society people hunger for is always the same. First is always more nature. A close second is a sense of community, after that it’s more varied, but local food is often part of the picture, being outdoors more, less traffic. Public transport that is cheap, convenient and goes where you want, whenever you want. A more equal society, clean air and water. Access to health care and to feel hope for the future, or our children’s future. This is the picture on the front of the jigsaw. In every chapter, I will remind the reader of the society we are aiming towards.

Another reason I like the jigsaw metaphor is that we can see what pieces we may be part of in our own lives. It’s not just about building castles in the air for fun. The stakes are too high for that. We must work out how we get to our desired society. No one person or element can do it by themselves. We need every part of society to be working together to create this new picture. Whether we be in education, business, politics, members of our community, artists, journalists, or just as employees or voters with a voice, you can see where you fit in. At the end of every chapter, if you like what it’s proposing, I will suggest how you can make a difference.

I have an idea of the many pieces that will make up the jigsaw, and am working on the corners. The criteria for a policy to be a corner piece is that without that, all the other wonderful ideas or policies would not be as effective. Contenders for the corner pieces include citizens assemblies as our current democracy is constitutionally incapable of prioritising existential threats such as climate change over short-term issues. Another might be personal carbon allowances/tradeable energy quotas – also known as personal carbon trading. This would transform the decisions that are made by consumers and by businesses by incentivising us to choose low-carbon alternatives. Business purpose justifies a corner but it’s tricky. The current legal form of corporations makes it impossible for even well-meaning CEOs to prioritise societal welfare when it conflicts with profit maximisation for shareholders. What if all businesses were Benefit Corporations/social enterprises where their aim was sufficient profit to supply necessary goods and services rather than profit maximisation? What would happen to markets and pensions? It’s easy to imagine distant futures but the process of getting there without triggering collapse is harder. Yet the alternative could be human extinction. I’m running events to get people together to puzzle out these sticky problems. Details are available here.

While I’m writing the book I’m releasing abridged chapters as a fortnightly LinkedIn newsletter. Each edition focuses on one piece of the puzzle. Subscribe for free to feedback on the ideas and share your view on what the corner pieces should be. I’d love to know your thoughts! 

https://www.dabaden.com/

Denise Baden | LinkedIn

https://bsky.app/profile/dabaden.bsky.social

Jean-Paul L. Garnier: One theme of The Iron Garden Sutra concerns failed generation ships and the existential troubles they face during their journeys. I have read several books recently with similar takes on generation ships. Do you feel that this kind of story reflects a growing tension between generations in the real world and youth feeling that they have been dealt a bad hand by previous generations?

A.D. Sui: Generation ships are a long-standing tradition in sci-fi. What’s not alluring about packing up ourselves into a tin can and running off into the universe in search of greener pastures? But in my opinion, it’s also a very naïve take. Space is hostile. Space is hard. But there is a romanticism in cutting and running. Staying is, arguably, far more difficult. 

I think every generation feels that pull of running away from their reality. Every generation can say that they have been dealt a bad hand. Millennials are economically disadvantaged because of policies enacted by Gen X and Boomers (and yes, have lived through three recessions now, but who’s counting?). Gen Xers felt they’ve been invisible all their lives. Boomers, I’m sure, felt disadvantaged in some way as well. Hard to imagine now, but one might. The generation before probably felt that they were unfairly thrust into a war that was only possible because of what the previous generation had done. And this is just the North American perspective. There are many more global conflicts, recessions, and other strains on each generation. We all want to run away, thinking that it will be better. To where? No one knows for sure, but somewhere that isn’t here. 

Part of The Iron Garden Sutra’s theme is deciding when to stand your ground and fight for the things we believe in. Even if we are one person. Even if the outcome doesn’t look hopeful. Millennials are of the age when our financial decisions and our voting have the most impact. Some of us are even in positions of influence. Some are making decisions on scales that will impact the next generation (hi, Gen Z, and sorry). We can continue to bemoan the hand we’ve been dealt, or we can also work towards leaving things better for those who are coming after us. I, personally, am a huge fan of complaining while doing the thing. 

It’s going to suck and it’s going to be a lot of work, sure, but we can leave a better world for those after us.

You’ve also created a religion in this novel, The Starlit. What did the process of creating a theology look like for you, and please tell us about the introduction of cosmology into the religion of peoples who have colonized the stars?

The Starlit is loosely based on Zen Buddhism. I have a very strong preference for non-monotheistic religions and like pondering where they can end up in thousands of years. What is the natural progression of something like Zen if it was supported into the future? What would its practitioners decide to keep and what would they discard? Because religion does change! Doctrine does change! It changes very slowly since religious institutions are massive and can’t afford to throw their entire weight around every other week, but it does change. 

I think the introduction of cosmology is the natural transition, given how we commonly incorporate elements from our immediate environments into religious texts. Parting the Red Sea, trudging through deserts, and all that. If people are traversing between stars frequently, then star-like language would begin bleeding into texts. 

The Iron Garden Sutra has multiple AI characters. Would you have written these characters differently had you written this book today?

I’ve been doing a lot of laughing/crying since the book has come out. You can guess why. 

A very niche fury that I’m experiencing about GenAI is that it has taken a very well-established trope in sci-fi and made it into a real-life abomination. I’ve been hearing some discussions in the genre that we need a new name for this concept now because any time we even drop the term “AI,” readers begin to think that we support the existence of Grok. 

In The Iron Garden Sutra, I have tried to move from the term “AI” and sometimes use “synthetic consciousness” because that’s really what I’m describing here. This is a fully-fledged individual that can act (mostly) autonomously, who has agency and drive, but isn’t born from organics. This isn’t Claude writing an email. This is something that is as much of a person as other characters in the novel. 

If I were to write this book again, I’d change nothing. I think I would lean into the AI ethics component of the book even harder to hammer the point home that these characters are sentient and deserving of individual rights. The caveat is that if I were to rewrite it, it would take several years for the book to get published and by that point we’d all be fighting Boston Robotics dogs for access to fresh water, and no one would be reading anymore.

Two of the characters in this book share a body. What complications arose during writing characters that do not have complete bodily autonomy and must occupy the same internal space?

Two characters/one body is becoming a very popular trope in spec fiction! 

This was, arguably, my favorite dynamic to write and explore. What kind of relationship can you have when one of you cannot act on the physical world without the other’s permission? How does a relationship develop when you have complete access to someone’s deepest, darkest thoughts? 

There’s a balance of power between Iris and VIFAI (Iris’s AI companion/helper) and I think this allows them to have a true relationship and friendship, even if Iris doesn’t believe it at first. It’s the closest and most meaningful relationship Iris has had in his entire life, but it cannot stay pure from the fact that he *is* the container for VIFAI and the one supposedly “in charge”. Without spoiling anything, this does budge a bit throughout the book and Iris does come to a deeper understanding that VIFAI is not as helpless as Iris had believed it to be.

The name of the main spaceship in the story is the Counsel of Nicaea, which suggests a Christian theological bent, and is a great contrast to the Starlit and their worldview reminiscent of Buddhism and Hinduism. What were your aims in creating such a stark, yet subtle, contrast? 

The contrast does exist, but it was not intentional! 

The Buddhist worldview is the one I am most familiar with and preferred writing from that vantage point, and I must admit that the Christian theological bent was inspired by the generation ship in the ‘Expanse’ series, and the Nauvoo, which was commissioned by a group of Mormons who wanted to travel far past the Solar System. It made sense to me that a group of people united by intense faith would do well in long-term space travel. Although, as we see with the Nicaea, that might not always be the case. 

Without spoilers, the main character has revelatory experiences leading him to contemplate the meaning of the void and the space between the stars. Can you elaborate on how you used spiritual growth and crisis of faith in your character arcs?

Oh, poor Iris. 

I wanted him to be a reluctant monk. I wanted him to look right, wear the right clothing, say the right things, but I wanted him to think all the wrong ones. Well, what he believes to be wrong. I think there is a stereotype of monks being happy and peaceful at all times, but in reality, they are just people, experiencing the same existence we are, who also hold a specific job. Being a monk is a job, above all else, and people come to it for very different and personal reasons. 

And I wanted Iris to grapple with how he related to the doctrine and his role as a monk. I wanted to push him towards an understanding of what holding the role of a Vessel meant to him. There is a term in Buddhism called a koan. It’s kind of like a riddle used to impart a teaching of some sort and it’s often posed by a teacher to their pupil. The goal is for the pupil to have a revelation, to “get” the koan. There is no single answer to a koan, but rather a feeling that comes when one understands it. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re learning to ride a bike and after stumbling and falling, and trying over and over again, suddenly, you catch your balance. Hard to describe, but once you have it, you have it.  

The entire experience aboard the Nicaea is a koan for Iris, a question of his relationship with faith that only he can answer, and only towards the end. 

There’s a sequel coming, The Starlight Samsara.. Can you tell us about when and what we can expect from the continued adventure?

The sequel should be coming sometime near the summer of 2027! You can expect some new faces in the cast, but also some favorites returning. While The Iron Garden Sutra touched on the notion of AI ethics, The Starlight Samsara takes a deeper dive into the topic. And finally, things do get better for Iris, but not before they get significantly worse. 

A.D. SUI is a Ukrainian-born, internationally raised speculative writer, Nebula winner, and Aurora, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. They are the author of The Dragonfly Gambit (2024), The Iron Garden Sutra (2026), and more than two dozen short stories. A failed academic and retired fencer, they spend most days wrangling their two dogs and tending to their myriads of tropical plants.
You can find them on most social media platforms as @thesuiway and https://thesuiway.ca/

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

Jean-Paul L. Garnier: One theme of The Iron Garden Sutra concerns failed generation ships and the existential troubles they face during their journeys. I have read several books recently with similar takes on generation ships. Do you feel that this kind of story reflects a growing tension between generations in the real world and youth feeling that they have been dealt a bad hand by previous generations?

A.D. Sui: Generation ships are a long-standing tradition in sci-fi. What’s not alluring about packing up ourselves into a tin can and running off into the universe in search of greener pastures? But in my opinion, it’s also a very naïve take. Space is hostile. Space is hard. But there is a romanticism in cutting and running. Staying is, arguably, far more difficult. 

I think every generation feels that pull of running away from their reality. Every generation can say that they have been dealt a bad hand. Millennials are economically disadvantaged because of policies enacted by Gen X and Boomers (and yes, have lived through three recessions now, but who’s counting?). Gen Xers felt they’ve been invisible all their lives. Boomers, I’m sure, felt disadvantaged in some way as well. Hard to imagine now, but one might. The generation before probably felt that they were unfairly thrust into a war that was only possible because of what the previous generation had done. And this is just the North American perspective. There are many more global conflicts, recessions, and other strains on each generation. We all want to run away, thinking that it will be better. To where? No one knows for sure, but somewhere that isn’t here. 

Part of The Iron Garden Sutra’s theme is deciding when to stand your ground and fight for the things we believe in. Even if we are one person. Even if the outcome doesn’t look hopeful. Millennials are of the age when our financial decisions and our voting have the most impact. Some of us are even in positions of influence. Some are making decisions on scales that will impact the next generation (hi, Gen Z, and sorry). We can continue to bemoan the hand we’ve been dealt, or we can also work towards leaving things better for those who are coming after us. I, personally, am a huge fan of complaining while doing the thing. 

It’s going to suck and it’s going to be a lot of work, sure, but we can leave a better world for those after us.

You’ve also created a religion in this novel, The Starlit. What did the process of creating a theology look like for you, and please tell us about the introduction of cosmology into the religion of peoples who have colonized the stars?

The Starlit is loosely based on Zen Buddhism. I have a very strong preference for non-monotheistic religions and like pondering where they can end up in thousands of years. What is the natural progression of something like Zen if it was supported into the future? What would its practitioners decide to keep and what would they discard? Because religion does change! Doctrine does change! It changes very slowly since religious institutions are massive and can’t afford to throw their entire weight around every other week, but it does change. 

I think the introduction of cosmology is the natural transition, given how we commonly incorporate elements from our immediate environments into religious texts. Parting the Red Sea, trudging through deserts, and all that. If people are traversing between stars frequently, then star-like language would begin bleeding into texts. 

The Iron Garden Sutra has multiple AI characters. Would you have written these characters differently had you written this book today?

I’ve been doing a lot of laughing/crying since the book has come out. You can guess why. 

A very niche fury that I’m experiencing about GenAI is that it has taken a very well-established trope in sci-fi and made it into a real-life abomination. I’ve been hearing some discussions in the genre that we need a new name for this concept now because any time we even drop the term “AI,” readers begin to think that we support the existence of Grok. 

In The Iron Garden Sutra, I have tried to move from the term “AI” and sometimes use “synthetic consciousness” because that’s really what I’m describing here. This is a fully-fledged individual that can act (mostly) autonomously, who has agency and drive, but isn’t born from organics. This isn’t Claude writing an email. This is something that is as much of a person as other characters in the novel. 

If I were to write this book again, I’d change nothing. I think I would lean into the AI ethics component of the book even harder to hammer the point home that these characters are sentient and deserving of individual rights. The caveat is that if I were to rewrite it, it would take several years for the book to get published and by that point we’d all be fighting Boston Robotics dogs for access to fresh water, and no one would be reading anymore.

Two of the characters in this book share a body. What complications arose during writing characters that do not have complete bodily autonomy and must occupy the same internal space?

Two characters/one body is becoming a very popular trope in spec fiction! 

This was, arguably, my favorite dynamic to write and explore. What kind of relationship can you have when one of you cannot act on the physical world without the other’s permission? How does a relationship develop when you have complete access to someone’s deepest, darkest thoughts? 

There’s a balance of power between Iris and VIFAI (Iris’s AI companion/helper) and I think this allows them to have a true relationship and friendship, even if Iris doesn’t believe it at first. It’s the closest and most meaningful relationship Iris has had in his entire life, but it cannot stay pure from the fact that he *is* the container for VIFAI and the one supposedly “in charge”. Without spoiling anything, this does budge a bit throughout the book and Iris does come to a deeper understanding that VIFAI is not as helpless as Iris had believed it to be.

The name of the main spaceship in the story is the Counsel of Nicaea, which suggests a Christian theological bent, and is a great contrast to the Starlit and their worldview reminiscent of Buddhism and Hinduism. What were your aims in creating such a stark, yet subtle, contrast? 

The contrast does exist, but it was not intentional! 

The Buddhist worldview is the one I am most familiar with and preferred writing from that vantage point, and I must admit that the Christian theological bent was inspired by the generation ship in the ‘Expanse’ series, and the Nauvoo, which was commissioned by a group of Mormons who wanted to travel far past the Solar System. It made sense to me that a group of people united by intense faith would do well in long-term space travel. Although, as we see with the Nicaea, that might not always be the case. 

Without spoilers, the main character has revelatory experiences leading him to contemplate the meaning of the void and the space between the stars. Can you elaborate on how you used spiritual growth and crisis of faith in your character arcs?

Oh, poor Iris. 

I wanted him to be a reluctant monk. I wanted him to look right, wear the right clothing, say the right things, but I wanted him to think all the wrong ones. Well, what he believes to be wrong. I think there is a stereotype of monks being happy and peaceful at all times, but in reality, they are just people, experiencing the same existence we are, who also hold a specific job. Being a monk is a job, above all else, and people come to it for very different and personal reasons. 

And I wanted Iris to grapple with how he related to the doctrine and his role as a monk. I wanted to push him towards an understanding of what holding the role of a Vessel meant to him. There is a term in Buddhism called a koan. It’s kind of like a riddle used to impart a teaching of some sort and it’s often posed by a teacher to their pupil. The goal is for the pupil to have a revelation, to “get” the koan. There is no single answer to a koan, but rather a feeling that comes when one understands it. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re learning to ride a bike and after stumbling and falling, and trying over and over again, suddenly, you catch your balance. Hard to describe, but once you have it, you have it.  

The entire experience aboard the Nicaea is a koan for Iris, a question of his relationship with faith that only he can answer, and only towards the end. 

There’s a sequel coming, The Starlight Samsara.. Can you tell us about when and what we can expect from the continued adventure?

The sequel should be coming sometime near the summer of 2027! You can expect some new faces in the cast, but also some favorites returning. While The Iron Garden Sutra touched on the notion of AI ethics, The Starlight Samsara takes a deeper dive into the topic. And finally, things do get better for Iris, but not before they get significantly worse. 

A.D. SUI is a Ukrainian-born, internationally raised speculative writer, Nebula winner, and Aurora, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. They are the author of The Dragonfly Gambit (2024), The Iron Garden Sutra (2026), and more than two dozen short stories. A failed academic and retired fencer, they spend most days wrangling their two dogs and tending to their myriads of tropical plants.
You can find them on most social media platforms as @thesuiway and https://thesuiway.ca/

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

By Kemi Cole

Adita does not want to lead anything. She is seventy years old, she would rather pedal a solar tractor across an acre than borrow a battery from a neighbour, and she has spent her life arranging her existence so that other people leave her alone. However, the system she lives under has other ideas.

Yat Madit, the political system Dilman Dila imagines in his novella The Blossoming of the Big Tree, distributes power so thoroughly that there is nowhere to hide from it. Dila has also written an essay tracing the precolonial Acholi governance structures that inspired this world, grounding the fiction in historical and political argument. This is the beating heart of the book, and also its best joke. Adita becomes the central figure of a narrative about a system explicitly built to have no central figures. The irony is precise and it does not soften.

What makes Adita remarkable is not that she changes. She does not. She remains uncomfortable in her own skin, hostile to touch, resistant to the idea that her interiority should be understood by anyone else. Dila never asks her to overcome this. The narrative does not cure her through the pressure of events or through a relationship. Instead, her introversion becomes the actual mechanism by which Yat Madit functions at scale. A leader who wants nothing consolidates nothing. A leader who retreats cannot become a tyrant. The political argument and the character are the same thing. That is what makes her work.

The world Dila builds around her is grounded and specific. Kampala is Kampala. Villages have names. Solar panels are made from a paste of leaves and algae. Governance runs on consensus down to the smallest communal decision. Dila embeds Acholi concepts into the narrative without translation. He is writing as if Uganda is the centre of the world, not a location that requires outsider comprehension. That act of centering is political. What is unusual is not the centering itself, which is a defining feature of Africanfuturism, but the depth and specificity of the political system he builds from precolonial Acholi structures, and his refusal to simplify it. 

When war arrives, Adita must navigate the central paradox of Yat Madit: how do you mount a defence in a system explicitly built to reject centralised command? A federation of hundreds of villages cannot coordinate quickly enough through pure consensus. The problem emerges early. As someone says in frustration: “Really? An idea to defeat the mighty army of USA? You?” The question is not cruel. It is structural. Dila is naming what his system cannot do. In response, they create a War Council of twelve people to speed up decision-making, but that very act risks betraying the founding principle that power should not concentrate. The danger, as Dila makes clear, is that such small numbers could lead to centralism, to a few people making decisions that affect everyone. They have created the thing they feared most in order to survive.

In face of this massive threat of war, solutions seem to arrive faster than the reader can absorb them. A spaceship appears. Technology embedded with living jok code, a form of sentient programming rooted in Acholi spiritual tradition rather than Western computing logic, is deployed. A satellite is accessed. Because so much depends on mechanisms the narrative never fully clarifies, the resolution feels contingent in ways that might be intentional but are also difficult to settle into.

Lokang, who should be the most complex figure in the novella, sits at the centre of this problem. En, the pronoun used for Lokang, is not a god. En is not quite human. En designed much of Yat Madit and then withdrew from public life, quietly innovating for decades. The novella never gives the reader enough to know what en actually is beyond those outlines. This means Lokang cannot quite carry the weight the final movement of the story needs from en. Dila seems aware of this and does not try to solve it by making Lokang less opaque. It is a choice, but it costs something in the narrative and might leave a reader wanting more.

What is not in question is the seriousness of what Dila is attempting. He is not interested in the aesthetics of Africanfuturism. He is interested in whether a society built on consensus can survive the demand for speed that crisis requires, whether precolonial political structures powered by contemporary technology could actually function, whether you can write about power without making power the story. These are genuine questions and the kind that speculative fiction is uniquely positioned to ask, using narrative to stress-test political ideas that policy cannot yet imagine.

In the aftermath, the federation does not solidify into a new order. Power begins to reconcentrate around those who used it well during the crisis. The system’s founding commitments are already being tested. Adita is alone. The tree, in Acholi tradition the meeting place where the village gathers, remains. The conversation never ends. That is not a triumphant ending. It is an honest one. It is the kind of ending that makes you want to argue with the book, which is exactly what Dila has built it to do.

The Blossoming of the Big Tree is a genuinely absorbing read, funny and serious in equal measure, and Adita is one of the most quietly original protagonists I have encountered in the genre in some time. 

By Kemi Cole

Adita does not want to lead anything. She is seventy years old, she would rather pedal a solar tractor across an acre than borrow a battery from a neighbour, and she has spent her life arranging her existence so that other people leave her alone. However, the system she lives under has other ideas.

Yat Madit, the political system Dilman Dila imagines in his novella The Blossoming of the Big Tree, distributes power so thoroughly that there is nowhere to hide from it. Dila has also written an essay tracing the precolonial Acholi governance structures that inspired this world, grounding the fiction in historical and political argument. This is the beating heart of the book, and also its best joke. Adita becomes the central figure of a narrative about a system explicitly built to have no central figures. The irony is precise and it does not soften.

What makes Adita remarkable is not that she changes. She does not. She remains uncomfortable in her own skin, hostile to touch, resistant to the idea that her interiority should be understood by anyone else. Dila never asks her to overcome this. The narrative does not cure her through the pressure of events or through a relationship. Instead, her introversion becomes the actual mechanism by which Yat Madit functions at scale. A leader who wants nothing consolidates nothing. A leader who retreats cannot become a tyrant. The political argument and the character are the same thing. That is what makes her work.

The world Dila builds around her is grounded and specific. Kampala is Kampala. Villages have names. Solar panels are made from a paste of leaves and algae. Governance runs on consensus down to the smallest communal decision. Dila embeds Acholi concepts into the narrative without translation. He is writing as if Uganda is the centre of the world, not a location that requires outsider comprehension. That act of centering is political. What is unusual is not the centering itself, which is a defining feature of Africanfuturism, but the depth and specificity of the political system he builds from precolonial Acholi structures, and his refusal to simplify it. 

When war arrives, Adita must navigate the central paradox of Yat Madit: how do you mount a defence in a system explicitly built to reject centralised command? A federation of hundreds of villages cannot coordinate quickly enough through pure consensus. The problem emerges early. As someone says in frustration: “Really? An idea to defeat the mighty army of USA? You?” The question is not cruel. It is structural. Dila is naming what his system cannot do. In response, they create a War Council of twelve people to speed up decision-making, but that very act risks betraying the founding principle that power should not concentrate. The danger, as Dila makes clear, is that such small numbers could lead to centralism, to a few people making decisions that affect everyone. They have created the thing they feared most in order to survive.

In face of this massive threat of war, solutions seem to arrive faster than the reader can absorb them. A spaceship appears. Technology embedded with living jok code, a form of sentient programming rooted in Acholi spiritual tradition rather than Western computing logic, is deployed. A satellite is accessed. Because so much depends on mechanisms the narrative never fully clarifies, the resolution feels contingent in ways that might be intentional but are also difficult to settle into.

Lokang, who should be the most complex figure in the novella, sits at the centre of this problem. En, the pronoun used for Lokang, is not a god. En is not quite human. En designed much of Yat Madit and then withdrew from public life, quietly innovating for decades. The novella never gives the reader enough to know what en actually is beyond those outlines. This means Lokang cannot quite carry the weight the final movement of the story needs from en. Dila seems aware of this and does not try to solve it by making Lokang less opaque. It is a choice, but it costs something in the narrative and might leave a reader wanting more.

What is not in question is the seriousness of what Dila is attempting. He is not interested in the aesthetics of Africanfuturism. He is interested in whether a society built on consensus can survive the demand for speed that crisis requires, whether precolonial political structures powered by contemporary technology could actually function, whether you can write about power without making power the story. These are genuine questions and the kind that speculative fiction is uniquely positioned to ask, using narrative to stress-test political ideas that policy cannot yet imagine.

In the aftermath, the federation does not solidify into a new order. Power begins to reconcentrate around those who used it well during the crisis. The system’s founding commitments are already being tested. Adita is alone. The tree, in Acholi tradition the meeting place where the village gathers, remains. The conversation never ends. That is not a triumphant ending. It is an honest one. It is the kind of ending that makes you want to argue with the book, which is exactly what Dila has built it to do.

The Blossoming of the Big Tree is a genuinely absorbing read, funny and serious in equal measure, and Adita is one of the most quietly original protagonists I have encountered in the genre in some time. 

Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What inspired you to conduct the series of interviews in Human Voices, Alien Conversations, and how do you go about selecting interviewees?

James Machell: Several of the interviews had appeared in Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and Electronic Brain. What I wanted to do with Human Voices, Alien Conversations was pull them together into one narrative, and additional interviews were conducted to fill what I perceived to be the gaps in the collection as an overview of SF in the 21st Century. In order to show this with a bird’s eye, I couldn’t just focus on writing when there’s art, editing, performance, and adaptation. I also wanted to explore understated significance. Samuel R. Delany, for example, is nowhere near as well known as Andy Weir, but his influence, even at the time of composing his major works, has been much more profound. Similarly, Chris Moore, with his prog-rock styled art for the SF Masterworks Series, created some of the most recognisable images in the history of SF but did so quietly, never chasing awards or drawing attention to himself: he let his art speak. Cyberpunk, almost exclusively associated with William Gibson, was developed by a “team” of writers in the ‘80s: I thought it would be much more interesting to speak with Pat Cadigan, who is frequently dubbed the “queen” of the subgenre. But I couldn’t just focus on the legends when their contributions to SF are constantly evolving through their influence on younger writers. Interviewees, therefore, vary greatly in age, juxtaposing the perspectives of those blossoming into the SF landscape with those who loosened the soil. Bogi Takács, Samantha Mills, and Ai Jiang, also included in Human Voices, Alien Conversations, are writers we should be looking out for. The final interview is with Matthew Holness, co-writer, co-director, and star of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which gets my vote as the most underappreciated use of SF in visual media. As Holness is now working on the third in a series of spin-off novels, he was ideal to pull everything together. 

JPG: How do you go about researching your subjects in preparation for interviews?

JM: Most of the interviewees were selected because I’d been enjoying their work for years. The questions came easily. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, however, were excellent resources for pinning down dates and discovering aspects of their careers which may have eluded even the most die-hard fan.  

JPG: What do you see as some of the main concerns and themes in early 21st Century science fiction?

JM: I might cheat here and offer two answers because I think the answer differs based on whether we’re talking about long or short form SF. With novels, the main concerns are harder to pinpoint, in major Western ones of this century, including M. John Harrison’s Light, China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. These books deal with the climate, colonisation, technology (developing with unprecedented strangeness), and the uncanny, but none of this is new. I think concerns may have shifted but the passions of the writer and tastes of the reader have roughly been continuous since the ‘60s. There’s a reason the Modernist period lasted all of forty years and the postmodern sees no sign of ending. Naturally, we live on a different planet now, but I don’t believe the cognitive shift from Donald Trump’s presidency or the rise of AI has been as profound as the First World War or Civil Rights Movement, at least among readers. Characters were having conversations with their automatic computers in the ‘50s and we can go all the way back to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 dystopia, It Can’t Happen Here, for premonitions of Trumpism.

The underlying revolution in 21st century SF is the shift in emphasis from sexuality to gender. Ellen Datlow waved goodbye to the 20th with her anthologies, Alien Sex and Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, perhaps the last time to shock an audience who would become mentally hardened by the internet. Some of the most striking stories to emerge during the last five years include Blue Neustifter’s “Unknown Number” which is told through a series of texts between a transgender woman and an alternate universe version of herself in which she didn’t physically transition, and Samantha Mills’ “Rabbit Test,” which contrasts the future of invasive procedures on women’s bodies with the history of abortion and pregnancy tests. In both cases, the author is examining the self of their protagonists in correlation to the world around them. This is a far cry from H. P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, or Clive Barker menacing their readers with abominations. The notion of the self is evolving and magazines, with a small but dedicated audience, provide a space for writers to explore this in different settings. Enormous strides have been made in the last 26 years regarding the understanding of gender fluidity and trans* identity. “What does it mean to be a woman?” is a question posed and answered since at least Simone de Beauvoir. My prediction for the next quarter of this century is that we’ll see further examinations of masculinity. Louis Theroux’s recent documentary on the “manosphere” has highlighted the prevalence of toxic manhood being marketed to young people. SF writers from the targeted age group will no doubt reflect on the so-called “red pill” philosophy and what it means to be a man in the mid-21st century. 

JPG: In your introductions and interviews, authors such as J. G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon are regularly referenced. What is your attraction to these difficult, genre-defying works?

JM: My attraction stems largely from seeing myself in their work. As much as I enjoy Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, I am less passionate about aristocrats discovering the joy of “simple living” as characters feeling anxious and being right to do so. J. G. Ballard’s Crash is a photorealistic portrait of evil. Here, he examines a dystopian gang of car crash fetishists. Now, I’ve never been turned on by a car (I can’t even drive) but this aligns with my experience of real-world villains. They are weird, which is also to say, unpredictable. (One of the themes I’d like to explore more in my own writing is the exhaustion of constantly having to figure out the thought process and motivations of those who’d cut off their own finger to rob a stranger of their hand.) With Pynchon, this applies as well, but he delves deeper (partly because his works tend to be much longer) into the propulsion that stems from threat. His characters are rarely still; they search for peace, but their loud worlds have been shaken. At the risk of sounding gloomy here, I’ll add that I also find myself in Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence, but there’s even less to be said about these authors in 2026. 

Part of the reason for Ballard and Pynchon coming up in Human Voices, Alien Conversations is that the interviewees tend to share a passion for them. Several list a Ballard novel among their favourite works of SF. This isn’t a coincidence. The likes of Jeff Noon will have found the same things to enjoy in Ballard as I have in his Vurt Series. The other writers that come up most frequently in my writing include Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Samuel R. Delany. In Human Voices, Alien Conversations, Delany lists Bester and Sturgeon as the writers of his favourite SF novels. You can find his key mainstream influences in there as well. 

JPG: What do you think are some of today’s biggest differences in science fiction coming from the UK and US?

JM: The central difference, to my mind, between British and American writers, is their self-consciousness as writers of genre fiction. This, in the UK, goes back to Olaf Stapledon, David Lindsay, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton, who were writing novels about other planets and the future, but I doubt “science fiction” was a term often used. They were writing allegories and warnings. Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. “Doc” Smith, however, were firmly aware of their roots in pulp, brazenly (and gloriously) escapist. This trend extends beyond the Golden Age. Compare J. G. Ballard’s grey dystopias with Philip K. Dick’s plastic realities. One seems to follow Kafka’s route into the speculative, while the other invigorates SF canon tropes. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, China Mieville’s The City & The City, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas are among the most loved contemporary works of British SF, but none of these revel in their speculative setting. John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, however, is a novel that could only be written by an American. (There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, Michael Moorcock being a prime example of a writer who managed to fuse a British and American way of thinking.) 

JPG: You are also a writer for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. How did that come about, and how has writing for the encyclopedia affected your approach to interviewing SF writers, editors, and artists?

JM: This actually came about after an interview. 

I had been reading The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction since I was a student and as someone who now writes about SF, the SFE is an inescapable reference work. It’s not just useful as a source of information, but opinion. You’ll see in Pat Cadigan’s Human Voices, Alien Conversations interview that she has a very interesting response to the SFE’s take on her career. As John Clute (its co-editor with David Langford) has supplied a Brobdingnagian number of entries, I thought he would be an interesting person to interview for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine. We carried on talking and following some of my own entries, we met in person. The one featured in Human Voices, Alien Conversations was our second, and was conducted at his dining table while I anxiously ensured that my phone was still recording. I’m still impressed by the speed with which he was able to formulate opinions, and it explains how he came to publish more words than perhaps any other critic. We’ve since started an SFE Substack, which currently features essays by John, me, and Gary Westfahl, but we’re open to new contributors. Topics thus far have included Brexit, The Wind and the Willows, Gormenghast, and autism as a product of human evolution. 

In terms of influencing my interviewing technique, it’s shown me that non-fiction can be both informative and challenging. Dr. Simon Malpas, who is a senior lecturer at The University of Edinburgh, said quite a few nice things about Human Voices, Alien Conversations, but the one I most appreciated was that it is “occasionally provocative.” I think the same could be said of the SFE in that it gives a balanced view of quality and in contrast to Wikipedia, isn’t afraid to make debatable assertions about SF history. It does, however, get some disgruntled emails, predominantly from insecure authors, which I see as a sign of doing something right.  

JPG: Can you share your thoughts on the interview as an artform and its role in genre fiction?

JM: Alfred Bester (better known for The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination) is a great example of an interviewer who turned conversations into art. “Woody [Allen] isn’t a funny man in real life,” he writes in an introduction. He makes his own presence felt so that the reader doesn’t perceive questions as appearing from dark corners, nor is the interviewee professing their responses like an influencer with a smartphone. I particularly enjoyed his exchange with Isaac Asimov because, although the focus was on the Foundation author, there was a real sense of being in a room with two characters. The best interviews tell a story. Of course, they’re opportunities for interviewees to promote their work, but they’re also vehicles of discovery as to how they got there. And you make that discovery through the lens of the interviewer. This is why Human Voices, Alien Conversations opens autobiographically, giving the reader a sense of who I am and how I came to be posing questions. In terms of the role it plays in genre fiction, I think it serves the same role as it does in the literary sphere: consumers of art want to feel a connection with the artist. I wonder if The Beatles would have achieved half their success if they recorded anonymously, never appeared on an album cover, and never advertised the personality in their music. 

JPG: Do you have any advice for interviewers and non-fiction genre adjacent writers? 

JM: The big thing I learned from Human Voices, Alien Conversations is to think of SF as something that’s happening now rather than the current period as a link in a chain that goes back to Mary Shelley. When thinking of SF editors, the first ones that come to mind are Hugo Gernsback, August Derleth, John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and Michael Moorcock, all prolific authors themselves. When I asked Neil Clarke about why his focus was on editing rather than writing, his response was that it wasn’t unusual, giving Ellen Datlow and Jonathan Strahan as examples. Had I been thinking more in 21st Century terms, Clarke would not have struck me as unique, as while there are many contemporary editors who write their own fiction, I can think of about as many who don’t. It is a question, however, that I chose to keep in, anticipating that many readers of the collection may also approach SF with a similar mindset.   

Secondly, I’d advise newer non-fiction writers to diversify. I began interviewing for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine because I’d previously published prose, poetry, and an article there (I was at the time and may still be the first to do all three). There are lots of people who want people to read what they write, but there are many gaps in the fence. 

Keep trying to squeeze through the same one: you may get through, or you may get stuck. 

###

Bios:

James Machell is a British writer. He contributes to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and curates its Substack. He also serves as Outreach Manager for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and was the 2025 Contest Chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Find him on Bluesky @jamesmachell.bsky.social or YouTube @Fell-Purpose. https://jamesmachell.com/ 

#

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What inspired you to conduct the series of interviews in Human Voices, Alien Conversations, and how do you go about selecting interviewees?

James Machell: Several of the interviews had appeared in Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and Electronic Brain. What I wanted to do with Human Voices, Alien Conversations was pull them together into one narrative, and additional interviews were conducted to fill what I perceived to be the gaps in the collection as an overview of SF in the 21st Century. In order to show this with a bird’s eye, I couldn’t just focus on writing when there’s art, editing, performance, and adaptation. I also wanted to explore understated significance. Samuel R. Delany, for example, is nowhere near as well known as Andy Weir, but his influence, even at the time of composing his major works, has been much more profound. Similarly, Chris Moore, with his prog-rock styled art for the SF Masterworks Series, created some of the most recognisable images in the history of SF but did so quietly, never chasing awards or drawing attention to himself: he let his art speak. Cyberpunk, almost exclusively associated with William Gibson, was developed by a “team” of writers in the ‘80s: I thought it would be much more interesting to speak with Pat Cadigan, who is frequently dubbed the “queen” of the subgenre. But I couldn’t just focus on the legends when their contributions to SF are constantly evolving through their influence on younger writers. Interviewees, therefore, vary greatly in age, juxtaposing the perspectives of those blossoming into the SF landscape with those who loosened the soil. Bogi Takács, Samantha Mills, and Ai Jiang, also included in Human Voices, Alien Conversations, are writers we should be looking out for. The final interview is with Matthew Holness, co-writer, co-director, and star of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which gets my vote as the most underappreciated use of SF in visual media. As Holness is now working on the third in a series of spin-off novels, he was ideal to pull everything together. 

JPG: How do you go about researching your subjects in preparation for interviews?

JM: Most of the interviewees were selected because I’d been enjoying their work for years. The questions came easily. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, however, were excellent resources for pinning down dates and discovering aspects of their careers which may have eluded even the most die-hard fan.  

JPG: What do you see as some of the main concerns and themes in early 21st Century science fiction?

JM: I might cheat here and offer two answers because I think the answer differs based on whether we’re talking about long or short form SF. With novels, the main concerns are harder to pinpoint, in major Western ones of this century, including M. John Harrison’s Light, China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. These books deal with the climate, colonisation, technology (developing with unprecedented strangeness), and the uncanny, but none of this is new. I think concerns may have shifted but the passions of the writer and tastes of the reader have roughly been continuous since the ‘60s. There’s a reason the Modernist period lasted all of forty years and the postmodern sees no sign of ending. Naturally, we live on a different planet now, but I don’t believe the cognitive shift from Donald Trump’s presidency or the rise of AI has been as profound as the First World War or Civil Rights Movement, at least among readers. Characters were having conversations with their automatic computers in the ‘50s and we can go all the way back to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 dystopia, It Can’t Happen Here, for premonitions of Trumpism.

The underlying revolution in 21st century SF is the shift in emphasis from sexuality to gender. Ellen Datlow waved goodbye to the 20th with her anthologies, Alien Sex and Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, perhaps the last time to shock an audience who would become mentally hardened by the internet. Some of the most striking stories to emerge during the last five years include Blue Neustifter’s “Unknown Number” which is told through a series of texts between a transgender woman and an alternate universe version of herself in which she didn’t physically transition, and Samantha Mills’ “Rabbit Test,” which contrasts the future of invasive procedures on women’s bodies with the history of abortion and pregnancy tests. In both cases, the author is examining the self of their protagonists in correlation to the world around them. This is a far cry from H. P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, or Clive Barker menacing their readers with abominations. The notion of the self is evolving and magazines, with a small but dedicated audience, provide a space for writers to explore this in different settings. Enormous strides have been made in the last 26 years regarding the understanding of gender fluidity and trans* identity. “What does it mean to be a woman?” is a question posed and answered since at least Simone de Beauvoir. My prediction for the next quarter of this century is that we’ll see further examinations of masculinity. Louis Theroux’s recent documentary on the “manosphere” has highlighted the prevalence of toxic manhood being marketed to young people. SF writers from the targeted age group will no doubt reflect on the so-called “red pill” philosophy and what it means to be a man in the mid-21st century. 

JPG: In your introductions and interviews, authors such as J. G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon are regularly referenced. What is your attraction to these difficult, genre-defying works?

JM: My attraction stems largely from seeing myself in their work. As much as I enjoy Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, I am less passionate about aristocrats discovering the joy of “simple living” as characters feeling anxious and being right to do so. J. G. Ballard’s Crash is a photorealistic portrait of evil. Here, he examines a dystopian gang of car crash fetishists. Now, I’ve never been turned on by a car (I can’t even drive) but this aligns with my experience of real-world villains. They are weird, which is also to say, unpredictable. (One of the themes I’d like to explore more in my own writing is the exhaustion of constantly having to figure out the thought process and motivations of those who’d cut off their own finger to rob a stranger of their hand.) With Pynchon, this applies as well, but he delves deeper (partly because his works tend to be much longer) into the propulsion that stems from threat. His characters are rarely still; they search for peace, but their loud worlds have been shaken. At the risk of sounding gloomy here, I’ll add that I also find myself in Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence, but there’s even less to be said about these authors in 2026. 

Part of the reason for Ballard and Pynchon coming up in Human Voices, Alien Conversations is that the interviewees tend to share a passion for them. Several list a Ballard novel among their favourite works of SF. This isn’t a coincidence. The likes of Jeff Noon will have found the same things to enjoy in Ballard as I have in his Vurt Series. The other writers that come up most frequently in my writing include Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Samuel R. Delany. In Human Voices, Alien Conversations, Delany lists Bester and Sturgeon as the writers of his favourite SF novels. You can find his key mainstream influences in there as well. 

JPG: What do you think are some of today’s biggest differences in science fiction coming from the UK and US?

JM: The central difference, to my mind, between British and American writers, is their self-consciousness as writers of genre fiction. This, in the UK, goes back to Olaf Stapledon, David Lindsay, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton, who were writing novels about other planets and the future, but I doubt “science fiction” was a term often used. They were writing allegories and warnings. Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. “Doc” Smith, however, were firmly aware of their roots in pulp, brazenly (and gloriously) escapist. This trend extends beyond the Golden Age. Compare J. G. Ballard’s grey dystopias with Philip K. Dick’s plastic realities. One seems to follow Kafka’s route into the speculative, while the other invigorates SF canon tropes. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, China Mieville’s The City & The City, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas are among the most loved contemporary works of British SF, but none of these revel in their speculative setting. John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, however, is a novel that could only be written by an American. (There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, Michael Moorcock being a prime example of a writer who managed to fuse a British and American way of thinking.) 

JPG: You are also a writer for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. How did that come about, and how has writing for the encyclopedia affected your approach to interviewing SF writers, editors, and artists?

JM: This actually came about after an interview. 

I had been reading The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction since I was a student and as someone who now writes about SF, the SFE is an inescapable reference work. It’s not just useful as a source of information, but opinion. You’ll see in Pat Cadigan’s Human Voices, Alien Conversations interview that she has a very interesting response to the SFE’s take on her career. As John Clute (its co-editor with David Langford) has supplied a Brobdingnagian number of entries, I thought he would be an interesting person to interview for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine. We carried on talking and following some of my own entries, we met in person. The one featured in Human Voices, Alien Conversations was our second, and was conducted at his dining table while I anxiously ensured that my phone was still recording. I’m still impressed by the speed with which he was able to formulate opinions, and it explains how he came to publish more words than perhaps any other critic. We’ve since started an SFE Substack, which currently features essays by John, me, and Gary Westfahl, but we’re open to new contributors. Topics thus far have included Brexit, The Wind and the Willows, Gormenghast, and autism as a product of human evolution. 

In terms of influencing my interviewing technique, it’s shown me that non-fiction can be both informative and challenging. Dr. Simon Malpas, who is a senior lecturer at The University of Edinburgh, said quite a few nice things about Human Voices, Alien Conversations, but the one I most appreciated was that it is “occasionally provocative.” I think the same could be said of the SFE in that it gives a balanced view of quality and in contrast to Wikipedia, isn’t afraid to make debatable assertions about SF history. It does, however, get some disgruntled emails, predominantly from insecure authors, which I see as a sign of doing something right.  

JPG: Can you share your thoughts on the interview as an artform and its role in genre fiction?

JM: Alfred Bester (better known for The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination) is a great example of an interviewer who turned conversations into art. “Woody [Allen] isn’t a funny man in real life,” he writes in an introduction. He makes his own presence felt so that the reader doesn’t perceive questions as appearing from dark corners, nor is the interviewee professing their responses like an influencer with a smartphone. I particularly enjoyed his exchange with Isaac Asimov because, although the focus was on the Foundation author, there was a real sense of being in a room with two characters. The best interviews tell a story. Of course, they’re opportunities for interviewees to promote their work, but they’re also vehicles of discovery as to how they got there. And you make that discovery through the lens of the interviewer. This is why Human Voices, Alien Conversations opens autobiographically, giving the reader a sense of who I am and how I came to be posing questions. In terms of the role it plays in genre fiction, I think it serves the same role as it does in the literary sphere: consumers of art want to feel a connection with the artist. I wonder if The Beatles would have achieved half their success if they recorded anonymously, never appeared on an album cover, and never advertised the personality in their music. 

JPG: Do you have any advice for interviewers and non-fiction genre adjacent writers? 

JM: The big thing I learned from Human Voices, Alien Conversations is to think of SF as something that’s happening now rather than the current period as a link in a chain that goes back to Mary Shelley. When thinking of SF editors, the first ones that come to mind are Hugo Gernsback, August Derleth, John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and Michael Moorcock, all prolific authors themselves. When I asked Neil Clarke about why his focus was on editing rather than writing, his response was that it wasn’t unusual, giving Ellen Datlow and Jonathan Strahan as examples. Had I been thinking more in 21st Century terms, Clarke would not have struck me as unique, as while there are many contemporary editors who write their own fiction, I can think of about as many who don’t. It is a question, however, that I chose to keep in, anticipating that many readers of the collection may also approach SF with a similar mindset.   

Secondly, I’d advise newer non-fiction writers to diversify. I began interviewing for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine because I’d previously published prose, poetry, and an article there (I was at the time and may still be the first to do all three). There are lots of people who want people to read what they write, but there are many gaps in the fence. 

Keep trying to squeeze through the same one: you may get through, or you may get stuck. 

###

Bios:

James Machell is a British writer. He contributes to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and curates its Substack. He also serves as Outreach Manager for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and was the 2025 Contest Chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Find him on Bluesky @jamesmachell.bsky.social or YouTube @Fell-Purpose. https://jamesmachell.com/ 

#

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

Vector (ed. Polina Levontin): As a literary scholar, you have written both about motherhood in Frankenstein and theorised the gothic genre in Dracula, a book you edited. How does writing and ‘research as practice’ intersect in The Turn?

Rachel Feder: One of my mentors in graduate school, Yopie Prins, once described herself as “promiscuous” in her scholarly interests. This stuck with me, and I like to say that I’m a slut for genre. I’m interested in genre as a form of experiment, one that calls a certain imagined readership into being. I’m interested in how genre hopping might allow me to imagine and, hopefully, connect with different communities of readers.

The Gothic is a really interesting test case, here. A text I think about a lot is Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished Gothic novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, which is, in my opinion, her most radically proto-feminist work. When Wollstonecraft enters political-theoretical discussions—which it’s actually incredible that she was able to do so effectively, given both her gender and her class and family background—she writes to the readership that was already established for that discourse field. She offers almost chiropractic adjustments to patriarchy. But then we get this raw, unfinished Gothic novel (edited and mediated by Godwin, who burned her drafts, sure), and suddenly we’re talking directly about abuse, assault, abortion, and suicide, in highly political ways. The femme-coded nature of the Gothic—which has always been a trade, or even pulp, genre—lets Wollstonecraft imagine talking directly to the victims of patriarchy. One of the most invested readers of that text was Mary Shelley—it really haunts her work—so Wollstonecraft’s feminist intervention in the Gothic informs the history of science fiction, too.

Personally, I’m interested in how the Gothic reveals totalities. When I want to understand forces that feel invisible, totally oppressive, or inevitable in our world, playing with fiction lets me take a hard look at my subject. When someone runs out of a haunted house, you get to see the house, if only for a moment.

And the follow-up question is the converse: writing from experience rather than theory, about motherhood, academic life, academic life as a mother… To me, who is also both, The Turn spoke directly. Genre fiction is precisely the mode to talk about the politics of care, both childcare and care as a creator more generally. Was reaching for the Gothic motivated by the desire to convey the real problems in the most visceral way?

RF: Across genres, I would say that my writing mind and my parental mind are inseparable. I like to joke that I made my kids strange baby books—I began working in earnest on my monograph, Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood Under the Sign of Frankenstein, almost immediately postpartum with my older child, and started writing The Turn while home with a new baby during the pandemic. One argument I make in Harvester is that there is no such thing as writing from theory rather than experience. Our experiences—including our familial and embodied experiences, and our experiences of giving and receiving care—are always going to inform how we understand theory.

And then of course, there are external events. The pandemic. Did it really happen? Apparently, forgetting – a global amnesia – seems to be one of our responses. The memory gaps, of course, play a key part in the plot. Is this a random connection? When, in relation to the pandemic, did you begin writing this novella? Did you have to overcome forgetting?

RF: In the summer of 2020, my husband and kids and I were staying at my childhood home in Boulder. (The house in The Turn is not based on my childhood home, but rather on the home of my friend, the writer, scholar, and lawyer Natalie Brown.) I awoke one morning to a strange dream, the dream Baxter has at the beginning of the novella. In the dream, I walked out into my childhood living room and looked out the window to find the house was a ship floating on the sea. 

My first attempt at this project was a story serialized in the online literary journal Luna Luna Magazine. The editors there were so generously willing to take a chance on something I had yet to write, and very kind to me when, for various reasons, I was unable to keep going. But Baxter stayed with me, and, with some distance, I was finally able to come back to her story, and bring her home.

It’s interesting to me that you bring up forgetting. I’m a very inductive writer, so I didn’t imagine the memory gaps in the story as such when I was first drafting—I was just learning things at the same time Baxter did. But forgetting is such a crucial component of the way, for example, Mary Shelley imagines motherhood in relation to the Gothic. In terms of The Turn, I think the question for me has more to do with the fraught connection between cognitive and embodied knowledge.

One of the horror/realism aspects in The Turn is how gendered parental roles are. Fathers seem superfluous, while the biological bond between a mother and a child is rendered fantastical and supernatural. Is the gender of the child significant? In this way, we find a protagonist torn between two male figures with unnatural power over her body. 

RF: It’s really important to me, as a cis hetero person who often writes about parenthood—and who writes, inherently, from my own experience of the world, my own identity—not to ever imply that I think about biological motherhood as somehow better or “more than” any other type of parenthood. I feel the need to tread lightly to avoid spoilers here, so I will just mention that the monstrous forces at the margins of Baxter’s world are both paternal and maternal in nature—a hallmark of the Gothic.

Regardless of whether this pertains to gender, the fantastical, supernatural bonds in the book have to do with loving a child unconditionally and caring for that child no matter what. That’s the real magic, I think, that makes a parent. 

In terms of the kids, Thebes and Quinn just kind of came to me whole cloth. You’d need to ask them any questions you have about their genders.

Power is often narrativised as magic. The imagery of vampirism has been used in critiques of capitalism and deployed to represent sexual power. Situating consent within the ambivalent framing of the gothic genre seemed especially difficult. What were the parts that gave you the most trouble?

RF: When I teach the history of vampire literature, I invite students to consider how stories can be subversive, but not necessarily progressive. Monster stories often open up pockets of possibility—for queerness and polyamory in Dracula, for example—but then punish these desires and reassert the status quo.

One of the Gothic novellas that inspired this project is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. I’ll never forget reading that text in class for the first time. The professor, the great James scholar William Veeder, paid particular attention to the end of the book. I remember him saying something along the lines of, sometimes the Gothic opens Pandora’s box, and what comes out is too powerful. You can’t close the box. You can’t reassert the frame. You can’t put things back in their “proper” place. I’m committed to this Gothic potential. The greatest challenge of this project—and the most rewarding—was letting Baxter fully embrace her own power, even as the world around her continued to spin into disorder.

Will there be a sequence? What are you working on now?

RF: The form of the Gothic governess novella is an integral part of The Turn’s deep engagement with literary history. Someday I’d love to try my hand at some kind of serialized adaptation of the story to a different medium, extending past the current ending, maybe even in collaboration with other writers.

I’m working on a few projects now, in different genres: a literary horroromance novel; a libretto for a musical; a collaborative scholarly project. Like all my creative endeavors, these examine how literary history informs our shared cultural mythologies, and our sense of what we owe ourselves and each other.

Vector (ed. Polina Levontin): As a literary scholar, you have written both about motherhood in Frankenstein and theorised the gothic genre in Dracula, a book you edited. How does writing and ‘research as practice’ intersect in The Turn?

Rachel Feder: One of my mentors in graduate school, Yopie Prins, once described herself as “promiscuous” in her scholarly interests. This stuck with me, and I like to say that I’m a slut for genre. I’m interested in genre as a form of experiment, one that calls a certain imagined readership into being. I’m interested in how genre hopping might allow me to imagine and, hopefully, connect with different communities of readers.

The Gothic is a really interesting test case, here. A text I think about a lot is Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished Gothic novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, which is, in my opinion, her most radically proto-feminist work. When Wollstonecraft enters political-theoretical discussions—which it’s actually incredible that she was able to do so effectively, given both her gender and her class and family background—she writes to the readership that was already established for that discourse field. She offers almost chiropractic adjustments to patriarchy. But then we get this raw, unfinished Gothic novel (edited and mediated by Godwin, who burned her drafts, sure), and suddenly we’re talking directly about abuse, assault, abortion, and suicide, in highly political ways. The femme-coded nature of the Gothic—which has always been a trade, or even pulp, genre—lets Wollstonecraft imagine talking directly to the victims of patriarchy. One of the most invested readers of that text was Mary Shelley—it really haunts her work—so Wollstonecraft’s feminist intervention in the Gothic informs the history of science fiction, too.

Personally, I’m interested in how the Gothic reveals totalities. When I want to understand forces that feel invisible, totally oppressive, or inevitable in our world, playing with fiction lets me take a hard look at my subject. When someone runs out of a haunted house, you get to see the house, if only for a moment.

And the follow-up question is the converse: writing from experience rather than theory, about motherhood, academic life, academic life as a mother… To me, who is also both, The Turn spoke directly. Genre fiction is precisely the mode to talk about the politics of care, both childcare and care as a creator more generally. Was reaching for the Gothic motivated by the desire to convey the real problems in the most visceral way?

RF: Across genres, I would say that my writing mind and my parental mind are inseparable. I like to joke that I made my kids strange baby books—I began working in earnest on my monograph, Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood Under the Sign of Frankenstein, almost immediately postpartum with my older child, and started writing The Turn while home with a new baby during the pandemic. One argument I make in Harvester is that there is no such thing as writing from theory rather than experience. Our experiences—including our familial and embodied experiences, and our experiences of giving and receiving care—are always going to inform how we understand theory.

And then of course, there are external events. The pandemic. Did it really happen? Apparently, forgetting – a global amnesia – seems to be one of our responses. The memory gaps, of course, play a key part in the plot. Is this a random connection? When, in relation to the pandemic, did you begin writing this novella? Did you have to overcome forgetting?

RF: In the summer of 2020, my husband and kids and I were staying at my childhood home in Boulder. (The house in The Turn is not based on my childhood home, but rather on the home of my friend, the writer, scholar, and lawyer Natalie Brown.) I awoke one morning to a strange dream, the dream Baxter has at the beginning of the novella. In the dream, I walked out into my childhood living room and looked out the window to find the house was a ship floating on the sea. 

My first attempt at this project was a story serialized in the online literary journal Luna Luna Magazine. The editors there were so generously willing to take a chance on something I had yet to write, and very kind to me when, for various reasons, I was unable to keep going. But Baxter stayed with me, and, with some distance, I was finally able to come back to her story, and bring her home.

It’s interesting to me that you bring up forgetting. I’m a very inductive writer, so I didn’t imagine the memory gaps in the story as such when I was first drafting—I was just learning things at the same time Baxter did. But forgetting is such a crucial component of the way, for example, Mary Shelley imagines motherhood in relation to the Gothic. In terms of The Turn, I think the question for me has more to do with the fraught connection between cognitive and embodied knowledge.

One of the horror/realism aspects in The Turn is how gendered parental roles are. Fathers seem superfluous, while the biological bond between a mother and a child is rendered fantastical and supernatural. Is the gender of the child significant? In this way, we find a protagonist torn between two male figures with unnatural power over her body. 

RF: It’s really important to me, as a cis hetero person who often writes about parenthood—and who writes, inherently, from my own experience of the world, my own identity—not to ever imply that I think about biological motherhood as somehow better or “more than” any other type of parenthood. I feel the need to tread lightly to avoid spoilers here, so I will just mention that the monstrous forces at the margins of Baxter’s world are both paternal and maternal in nature—a hallmark of the Gothic.

Regardless of whether this pertains to gender, the fantastical, supernatural bonds in the book have to do with loving a child unconditionally and caring for that child no matter what. That’s the real magic, I think, that makes a parent. 

In terms of the kids, Thebes and Quinn just kind of came to me whole cloth. You’d need to ask them any questions you have about their genders.

Power is often narrativised as magic. The imagery of vampirism has been used in critiques of capitalism and deployed to represent sexual power. Situating consent within the ambivalent framing of the gothic genre seemed especially difficult. What were the parts that gave you the most trouble?

RF: When I teach the history of vampire literature, I invite students to consider how stories can be subversive, but not necessarily progressive. Monster stories often open up pockets of possibility—for queerness and polyamory in Dracula, for example—but then punish these desires and reassert the status quo.

One of the Gothic novellas that inspired this project is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. I’ll never forget reading that text in class for the first time. The professor, the great James scholar William Veeder, paid particular attention to the end of the book. I remember him saying something along the lines of, sometimes the Gothic opens Pandora’s box, and what comes out is too powerful. You can’t close the box. You can’t reassert the frame. You can’t put things back in their “proper” place. I’m committed to this Gothic potential. The greatest challenge of this project—and the most rewarding—was letting Baxter fully embrace her own power, even as the world around her continued to spin into disorder.

Will there be a sequence? What are you working on now?

RF: The form of the Gothic governess novella is an integral part of The Turn’s deep engagement with literary history. Someday I’d love to try my hand at some kind of serialized adaptation of the story to a different medium, extending past the current ending, maybe even in collaboration with other writers.

I’m working on a few projects now, in different genres: a literary horroromance novel; a libretto for a musical; a collaborative scholarly project. Like all my creative endeavors, these examine how literary history informs our shared cultural mythologies, and our sense of what we owe ourselves and each other.

By Ana Sun

Ever wonder why we tend to refer to the future in its singular form in everyday speech? Why ‘the future’, and not simply ‘futures’? Considering that we can probably agree that a myriad of futures is possible before one of them falls into the present, this seems to be a mundane but overlooked mystery. 

In Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040, Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman observed [1]:  

There is a problem with most books about the future – and indeed, there is a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. This is because of a simple point. The fact is, there is no single future, regardless of our deepest desire that it be so, and there is no heavenly salvation in sight.

As someone who often explores progressive, positive futures within the context of climate change and social justice through science fiction, in particular Solarpunk [2], I’m intrigued: does the common view of a singular future mean we are more likely to believe that climate collapse is inevitable? Do we therefore find it difficult to imagine – and enact – alternatives? Have we inadvertently accepted a destiny described by cyberpunk, a future rocket-boosted by uncaring technology, systems of oppression and power concentrated in the hands of a few? In Zoefuturistic terms, have we simply accepted the ‘being’ and forfeited the ‘becoming’?

There’s some evidence that language can influence how we perceive time and our relationship with the future… or, rather, futures [3]. Our bodies are limited in conscious capacity, our brains constrained by how our memories are formed [4] [5] [6].

Unlike futurists and futurologists, thinking about the long-term future in its simultaneous multiplicities, especially when it comes to a complex issue such as climate change, is not something that most of us are able to conceptualise easily [7]. Sure, we may deal well enough with the immediate future, such as considering different possible routes we might take between two locations, or how we might fill the hours between morning and night on a given day. Beyond a certain timeframe, the future can resemble a different place; this afternoon, tonight, or tomorrow can easily seem like disembodied worlds beyond our reach [27]. And yet, the next second appears on the near horizon in the shadow of the following minute, then the hour thereafter – all rapidly pouring into the now, one liquid moment flowing into the next.

Perhaps there are deeper reasons for why we struggle with notions of futures in our everyday lives, and that’s worth examining. 

Caught in destiny’s net

Sometime in the early summer of 2025, after an event on climate change resilience, a frustrated attendee next to me mumbled words to the effect, “So all of it is going to end, isn’t it?” 

At the time, her blunt nihilism shocked me into silence, but that feeling of impotence is all too familiar: what’s the use of fighting if all will be destroyed in the end? If we were to believe that an impending climate collapse is destiny, we’d have already been defeated before we even began. 

One winter morning, I asked a question to an audience of about two hundred people in the middle of a talk I was giving: how did they visualise critical environmental thresholds – what we commonly call ‘climate tipping points’? The majority believed these to be a cliff-edge for survival: once we topple over the side, it’s game over. No surprise; I certainly did too, once.

In August 2025, updated analysis showed an increased risk of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapsing when researchers examined data modelling that ran for a longer timeframe until 2300 and 2500 [8]. Separately, a seventh planetary boundary – out of the nine environmental limits that demarcate the planet’s health –  has been breached this year, according to the annual assessment by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as ocean acidification transgresses the critical safe threshold for marine ecosystems [9].

All these are alarming signals designed to induce a sense of urgency and a drive to action, but taken alone without accompanying solutions, these types of headlines incite panic and breed disempowerment [10], rendering us helpless and stripped of agency while an inevitable future barrels down upon us.

The AMOC tipping point is particularly worrying because the change to humanity as we know it would be drastic. If we don’t succeed in lowering our CO2 emissions in line with the Paris Agreement,  the current estimation is that we might pass this particular tipping point within a few decades. 

There still remains deep uncertainty whether the AMOC may weaken partially or result in a full collapse, and over what timeframe. Likely, we have at least a few decades at hand to act to avert the worst outcomes. Johan Rockström, Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said of the seventh planetary boundary breach [11]:

We’re not yet in the high-risk zone of irreversible, unmanageable change of the planet, which suggests that we can still turn this around. The window is still open even though it’s closing fast, and we have so much evidence of scalable solutions across all sectors from the food sector to the built environment to the energy transition that we can bend the curves and bring ourselves back within a safe operating space within the next decades.

Seaver Wang, the Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute wrote comprehensively about the misnomer of ‘tipping points’: 

First, the word ‘tipping’ implies the rapidity of an unbalanced cart toppling over. […] Second, the word ‘point,’ too, is bound to confuse. It implies a single, precise, known critical threshold beyond which Earth system components tip. [12]

The reality is that environmental tipping points are far more complex [13]. The Global Tipping Points Report 2023 emphasises that their assessment ‘does not suggest that crossing major tipping points could lead to runaway warming, with mitigation to prevent further tipping points being worthwhile even if some tipping points are reached. [14]’. 

We also spend so little time focusing on positive tipping points – such as those scalable solutions that Johan Rockström refers to [11] [15]. If my sample of two hundred or so attendees was anything to go by, solutions that have a positive impact aren’t something that typically crosses our minds. While our media coverage would have us imagine apocalyptic scenarios where the Earth drowns under several metres of seawater – a scenario that, in reality, is highly unlikely in the near future – the current estimates suggest that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would likely take hundreds to thousands of years to melt after their tipping points are breached [16]. The complexity in predicting circulation and heat transfers in the ocean means much is unknown; current projections, even in our worst case scenario, project sea level rise of up to 180mm by 2050 [17].

We shouldn’t be under the impression that all is well – but there’s time to act, to reverse the damage if we could collectively grasp our agency.

Unfortunately, few narrative tools exist to remind us we are not rolling downhill off the far side of Freytag’s Pyramid into fated tragedy. Just how well science fiction is placed to shift collective imagination is still a nascent experiment [18].

Science fiction: from imaginary prediction to unintended blueprint

It might sometimes look like cyberpunk has predicted our current trajectory: a world where AI is poised to displace us, where an elite, privileged few exploit political institutions to concentrate their power, preying on people and planet to enrich themselves. 

Ursula K. Le Guin famously declared [19], ‘Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.’ Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discusses this at length in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [20]: ‘SF is imaginary prediction, drawing on the same sort of historical-projective suspension of disbelief as the real thing, if only to explore, to problematize, and to play with it.’

In other words, science fiction originally took on the mantle of holding up a mirror to our present from a possible future. Until recently, SF has often been written in past tense, presenting narratives as if a particular future has already happened so we could project ourselves forward in time. But how did we get from those glorious imaginary predictions to what Simon McNeil recounts as the ‘future horrors Silicon Valley merchants of human misery are trying to produce’ [21]? How did we get from Star Trek to a world where technology is threatening humanity, at the very same time as our obsession with economic growth means the planet can no longer sustain all of us?

In his epic essay The Men Who Sold the Moon, Eden Kupernmintz explains how we our current situation might have transpired [22]:  

[..] if you want to read about militarism in Heinlein’s work, you can find countless articles online on the topic, as well as on the fascism of Campbell and the many, many awful passages of Vance’s career. But consider the supposedly more progressive works of authors like Simak, Asimov, Pohl Anderson, Blish, or Roddenberry. Most, if not all, of their ideas and values are realized through individualist, liberal lenses. They are mostly concerned with heroes who uphold values such as compassion, honor, duty, and virtue. They very rarely, if ever, engage with meaningful, systematic criticisms of society. Indeed, they are perfect examples of “suburban science fiction”, importing much of the underlying, and thus powerful, presuppositions of our own society into the future. Their heroes are almost invariably male, white, abled, and dripping with machismo and “charisma”. Solutions to problems revolve around rationalism and scientism at best and downright calls for technocracy at worst. The idea of the supremacy of science, without engaging in its colonial roots, without engaging with ideas and problems like eugenics, without any meaningful critiques of its role in serving capitalism, is one of the main motivating powers of much of the careers cited above.

Kupernmintz goes on to suggest that the heroes portrayed in the Golden Age of science fiction created the archetypes upon which powerful people such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel could comfortably model themselves. A challenging stance, certainly, to flatten such rich visions of the future. However, even the post-scarcity utopia depicted in Star Trek would have assumed that we continue extractive practices on Earth’s finite resources – such as precious metals and fossil fuels – for us to get there [23].

Science fiction as a genre has never set out to predict any specific future and yet here we are, witnessing what should have been cautionary tales become ingrained blueprints for the potential destruction of humanity and our living planet – adding to already debilitating helplessness, tempting us to give in to seemingly inescapable destiny. 

In recent years, we’ve seen a more significant shift of how we discuss science fiction as a mirror of our present to a vehicle for intentional imagination and activism. Roger Luckhurst in his review of Uneven Futures [24] calls it ‘a move from SF as noun to SF as verb, a set of actions, […] a move from static textual study to motivated activity that follows on from the reading of texts.’ Alongside genres such as Afrofuturism and Solarpunk, we can also observe increasing use of applied science fiction to anticipate policy risks and opportunities [25].

Even then, the question continues to plague me: might stories alone be enough? Would words on a page ultimately change how we behave, as individuals living within systems that are often out of our control? A question worth asking, considering our human physiology proves a disadvantage when it comes to thinking about the future – because of our struggle with the concept of time.

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey

In a book that’s equal parts science, philosophy and poetry, The Death of Forever, Darryl Reanney explains how time as we would commonly think of it – as a force external to us – is likely an illusion [6]:

Superficially, time is something we create when we measure it, dividing it into seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. […] Our experience of time is of something that moves, that sweeps upon its breast like a river forever moving at a constant rate from past to future.

Our sense of how time passes directly correlates to the number of instances our brains encode as new experiences; these are also how memories are formed. This is why sometimes a month can speed by, but a minute can feel eternal [26].

My favourite understanding of what happens to our sense of time – from moments to memories – comes from Daniel Kahnemann, who describes the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ [5]. The experiencing self is the part of us that lives in the continuous present and knows only of the now. However, these actual moments get discarded, filtered through the ‘remembering self’, which leaves us with a cohesive picture of who we are. Kahnemann says:

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories – it starts immediately. We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”

Suppose a collection of these stories is how we make sense of our past, but scientists have discovered the neural pathways we use to remember the past are identical to ones we use for imagining the future. 

Professors Martin A. Conway and Catherine Loveday articulated the remembering-imagining system as a window where we can access everyday memories of the recent past and the near future [27]. In their research, they found that events that lie further in the future are more abstract, just as memories in the remote past become more generic; they likened it to a ‘fish-eye lens’. Interesting challenges arise when we need to think beyond the visible future [28]: 

Just as in certain areas of physics, for example, quantum mechanics, it is not possible to precisely predict a future state of a system, so with people the future is only probable. However, once a future state has come into being, it may be possible, to at least some extent, to work back to previous states. […]

Nevertheless, retrospectively reversible or not, given that there are an infinite number of indeterminate possible futures, this poses a major adaptive problem for goal-driven organisms. This is particularly so as the end point of all unrealized goals lies somewhere in the future. Indeed, in order to have a goal a future state has to be anticipated and often consciously imagined.”

While their research refers specifically to individual memory forming and goal creation, I can’t help wondering what this would mean on a collective level. More on that later.

Firstly, our actual experiences are fleeting. The moment passes and our brains form a narrative about what we thought happened – and no, it’s not necessarily reliable. Secondly, cognitive science suggests that we can only look as far into the future clearly as we are able to recall the past; beyond a certain point, the future becomes less certain and more conjecture, just as the past becomes fuzzier in our memory. If we want to determine a goal that’s beyond the boundary of the remembering-imagining system, we need to consciously imagine what we want our futures to be. But that assumes we have free will and therein lies another pitfall, a conundrum possibly best summarised by S. Pahl and colleagues [29]: 

If evidence for climate change events is difficult to retrieve from memory, climate risks will be underestimated (or biased toward very salient information or images). Moreover, information about climate change faces stiff competition from the media barrage and other daily issues that are simply more salient, compelling and urgent in demanding our attention. […] In addition, research in cognitive psychology has indicated that individuals experience less emotive mental imagery with respect to generalized long-term goals (such as living more healthily or sustainably) compared to short-term goals (such as eating a doughnut or driving to the shop), because the former are less engaging and may lack specific cues in our daily environment that trigger appropriate action (whereas a doughnut might be displayed in a shop we walk past, with additional multi-sensory cues such as smell).

In her excellent book Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore discusses the famous Libet experiments – which imply an intention to act exists before the brain is conscious of the action, therefore potentially suggesting that ‘free will’ is an illusion [4]. The idea that we don’t have free will is so antithetical to our experience that the debate surrounding interpretation of these experiments endures. However, Libet discovered that what we do have is an overriding mechanism. In Blackmore’s words, “although we do not have free will, we do have ‘free won’t’.”

On an individual level, this means we have a severe cognitive disadvantage in connecting a climate-crisis-free future to our immediate present in a way that drives positive action. The question then: how might we exercise our ‘free won’t?’

In her final chapter, Blackmore gives us a potential clue:

Some people argue that the addition of language completely transforms minds, bringing about the essentials of consciousness, including the sense of self, theory of mind and the ability to think about past and future.

The power of language, the power of becoming

You might well call to mind Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or its film adaptation Arrival. I doubt we’d remember the future without some alien assistance in this world; however, evidence shows language can influence our perception of time, including how we might visualise time as directions. Some languages contain the sense of time in their grammar: past tense (“I went”), present tense (“I go”) and a future tense (“I will go”). English does not have conjugations, but Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese do. Other languages could be said to be ‘futureless’, where a qualifier (e.g. tomorrow, last night), when tagged onto a phrase, clarifies the sense of time; in languages such as Mandarin and German, we would say “I go tomorrow”, and it refers to a future time [3]. 

In a 2013 study, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at UCLA, concludes that speakers of ‘futureless languages’ such as German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages engaged more with the future in terms of financial savings and maintained better health, behaviours he attributes to how they don’t view the future as something separate from the present [30]. While we should be conscious that correlation never implies causation, the results are nonetheless fascinating.

We would have to make greater logical leaps to conclude if understanding our own linguistic biases would reframe our relationship to the perceived destiny of the climate crisis – and to conjure up viable alternatives. However, the field of futures anthropology might provide some useful vocabulary to unpack how we experience and envision the future, revealing how we might act in the present. Unlike Dr. Louise Banks, perhaps we don’t have to know the future to make our choices. 

From the outset of this essay, I raised the question of whether we might be treating environmental collapse as destiny, a deliberate word choice. ‘Destiny’ is one of the six orientations that Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight proposed in The Anthropology of the Future, enabling us to examine our relationship with the future – or futures – with richer nuance [31]. Other orientations include anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality and hope. 

I used the word destiny as we might do in common parlance, but also as an orientation: how a future would come to pass regardless of what happens in between, despite how we might get from here to there. The intention had been to provoke: have we simply accepted that an inequitable AI future coupled with the climate emergency would happen? Are we content to let it happen? 

The nuances of these words warrant a closer look. Expectation has a close but different nuance to anticipation: 

One may, for instance, expect rain and take an umbrella when going out ‘just in case.’ The expectation of rain, is, in this instance, still on the horizon and is tempered by, for example, weather reports that have failed in the past. […] Expectation may be viewed as a conservative teleology, one that gives thickness to the present through its reliance on the past. To anticipate rain, however, is to feel and smell it in the air, to close one’s windows and cover lawn furniture while imagining the future in the present. Anticipation slims the present, often breaking entirely with the past as it draws present and future into the same activity timespace [31].

Anticipation has a forward pull; expectation implies an action that often coincides with a notion of ‘ought’ or ‘should’. We expect that if we install solar panels, we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; we expect it because we’ve seen this happen before. To anticipate a world running on renewables has a forward-looking nuance, it may mean we focus on developing technologies across different types of energy generators to manage consistent power. Anticipating this kind of future gives me goosebumps. 

Speculation happens in the gap between what we expect and what we anticipate – when the end point is not clear, and when the information is partial or unavailable. For example, if the rollout of solar farms did not necessarily reduce reliance on fossil fuels, we might speculate that something has gone quite wrong with our energy governance. Or we might speculate whether we would have better success had we decided to prioritise, say, bladeless turbines. At the time of writing, the UK government is building policies on speculation: to ensure long-term energy resilience, we would need a combination of sources, including nuclear, geothermal, solar and wind [33]. The power of speculation could be that first step that creates hypotheses and assumptions against which we can create models or gather existing evidence – enabling us to make solutions real. 

Just the other day, while on a train to North Wales, I’d been struck by the number of solar farms en route; this is a new thing. Potentiality is rooted in the present, a sense that things have been set in motion, lending possibility to certain futures. Based on the view out my train window, and the offshore wind farms when I look out to the English Channel closer to home, a world running solely on a diverse range of renewables is a potentiality.

Finally, hope — a word used so often, we probably take its meaning for granted. Hope: a forward-driving force, fed by potentiality, resting on anticipation. Bryant and Knight describe hope as an orientation that ‘emerges in the gap between the potential and the actual, between matter and its not-yet form’. But my preferred definition comes the stirring words of Rebecca Solnit [34]:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and in that spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. […] Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. 

In order to evade undesirable destinies, of all the orientations available to us, I consider hope our primary vehicle. But individual hope is rarely enough – how might we bolster collective hope for collective action? 

Making future memories to remember

Summer had come early that day in May, rendering the communal meeting space warmer inside than out. As part of the cultural work around the Rights of River Charter for the Ouse, about twenty of us gathered and explored how we might strengthen our relationship to the river and channel its voice through conversation and collaborative art. In the centre of the room, an old metal bucket had been filled with river water earlier that morning; throughout the entire day, a part of the Ouse remained with us.

The inspiration and exhilaration from that one day gave birth to collective and individual memories that have since continued. Ideas flowed, creativity flourished, connections between humans and human-to-water rejuvenated. For me, the workshop sowed seeds of imagination, evoking emotions that would later make it into my writing, into the edits for my short story collection [2] that I’d been working on at the time. 

In this instance, collective memory has been instrumental in building a future-facing, positive relationship with a body of water that we have neglected for too long. Of course, collective memory could be traumatic too, as evidenced by the events around Covid-19 [35] – a global pandemic which had long been a potentiality most of us somehow ignored. To imagine desired futures, we would need to be intentional about creating collective memories so we can have rich pasts to carry forward into new futures. 

Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, wrote in his recent book How to Fall in Love with the Future [36]: 

Researchers use the term ‘mental time travel’ to describe our capacity to imagine the future – or the past – and how that capacity impacts our present-day experiences and decisions. While a lot of research has focused on individual future thought, more recently researchers have been expanding the focus of their attention to collective memory and collective future thought, or what they term ‘collective mental time travel’. 

[…] When we ‘time travel’ to the future, we dip into the cupboards of our memory, rummage around for snippets that might be useful, and then combine these snippets to create novel and unique ideas about the future. In other words, we assemble visions of the future from the resources of our past.’ 

Researchers have also found that social interaction with knowledge can shape outcomes: it could induce forgetfulness but also reinforce insights [37]. At the end of his book, Hopkins generously shares his ‘Time Machine Blueprint’ – tools to help a collective group of people mentally travel into the future. Science-fiction writers would recognise the worldbuilding; improv theatre types would recognise the set ups. 

We already have the skills and the tools to evade a destiny we don’t want. We already know how to form collective memories; we celebrate festivals, commune for conventions. As storytellers, we know what matters less is when the story is being told because our experiencing selves will forget it all. It’s about what happens after it ends – what our remembering selves will keep.

Participating in making collective memories – the conscious decision to take words off a page into our real world – charts a way forward to creating kindred futures: futures enabling us to reclaim our agency from the illusion of destiny, futures that care for people and planet.

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29. S. Pahl, S. Sheppard, C. Boomsma, and C. Groves. “Perceptions of time in relation to climate change.” WIREs Clim Change, Vol. 5, Issue 3: 375-388, May/June 2014. https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.272 
30. M. K. Chen. “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” American Economic Review, vol. 103, no. 2, April 2013 (pp. 690–731), https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.2.690
31. R. Bryant and D. M. Knight, Anthropology of the Future. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
32. UK Department for Energy Security & Net Zero. “Unlocking the benefits of the clean energy economy.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-budget-and-growth-delivery-plan/unlocking-the-benefits-of-the-clean-energy-economy-accessible-webpage (accessed May 13, 2026).
33. G. Gharde, S. Mander, C. McLachlan, C. Jones and A. Larkin. “UK energy experts call for wider range of plausible futures for decarbonisation scenarios.” Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, March 2026. https://tyndall.ac.uk/news/uk-energy-experts-call-for-wider-range-of-plausible-futures-for-decarbonisation-scenarios/ (accessed May 19, 2026).
34. R. Solnit,. Hope in the Dark. Great Britain: Canongate Books, 2016.
35. N. Rouhania et al. “Collective events and individual affect shape autobiographical memory,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120 (29) e2221919120, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221919120 
36. R. Hopkins, How to Fall in Love with the Future. White River Junction, VT, U.S.A. : Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025.
37. C. Merck, M. N. Topcu and W. Hirst. “Collective mental time travel: Creating a shared future through our shared past,” Memory Studies, vol. 9(3) 284­ –294, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698016645236 

By Ana Sun

Ever wonder why we tend to refer to the future in its singular form in everyday speech? Why ‘the future’, and not simply ‘futures’? Considering that we can probably agree that a myriad of futures is possible before one of them falls into the present, this seems to be a mundane but overlooked mystery. 

In Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040, Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman observed [1]:  

There is a problem with most books about the future – and indeed, there is a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. This is because of a simple point. The fact is, there is no single future, regardless of our deepest desire that it be so, and there is no heavenly salvation in sight.

As someone who often explores progressive, positive futures within the context of climate change and social justice through science fiction, in particular Solarpunk [2], I’m intrigued: does the common view of a singular future mean we are more likely to believe that climate collapse is inevitable? Do we therefore find it difficult to imagine – and enact – alternatives? Have we inadvertently accepted a destiny described by cyberpunk, a future rocket-boosted by uncaring technology, systems of oppression and power concentrated in the hands of a few? In Zoefuturistic terms, have we simply accepted the ‘being’ and forfeited the ‘becoming’?

There’s some evidence that language can influence how we perceive time and our relationship with the future… or, rather, futures [3]. Our bodies are limited in conscious capacity, our brains constrained by how our memories are formed [4] [5] [6].

Unlike futurists and futurologists, thinking about the long-term future in its simultaneous multiplicities, especially when it comes to a complex issue such as climate change, is not something that most of us are able to conceptualise easily [7]. Sure, we may deal well enough with the immediate future, such as considering different possible routes we might take between two locations, or how we might fill the hours between morning and night on a given day. Beyond a certain timeframe, the future can resemble a different place; this afternoon, tonight, or tomorrow can easily seem like disembodied worlds beyond our reach [27]. And yet, the next second appears on the near horizon in the shadow of the following minute, then the hour thereafter – all rapidly pouring into the now, one liquid moment flowing into the next.

Perhaps there are deeper reasons for why we struggle with notions of futures in our everyday lives, and that’s worth examining. 

Caught in destiny’s net

Sometime in the early summer of 2025, after an event on climate change resilience, a frustrated attendee next to me mumbled words to the effect, “So all of it is going to end, isn’t it?” 

At the time, her blunt nihilism shocked me into silence, but that feeling of impotence is all too familiar: what’s the use of fighting if all will be destroyed in the end? If we were to believe that an impending climate collapse is destiny, we’d have already been defeated before we even began. 

One winter morning, I asked a question to an audience of about two hundred people in the middle of a talk I was giving: how did they visualise critical environmental thresholds – what we commonly call ‘climate tipping points’? The majority believed these to be a cliff-edge for survival: once we topple over the side, it’s game over. No surprise; I certainly did too, once.

In August 2025, updated analysis showed an increased risk of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapsing when researchers examined data modelling that ran for a longer timeframe until 2300 and 2500 [8]. Separately, a seventh planetary boundary – out of the nine environmental limits that demarcate the planet’s health –  has been breached this year, according to the annual assessment by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as ocean acidification transgresses the critical safe threshold for marine ecosystems [9].

All these are alarming signals designed to induce a sense of urgency and a drive to action, but taken alone without accompanying solutions, these types of headlines incite panic and breed disempowerment [10], rendering us helpless and stripped of agency while an inevitable future barrels down upon us.

The AMOC tipping point is particularly worrying because the change to humanity as we know it would be drastic. If we don’t succeed in lowering our CO2 emissions in line with the Paris Agreement,  the current estimation is that we might pass this particular tipping point within a few decades. 

There still remains deep uncertainty whether the AMOC may weaken partially or result in a full collapse, and over what timeframe. Likely, we have at least a few decades at hand to act to avert the worst outcomes. Johan Rockström, Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said of the seventh planetary boundary breach [11]:

We’re not yet in the high-risk zone of irreversible, unmanageable change of the planet, which suggests that we can still turn this around. The window is still open even though it’s closing fast, and we have so much evidence of scalable solutions across all sectors from the food sector to the built environment to the energy transition that we can bend the curves and bring ourselves back within a safe operating space within the next decades.

Seaver Wang, the Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute wrote comprehensively about the misnomer of ‘tipping points’: 

First, the word ‘tipping’ implies the rapidity of an unbalanced cart toppling over. […] Second, the word ‘point,’ too, is bound to confuse. It implies a single, precise, known critical threshold beyond which Earth system components tip. [12]

The reality is that environmental tipping points are far more complex [13]. The Global Tipping Points Report 2023 emphasises that their assessment ‘does not suggest that crossing major tipping points could lead to runaway warming, with mitigation to prevent further tipping points being worthwhile even if some tipping points are reached. [14]’. 

We also spend so little time focusing on positive tipping points – such as those scalable solutions that Johan Rockström refers to [11] [15]. If my sample of two hundred or so attendees was anything to go by, solutions that have a positive impact aren’t something that typically crosses our minds. While our media coverage would have us imagine apocalyptic scenarios where the Earth drowns under several metres of seawater – a scenario that, in reality, is highly unlikely in the near future – the current estimates suggest that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would likely take hundreds to thousands of years to melt after their tipping points are breached [16]. The complexity in predicting circulation and heat transfers in the ocean means much is unknown; current projections, even in our worst case scenario, project sea level rise of up to 180mm by 2050 [17].

We shouldn’t be under the impression that all is well – but there’s time to act, to reverse the damage if we could collectively grasp our agency.

Unfortunately, few narrative tools exist to remind us we are not rolling downhill off the far side of Freytag’s Pyramid into fated tragedy. Just how well science fiction is placed to shift collective imagination is still a nascent experiment [18].

Science fiction: from imaginary prediction to unintended blueprint

It might sometimes look like cyberpunk has predicted our current trajectory: a world where AI is poised to displace us, where an elite, privileged few exploit political institutions to concentrate their power, preying on people and planet to enrich themselves. 

Ursula K. Le Guin famously declared [19], ‘Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.’ Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discusses this at length in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [20]: ‘SF is imaginary prediction, drawing on the same sort of historical-projective suspension of disbelief as the real thing, if only to explore, to problematize, and to play with it.’

In other words, science fiction originally took on the mantle of holding up a mirror to our present from a possible future. Until recently, SF has often been written in past tense, presenting narratives as if a particular future has already happened so we could project ourselves forward in time. But how did we get from those glorious imaginary predictions to what Simon McNeil recounts as the ‘future horrors Silicon Valley merchants of human misery are trying to produce’ [21]? How did we get from Star Trek to a world where technology is threatening humanity, at the very same time as our obsession with economic growth means the planet can no longer sustain all of us?

In his epic essay The Men Who Sold the Moon, Eden Kupernmintz explains how we our current situation might have transpired [22]:  

[..] if you want to read about militarism in Heinlein’s work, you can find countless articles online on the topic, as well as on the fascism of Campbell and the many, many awful passages of Vance’s career. But consider the supposedly more progressive works of authors like Simak, Asimov, Pohl Anderson, Blish, or Roddenberry. Most, if not all, of their ideas and values are realized through individualist, liberal lenses. They are mostly concerned with heroes who uphold values such as compassion, honor, duty, and virtue. They very rarely, if ever, engage with meaningful, systematic criticisms of society. Indeed, they are perfect examples of “suburban science fiction”, importing much of the underlying, and thus powerful, presuppositions of our own society into the future. Their heroes are almost invariably male, white, abled, and dripping with machismo and “charisma”. Solutions to problems revolve around rationalism and scientism at best and downright calls for technocracy at worst. The idea of the supremacy of science, without engaging in its colonial roots, without engaging with ideas and problems like eugenics, without any meaningful critiques of its role in serving capitalism, is one of the main motivating powers of much of the careers cited above.

Kupernmintz goes on to suggest that the heroes portrayed in the Golden Age of science fiction created the archetypes upon which powerful people such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel could comfortably model themselves. A challenging stance, certainly, to flatten such rich visions of the future. However, even the post-scarcity utopia depicted in Star Trek would have assumed that we continue extractive practices on Earth’s finite resources – such as precious metals and fossil fuels – for us to get there [23].

Science fiction as a genre has never set out to predict any specific future and yet here we are, witnessing what should have been cautionary tales become ingrained blueprints for the potential destruction of humanity and our living planet – adding to already debilitating helplessness, tempting us to give in to seemingly inescapable destiny. 

In recent years, we’ve seen a more significant shift of how we discuss science fiction as a mirror of our present to a vehicle for intentional imagination and activism. Roger Luckhurst in his review of Uneven Futures [24] calls it ‘a move from SF as noun to SF as verb, a set of actions, […] a move from static textual study to motivated activity that follows on from the reading of texts.’ Alongside genres such as Afrofuturism and Solarpunk, we can also observe increasing use of applied science fiction to anticipate policy risks and opportunities [25].

Even then, the question continues to plague me: might stories alone be enough? Would words on a page ultimately change how we behave, as individuals living within systems that are often out of our control? A question worth asking, considering our human physiology proves a disadvantage when it comes to thinking about the future – because of our struggle with the concept of time.

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey

In a book that’s equal parts science, philosophy and poetry, The Death of Forever, Darryl Reanney explains how time as we would commonly think of it – as a force external to us – is likely an illusion [6]:

Superficially, time is something we create when we measure it, dividing it into seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. […] Our experience of time is of something that moves, that sweeps upon its breast like a river forever moving at a constant rate from past to future.

Our sense of how time passes directly correlates to the number of instances our brains encode as new experiences; these are also how memories are formed. This is why sometimes a month can speed by, but a minute can feel eternal [26].

My favourite understanding of what happens to our sense of time – from moments to memories – comes from Daniel Kahnemann, who describes the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ [5]. The experiencing self is the part of us that lives in the continuous present and knows only of the now. However, these actual moments get discarded, filtered through the ‘remembering self’, which leaves us with a cohesive picture of who we are. Kahnemann says:

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories – it starts immediately. We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”

Suppose a collection of these stories is how we make sense of our past, but scientists have discovered the neural pathways we use to remember the past are identical to ones we use for imagining the future. 

Professors Martin A. Conway and Catherine Loveday articulated the remembering-imagining system as a window where we can access everyday memories of the recent past and the near future [27]. In their research, they found that events that lie further in the future are more abstract, just as memories in the remote past become more generic; they likened it to a ‘fish-eye lens’. Interesting challenges arise when we need to think beyond the visible future [28]: 

Just as in certain areas of physics, for example, quantum mechanics, it is not possible to precisely predict a future state of a system, so with people the future is only probable. However, once a future state has come into being, it may be possible, to at least some extent, to work back to previous states. […]

Nevertheless, retrospectively reversible or not, given that there are an infinite number of indeterminate possible futures, this poses a major adaptive problem for goal-driven organisms. This is particularly so as the end point of all unrealized goals lies somewhere in the future. Indeed, in order to have a goal a future state has to be anticipated and often consciously imagined.”

While their research refers specifically to individual memory forming and goal creation, I can’t help wondering what this would mean on a collective level. More on that later.

Firstly, our actual experiences are fleeting. The moment passes and our brains form a narrative about what we thought happened – and no, it’s not necessarily reliable. Secondly, cognitive science suggests that we can only look as far into the future clearly as we are able to recall the past; beyond a certain point, the future becomes less certain and more conjecture, just as the past becomes fuzzier in our memory. If we want to determine a goal that’s beyond the boundary of the remembering-imagining system, we need to consciously imagine what we want our futures to be. But that assumes we have free will and therein lies another pitfall, a conundrum possibly best summarised by S. Pahl and colleagues [29]: 

If evidence for climate change events is difficult to retrieve from memory, climate risks will be underestimated (or biased toward very salient information or images). Moreover, information about climate change faces stiff competition from the media barrage and other daily issues that are simply more salient, compelling and urgent in demanding our attention. […] In addition, research in cognitive psychology has indicated that individuals experience less emotive mental imagery with respect to generalized long-term goals (such as living more healthily or sustainably) compared to short-term goals (such as eating a doughnut or driving to the shop), because the former are less engaging and may lack specific cues in our daily environment that trigger appropriate action (whereas a doughnut might be displayed in a shop we walk past, with additional multi-sensory cues such as smell).

In her excellent book Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore discusses the famous Libet experiments – which imply an intention to act exists before the brain is conscious of the action, therefore potentially suggesting that ‘free will’ is an illusion [4]. The idea that we don’t have free will is so antithetical to our experience that the debate surrounding interpretation of these experiments endures. However, Libet discovered that what we do have is an overriding mechanism. In Blackmore’s words, “although we do not have free will, we do have ‘free won’t’.”

On an individual level, this means we have a severe cognitive disadvantage in connecting a climate-crisis-free future to our immediate present in a way that drives positive action. The question then: how might we exercise our ‘free won’t?’

In her final chapter, Blackmore gives us a potential clue:

Some people argue that the addition of language completely transforms minds, bringing about the essentials of consciousness, including the sense of self, theory of mind and the ability to think about past and future.

The power of language, the power of becoming

You might well call to mind Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or its film adaptation Arrival. I doubt we’d remember the future without some alien assistance in this world; however, evidence shows language can influence our perception of time, including how we might visualise time as directions. Some languages contain the sense of time in their grammar: past tense (“I went”), present tense (“I go”) and a future tense (“I will go”). English does not have conjugations, but Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese do. Other languages could be said to be ‘futureless’, where a qualifier (e.g. tomorrow, last night), when tagged onto a phrase, clarifies the sense of time; in languages such as Mandarin and German, we would say “I go tomorrow”, and it refers to a future time [3]. 

In a 2013 study, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at UCLA, concludes that speakers of ‘futureless languages’ such as German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages engaged more with the future in terms of financial savings and maintained better health, behaviours he attributes to how they don’t view the future as something separate from the present [30]. While we should be conscious that correlation never implies causation, the results are nonetheless fascinating.

We would have to make greater logical leaps to conclude if understanding our own linguistic biases would reframe our relationship to the perceived destiny of the climate crisis – and to conjure up viable alternatives. However, the field of futures anthropology might provide some useful vocabulary to unpack how we experience and envision the future, revealing how we might act in the present. Unlike Dr. Louise Banks, perhaps we don’t have to know the future to make our choices. 

From the outset of this essay, I raised the question of whether we might be treating environmental collapse as destiny, a deliberate word choice. ‘Destiny’ is one of the six orientations that Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight proposed in The Anthropology of the Future, enabling us to examine our relationship with the future – or futures – with richer nuance [31]. Other orientations include anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality and hope. 

I used the word destiny as we might do in common parlance, but also as an orientation: how a future would come to pass regardless of what happens in between, despite how we might get from here to there. The intention had been to provoke: have we simply accepted that an inequitable AI future coupled with the climate emergency would happen? Are we content to let it happen? 

The nuances of these words warrant a closer look. Expectation has a close but different nuance to anticipation: 

One may, for instance, expect rain and take an umbrella when going out ‘just in case.’ The expectation of rain, is, in this instance, still on the horizon and is tempered by, for example, weather reports that have failed in the past. […] Expectation may be viewed as a conservative teleology, one that gives thickness to the present through its reliance on the past. To anticipate rain, however, is to feel and smell it in the air, to close one’s windows and cover lawn furniture while imagining the future in the present. Anticipation slims the present, often breaking entirely with the past as it draws present and future into the same activity timespace [31].

Anticipation has a forward pull; expectation implies an action that often coincides with a notion of ‘ought’ or ‘should’. We expect that if we install solar panels, we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; we expect it because we’ve seen this happen before. To anticipate a world running on renewables has a forward-looking nuance, it may mean we focus on developing technologies across different types of energy generators to manage consistent power. Anticipating this kind of future gives me goosebumps. 

Speculation happens in the gap between what we expect and what we anticipate – when the end point is not clear, and when the information is partial or unavailable. For example, if the rollout of solar farms did not necessarily reduce reliance on fossil fuels, we might speculate that something has gone quite wrong with our energy governance. Or we might speculate whether we would have better success had we decided to prioritise, say, bladeless turbines. At the time of writing, the UK government is building policies on speculation: to ensure long-term energy resilience, we would need a combination of sources, including nuclear, geothermal, solar and wind [33]. The power of speculation could be that first step that creates hypotheses and assumptions against which we can create models or gather existing evidence – enabling us to make solutions real. 

Just the other day, while on a train to North Wales, I’d been struck by the number of solar farms en route; this is a new thing. Potentiality is rooted in the present, a sense that things have been set in motion, lending possibility to certain futures. Based on the view out my train window, and the offshore wind farms when I look out to the English Channel closer to home, a world running solely on a diverse range of renewables is a potentiality.

Finally, hope — a word used so often, we probably take its meaning for granted. Hope: a forward-driving force, fed by potentiality, resting on anticipation. Bryant and Knight describe hope as an orientation that ‘emerges in the gap between the potential and the actual, between matter and its not-yet form’. But my preferred definition comes the stirring words of Rebecca Solnit [34]:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and in that spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. […] Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. 

In order to evade undesirable destinies, of all the orientations available to us, I consider hope our primary vehicle. But individual hope is rarely enough – how might we bolster collective hope for collective action? 

Making future memories to remember

Summer had come early that day in May, rendering the communal meeting space warmer inside than out. As part of the cultural work around the Rights of River Charter for the Ouse, about twenty of us gathered and explored how we might strengthen our relationship to the river and channel its voice through conversation and collaborative art. In the centre of the room, an old metal bucket had been filled with river water earlier that morning; throughout the entire day, a part of the Ouse remained with us.

The inspiration and exhilaration from that one day gave birth to collective and individual memories that have since continued. Ideas flowed, creativity flourished, connections between humans and human-to-water rejuvenated. For me, the workshop sowed seeds of imagination, evoking emotions that would later make it into my writing, into the edits for my short story collection [2] that I’d been working on at the time. 

In this instance, collective memory has been instrumental in building a future-facing, positive relationship with a body of water that we have neglected for too long. Of course, collective memory could be traumatic too, as evidenced by the events around Covid-19 [35] – a global pandemic which had long been a potentiality most of us somehow ignored. To imagine desired futures, we would need to be intentional about creating collective memories so we can have rich pasts to carry forward into new futures. 

Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, wrote in his recent book How to Fall in Love with the Future [36]: 

Researchers use the term ‘mental time travel’ to describe our capacity to imagine the future – or the past – and how that capacity impacts our present-day experiences and decisions. While a lot of research has focused on individual future thought, more recently researchers have been expanding the focus of their attention to collective memory and collective future thought, or what they term ‘collective mental time travel’. 

[…] When we ‘time travel’ to the future, we dip into the cupboards of our memory, rummage around for snippets that might be useful, and then combine these snippets to create novel and unique ideas about the future. In other words, we assemble visions of the future from the resources of our past.’ 

Researchers have also found that social interaction with knowledge can shape outcomes: it could induce forgetfulness but also reinforce insights [37]. At the end of his book, Hopkins generously shares his ‘Time Machine Blueprint’ – tools to help a collective group of people mentally travel into the future. Science-fiction writers would recognise the worldbuilding; improv theatre types would recognise the set ups. 

We already have the skills and the tools to evade a destiny we don’t want. We already know how to form collective memories; we celebrate festivals, commune for conventions. As storytellers, we know what matters less is when the story is being told because our experiencing selves will forget it all. It’s about what happens after it ends – what our remembering selves will keep.

Participating in making collective memories – the conscious decision to take words off a page into our real world – charts a way forward to creating kindred futures: futures enabling us to reclaim our agency from the illusion of destiny, futures that care for people and planet.

References

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24. R. Luckhurst. “Science Fiction as Mode of Action: On MIT Press’s ‘Uneven Futures.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2023. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/article-science-fiction-as-mode-of-action-on-mit-presss-uneven-futures/ (accessed May 17, 2026).
25. B. Quinn. “UK Ministry of Defence enlists sci-fi writers to prepare for dystopian futures.” The Guardian, January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/19/ministry-of-defence-enlists-sci-fi-writers-to-prepare-for-dystopian-futures (accessed May 17, 2026).
26. J. M. Broadway and B. Sandoval. “Why Does Time Seem to Speed Up with Age?” Scientific American, July 2016. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-time-seem-to-speed-up-with-age/ (accessed  Sep. 29, 2025).
27. M. A. Conway and C. Loveday. “Remembering, imagining, false memories & personal meanings,” Consciousness and Cognition, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.12.002 
28. M. A. Conway, C. Loveday and S. N. Cole. “The Remembering–Imagining System,” Memory Studies Vol. 9 (3) 256­ –265,  2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698016645231 
29. S. Pahl, S. Sheppard, C. Boomsma, and C. Groves. “Perceptions of time in relation to climate change.” WIREs Clim Change, Vol. 5, Issue 3: 375-388, May/June 2014. https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.272 
30. M. K. Chen. “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” American Economic Review, vol. 103, no. 2, April 2013 (pp. 690–731), https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.2.690
31. R. Bryant and D. M. Knight, Anthropology of the Future. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
32. UK Department for Energy Security & Net Zero. “Unlocking the benefits of the clean energy economy.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-budget-and-growth-delivery-plan/unlocking-the-benefits-of-the-clean-energy-economy-accessible-webpage (accessed May 13, 2026).
33. G. Gharde, S. Mander, C. McLachlan, C. Jones and A. Larkin. “UK energy experts call for wider range of plausible futures for decarbonisation scenarios.” Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, March 2026. https://tyndall.ac.uk/news/uk-energy-experts-call-for-wider-range-of-plausible-futures-for-decarbonisation-scenarios/ (accessed May 19, 2026).
34. R. Solnit,. Hope in the Dark. Great Britain: Canongate Books, 2016.
35. N. Rouhania et al. “Collective events and individual affect shape autobiographical memory,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120 (29) e2221919120, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221919120 
36. R. Hopkins, How to Fall in Love with the Future. White River Junction, VT, U.S.A. : Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025.
37. C. Merck, M. N. Topcu and W. Hirst. “Collective mental time travel: Creating a shared future through our shared past,” Memory Studies, vol. 9(3) 284­ –294, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698016645236 

By Goblin Futures.

Station to Station is a fishpunk game of building a better world. It is a hybrid card/tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) in the vein of works such as Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman’s The Deep Forest, a favourite of ours. While fishpunk is its truest descriptor, categories like solarpunk and weirdhope shed some light on its nature.

“Sometimes when you lose, you win” (Sun Ra, Space Is the Place)

“Whatever you win, you’ve lost” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

We designed Station to Station in response to the themes of The Lost Bay discord server’s Build a Better World TTRPG jam and Vector’s Zoefuturism call. Our mechanical starting points were that the game would require tarot cards as physical components, include dynamic use of oracles to bridge rules and storytelling, and its endgame would give meaning to anything players ‘lost’ as they played. Our worlding starting point was that the game would take place in an archipelago, a landscape type that has fascinated us since childhoods spent reading Ursula K. Le Guin and messing around with computer game map editors. As places where land and sea flow across each other, archipelagos are sites of life and relationality, where attempts at imposing rigid boundaries will always fail. Our next realisation was that the game would revolve around travel aboard sentient bio-trains that are huge and ancient, and may only be travelled on if they willingly agree. In our playthroughs, both in testing and following release, we have noticed that players are drawn to explore the nature of their kinship with their group’s train, with these strange entities playing prominent roles in storytelling as agents unto themselves.

The game builds on our longstanding interest in oracular game design. The use of aleatory resolution methods such as dice, cards, or coins in games echoes divinatory practices; tarot historically was used for gameplay before it became a cartomantic tool. Equally, the use of tables of outcomes as storytelling procedures in TTRPGs resonates with manuals for fortune-telling, with indie game designers such as Perplexing Ruins and Alfred Valley foregrounding oracle tables in their work. Station to Station pushes things just a little further, whereby its Coral Oracle blends variance with player choice, at times creating productive tensions between storytelling and mechanically optimal gameplay. A second oracle, The Lost and Found Oracle, gives life to the sacrifices made along the way to building a better world. The game’s rooting in oracularity grounds players in a sense that they are influencing and responding to an ongoing stream of strange encounters, losses, and becomings.

“Heaven and earth aren’t humane” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

Underlying the game’s use of oracles and incorporation of tarot are a set of Attitudes – confrontation, manipulation, scarcity, abundance – that pertain equally to the game’s world and its player characters. These Attitudes are not rendered in terms of anthropocentric moralising, which seeks to divide the world into forced binaries, but as neutral approaches that become specific and grounded through context. Story prompts cover a range of possibilities of flourishing and struggle, and repeatedly centre on symbiosis, life, and transformation. This carries over to the endgame, with playthroughs culminating at heterotopian destinations whose communities have their own unresolved contradictions. Player characters will both adjust to these tensions and help change them, with the distinction between group and destination ultimately melting away. As this happens, some of what was lost along the way will come back, be healed, or come to be seen in a more hopeful light. And for groups who do not get to the endgame, all is not lost. The sea gives and takes, and you can always play again.

“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.” (Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)

We hope you enjoy Station to Station! Stay fishpunk.

– GOBLIN FUTURES

By Goblin Futures.

Station to Station is a fishpunk game of building a better world. It is a hybrid card/tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) in the vein of works such as Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman’s The Deep Forest, a favourite of ours. While fishpunk is its truest descriptor, categories like solarpunk and weirdhope shed some light on its nature.

“Sometimes when you lose, you win” (Sun Ra, Space Is the Place)

“Whatever you win, you’ve lost” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

We designed Station to Station in response to the themes of The Lost Bay discord server’s Build a Better World TTRPG jam and Vector’s Zoefuturism call. Our mechanical starting points were that the game would require tarot cards as physical components, include dynamic use of oracles to bridge rules and storytelling, and its endgame would give meaning to anything players ‘lost’ as they played. Our worlding starting point was that the game would take place in an archipelago, a landscape type that has fascinated us since childhoods spent reading Ursula K. Le Guin and messing around with computer game map editors. As places where land and sea flow across each other, archipelagos are sites of life and relationality, where attempts at imposing rigid boundaries will always fail. Our next realisation was that the game would revolve around travel aboard sentient bio-trains that are huge and ancient, and may only be travelled on if they willingly agree. In our playthroughs, both in testing and following release, we have noticed that players are drawn to explore the nature of their kinship with their group’s train, with these strange entities playing prominent roles in storytelling as agents unto themselves.

The game builds on our longstanding interest in oracular game design. The use of aleatory resolution methods such as dice, cards, or coins in games echoes divinatory practices; tarot historically was used for gameplay before it became a cartomantic tool. Equally, the use of tables of outcomes as storytelling procedures in TTRPGs resonates with manuals for fortune-telling, with indie game designers such as Perplexing Ruins and Alfred Valley foregrounding oracle tables in their work. Station to Station pushes things just a little further, whereby its Coral Oracle blends variance with player choice, at times creating productive tensions between storytelling and mechanically optimal gameplay. A second oracle, The Lost and Found Oracle, gives life to the sacrifices made along the way to building a better world. The game’s rooting in oracularity grounds players in a sense that they are influencing and responding to an ongoing stream of strange encounters, losses, and becomings.

“Heaven and earth aren’t humane” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

Underlying the game’s use of oracles and incorporation of tarot are a set of Attitudes – confrontation, manipulation, scarcity, abundance – that pertain equally to the game’s world and its player characters. These Attitudes are not rendered in terms of anthropocentric moralising, which seeks to divide the world into forced binaries, but as neutral approaches that become specific and grounded through context. Story prompts cover a range of possibilities of flourishing and struggle, and repeatedly centre on symbiosis, life, and transformation. This carries over to the endgame, with playthroughs culminating at heterotopian destinations whose communities have their own unresolved contradictions. Player characters will both adjust to these tensions and help change them, with the distinction between group and destination ultimately melting away. As this happens, some of what was lost along the way will come back, be healed, or come to be seen in a more hopeful light. And for groups who do not get to the endgame, all is not lost. The sea gives and takes, and you can always play again.

“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.” (Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)

We hope you enjoy Station to Station! Stay fishpunk.

– GOBLIN FUTURES

The Afterlives of Greek Drama in Science Fiction Theatre: A Review on the Occasion of the 10-Year Anniversary of TALOS V

By Yichun Zhang

You are not just watching the fifth Talos Science Fiction Theatre Festival—you are in it. One moment you are a sailor aboard Odysseus’s ship, another you are playing an interactive survival game in a retrofuturistic city. Next, diaries are read alongside ancient Greek monstresses in the midst of a cabaret. With its immersive method, Talos V brings together Greek mythology, speculative futures, and urgent contemporary politics. The festival reaches into many dimensions to present an international group of works that are as evocative as they are unpredictable.

Organised by Artistic Director Christos Callow Jr (of the Greek theatre company Cyborphic & University of Derby) and Associate Producer Colleen Bowes (Central School of Speech & Drama), Talos V took place from 11–13 December 2025 at The Bread & Roses Theatre. 

A total of five productions were selected for the 2025 festival: Odysseus, Not Your Hero, Assigned Earth at Birth, Babel Beast, The Failure of the Century (WIP), and Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: PALESTINE BENEFIT EDITION. Each piece creatively incorporates sci-fi elements or engages with speculative ideas. To varying degrees, each piece also reflects on, deconstructs, or subverts established traditions, from ancient Greek myth, to patriarchal cultural structures, to the notion of the classic or Western canon itself. 

The Failure of the Century, a play by Nick Mamatas

The festival opens with Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr, directed by Emma Kopf, and with tech/production assistance from Colleen Bowes. Set after the Trojan War, the story follows Odysseus (played by Yiannis Sykovaris) after he almost drowned on his journey home. Upon waking, the God of the Sea, Poseidon (played by Stephanie Christodoulidou), who later transforms into the forms of the Sirens and Cyclops, puts him to three trials to decide whether he deserves the title of a “hero” and is worthy of returning home. 

This Odysseus, however, surely does not conform to the stereotype of an ancient Greek hero at all. Apart from a heavy beard that may loosely signal the image, he appears in a black-and-white vest printed with a six-pack and a pair of tapered tracksuit bottoms. One could easily feel the unseriousness as he occasionally nibbles at stage props. The trials set by the god also add to the comic effect: in the ‘cooking contest’, he is forced to turn a crew (audience) member into steamed meat; in the encounter with the siren monsters, he sacrifices half his crew through a ‘democratic,’ audience participation process. The play reaches its climax with the final question: will he choose to return home and become a nobody, or will he become a “hero”?

One of the pleasures of watching Odysseus is its live, on-stage soundscape. The performers make sound in real time with everyday objects such as delivery boxes, sauce jars, crisp packets, to mimic the sounds of storms, seagulls, monsters and waves on the spot with sound software. While the sound-making on stage had some challenges, its low-budget execution adds to the piece’s playful deconstruction, making the limitations feel deliberate and conceptually engaging. 

Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr

The play is full of playful jabs at the British habit of adapting ancient Greek drama—like the way so many versions of Odysseus end up with English accents. It looks back on the epic tradition,twisting it in unexpected ways, and re-examines the complex relationship between the appropriation of classics and their global circulation.

The second show, Assigned Earth at Birth, takes a very different route. It explores the question of how individuals, within the context of the Anthropocene, confront fatalistic imaginaries and nihilistic tendencies. It follows a queer woman—assigned to Earth by an alien anthropologist for fieldwork—who becomes increasingly disheartened by humanity through Zoom discussions on patriarchy, queer identity, and climate change. 

Directed by Zoyander Street and with D. Squinkifer as lead developer, the production revolves around their custom theatrical software, Intrapology. With this software, the script could show up in real time for the actors, while the audience contributes by writing dialogue or voting on the next course of action. Although the video call format is visually somewhat restrained for an in-person performance, the work is strikingly queer-futurist with a lot of potential in its interactive form. It invites the audience to embrace the fluidity of queer identity and actively think about imagining an inclusive and sustainable future.

Babel Beast was written and performed by Sofia Natoli, an Italian theatre artist who grew up in France and London. The show brings the audience into the monstrous, glittering world of ancient Greece’s Mount Olympus. The show moves with a fluid, cross-genre energy, sliding effortlessly between performance styles that range from striptease to burlesque. Along the way, it explores ideas of multiculturalism, identity, and exoticism, and questions what defines monstrosity. 

The most compelling aspect of the show is the visual and symbolic tension created by the use of props. Sofia draws on the familiar cabaret vocabulary of corsets, stockings, and angel wings, but also disrupts it with the jarring inclusion of boxing gloves and a beaked mask. These humorous intrusions work to shatter the sexualised fantasies projected onto the bodies of foreign women within patriarchal narratives.

The show is delivered largely in monologue form, but this does not prevent its multilingual strategy from inviting English-speaking audiences to experience the disorienting vulnerability of being in-between cultural spaces. This is already evident in the earlier sonic collage: an overwhelming blend of French, Italian, and British pop music. It is echoed again in the performance’s later moments, where Sofia guides and corrects the audience’s pronunciation as they are asked to read non-English texts aloud with discomfort.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe. As researchers and creative practitioners in game writing, they bring a philosophical and poetic texture to their work. The show opens with a satirical, viscerally grotesque depiction of Blenheim Palace, which takes an immediately absurd turn when Mr. Blobby appears on stage. There is surely a poetics of displacement that emerges through the musical language of two people reading poems out loud in a creative performance. This creates a chant-like repetition and a collective voice that breaks through the system. 

One of the recurring themes is the class struggle and the inequality and precariousness of subaltern life in a hyper-technological society: a theme familiar in many apocalyptic narratives. Everything continues in a degraded, hyper-capitalist form, and the audience is invited to take part in an urban survival game in this retrofuturistic city. This stands in stark contrast to the show’s evocation of futuristic space travel and the ideological promise of a “beautiful new world” to come.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe.

The last show, The Failure of the Century, is a play by writer Nick Mamatas and director Kira E. Wiggins and made its debut as a work-in-progress performance at the festival. Inspired by A Christmas Carol, the performance is structured by a sequence of absurd ghostly visitations to Lovecraft’s study. It is simply structured by encounters between H. P. Lovecraft (played by Kazuo Salazar) and figures drawn from both his life and his fiction, Frank Belknap Long, Sonia Greene, and Nyarlathotep (all played by Lou Belser).  

The play is full of sharp, intelligent references to both Dickens and Lovecraft, and the dialogues are layered and thought-provoking. What I like about it is how the writer links Lovecraft’s thoughts on cosmic horror to the idea of failure, and that grants his ideas new resonance when set against the anxieties of wartime and post-war crises. The title “The Failure of the Century” is smart and works on many levels. Lovecraft is exhausted, financially strained, and creatively blocked. His personal struggles echo the wider chaos of a world on the brink of war. Beneath the weariness that permeates the performance, the comic moments stand out, particularly the ideological “contamination” suggested by the physical presence of Hitler’s book in Lovecraft’s study.

The lighting and sound design is simple but effective. They both help to shift dynamics and bridge dialogue. Without going into too much detail, the image of Lovecraft alone in a dim studio typing quickly establishes a mood of isolation, which is unsettled by the spectral arrivals of these figures. The play also cleverly intertwines the past, present and future. This is especially evident when Nyarlathotep urges Lovecraft to continue writing, insisting that the twentieth century demands it.

Overall, Talos V is a lively platform for young theatre artists to explore the boundaries of sci-fi on stage. What I really love about the festival is that, even on limited budgets, it provides a platform for these  inventive and playful small productions to successfully   combine the science fictional, the classical, and Greek theatre organically rather than forcing the blend. While it could benefit from more funding, the most important thing is that it remains the UK’s first and only festival devoted to sci-fi theatre. With these enthusiastic young writers and theatre artists dedicated to this unusual genre, I look forward to seeing more new productions in the years to come. 

The Afterlives of Greek Drama in Science Fiction Theatre: A Review on the Occasion of the 10-Year Anniversary of TALOS V

By Yichun Zhang

You are not just watching the fifth Talos Science Fiction Theatre Festival—you are in it. One moment you are a sailor aboard Odysseus’s ship, another you are playing an interactive survival game in a retrofuturistic city. Next, diaries are read alongside ancient Greek monstresses in the midst of a cabaret. With its immersive method, Talos V brings together Greek mythology, speculative futures, and urgent contemporary politics. The festival reaches into many dimensions to present an international group of works that are as evocative as they are unpredictable.

Organised by Artistic Director Christos Callow Jr (of the Greek theatre company Cyborphic & University of Derby) and Associate Producer Colleen Bowes (Central School of Speech & Drama), Talos V took place from 11–13 December 2025 at The Bread & Roses Theatre. 

A total of five productions were selected for the 2025 festival: Odysseus, Not Your Hero, Assigned Earth at Birth, Babel Beast, The Failure of the Century (WIP), and Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: PALESTINE BENEFIT EDITION. Each piece creatively incorporates sci-fi elements or engages with speculative ideas. To varying degrees, each piece also reflects on, deconstructs, or subverts established traditions, from ancient Greek myth, to patriarchal cultural structures, to the notion of the classic or Western canon itself. 

The Failure of the Century, a play by Nick Mamatas

The festival opens with Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr, directed by Emma Kopf, and with tech/production assistance from Colleen Bowes. Set after the Trojan War, the story follows Odysseus (played by Yiannis Sykovaris) after he almost drowned on his journey home. Upon waking, the God of the Sea, Poseidon (played by Stephanie Christodoulidou), who later transforms into the forms of the Sirens and Cyclops, puts him to three trials to decide whether he deserves the title of a “hero” and is worthy of returning home. 

This Odysseus, however, surely does not conform to the stereotype of an ancient Greek hero at all. Apart from a heavy beard that may loosely signal the image, he appears in a black-and-white vest printed with a six-pack and a pair of tapered tracksuit bottoms. One could easily feel the unseriousness as he occasionally nibbles at stage props. The trials set by the god also add to the comic effect: in the ‘cooking contest’, he is forced to turn a crew (audience) member into steamed meat; in the encounter with the siren monsters, he sacrifices half his crew through a ‘democratic,’ audience participation process. The play reaches its climax with the final question: will he choose to return home and become a nobody, or will he become a “hero”?

One of the pleasures of watching Odysseus is its live, on-stage soundscape. The performers make sound in real time with everyday objects such as delivery boxes, sauce jars, crisp packets, to mimic the sounds of storms, seagulls, monsters and waves on the spot with sound software. While the sound-making on stage had some challenges, its low-budget execution adds to the piece’s playful deconstruction, making the limitations feel deliberate and conceptually engaging. 

Odysseus, Not Your Hero, written by Christos Callow Jr

The play is full of playful jabs at the British habit of adapting ancient Greek drama—like the way so many versions of Odysseus end up with English accents. It looks back on the epic tradition,twisting it in unexpected ways, and re-examines the complex relationship between the appropriation of classics and their global circulation.

The second show, Assigned Earth at Birth, takes a very different route. It explores the question of how individuals, within the context of the Anthropocene, confront fatalistic imaginaries and nihilistic tendencies. It follows a queer woman—assigned to Earth by an alien anthropologist for fieldwork—who becomes increasingly disheartened by humanity through Zoom discussions on patriarchy, queer identity, and climate change. 

Directed by Zoyander Street and with D. Squinkifer as lead developer, the production revolves around their custom theatrical software, Intrapology. With this software, the script could show up in real time for the actors, while the audience contributes by writing dialogue or voting on the next course of action. Although the video call format is visually somewhat restrained for an in-person performance, the work is strikingly queer-futurist with a lot of potential in its interactive form. It invites the audience to embrace the fluidity of queer identity and actively think about imagining an inclusive and sustainable future.

Babel Beast was written and performed by Sofia Natoli, an Italian theatre artist who grew up in France and London. The show brings the audience into the monstrous, glittering world of ancient Greece’s Mount Olympus. The show moves with a fluid, cross-genre energy, sliding effortlessly between performance styles that range from striptease to burlesque. Along the way, it explores ideas of multiculturalism, identity, and exoticism, and questions what defines monstrosity. 

The most compelling aspect of the show is the visual and symbolic tension created by the use of props. Sofia draws on the familiar cabaret vocabulary of corsets, stockings, and angel wings, but also disrupts it with the jarring inclusion of boxing gloves and a beaked mask. These humorous intrusions work to shatter the sexualised fantasies projected onto the bodies of foreign women within patriarchal narratives.

The show is delivered largely in monologue form, but this does not prevent its multilingual strategy from inviting English-speaking audiences to experience the disorienting vulnerability of being in-between cultural spaces. This is already evident in the earlier sonic collage: an overwhelming blend of French, Italian, and British pop music. It is echoed again in the performance’s later moments, where Sofia guides and corrects the audience’s pronunciation as they are asked to read non-English texts aloud with discomfort.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe. As researchers and creative practitioners in game writing, they bring a philosophical and poetic texture to their work. The show opens with a satirical, viscerally grotesque depiction of Blenheim Palace, which takes an immediately absurd turn when Mr. Blobby appears on stage. There is surely a poetics of displacement that emerges through the musical language of two people reading poems out loud in a creative performance. This creates a chant-like repetition and a collective voice that breaks through the system. 

One of the recurring themes is the class struggle and the inequality and precariousness of subaltern life in a hyper-technological society: a theme familiar in many apocalyptic narratives. Everything continues in a degraded, hyper-capitalist form, and the audience is invited to take part in an urban survival game in this retrofuturistic city. This stands in stark contrast to the show’s evocation of futuristic space travel and the ideological promise of a “beautiful new world” to come.

Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: Palestine Benefit Edition is written and performed by Erica Masserano and Francis Gene-Rowe.

The last show, The Failure of the Century, is a play by writer Nick Mamatas and director Kira E. Wiggins and made its debut as a work-in-progress performance at the festival. Inspired by A Christmas Carol, the performance is structured by a sequence of absurd ghostly visitations to Lovecraft’s study. It is simply structured by encounters between H. P. Lovecraft (played by Kazuo Salazar) and figures drawn from both his life and his fiction, Frank Belknap Long, Sonia Greene, and Nyarlathotep (all played by Lou Belser).  

The play is full of sharp, intelligent references to both Dickens and Lovecraft, and the dialogues are layered and thought-provoking. What I like about it is how the writer links Lovecraft’s thoughts on cosmic horror to the idea of failure, and that grants his ideas new resonance when set against the anxieties of wartime and post-war crises. The title “The Failure of the Century” is smart and works on many levels. Lovecraft is exhausted, financially strained, and creatively blocked. His personal struggles echo the wider chaos of a world on the brink of war. Beneath the weariness that permeates the performance, the comic moments stand out, particularly the ideological “contamination” suggested by the physical presence of Hitler’s book in Lovecraft’s study.

The lighting and sound design is simple but effective. They both help to shift dynamics and bridge dialogue. Without going into too much detail, the image of Lovecraft alone in a dim studio typing quickly establishes a mood of isolation, which is unsettled by the spectral arrivals of these figures. The play also cleverly intertwines the past, present and future. This is especially evident when Nyarlathotep urges Lovecraft to continue writing, insisting that the twentieth century demands it.

Overall, Talos V is a lively platform for young theatre artists to explore the boundaries of sci-fi on stage. What I really love about the festival is that, even on limited budgets, it provides a platform for these  inventive and playful small productions to successfully   combine the science fictional, the classical, and Greek theatre organically rather than forcing the blend. While it could benefit from more funding, the most important thing is that it remains the UK’s first and only festival devoted to sci-fi theatre. With these enthusiastic young writers and theatre artists dedicated to this unusual genre, I look forward to seeing more new productions in the years to come. 

Reviewed by Chisom Umeh The MIT Press, 2026

Is there a better time to talk about a less-warring, more prosperous, empathetic, and humane world than the present moment, where the militaries of powerful countries have taken up arms against each other, dropping bombs on civilians and tearing down cultural heritage that took decades to build?

Sadly, living in such a moment rarely engenders the appetite for dreams and imaginings of a better future. Rather, it makes us envision periods where the worst that could happen to humanity has happened: nuclear bombs have detonated, floods have sunk major cities, or an asteroid has lodged itself in the Earth’s crust. We see the presidents of powerful countries threatening or actually invading less powerful ones and that prompts us to take up pens and weave the most authoritarian panopticons we can imagine. We watch anti-science rhetoric spread in the media about climate change and we’re tempted to paint pictures of doomed, environmentally degraded futures.

The current happenings rarely inspire utopian stories in us. Instead, they often steer us toward the catastrophic.

In Joe P. L. Davidson’s Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (The MIT Press), we learn that this way of thinking hasn’t always been the case. There has never been a time when there wasn’t some form of global turmoil. However, many writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries  were inclined to look beyond the specific troubles that plagued their era and envisioned possible futures where the problems had been solved. This period saw a blossoming of utopian fiction, coloring the literature of the time with visions of better and hopeful lives. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi (1983), and many more, are amongst the books Davidson touches on, in showing how writers of the past treated the situations around them.

Davidson shows us in this book that, even amidst the current horrors and seeming pessimism about the future, utopian stories can still be told and told well. He helps us see that, amidst the seeming dearth of utopian fiction, some writers are still standing up for the genre and putting in the work.

I particularly loved how the modern texts like Claire G Colman’s Enclave (2022), River Solomon’s The Deep (2019), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), were juxtaposed with older books like Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890). This juxtaposition helps readers understand how utopian thinkers of the past viewed the concept, how they related it to their particular society and preoccupations, and how recent writers have engaged with the subject, noting the differences between both modes of approach.

While the older writers wrote utopian futures only as they could envision them, fashioning worlds imbued with whatever politics they liked, more recent authors take a different approach when crafting utopian stories. In Kathleen Hughes’ PhD thesis, Imagining the Future of Work (2024), she mentions that in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, “The past and the present, just as much as the future, are presented by Morris as temporary and transient.” But the more contemporary writers, according to Davidson, employ a method that he has come to call “postdystopian utopia.” This is a mode of writing utopias that doesn’t overlook the horrors of the present or the past, to weave into existence future worlds of abundance and peace. It acknowledges existing injustices and, rather than dismissing them in favor of an imaginary time, incorporates them into the story and uses them to make a point:

“What I call postdystopian utopia,” Davidson writes, “is a precarious balance between liberation and horror, in which the possibility of better worlds becomes apparent only by acknowledging worse worlds. The postdystopian utopia addresses the bad feelings that prevail in contemporary culture.”

The concept of postdystopian utopia is Davidson’s idea of how the genre of utopian fiction can be jump-started and reintroduced into global discourse meaningfully, as exemplified by recent books like Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), and Claire North’s Notes From A Burning Age (2021). It is not hungry to leap to a time when every problem of the day has been magically resolved. Rather, it approaches genre with the hope of “confronting and overcoming the skepticisms about the possibility of alternative worlds.”

A close reading of Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022) in the book shows us exactly what a postdystopian utopia may look like in writing. Christine, the protagonist in the novel, is exiled from a community called Safetown where she has lived all her life and has been made to believe is the only safe place left in the world. True to her conviction, the outside world is indeed a hellscape. But, by chance, she gets a ticket to a train that takes her to a part of the country that has become a utopia in all practical sense. She is shocked beyond belief that such a place exists and yet she had lived in Safetown all the while with its segregation, discrimination, and 24-hour surveillance. Davidson uses this story to show us what a postdystopian utopian narrative is like, and how this category is distinct from both classic utopias or dystopias. In the novel, dystopian worlds are touched upon within the pages of utopia. Dystopian societies aren’t done away with, but are made to exist side by side with the utopian ones, though the latter is the more dominant force, persisting amidst other negative societies.

In Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Davidson shows the same genre convention in how a seemingly utopian underwater society exists even though the world above is anything but perfect. “They are undisturbed by the outside world; their watery society is protected from the forces of white supremacy on the land. In fact, such is the happiness of the wajinru that they can almost forget the Middle Passage.”

Davidson succeeds at drawing parallels between the past and alternate futures, connecting one with the other through discussing nostalgia, apocalypse, and trauma. With a scholarly lens and strong research, the book, through the concept of postdystopian utopia, advocates for a  way of approaching utopian fiction that could once again breathe life into the genre and, perhaps, give it its day in the sun once again. He shines a light on texts that have used this method in different ways, and shows that it is quite effective in our present time. 

At the end of this book, I came away somewhat hopeful for new forms of utopian fiction. Before now, I had rarely encountered it in recent books amidst (relative to utopian fiction) the large numbers of dystopian works in the markets like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2008) and its many spawns, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021), and many more. I simply thought it was something people just didn’t engage with anymore. But Davidson’s clear-eyed writing in Saving Utopia has shown me that sometimes, we only need to change our sitting positions to see what has always been there in a new light.

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.

Reviewed by Chisom Umeh The MIT Press, 2026

Is there a better time to talk about a less-warring, more prosperous, empathetic, and humane world than the present moment, where the militaries of powerful countries have taken up arms against each other, dropping bombs on civilians and tearing down cultural heritage that took decades to build?

Sadly, living in such a moment rarely engenders the appetite for dreams and imaginings of a better future. Rather, it makes us envision periods where the worst that could happen to humanity has happened: nuclear bombs have detonated, floods have sunk major cities, or an asteroid has lodged itself in the Earth’s crust. We see the presidents of powerful countries threatening or actually invading less powerful ones and that prompts us to take up pens and weave the most authoritarian panopticons we can imagine. We watch anti-science rhetoric spread in the media about climate change and we’re tempted to paint pictures of doomed, environmentally degraded futures.

The current happenings rarely inspire utopian stories in us. Instead, they often steer us toward the catastrophic.

In Joe P. L. Davidson’s Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (The MIT Press), we learn that this way of thinking hasn’t always been the case. There has never been a time when there wasn’t some form of global turmoil. However, many writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries  were inclined to look beyond the specific troubles that plagued their era and envisioned possible futures where the problems had been solved. This period saw a blossoming of utopian fiction, coloring the literature of the time with visions of better and hopeful lives. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi (1983), and many more, are amongst the books Davidson touches on, in showing how writers of the past treated the situations around them.

Davidson shows us in this book that, even amidst the current horrors and seeming pessimism about the future, utopian stories can still be told and told well. He helps us see that, amidst the seeming dearth of utopian fiction, some writers are still standing up for the genre and putting in the work.

I particularly loved how the modern texts like Claire G Colman’s Enclave (2022), River Solomon’s The Deep (2019), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), were juxtaposed with older books like Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890). This juxtaposition helps readers understand how utopian thinkers of the past viewed the concept, how they related it to their particular society and preoccupations, and how recent writers have engaged with the subject, noting the differences between both modes of approach.

While the older writers wrote utopian futures only as they could envision them, fashioning worlds imbued with whatever politics they liked, more recent authors take a different approach when crafting utopian stories. In Kathleen Hughes’ PhD thesis, Imagining the Future of Work (2024), she mentions that in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, “The past and the present, just as much as the future, are presented by Morris as temporary and transient.” But the more contemporary writers, according to Davidson, employ a method that he has come to call “postdystopian utopia.” This is a mode of writing utopias that doesn’t overlook the horrors of the present or the past, to weave into existence future worlds of abundance and peace. It acknowledges existing injustices and, rather than dismissing them in favor of an imaginary time, incorporates them into the story and uses them to make a point:

“What I call postdystopian utopia,” Davidson writes, “is a precarious balance between liberation and horror, in which the possibility of better worlds becomes apparent only by acknowledging worse worlds. The postdystopian utopia addresses the bad feelings that prevail in contemporary culture.”

The concept of postdystopian utopia is Davidson’s idea of how the genre of utopian fiction can be jump-started and reintroduced into global discourse meaningfully, as exemplified by recent books like Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), and Claire North’s Notes From A Burning Age (2021). It is not hungry to leap to a time when every problem of the day has been magically resolved. Rather, it approaches genre with the hope of “confronting and overcoming the skepticisms about the possibility of alternative worlds.”

A close reading of Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022) in the book shows us exactly what a postdystopian utopia may look like in writing. Christine, the protagonist in the novel, is exiled from a community called Safetown where she has lived all her life and has been made to believe is the only safe place left in the world. True to her conviction, the outside world is indeed a hellscape. But, by chance, she gets a ticket to a train that takes her to a part of the country that has become a utopia in all practical sense. She is shocked beyond belief that such a place exists and yet she had lived in Safetown all the while with its segregation, discrimination, and 24-hour surveillance. Davidson uses this story to show us what a postdystopian utopian narrative is like, and how this category is distinct from both classic utopias or dystopias. In the novel, dystopian worlds are touched upon within the pages of utopia. Dystopian societies aren’t done away with, but are made to exist side by side with the utopian ones, though the latter is the more dominant force, persisting amidst other negative societies.

In Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Davidson shows the same genre convention in how a seemingly utopian underwater society exists even though the world above is anything but perfect. “They are undisturbed by the outside world; their watery society is protected from the forces of white supremacy on the land. In fact, such is the happiness of the wajinru that they can almost forget the Middle Passage.”

Davidson succeeds at drawing parallels between the past and alternate futures, connecting one with the other through discussing nostalgia, apocalypse, and trauma. With a scholarly lens and strong research, the book, through the concept of postdystopian utopia, advocates for a  way of approaching utopian fiction that could once again breathe life into the genre and, perhaps, give it its day in the sun once again. He shines a light on texts that have used this method in different ways, and shows that it is quite effective in our present time. 

At the end of this book, I came away somewhat hopeful for new forms of utopian fiction. Before now, I had rarely encountered it in recent books amidst (relative to utopian fiction) the large numbers of dystopian works in the markets like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2008) and its many spawns, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021), and many more. I simply thought it was something people just didn’t engage with anymore. But Davidson’s clear-eyed writing in Saving Utopia has shown me that sometimes, we only need to change our sitting positions to see what has always been there in a new light.

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.

Interview with Tristan Evarts

Tristan Evarts is the editor of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and since 2019 he has overseen the publication of optimistic prose, poetry, non-fiction, and art. The magazine operates with a reverence for the classics of the SF canon while pushing to explore new ways of living, technology as a friend rather than enemy, and humanity adapting to present crossroads. Themes push writers to examine the different manifestations of utopia, ranging from language to disability to weird SF. Contributors include Beth Cato, Jean-Paul L. Garnier, and Bogi Takács. Cover artists range from Donato Giancola to Stephen Youll to Alyssa Winans. Every December, Utopia SF publishes an art special, showcasing a broad range of talent, with a portion of the profits donated to charity.  

Tristan gave me my start as an SF interviewer when he took me on as outreach manager in 2023, so it’s a real pleasure to be sharing this interview with him now.  

James Machell

JM: What do you think makes a really great utopian story?

TE: I think a great utopian story realizes that a utopian world isn’t the end game in and of itself, and that it’s really just a launching pad for truly discovering the universe and examining the more subtle but powerful aspects of what makes us human. It doesn’t accomplish this the way most people seem to want, by tearing down the utopia and setting us back to the apocalyptic and imperfect world we live in today, but by saying “Okay, we’ve gotten past our worst, childlike instincts. Not suppressed or ignored them, but actually learned to deal with them in a healthy way. What next?” We can still find conflict, but we get to solving it the right way in the end. We learn, we grow, we discover new mysteries, and when conflict arises, we show how to navigate it in a healthy way, even if it might take a while to get there. I’d point to many classic Star Trek episodes, or James White’s Sector General novels, as some good examples.

JM: Can you take us through how Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has developed since it was founded in 2019?

TE: It’s developed quite a lot. It went from a single-person, token-paying small operation in 2019 to what it is today: a globally staffed, pro-paying magazine. It’s been quite a journey and I owe an awful lot to all the staff and volunteer readers who have joined us over the years to help progress us to where we are today. And we’re not done yet! Our hope, as always, is to increase readership and subscribers, which helps drive up the amount we can pay authors and artists. We’ve come a mighty long way and there’s further still to go!

JM: What drew you to publishing utopian writing?

TE: Chiefly a desire to move away from the (at the time) crushing amount of dystopian fiction out there. You know the phrase: “You are what you eat.” The same is true that “you are what you read.” If all you read is dark, gritty, disparaging, cynical things about the world then that’s how you start to view it and, at least at an unconscious level, how you begin to shape the world around you. It’s a cyclical pattern—people who see the world as apocalyptic are more likely to see the darker things and when those get more attention, they take over our worldview. For a real-life example, just look at the news cycle and see how that affects people’s worldview and mental health. We need to see the good, the hopeful, especially when things are at their darkest. We need to know that we can (and will) overcome this and this is what it’s going to look like at the end. And seeing Utopia as a beginning and not an end is important too. I think, with the arrival of all the cozy books coming out, more people are starting to realize this. I think in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, we’re mentioned as part of the solarpunk movement and hearing that is quite an honor.

JM: In addition to publishing science fiction stories, poetry, non-fiction, and art, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine also offers a critique service, helping budding writers to find their feet. You’ve also recently taught an Apex creative writing class. Can you describe your approach to assessing a piece of writing,  and some of the suggestions you’re most likely to make?

TE: Let’s start off with assessment. When I look at a story there are a few things I’m really hoping to see before I go on to accept it. The first is: does the story grip me from the first paragraph? If I make it to the end of the first page and am not thoroughly engrossed with a story or character, I’ll usually pass on it. Second is pacing and momentum. If a story starts off strong, does it carry through the rest of the piece? Sometimes, for short pieces, I’ll read through it entirely, but for longer pieces, there’s a trick to use. In the well-written, well-structured story, you can read the first and last sentences in each paragraph without reading anything in the middle and still walk away with all the essential information you need for plot and story. If you do that and stumble or get confused, it means the story has pacing issues and depending on how far from the mark that goes, I may decide it requires more editing than any of us have time to do before the next issue and pass on it. Third is the ending. The last line a person writes is the single most important line they will write. It’s going to decide if the story stays in my memory, awakens that feeling of wonder, or simply fizzles into the frustrating silence of unfinished or underdeveloped potential. So, if it’s got a strong start and consistent pacing, but the ending is flat or leaves us in a rather dismal or dystopian way, I’m liable to pass on it.  If I accept it and decide to work with the author to edit it into shape, there are a lot of suggestions I might make depending on what the piece needs. My goal is always to elevate the writer – to get them to perfect their craft a bit more, to push harder and write better by cutting out extraneous words, adding complexity to the themes and ideas, and really project their message out into the world. 

JM: Roughly, what is the acceptance rate for stories submitted to Utopia Science Fiction Magazine?

TE: We receive hundreds upon hundreds of submissions in a given year and only publish a total of 15 to 20 stories in a given year. So, like all magazines, there’s a small acceptance rate based largely on limited space. We have to reject a lot of great stories just based on that alone. 

JM: Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has recently published its Weird Science Fiction issue. What themes can we be on the lookout for in the future?

TE: We have the cozy issue in June, and August is always an ‘anything goes’ field where we try to publish the best of the best. Every June/July the editors of Utopia meet up and discuss what we want the themes for the next volume to be. There are always a lot of good ideas passed around, but only a few issues we publish. So, what’s on the horizon for next volume’s themes? You’ll just have to stay tuned!

JM: What are some of the books and stories you wish you could travel back in time and publish yourself?

TE: That is a very good question and one I’m not sure I can answer. There are a lot of stories I love, but I’m glad they’ve been published elsewhere. It gives us a chance to read them, to learn from them and push the envelope farther in terms of ideas, technique, etc. We have a part of our magazine called The Vault where every issue I go back and find some amazing, public domain, stories to publish. So, in essence, if there are stories I really love I can go back in time and publish them in this manner  (after a very exhausting and extensive search for the public domain and copyright registrations). 

JM: When you’re not at the helm of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, you’re running Castle Books & Tea. Can you tell us a bit about your life as a bookseller and are you offering any good deals on rare books at the moment?

TE: Castle Books and Tea was born out of a bizarre moment when I realized I had free time, and it felt so unnatural I panicked and decided to launch a side project. I’m happy to say I no longer have anything remotely considered free time anymore. But it’s a real passion project— one of our specialities is vintage science fiction books. I’ve been to a lot of places to stock books and bought some amazing collections from people to resell. We’ve had books signed by Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Roger Zelazny, and a lot more. It’s fun to track down some of the harder to find books too, like Soviet Sci-Fi or the novels of Clifford D. Simak. We usually have a big sale in May to celebrate our anniversary (this year is the start of our 5th) and a lot of small sales throughout the year.

JM: What are some of the tropes and subjects that you’d prefer that authors avoid in submissions?

TE: I have read far more books about robots, AI, etc. than I ever hoped could have existed. While we find things about these books to like, it’s an exhausted topic and I find myself preferring more novel ideas. Otherwise, it’s a lot of what other sci-fi magazines hope to avoid seeing. We’re particular in that we really don’t need to see any dystopian, post-apocalyptic, shoot-em-dead stories. As our name suggests, these types of stories really aren’t for us.

JM: Any tips for budding writers who’d like to make Utopia Science Fiction Magazine their first place of publication? 

TE: Write every day and read every day. Read the stories you like and read them for technique, not just for story. Read what Utopia has published. A lot of them are available for free through our site, Medium, and Substack. Also don’t get discouraged. You will get rejected. A lot. But that’s all just practice for when you get accepted. And you will. Just keep improving your craft. 

Tristan Evarts

Tristan Evarts is the editor-in-chief of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and has been for the past seven years. He has a Bachelor’s in English and Philosophy with a specialization in creative writing and a Masters in Library and Information Science. When not editing, he is working at the library or at his bookshop, Castle Books and Tea, or growing his eclectic collection of books.

James Machell

James Machell is a British writer. He contributes to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and curates its Substack. He also serves as Outreach Manager for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and was the 2025 Contest Chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Find him on Bluesky @jamesmachell.bsky.social or YouTube @Fell-Purpose.