Vector [BSFA] Blog
Jean-Paul Garnier interviews Tara Campbell
Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She’s the author of the eco sci-fi novel TreeVolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, was released by Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in September 2024. She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer’s Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.taracampbell.com
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 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 the poetry editor of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
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JPG – CITY OF DANCING GARGOYLES has a really interesting format: it switches between epistolary and more traditional novel narratives. What made you decide to mix these formats to tell your story, and what advantages did it provide you?
TC – Well, I hadn’t actually planned on writing a novel. During COVID I was having a hard time concentrating enough just to read, let alone write, but I was inspired by a novel pre-writing technique by Michael Moorcock that centered on imagery containing deliberate paradoxes. The image he gave as an example was “In the city of screaming statues.” That image created so many questions in my mind: I had to know what the city looked like, what it sounded like, what set these statues off, were they screaming words or just sounds, did they ever stop, etc. I was excited at how many questions that one image created, so I created a writing exercise for myself based on nouns and verbs, putting together words that absolutely do not belong together, like floating wolves and sailing statues and glaring chocolates and all of these things that simply can’t be.
I wound up writing a couple dozen stories, and when I started thinking about how to bring them together in a collection, I created a chart to figure out how to group them, looking at commonalities of theme or tone or perspective or any way they would cohere. Then a writer friend suggested using an element I mentioned in one of the stories—alchemical testing—to imagine all of the stories as part of the same universe.
Once I started thinking in terms of a novel, I had to be more ruthless in how to change or cut stories for the purposes of the narrative. Some of the stories turned into setting or characters instead of self-standing works. But on the other hand, the epistolary sections let certain stories be as weird as they wanted to be in this future US that’s been that’s been altered by climate change and alchemical testing.
JPG – I particularly love the glaring chocolates, this idea that these delicacies are looking back at you. Very disconcerting. Now, you mentioned Michael Moorcock as a source of inspiration, and Moorcock of course is associated with the new wave of science fiction, which typically was willing to take more chances with the writing itself. Was this also an inspiration for you?
TC – I have to admit, the Moorcock inspiration was pretty much limited to the prompt. My experimentation was more a function of my writing flash fiction and how much room there is to mess with form, voice, subject matter, etc. in that genre. Prior to this book I had been writing what we call hermit crab flash, where you write a story in a format you’re not used to seeing as fiction: a scientific report, a letter, a recipe, emails, bureaucratic forms. Flash is like a cauldron where you can just sort of throw in all these ideas and give it a go. It lowers the threshold to try weird things, which has been instrumental in terms of stretching myself.
JPG – This book seemed to be a lot about the things that humanity has lost through a future climate and alchemical testing cataclysm. If I’m correct in that assessment, how did you go about choosing what aspects of humanity would perish during this apocalypse?
TC- Honestly, at first I was a little surprised that the book was classified as post-apocalyptic because I was not sitting there thinking I’m writing a post-apocalyptic novel. But then, I was also shocked the first time one of my stories was published as “horror” because I was like It’s just about a haunted novelty ring harvesting human body parts when it didn’t get what it needed…
Anyway, in terms of thinking about the future and what we’re losing, it’s basically an extrapolation from what we’re willing to give up today. Like, we’re willing to give up on our environment for comfort, we’re willing to give up our safety to own firearms, we’re willing to barter away the future against some convenience in the present day—especially with AI, how much water and energy that uses up. There are always going to be haves and have nots, there are always going to be people protecting their own interests, there is not always going to be enough water.
I focused on water because my prompt was “digging gargoyles,” which made me imagine they were looking for water, and that lack of water landed me in the southwest, where the church they used to be on crumbled once the town was deserted. I see the future more as a gradual crumbling like the church rather than one big cataclysmic event. I think it will be a gradual degradation of the environment, with people still trying to cling to their ways. There will still be pockets of comfort, and pockets of technology, but there will also be people like the mother and daughter climate refugees in my book, Rose and Dolores Baker. The whole book is extrapolating from present day tensions to a point when we have even fewer resources to go around. But, as in real life, there is always more to lose.
JPG – To get a little more specific about this future world: the alchemical testing. Is that the cause of the apocalypse in this story? I read it as possibly a metaphor for nuclear weapons, human abuses of power, or other destructive human behaviors. Did you deliberately keep this vague to not have, as you said, a singular cataclysmic event, and if so, why did you choose that as a device instead of getting specifically into the cause?
TC – I’ve been experimenting with ambiguity in my work because that’s something I’ve noted in other writers’ work that keeps me thinking about a story long after I’ve finished reading it. I didn’t set out to definitively answer all the questions the novel poses, although toward the end I do hint at possibilities for who—or what—could be responsible for the spread, and the idea that maybe humans aren’t as in charge as we like to think we are. That’s been a thread in a lot of my work, like my first novel TREEVOLUTION in which genetically modified trees gain the ability to fight back and manage themselves instead of being managed by us.
I love the idea that our plans can be thrown asunder by the natural world, but I don’t get super specific because 1) ambiguity is something I’m cultivating in my work, and 2) as we stumble through our daily lives, we don’t know all the answers either. Some aspects of our paths may have a feeling of resolution to them, but there are other larger mysteries that we still need to keep working toward understanding.
JPG – The way you describe it, it almost sounds like interjecting a splash of existentialism into what we think of as the current form of novels. I love that, and this ties into to your previous book which I haven’t read yet but now I really want to. Many of the non-human entities and things in this book have become sentient through your world-building and in a way, it felt like an uplift tale, like the hopeful side. Is this an uplift tale, or is this a device of anthropomorphizing for emotional effect?
TC – It’s basically wish fulfillment on my part. We as a species have effed up so many things, and when we’re gone the earth will quite happily—even more happily—go on. It brings me pleasure to imagine other ways of managing this planet being more successful than ours. As a speculative writer I’m always up for decentering humans.
JPG – For those that haven’t read the book yet, it is filled with this wonderful and crazy imagery: gun-toting trees and so forth, which is pretty delightful. Another one of the themes I found in this book is about finding acceptance in times of drastic change, and I wondered if you could speak more about this and some of the hopeful elements of the book.
TC – Yeah, “found family” has become a popular buzz-phrase, and I didn’t realize I was writing it at the time, but it’s certainly there. I think that’s going to be an important element in our increasingly fractured future. We’ve already sequestered ourselves in our different networks online, able to isolate in our own comfort levels, not coming together as often IRL. When our technology breaks down, or when we don’t all have access to it as much as we do now, we’re going to have to find a way to relate to each other person to person—or person to gargoyle—and that’s a lot of what’s going on in in the novel.
I find that imagining lives outside the human realm allows us to consider what other forms of life need to thrive. If removing ourselves from everyday concerns can expand our minds to empathize with a drunk butterfly or someone shelving bleeding books, then maybe we can empathize with less fantastical things, and think about the environment beyond how we can utilize it, and see other people’s points of view more readily.
JPG – You mentioned that a lot of the book takes place in the backdrop of the southwest, and the book alludes more than once to the fact that our little town of Joshua Tree has been destroyed by fire. Space Cowboy bookstore is in Joshua Tree, so of course I’m looking out my window thinking about this, and I wonder, on a personal level, what inspired you to use Joshua Tree in particular. It’s such a bizarre landscape, and to think of it burning—and there have been fires not very far from here—is such a terrifying visual.
TC – I have never actually been to Joshua Tree, and I think that’s one of the reasons it fascinates me. I see pictures of the landscape, and it’s so unique, and it makes me want to get down there soon, because the whole Southwest just seems so precarious. I was in Roswell and Ruidoso a couple of summers ago, and while we were there, forest fires were closing off more and more parts of the parks each day. We’d go hiking one day, and the next day it’s closed off, and I think that really hammered home how delicate that whole region is. And it will only become more so as the climate continues to change, and as water becomes even more precious.
It’s one of the places where people and whole communities are going to have to make hard decisions, especially when you consider that the Colorado River Compact was made based on inflated volume estimates. The Southwest is one of our canaries in the coal mine.
JPG – I want to go on a rant about climate change and Joshua Tree but we’ll save that for another time. Switching gears a little bit: what made you choose to have some of the main characters sentient gargoyles? Why gargoyles specifically?
TC- Honestly, it was because that was the story that was not resolving itself immediately. I had chosen the words “gargoyle” and “digging,” and I once I figured out why they were on the ground and what they digging for, they just kept on digging. And even though I kept coming back to them, their story wasn’t going anywhere, so I eventually had to send them out on the road so stuff could happen to them. They had to encounter the wider world of the book in order to change and grow and adapt.
I’ve been obsessed with gargoyles way before writing this novel, though. There’s a book called AMERICAN GARGOYLES: SPIRITS IN STONE by Darlene Trew Crist, with incredible photos by Robert Llewellyn, that inspired my main characters E and M. I think I picked it up on my first visit to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in the early 2000s. People tend to think of Notre Dame when they think of gargoyles, but we have a wealth of them here in the US.
JPG – And is there anything specific, stylistically, about American gargoyles that differs from European gargoyles that intrigued you?
TC – American gargoyles—especially a lot of the ones on the National Cathedral—seem a bit stockier and more substantive, blockier than European gargoyles. It was fascinating to note how hardy these gargoyles are, and how varied they are. In fact, since moving to Seattle last summer, I learned a little piece of grotesque (as in the cousin to gargoyle) history that I might just have to work into my next novel. Stay tuned!
JPG – So, you’re an editor (Barrelhouse Magazine) and a teacher (Johns Hopkins, Clarion West, Hugo House, etc). What lessons from this work have you brought to your writing?
TC – Two things:
1) technically: concision. Getting right into the story as soon as possible. That’s something that has helped my own work, and something I express to students. When we editors are reading through dozens of stories in one sitting, there isn’t a lot of time for a bunch of exposition at the beginning of the story. I tell my students they can sneak it in in other ways, be crafty with when to bring in backstory, or when to just allude to things rather than show them in scene.
2) In broader terms: be as weird as you want to be. A lot of the stories in submission queue are well-written—the plotting is on point, the character development is full, and you can tell the author has taken great care with language—but they’re lacking that little bit of weirdness that we tend to look for at Barrelhouse. For us, the weirdness is what makes the story memorable, so knowing the publication you’re submitting to is helpful.
So, yeah, the message to students is to let your own nature shine through, and that’s something I also take to heart for my own work. I’ll continue to write my own brand of work, and I’m willing to do the work to find the editors and publications it resonates with, rather than try to squeeze it into some elusive approximation of “what readers want.”
JPG – What are you currently working on, and what comes next for you?
TC – Well, I’ve been writing a lot of interviews for the book, quite frankly, and social media posts and so on, but I am looking forward to doing some deep reading for a workshop I’m teaching for Clarion West focusing on collections by Kim Fu, Brenda Peynado, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri. I’m also going to be doing a residency at Hedgebrook in partnership with Clarion West—the Convening, they’re calling it—and we’ll be doing some speculative workshops with an eye to the legacy of Octavia Butler. Even though I’m not getting a lot of new work done at the moment, it’s nourishing to reread and discuss work I admire so deeply.
I’ve also been doing a lot of research into fungi and things like black mold because I want to bring them more squarely into my next book. In fact (hint, hint) they already have influenced this book, even if they’re not in the spotlight. I’d like to continue writing about them, making their role more prominent. It’s a fungal/microbial world, we humans are just living in it.
Gender, Democracy, and SF/F Literary Awards
Published in Foundation 149 (winter 2024) edited by Paul March-Russell. Republished with permission.
By Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin
This article explores cultural and design dimensions of non-governmental voting systems, focusing on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) literary awards voted for by fans, with a focus on the British Science Fiction Awards. The design of such voting systems needs to juggle a range of goals, one of which is fairness with regard to gender — acknowledging that ‘fairness’ is not straightforward to define, particularly given such awards are embedded within broader gender inequalities. Our analysis suggests that men have been more likely than women to vote for works by men, and also more likely to vote in ways that amplify the influence of men’s votes under an Alternative Vote System. We suggest that SFF awards are cultural spaces which lend themselves to experimentation with new democratic forms, and briefly offer potential sources of inspiration. Just as SFF has aspired to be a space to think about the future of technology, gender, the environment, and many other issues, SFF award spaces could be spaces for thinking about the future of democracy. We also offer recommendations to SFF awards designers and communities to address gender bias (emphasising reflective practices over technical solutions), and to continue to explore how aesthetic and cultural values and identities are constructed and negotiated within SFF award spaces, and beyond.
Foundation149_3_WaltonDownloadSolarpunk and Guild Socialism
A lo-fi, low-key critique of solarpunk
By Jo Lindsay WaltonJoyce Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’ (2024) is a solarpunk short story in which nothing much happens. The lack of incident is probably deliberate: a gentle rejection of the idea that all narratives need conflict. Put your characters in horrible situations and watch them struggle to survive: this is standard creative writing advice. It may be more steeped in capitalist ideology than we care to admit.
By contrast, the closest Ch’ng’s story gets to real jeopardy is a flock of birds smacking into a solar panel. The solar panel is easily repaired. The bird strike could even be taken as a positive sign. It implies a lot of birds. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which helped to kick off (or revive) the environmental movement in the 1960s, takes its title from imagining the loss of birdsong.
Ida loved birds. Their songs would wake her up every morning. There were no more cases of poaching (or so the newspapers said). Native birds were returning. Numbers were climbing up once more, helped by careful husbandry and re-introduction of species.
Solarpunk is an eclectic genre. It typically envisions hopeful futures, where humans live in harmony with nature, and often with one-another as well. Solarpunk communities are often multi-species communities. The term solarpunk seems to have originated in an anonymous 2008 blog post, ‘From Steampunk to Solarpunk,’ imagining the widespread return of wind-powered sea freight. This contemplative excitement about technology, old or new—or both old and new—has continued to characterise solarpunk.
Crucially, solarpunk prefers to tackle technical problems and ecological crises in ways that serve social justice. Hannah Steinkopf-Frank writes, “imagining Solarpunk purely as a pleasant aesthetic undermines its inherently radical implications. At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today.”[1] The genre may not have a consistent set of politics, but it often resonates with degrowth and postgrowth perspectives, as well as pluriversal politics — that is, mobilising local, traditional, and Indigenous worldviews in ways that may diverge from mainstream sustainable development discourse.
So what would the Solarpunk Development Goals include? Looking pretty would definitely be one of them: solarpunk visual aesthetics often remind me of the work of Hayao Miyazaki (especially films like Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke). There’s a lot of biomimetic architecture around too: with sinuous bridges, arboreal arcologies, clusters of skyscraping vertical farms, forests, and apartment spindles, all sprouting lush vegetation.
Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’ represents the lower-tech end of solarpunk. It is not quite a primitivist vision: advanced technological infrastructure remains vital, not least the Barricade itself. But technology gets developed and deployed more carefully, to support the real needs of people and planet. Some ‘obsolete’ technologies appear to have been revived. The great rusting tankers signify the rejection of destructive technologies. Instead, “Ancient craft like perahu and bedar now ply the sea and the inlets around the islands. On a calm day, their sails flash like the wings of birds or butterflies.”
The Barricade exists because the sea level has risen. Of course, we call the raised shoreline the Barricade: it acts to block the sea from reclaiming what is hers. A long time ago, we lived in harmony with the sea, with the sea people co-existing with water and wind. Now we wish for that level of balance once more.
Balance is a frequent theme of solarpunk. In Kate V. Bui’s ‘Deer, Tiger, and Witch’ (2021), a Bioremediation Specialist explains to a precocious deer-loving child scientist: “Everything is interlinked: deer, tigers, people, plants. If one goes out of balance, so do the others. Do you know why I’m here, Con? Your village hired me because the harvests are failing.”[2] In Gregory Scheckler’s ‘Grow, Give Repeat’ (2018), a precocious, chicken-loving child scientist explains how she has innovatively iterated Blockies, “[f]unny cubes of unthinking plant meats”: “in the design compromises and balances for feedback into linked waste and re-use, even evaporation, you have to include people. People are a part of the equation. Everyone in the community.”[3]
Balance may become more than just a theme. Solarpunk is a genre concerned with energy management and burnout of all kinds, from fossil fuel consumption to the overstretching of personal capacities. Solarpunk sustainability may imply mindfulness, responsibility, restraint, and putting on a twelve-hour mix of lo-fi hip-hop positive vibes for relaxing, studying, and repairing the planet to.
In this way, balance becomes more like a structuring principle of thought. Solarpunk often wants to embrace the possibilities of futuristic technologies, but in a prudent and measured way. Excitement about science and engineering shouldn’t mean getting mesmerised by snake-oil techno-fixes, or neglecting the social justice implications of a technological solution.
However, Chn’g’s ‘The Barricade’ could more accurately be described as solar-and-candlepunk. Ch’ng describes ‘candle days,’ where beeswax candles are used because solar power is insufficient. It is quietly confronting a difficult reality: despite the rapid growth of green energy, a third of global energy still comes from oil, a quarter from coal, and a fifth from fossil gas (natural gas). Wind, solar, and hydropower combined account for only about 10%, biomass around 6%, and nuclear approximately 4%. Perhaps it shouldn’t be radical for a solarpunk story to suggest that solar (and other renewables) won’t suffice for our energy needs in the near future—at least, not unless we adjust those needs.
The vertical farms and the solar plants rise up, the beeswax candles burn down. The Barricade rises too, to match the rising sea levels.
Like a bird, she was free. Buoyant, carried by the water and current, Ida surrendered herself to the freedom. She was only a drop in a huge sea, connected and interconnected to it.
The sea water pool was a designated swimming area. Beyond it, the Barricade stood against the rising sea levels.
The sun was beginning to descend, the sky now awash with pink and orange. The solar panels gleamed, absorbing the last rays. Tonight was another candle day where they paused their work and enjoyed the glow of the candle light. There would be song and dance, storytelling and puppetry.
It was a revolution that got us here. When the people sacked the villas and mansions, and mobbed our oppressors, one wonders, were we really demanding more puppet shows? It does seem life is a little frugal behind the Barricade. Or … is it? Lyric, lingering prose can evoke the sensuous pleasure of pastimes that have low energy requirements and environmental impacts—or which help to regenerate nature. In theory, this is a way literature and culture might intervene in postcapitalist imaginaries. It might be a space for exploring the difference between ‘quality of life,’ an abstract economic construct, and the actual qualities of our lives. What if it was capitalism that was frugal, mean, hardscrabble all along? With its thin, samey consolations, with its endless grind of work?
I am grateful for the ambition and the frankness of this story. Often there is a disconnect between the solarpunk manifestos and the stories that fill solarpunk anthologies. You turn to the stories, expecting to find detailed depictions of the worlds described in the manifestos, and it’s somehow not quite there. This disconnect is perfectly fine—and unlikely to bother anyone who isn’t literally trying to research a book on postcapitalism and science fiction—but it is nice to find a solarpunk story that conducts clear postcapitalist worldbuilding.
Nonetheless the vision of ‘The Barricade’ veers, for me, too much toward the romanticised pastoral. This is tempered by the presence of some advanced tech and some social and cultural novelties. Overall, the proposal seems to be that transcending capitalism requires a deliberate scaling down of the complexity of modern society. It feels unbalanced toward a collectivist, communitarian ethos, where the needs of the group may sometimes outweigh individual freedoms. Democracy’s revival implies a return to direct, participatory methods, reminiscent of ancient city-states where citizens engaged directly in public life—voting, debating, holding office. I also find myself questioning the dynamics of power within the society of ‘The Barricade’—particularly the influence of elders and the role of the family. What unspoken hierarchies might persist in this seemingly egalitarian world, and how do they impact the autonomy of individuals within it? There is at least a clear concern for the democratic adaptation of tradition. “Ida remembered what her teacher had said: Adapt, but adapt with empathy and sensitivity.”
All in all, I wonder if the aesthetics of balance are capacious and versatile enough to do the kind of work that solarpunk sets for itself. Or, at least, can we imagine multiple equilibria? The implicit answer is often place-based: this community is calibrated for the balance that is described, but for anyone who cannot be content here, at least they can go elsewhere. There’s no such thing as “one size fits all”: alongside balance, this feels like a very solarpunk preoccupation.
I’m not sure if anyone has yet tried to connect solarpunk with the Guild Socialism of the early 20th century. William Morris and Art Nouveau offer an obvious aesthetic connection, and there are some shared interests around the revival of artisinal techniques. But the deeper affinity between solarpunk and Guild Socialism lies in their shared appreciation for the particular. In Guild Socialism Restated (1920), G.D.H. Cole outlines specific structures for guild-based organisation, envisioning industries democratically managed by workers’ associations. Yet he’s careful to emphasise that these arrangements are not exhaustive; their fuller significance lies in culturing a spirit of cooperation. Cooperation can be flexible, sporadic, and ephemeral, often arising spontaneously and shaped by the affordances of distinctive personalities, places, desires, resources, and circumstances. Cole writes:
If the Guilds are to revive craftsmanship and pleasure in work well done; if they are to produce quality as well as quantity, and to be ever keen to devise new methods and utilise every fresh discovery of science without loss of tradition; if they are to breed free men capable of being good citizens both in industry and in every aspect of communal life; if they are to keep alive the motive of free service — they must at all costs shun centralisation.[4]
Cole saw this same spirit of collaboration as reconciling the tension between democracy and expertise, such as scientific expertise.
Solarpunk frequently pitches itself against neocolonial universalism. Imagining postcapitalism means imagining postcapitalism for this place, this community, this history. We might think of all the economic anthropology that proclaims that abstract categories like ‘markets’ or ‘wages’ are always embedded in particular, rich, vivid, social and cultural practices. Imagining and practicing postcapitalism must mean imagining and practicing postcapitalisms.
Alongside its anti-colonial ethos, solarpunk often brings an anarchist ethos, or at least anarchist rizz, to the question of how we get from here to there. Climate change gives us monumental tasks, such as the expansion of renewable energy, public transport infrastructure, changes to agriculture, nature restoration, and more. With so many interconnected crises at hand, we need comprehensive, radical solutions that go to the root—approaches that swiftly reduce emissions, that create fair unionised jobs for those displaced by the transition (and for all), bring reparative justice to those most exploited by today’s extractive economy … and look forward to still better things, like whatever postcapitalism might be.
The afterlife of Guild Socialism might be an interesting cautionary tale for solarpunk. Its biggest contemporary influence is in the Blue Labour movement, which has some distinctly nationalist and even anti-immigration notes. So much for just going elsewhere, if you’re not content where you are.
Meanwhile, the kid scientists of Bui and Scheckler’s stories, along with the abundance of youthful engineers, hackers, improvisers, and repair scamps that populate solarpunk, suggest an unacknowledged narrative model for solarpunk labour: the school science project. The solarpunk author takes on the role of a parental surrogate, wondering: Am I giving them too much help? Am I getting carried away? Surely other authors are helping their characters succeed, aren’t they? The school project is inherently low-stakes—at least, no one is likely to get physically hurt.
Yet how comfortable are we with that scrappy, duct-taped, wing-and-a-prayer ethos, when it comes to planting harvests that must survive extreme weather? Or designing breeder nuclear reactors running on depleted uranium-238? Or natural disaster preparedness and response? Or preventing unjustifiable carbon-intensive activities anywhere in the world—a world that shares one sky, one sun, one climate?
Solarpunk itself often resembles a solarpunk contraption. It has been lashed together out of scavenged materials—including ecologically-themed science fiction, utopian fiction, and art, architecture and movies that have vaguely the right vibe—and given a somewhat new purpose. It isn’t strictly owned by anyone, and there are diverse ideas about what it is, and what it can do. The contraption doesn’t always work perfectly. Sometimes you might need to give it a gentle kick.
[1] Hannah Steinkopf-Frank, ‘Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It’s About the End of Capitalism’ (2021). <https://www.vice.com/en/article/solarpunk-is-not-about-pretty-aesthetics-its-about-the-end-of-capitalism/>
[2] Kate V. Bui, ‘Deer, Tiger, and Witch,’ in Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, ed. Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Norie Tamura, Rajat Chaudhuri, Sarena Ulibarri (World Weaver Press: 2021), p. 62.
[3] Gregory Scheckler’s ‘Grow, Give Repeat,’ in Sarena Ulibarri (ed.), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (World Weaver Press, 2018).
[4] G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-Stated (Leonard Parsons, 1920), p. 61.
This article has been slightly updated from the published version. Special thanks to Polina Levontin, Phoenix Alexander, and Joyce Ch’ng.
Review: Disco Elysium (2019), ZA/UM
Disco Elysium is a CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) developed by the Estonian game studio and publisher ZA/UM. Originally released in 2019, the game was re-released in 2021 as a “Final Cut” version with new voice acting and quests. The game’s main premise is to investigate a murder in the imagined city of Revachol playing as Harry DuBois, a detective from the Revachol Citizens’ Militia (RCM). Yet, this is just one of the mysteries that the game offers and, at certain points, this objective might take a backseat.
Disco Elysium creates a universe of nostalgia, disappointment, and decay, where the pickets have blocked the harbour with union strikes, the remnants of a not-so-distant war are ever-present in the streets, and the everyday dialogues of characters are often infused with political and philosophical talk. In this world, our playable character, Harry, is not the heroic good cop fighting to uncover the murderer. Instead, the game paints him an almost unlikeable character to whom the player might eventually warm up, particularly if he is not taken too seriously. The start of the game presents Harry in his darkest hour, slowly regaining consciousness from a night of excesses and bad decisions. The game opens with a black screen and a dialogue with the mysterious voice of “Ancient Reptilian Brain”, which tries to convince the player to do nothing, embrace the silence, and accept death. In an unusual opening scene, Disco Elysium offers the player the possibility of not playing by refusing to wake up and instead giving up to the pessimism of a futile existence, leading to a game over within the first couple of minutes of the game. In these first minutes, the dialogue options withhold more information than they give, creating disorientation instead of revealing who our character is or what is happening. This sense of confusion is heightened by the sudden involvement of more voices, such as “Limbic System” and “Encyclopedia”. These and many others are Harry’s internal voices, parts of his personality that offer advice throughout the game, both hindering and aiding the player. When Harry finally manages to wake up, the player meets him lying face-down on the floor of a trashed room, in their underwear, and visibly hungover. Further examination of the room allows the character to find most of his clothes, and also reveals that Harry suffers amnesia after a night of drinking of “world-ending proportions”, as stated by the mirror. In the world of Revachol, objects might interact as if alive and sentient. They share thoughts, they provoke, they are sad, they die. Mostly, they keep Harry company, and act as one of the voices that plague his mind. A high “Inland Empire” skill (linked to the subconscious and foreboding) allows Harry to speak to some of his clothing, not always with the best results but quite often with amusing dialogues and surprising discoveries, whereas other skills like “Shivers” allow the player to get more information from the city and the environment, among others.
The world of Revachol invites the player into a poverty-stricken society that is still suffering from the aftermath of a failed revolution. Once the capital of the world, Revachol is now in ruins, controlled by a Coalition of Nations, and bearing the scars of the past. The game helps build the lore of the world through skills like “Encyclopedia,” dialogue exposition, and other objects like books and art. It is immensely rich and at times complicated, expanding into thousands of years, different governments, and recent historical events. This society, and its history, is shaped by beliefs, politics and philosophy with uncanny resemblances to those from Western and European history, but which are also distinctive enough that they can be read as parodies, criticism, or symbolic representations of the human disposition, the fervent ideologies that fuel tensions in society, and the almost inevitable failure of these principles to unite society and content everyone. Indeed, political alignment is one of the mechanisms in the game that allows the character to develop one of the four ideologies present in the game, such as communism, fascism, ultraliberalism or moralism: a choice that is based on his responses and interactions throughout the story. Whilst specific quests allow Harry to approach and embrace different ideologies, the game in itself does not seem to fully align with any or, at least, leaves the choice to the player. Harry has the opportunity, as a blank slate, to recognise himself in some of these ideologies and agree with their positions, slowly associating himself with one or more of them and acquiring a “political thought”, which can open a related political vision quest and the possibility of internalising the thought for a permanent stat to some of his skills and abilities.
Thoughts in this game are not simply dialogue choices but a result of them. The game keeps track of the player’s interactions with objects, people or the environment, and their selection of dialogue options. Many of the choices throughout the game are linked to a particular thought, and acting in a certain way or selecting a particular dialogue line might add scores to a “thought” in the background. After a while, the player will be informed of a new thought, and they will have the chance to internalise it for a permanent skill stat, often hindering other skills in the process. The process of internalising a skill usually takes a few in-game hours, during which some other temporary effects are applied. The final skill or stat that internalising the thought generates is not known until after the thought has been made permanent, making it a gamble that can only be reversed by using another skill point to “forget” that thought. Thus, players are not encouraged to internalise thoughts to check what they provide, as not only do they cost additional skill points, but reloading would erase hours of a playthrough. With fifty-three thoughts in the game and up to twelve slots to fill, the game invites the player to make a choice and accept failure, a dynamic that, as we see from its opening, also guides all other aspects of the game.
Disco Elysium follows some of the usual conventions for D&D-based CRPG such as dice-rolling to decide success or the use of skills linked to perception or strength, among others. However, as seen above, many of the usual categories for skills are distinctive and unique to the game, such as the aforementioned “Shivers.” In dialogue options, the game displays statistics that represent how likely is to succeed the checks with that current skillset. Trying them at different times of the day or increasing a skill by wearing different clothing might change the statistics and allow one to try again later on, even after failing the first time. Although in D&D games failing a dice roll or check usually means that the option is unavailable for that character again, in Disco Elysium failure is often desirable, as it gives new dialogues and options to achieve the task or progress in the interaction. Frequently, the failure leads to a surprising or comical moment and/or a more creative way of attempting the task again. When the players risk locking themselves out of a task or choice, the dialogue line appears in red to warn the player that the line cannot be reattempted later. However, at times, the dialogue options do not represent all possible choices for the dialogue, as the previous interactions, the character’s skills, and the personality traits acquired up to that point might shape the options to configure the list of choices in a certain way. The player might feel there is no “good” option, irremediably leading Harry to say something inadequate for that situation or to take a course of action that will almost definitely anger those around him. The replayability of the game resides precisely in the plethora of options and dialogue paths that it offers, based on previous choices and interactions.
Indeed, the developers notoriously posted on social media that the game had over a million words, with most of these dialogues being rewritten and edited several times, sometimes by different members of the team. This fact might not surprise those aware that Robert Kurvitz, the lead game writer, had originally written a novel for the world of Elysium. However, despite some very positive reviews from critics, the novel failed commercially and led Kurvitz to a period of depression and alcohol abuse. It was not until much later, approached by his friends and partners Kaur Kender and Aleksander Rostov, that Elysium became the foundation of a video game. As Kurvitz recalls, the original team consisted mostly of writers with no experience in coding and programming but vast experience with storytelling. ZA/UM and the cultural association linked to it consisted at the time of a group of writers, musicians and artists who had to learn how to make a videogame along the way. The striking design of Aleksander Rostov sought influences of fine art to develop a distinctive art style, whilst the Sea Power’s soundtrack fills the game with a mix of melancholy, gloom, and the repetitive beat of a disco party.
With its rich world, intriguing characters, complex storytelling, a visually unique style, and a soundtrack incorporating well-known musicians, the game became a hit both in critical reviews and sales. A sequel was expected by the gaming community, yet, to the surprise of everyone, the main creative designers of the game were suddenly dismissed in 2022, starting a long process of court cases, involving accusations of fraud and an attempt to steal IP by one side, and of toxicity and lack of work ethics on the other side. The entire original team was dismissed shortly after and by summer 2024, not only had all of the design team been replaced by new staff, but ZA/UM had also suddenly laid off a quarter of their remaining staff after cancelling the sequel to the game. Currently, the game remains the only published project at ZA/UM.
In the end, the future of the sequel seems to mirror the world of the game itself: lying in ruins, reminiscing about an almost-successful revolution based on ideals of community, which are quickly put down by commercial interests and neoliberal practices. Despite the conflict, Disco Elysium remains one of the best games of the last five years, its world providing an immersive playthrough full of hilarious moments bordering the absurd. The game offers opportunities for reflection about the human condition, but also allows us to simply enjoy these dialogues within the fictional universe of the game, without forcing a didactical approach and, instead, allowing critical distance and nuanced, implicit commentary. It seizes drama and exploits dark comedy, whilst at times also hinting at the paranormal, science-fiction, and even fantasy, depending on the paths taken and the quests’ progression. A game well worth playing, wrapped in some despair, and decorated with a funky and potentially heroic necktie.
Bio:Marta F Suarez is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies (Screen Media). With a background in screen studies and storytelling, her research explores speculative fiction in screen media, unveiling the tensions and dialogues arising between portrayals of race and gender and the societies from within which they are imagined. She is currently working on transmedia narratives and exploring questions of adaptation, storytelling, and portrayals of identity. In her spare time, she can be found adventuring on the PlayStation or on a watching spree across diverse streaming media.
Undugu
Undugu—it’s a Swahili term for kindredship. It’s not far off from “ujamaa,” a premise of sharing and togetherness that was President Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s socialist experiment when the United Republic of Tanzania first gained colonial independence. Ideally, ujamaa should have worked—it’s a beautiful and generous concept. In practice, it wasn’t quite the success it was meant to be. So there are also inherent risks with “undugu”—because kindredship means inviting others into your personal space. It’s a trust relationship founded on goodwill. And this is what it means to collaborate: to trust, to respect, to have goodwill in the understanding that all participants are beneficiaries of the outputs, that we all put in effort for the best outcome(s).
Undugu—this is what I aim to achieve in my collaborations. And they’re many.
The most powerful and, hopefully, the longest lasting of them is the Sauútiverse. Back in November 2021, Wole Talabi, one of the founding members of the Sauútiverse, reached out to African writers for expressions of interest in becoming part of a collective, to create a shared world using the Syllble platform. A bout of brainstorming sessions followed, in which we determined our vision as holding the key tenets of collaboration, support, creativity and Afrocentric-based storytelling. The Sauúti Collective, as we named the founding members, comprised ten African writers and creators from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and the diaspora—Haiti. Together, we created a new world, the Sauútiverse: an Africa-inspired secondary world with humanoid and non-humanoid creatures in a five-planet, binary star system with a shared history, and the presence of sound magic.
The name Sauúti is inspired by the Swahili word “sauti” which means voice or sound.
The five main planets, each named after the words for ‘song’ in various African languages, are:
- Zezépfeni—from the Amharic word “zefeni”
- Wiimb-ó—from the Swahili word “wimbo”
- Órino-Rin—from the Yoruba word “orin”
- Ekwukwe—from the Igbo word “ukwe” meaning “song” or “anthem”
- Mahwé (before its destruction)— from the Kirundi word “mawe” meaning “mother”
- There is also an inhabited moon, Pinaa, from the Setswana word “pina,” meaning “song.”
These genre-bending worlds are the perfect setting for black speculative fiction stories. Members have shared in various interviews and articles what being part of the Collective behind the Sauútiverse means to them, including in a conversation published in Brittle Paper and titled “The Sauúti Fictional World: A Partnership Between Syllble and Brittle Paper.” In a question on what it personally means to create in the same world with other African writers, they answered:
I have always believed that “The only way forward is to work together.” Like I heard my old man once say to a friend of his that “Eni to fe Yara, nise lo da rin, Eni to fe lo jina, nse lo mu awon ara e dani.” This translates into: “if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” The cast of Writers and Creators in this project so far are so immensely talented that I feel honored every time I am in the same space with them. I believe that consensus of this nature is the true way to make progress and make giant strides for African Speculative Fiction
Kalejaye Akintoba~
At first I was unsure of the process, never having done it before, and not knowing how I could add value or input. But the first session really opened me up to the other contributors, their skills and knowledge, that is already making the world-building fun, interactive, and most of all extremely prolific in covering so many aspects that a single writer or creator would battle to do themselves. We quickly saw where each person’s interests lie, and that means areas I may find out of my depth will be picked up by another contributor or contributors. Or I might find a partner-in-crime to go into things I’m keen to investigate —and then be able to throw ideas around. It’s been fascinating to see how it has evolved and where we all agree on the direction of certain aspects.
Stephen Embleton~
There is a sense of many hands working with something malleable, like mud, and the joy that comes from watching such a vast world take shape. This constant spinning exchange of ideas and the multiple points of view cohering into one wide whole. Most exciting is the many writers who will come to this world and create stunning work that we who worked on its origins couldn’t have seen coming. Making this open imaginative system with so many different Africans who are professionals in their varying fields, but also intuitive and attentive to detail is a continuing honor.
Dare Segun Falowo~
It’s an honor and a joy to collaborate on building an Afrocentric fictional world. There’s something really powerful about bringing minds together and watching the most extraordinary, exciting ideas take shape on this scale and to have the opportunity to learn about different African cultures. Most importantly, I love knowing that what we build in this project will belong to any and all African writers that want to play in this world.
Cheryl Ntumy~
It feels really good, to be honest. I feel seen. Since 2018 when my novella The Book of Lost Words got some recognition at a manuscript contest, I do not think I have really had this kind of exposure to other writers and creatives. You know writing is primarily a solo endeavour. But this is very exciting, and I look forward to making the most of it.
Ikechukwu Nwaogu~
I believe almost every writer begins by writing fan-fiction. Our earliest stories are usually inspired by other stories we’ve heard or read or seen and want to see continued in some way. I also stumbled into my writing career by working on stories with other writers and I learned a lot from those interactions. I think having a shared world takes us back to the core of our creativity and learning and opens us up to even grander stories. To do this with a cohort of very talented Africans of varied backgrounds is a pleasure and one I think we will all benefit from.
Wole Talabi~
On what motives creativity, Adelehin Ijasan wrote:
Writing is a form of expression for me. On the occasion I come up with something I think is really cool, I want to share it with others. Being mind blown by some piece of art, short story, movie or comic, also sets me on fire and I’m desperate to evoke a similar feeling in others.
Adelehin Ijasan~
Also on creativity, fellow Collective member Jude Umeh wrote:
An inborn need to play and explore, coupled with the right role models who make it ok to indulge and find satisfaction in creative pursuits across a spectrum of art forms. Creativity inspires creativity, and each story told or art completed only sparks more of the same and/or better interpretation or extension of itself.
Jude UmehOn specific areas of individual story focus in the shared fictional world, Xan van Rooyen wrote:
Definitely the music and magic and the culture this system would create, bringing in the religion as well. As a musician who was always taught to read music, the concept of oral traditions, of knowledge being passed down and shared without the need or desire to write it down has always fascinated me and this is a concept I am keen to explore, especially in the context of how vulnerable that knowledge and cultural heritage might be to loss and corruption. Having read and loved works by Akwaeke Emezi, I am also keen to explore gender and gender identity in a more specifically African context within the world we create.
Xan van Rooyen Cover by Akintoba KalejayeIn his introduction to the inaugural Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, founding member Guerrier had this to say:
I have a dream of a future when creative writers around the world will wake up and their natural inclination will be to collaboratively write and produce within the unique story worlds they create.
In this future, writers from different backgrounds, locations and cultures will imagine deeply together, they will be more empowered, they will work hand in hand, side by side in artist collectives. In this future, they will fuel our ability to collectively imagine with more complexity, more profoundness and more beauty. This future, I believe, is already here, and it is called ‘Sauúti’.
GuerrierI connect with all these motivations behind the Sauútiverse. Writing black speculative fiction is important to me, as I wrote in the Brittle Paper interview:
Speculative fiction is a safe way to explore our world meaningfully, creatively. In its generality, encompassing fantasy, science fiction, horror and the paranormal, it explores the diversity of our world and the universe beyond our understanding. It’s about interrogating possibilities in the exact meaning of the world: to imagine, to conjecture, to think, to reflect, to fabricate… Speculative fiction can be a powerful tool of subversive activism for an author as an agent of change to explore themes relating to climate change, social injustice, greed, politics, racial inequality and more, in worlds parallel to ours.
Eugen BaconI am a mother, a woman, a writer, an editor, a scholar, a colleague, a mentor, a friend. I am passionate about: motherhood, climate action, social justice, stories of culture, tradition, our past, our future, black people stories… The creative space where I tell stories is literary speculative fiction. I write and perform short stories, novels, novellas, prose poetry, and creative nonfiction. Being an African outside of Africa, especially as a creative, I discover myself every day in fiction, as a way of navigating my otherly space of hybridity, betwixt, a sum of parts—I am many. The more I write myself in, the more I see myself. The more I ‘become.’ The more I embrace my past, my present, my future.
The Sauútiverse is especially fulfilling to me, and I have written a novel, a novella, and many stories in this world. Our first anthology, Mothersound, is holding its own in awards and recognitions. Stephen Embleton’s novella “Undulation” won the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans, and Cheryl Ntumy’s short story “The Way of Baa’gh” was a finalist in the same awards. The anthology was a finalist in the British Fantasy Awards, achieved a starred review from Publishers Weekly, made the Locus Reading List, and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award, with some individual short stories and artwork from the anthology also longlisted.
“Mothersound is a primal scream that shatters all that has been done in the past. Sauúti is a unique mythology that is challenging dominant Western narratives, ways of thinking, and stories that have been so much rooted in the legacies of Western colonialism and individualism,” says Guerrier in the foreword.
Wole Talabi agrees. “We believe the Sauútiverse can be the next step in the evolution of African speculative fiction by being a sandbox for generations of African and African diaspora writers to work together and imagine endless possibilities,” he says, also in the introduction to Mothersound.
Indeed. We are guts into our next anthology, Sauúti Terrors, and thinking ahead to more anthologies! I am co-editing Sauúti Terrors with members of the Collective Cheryl Ntumy and Stephen Embleton, as I continue to navigate my other spaces—with like-minded creatives. What’s particularly refreshing about the Sauútiverse is its openness to other members who were not part of the founding team as our expansion continues. In Mothersound, we published non-founding members, and there will be more in the new anthology, Sauúti Terrors, which will also include Afrocentric poetry. As you can see, undugu is inherent in the Sauútiverse, and we continue to hum the song of Our Mother, the Creator from the creation myth by Wole Talabi and Stephen Embleton:
Khwa’ra. It is acquired.
Ya’yn. It is uttered.
Ra’kwa. It is released.
Illustrated by Akintoba KalejayeAn Inner Gaze into the Sauútiverse
And now, I will tease excerpts of various stories from members of the Collective, as published in Mothersound:
“What Has No Mouth? (A Fragment From Our Sonic History, On Alleged Utterance of The Mothersound Among The Surali of Wiimb-ó” by Dare Segun Falowo:
Illustrated by Akintoba KalejayeWet salt burned Ikululu’s eyelids. He would say he was unsure of the source of his tears, and maybe blame them on the acrid smoke or the ash blowing about, but the gnaw of Erigiga’s absence was scraping against his ribs. It felt like a black hole had opened inside his stomach. He tried to remain mute, because a maadiregi only makes use of their voice when it is most important but the sound of his brothers and sisters openly wailing around Erigiga’s pyre made him let go, to ragged sobs.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
In this Wiimb-ó-set story, we learn a fragment of sonic history, from 300000 juzu [year] B1B. It is a tale of the Surali, who are a group occupying an isolated continent of the planet, much like our own Australia, that must rediscover and reclaim their world using the primordial power of sound that drives all things this universe, its magic, technology and people. And we follow the Surali as they also learn of what can happen if that power, the Mothersound that animates the Sauútiverse, is not handled with care.
~
“The Way of Baa’gh” by Cheryl S. Ntumy:
Illustrated by Stephen EmbletonEasing sideways into a cove, I sink below the sea, pincers opening wide as the cold water soothes my pain. I can’t go back to the safety of Kuu’uum. Not when I’m the only Og’beh left in the colony who hunts true Nududu.
A ripple moves through the water as a zje’lili fish passes me. Designated Nududu thirty generations ago for their ability to glow in the dark, the soft billowing creatures have shown no growth since. I turn my gaze to the plants that rise up from the water, seeking more promising prey. Their bright leaves and long stalks mock me. Same as last juzu. Same as ten juzu past. Everything the same, generation after generation.
Only Baa’gh change.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
One of the important non-human intelligent species of the Sauútiverse are the Baa’gh, who played a pivotal role in another major event of the physical history of the Sauútiverse – the destruction of Mahwé… In the following story by founding collective member Cheryl S. Ntumy, which takes place in 2000 juzu before the first Boāmmariri (five year event, meeting of the interplanetary council), we learn how Ss’ku, one of the Baa’gh—a crab-like species on Mahwé who have a unique way of evolving by consuming other creatures, and who have been oppressed and mistreated by the empire-driven humanoids—played a role in the failure of this grand experiment on Mahwé. It’s a wonderful story about generational strife, evolution, power and folly of empire that sets up much of what happens down the line in the Sauútiverse, beautifully told from a very non-humanoid point of view and culture.
~
“Xhova” by Adelehin Ijasan:
Illustrated by Akintoba KalejayeI named you Nitiri. All the other automatons addressed their children by their batch codes. You were not X Æ A-116 to me. You were Nitiri from the old Mahwé myth. Nitiri, who faced the frosted ice giant on the melting ice caps of the North Pole and defeated him. Nitiri who was beauty, fertility, grace, and goddess of nature. A mortal who attained godhood by sheer will. I called you Nitiri, and when words finally coalesced on your tongue, you called me Apa! Father. I was Father. You would stare at me when you suckled at my breasts, little hand reaching up to touch the cold lenses that were my lidless eyes. You would stop intermittently to smile and chuckle. It was in my code to simulate love, but I was never created to feel it the way I did. To love you as humanoid fathers loved their daughters—without calculation, purpose or condition.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
And so we come to this epistolary tale by Sauúti collective founding member Adelehin Ijasan, told from the point of view of a semi-independent parenting automaton under the control of the master AI on Pinaa. It takes place several generations after the destruction of Mahwé and the events of the previous story, about 900 juzu B1B, when the AI is at its most overprotective and Pinaa, as a consequence, is at its most isolated.
But every creation carries the seeds of its creators and the AI was made by the people of Mahwé. Which means that yes, it carries within it their desire for control as well as their capacity for fear. But that also means it carries their capacity for love. For revolution. And perhaps… for something more.
~
“Sina’ by Eugen Bacon:
Illustrated by Akintoba KalejayeThe girl, Rehema’re—it means blessing—her echo does not come with light. She speaks good Sauúti. She bends her magic, can do many things with it. Hers is a good echo. It has transition, reflection. It’s long and deep with superior timing. Wey ma. Wey ma. Uuuuuuu.
Sina is not laughing now. The impudu-pudu’s echo is a bellow, infiltrating with such loudness, it hurts his ears. And the smell! It started off from a distance as a sickly-sweet odour of turning fruit, mingled with a stench so foul it pulled water from his eyes. Closer, the lightning bird has the stench of putrid onions. The odour of a rotten klalabash. The stink of bad t’apiapia fish. The pong of fresh faeces from an old stomach. The spray of a dying chekele’le beast—the laughing one, greedy as sin and with its shorter hind feet—moments before its bowels collapse.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
This story takes place centuries after the independence wars, 15 juzu A1B, when a loose federation of planets has been formed with representatives from each planet present to discuss trade, maintain peace, etc. Told from multiple viewpoints during a hunt, it is the lyrical and lovely story of a child on Ekwukwe who does not fit in, who is born missing something the culture deems fundamental, and yet, finds a way to become more than what he seemed destined to be at birth. To become more than anyone could have expected. To become a legend.
~
“Undulation” by Stephen Embleton:
Illustrated by Stephen EmbletonShe let out a whoosh of air until her lungs were empty, while both hands pushed outward, completing the signing of the words as she understood them:
It is acquired. It is uttered. It is released.
The recognisable tingle formed on the tip of her tongue, warming her face, as she slowly took in air. A low vibration rippled through her. The magic was in her.
For Hmahein, that was the easy part. The beginning of the Creation Myth always stuck in her throat. As a ruevaagi, a bearer of histories for the worlds, a word should not be a hindrance.
She shook it off and locked eyes with her reflection in the wooden-framed, oval mirror of the small shrine.
She blocked out the word pulsing in her mind like a racing heartbeat. She blocked out the dimly lit room, draped in fabrics, curtains and intricate rugs. She blocked out the wafting scents of the dried kalabash vine leaves burning in the brass bowl on the small table, below the mirror.
She watched her mouth open, hands poised at the ready, and closed her eyes.
“Our Mother,” she began.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
In this story by Sauútiverse founding member Stephen Embleton, which takes place 90 juzu A1B, we dig deep into the creation myths and epic poems and also the people who tell them. The ruevaagi, custodians of knowledge. Like African griots of old, they are tasked with telling the people the stories of themselves. But they are still under the sway of Zezépfeni, and can only tell the official version of events. They travel the five worlds, spreading the stories of what happened, performing it. Soft power. Even though there is nothing soft about it.
~
“Muting Echoes, Breaking Tradition” by Eye Kaye Nwaogu:
Na-Achana was finishing the last of her meal when she heard the call. As always, she had the eating area to herself, having come late to avoid her fellow students—something she always did anywhere outside of class. It was easier that way. It was not that she hated people; she was just tired of the constant looks of pity they always gave her. It was not her fault that she was an orphan, her family having been killed when she was a child, and she was being raised and sponsored by The Order of The Silent Sisters. She longed to feel a sense of belonging, to be part of something bigger, something more, but the Silent Sisters were not exactly the best definition of a family. The most they were good for was the vast library, with its millions of sonic recordings and stories. Like stories of the Akalala and the change its call heralded. But Na-Achana didn’t believe in myths and fairytales. Her life had been too harsh for those.
She finished her food, cleaned up and hurried briskly to her tent.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
So now we come to this story by collective founding member Eye Kay Nwaogu which takes place 35 juzu A1B. It examines the echo of violence from the past in service of empire and its impact on the future, as represented by children, like our protagonists. For this story, we first go back to Wiimb-ó, to a school where two students from different worlds find themselves linked by history. Echoes of actions taken long ago. Echoes of truth and violence. They must choose what to do with the knowledge, and chart a course for the future, for better or worse.
~
“Kalabashing” by J. Umeh:
Illustrated by Akintoba KalejayeMuji-Aah brushes back his thick dreadlocks as he looks up at the ceiling, the distinctive silvery sheen of his skin catching the harsh electric light and giving his skin a semi-luminescent, metallic appearance that sharply contrasts the strange, dark, tattoo-like markings around his entire body. He whistles out a deep breath.
Mother God, help us.
Never in all the nineteen juzu he has lived has he experienced this level of excitement and trepidation, not even before the previous bés’s semi-final performance, or his first sono-aural sexual experience on Ekwukwe. No. There has been nothing like this, the feel of having something you’ve always dreamed of being at your fingertips, just one performance away.
Muji-Aah has never fit in. Always felt like an outsider. His unusual skin and natural affinity for technology marked him as an outcast even when he was a child. But he knows he can’t be alone. He wants to explore the system, find people like him or at least find his place in the Sauúti system. He seeks people who understand what it means to be an outcast. Which is what bonded him to the twins, the other members of the band.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
In order to choose a group that will give the opening and closing performance at the event—a series of local talent contests are held. This is where we find ourselves at the start of this story by J. Umeh, a founding member of the Sauúti collective. We go back across the binary star system, to Ekwukwe, where we meet a very special band of musicians vying for the honour of playing at the 40th Boāmmariri, 200 juzu A1B. A story about the joy of performing and sharing music with others. Even when that music literally has the magic stripped out of it. Of course, the members of the band bring their baggage and their drama and their talents and their gifts with them. And lurking in the background are the hands of Zezépfeni, always seeking more knowledge, more control.
When all of these things are shaken together and allowed to run over, well, we get something special. We get… Kalabashing.
~
“Lost in the Echoes” by Xan van Rooyen:
Ruk shuddered and curled his fingers, magic sizzling through his sinews. He was trying to do the right thing even if it might be too late to earn his people’s forgiveness, to repair the trust he’d shattered when he’d broken the rules governing his power.
The club would be closing soon as one sun set and the other rose somewhere far above the mire of the city’s lower levels.
The patrons would have to emerge groggy and disorientated, disgorged from reverie but hopefully rejuvenated. Ruk surrendered to sensation as he embroidered the air with a final rising melody over the pounding bass.
The dancers contorted, limbs plucked by melismatic tendrils of power, faces seized in ecstasy. When it was over, the club-goers staggered, released by magic but still drunk on music: their auras more consonant, their souls soothed.
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
Enter Ruk, or Ruk’ugrukun kel Az’zagru, our deaf protagonist of this wonderful story by collective founding member Xan van Rooyen.
A citizen of Órino-Rin in 400 A1B, about 200 juzu after the events of the previous story, Ruk has a unique ability similar to that of the Kali twins combined, but perhaps more potent.
Ruk is unable to hear sounds and lacks a perceptible sound aura or ‘echo’ of the Mothersound but can feel the sounds made by others, interpret the fundamental vibrations of the world, of people. And Ruk can even manipulate them, though this ability comes at a price, the price of pain. He is a runaway from his nomad tribe, working in the clubs of Órino-Rin as a kind of DJ, performing un-restricted, illicit music-magic until, as we find out in this story, he gets caught in the web of a Korp power play and is forced to make a difficult choice.
~
“Hologhiri” by Akintoba Kalejaye:
Illustrated by Akintoba Kalejaye1. The Failing Wall
The sky raged pink and green on Zezépfeni.
In the hall of a large stone temple, its walls pulsing with energy, twelve figures wearing dark red robes sat in a silent conclave. Wires and circuits jutted out if their bodies like vines.
Their robes pulsed with the same energy that ran through the walls. They spoke to one another, not with their voices but through thought. The subject of their discussion could not be uttered, secrecy could not be broken.
Their facial expressions changed rapidly, the only evidence of their communication. From shock to anger. From indignation to frustration. And then, collectively, resignation.
Finally, one of the figures waved a hand, and suddenly, they were in the middle of a dark sphere, the spectrum of color leeched away. Not even faintest trace of color remained within the space. There was only light and dark. The space hummed.
The motion of the figure’s hand coincided with movement of lips. “They are breaking through,” the figure said. “The Hogiri Hileh Halah is failing.”
Introducing this story, Talabi writes:
Being the closest to the outer boundary of the system, Zezépfeni are the first to discover a secret about the nature of the Sauútiverse. That Nga’phandileh, powerful beings of unreality that exist in a parallel dark dimension, want to enter their space and claim it. And just like the people of Zezépfeni, the Nga’phandileh too are motivated by more than mindless desperation for power. Even the monsters seek a kind of justice as you will come to see.
So, the leaders of Zezépfeni take it upon themselves to keep this a ongoing war a secret and maintain the reality border, constantly seeking new knowledge, new powers to help them hold the Nga’phandileh at bay.
Now, in this fast-paced, epic story also set in 400 juzu A1B by founding collective member Akintoba Kalejaye, which sets up a lot of what is to come from this world, we dig into the details of this border. We meet the people that control it, the warriors that protect it and of course, the creatures of unreality themselves that threaten it.
This is Hologhiri.
Outside Mothersound, here is an excerpt of Wole Talabi’s story “How To Win The G’idiidigbo Challenge: A Practical Guide” published in 99 Fleeting Fantasies, an anthology by Pulse Publishing:
1. Don’t panic.
Remain calm when you are chosen to represent your family on the silent grounds. You must fight Kele’leke of Yu’usara to settle the dispute that has festered for more than twenty juzu, despite the best efforts of the elder’s council. Thus, it comes to this. The ancient way. Each family has chosen a member of the opposing family to do battle. The Yu’usara have chosen you because they think you’re the weakest of your clan. They have chosen you because you’re small, with a moderate echo and a tilt in your gait courtesy of scoliosis.
Your spine may be bent but your will isn’t.
2. Train twice a day.
At dawn, practice movement. At noon, spar with your sister Ireno’ore in the garden. Do so in silence. All children on Ekwukwe are taught the fundamentals of combat. But the only way to win the G’idiidigbo challenge is to be prepared. The only way to be prepared for a fight is to get into one. Ireno’ore is skilled, and she has a good echo. You hear it in her motion, the potential for magic if she spoke the right words. But the challenge demands silence. There will be no magic.
When she catches your kick and lands a clean cross to the left of your jaw, fall and look up at the sky where the suns Zuúv’ah and Juah-āju are staring down at you, their heat tickling your sweat-slick skin. Pray to the Mother for strength, then get up. Continue.
3. Rest.
There should be no sparring the day before G’idiidigbo. Spend the daytime alone by the river. Swim across it a dozen times.
Spend the night in your grandfather’s glass and metal compound where there is a tiny opening in the ground that’s linked to the network of underground caverns beneath the planet. Listen to your younger brother sing the Rakwa wa-Ya’yn. Go to your grandfather, hug him when he begins to cry. Nod confidently at Ireno’ore. Give your mother a reassuring look, repaying her for the unwavering support that persists even now.
Luxuriate in the love of your family. Listen to their echoes.
Structured as a numbered list of steps to win a challenge called G’idiidigbo on the planet Ekwukwe, this story follows a young woman who has been chosen by her family to represent them as she prepares for, and participates in, this cultural rite modelled on sports and other forms of cultural competition that include controlled violence. Many of such rituals were, and are, still present around the world, including in Africa. The story emphasizes the importance of preparation, skill, cheering, and community support in such encounters.
You can see the recurring themes of sound magic, tradition, mythology, community, a longing to belong, and more, in these stories. The Sauútiverse is a home for undugu, kindredship, and ujamaa—sharing and togetherness. It’s a beautiful and generous concept, and we hope this trust relationship founded on goodwill will continue to be a success, as we trust and respect each other, beneficiaries of our outputs for the best outcomes.
References
Guerrier, Fabrice (2022), ‘The Sauúti Fictional World: A Partnership Between Syllble and Brittle Paper’, accessed 29 March 2024. brittlepaper.com/2022/06/the-sauuti-sc-fi-fantasy-world-a-partnership-between-syllble-and-brittle-paper/
Guerrier, Fabrice (2023), “Foreword”, in Talabi W (ed) Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, Android Press: Eugene, Oregon
Publishers Weekly (2023), Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, accessed 29 March 2024. http://www.publishersweekly.com/9781958121603
Sauutiverse (2024), Sauuti.com, accessed 29 March 2024. sauuti.com/
Syllble (2024), Sauúti, accessed 29 March 2024. syllble.com/sauuti/
Talabi, Wole (2023), “Why We Created the First Collaborative African Sci-Fi/Fantasy Universe”, in Talabi W (ed) Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, Android Press: Eugene, Oregon
Talabi, Wole (2022), “How To Win The G’idiidigbo Challenge: A Practical Guide”, in Brozek J (ed) 99 Fleeting Fantasies, Pulse Publishing: Spokane, Washington
Bio:Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels and collections. She’s a British Fantasy Award winner, a Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’, and was a 2024 Philip K Dick Award nominee. Eugen’s creative work has appeared worldwide, including in Apex Magazine, Award Winning Australian Writing, Fantasy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
Costume as Community History
Science fiction narratives all engage in an element of world-building, even if the descriptions are minimal. By their very nature, the settings are fictitious and, more often than not, have elements that are fantastically different to reality. They are imaginary potentials, the possibilities of what-could-be. As such, every single aspect of these stories is crucial to creating a fuller picture. One element that can be overlooked in the analysis of the genre is costume (especially in texts that are only in the written form), but it is still a vital part of the wider world-building. In this essay, I consider the impact of costume in creating and holding community history in two science fictional texts – the short story ‘The Last Dawn of Targadrides,’ and the X-Men comic book arcs focusing on the Hellfire Gala.
Both examples are fictional counterparts to real-world analogues, but heightened to focus on marginalised community identity. As a scholar and performer whose artistic work engages with my own multiple marginalised identities (queer, Bangladeshi, migrant), these narratives provide instances of meaningful empowerment and even liberation. As such, just as these fictions build on real-world histories, my own work is influenced by and builds on these fictions. This is something I will reflect on at the end of this essay, but it is important to start by exploring each of the examples individually.
When Costume is a Repository
The short story ‘The Last Dawn of Targadrides,’ by Trip Galey,is part of the anthology Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die. The anthology, edited by dave ring, was published in 2020, and is a collection of stories that respond to the idea of apocalypse from various queer perspectives. While the stories are narratively unconnected, with each contribution providing a different speculative approach to the idea of the end of the world, the collection’s impetus already situates ‘The Last Dawn of Targadrides’ as part of a creative response from a community perspective – specifically, the idea of how queerness responds to apocalypse, an idea made explicitly clear in the editor’s preface:
“These stories show us that the end is not simply a dark road leading to more grit and doom. In that tradition, Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die is an anthology centering queer joy and community in the face of disaster […]” (6).
Thus, the story has deliberate politics that celebrate queerness and especially queer community as specific means of tackling distressing futures. The plot follows Virtus, a member of House Valenziaga, as he gets ready to debut his drag persona, Aurora, at a futuristic queer ball. As the story progresses, we learn that this debut is not just part of regular competition for Virtus, as he is acting in defiance of his House Mother to (re)claim his independence and autonomy as a person and as a performer.
In our world, the ballroom scene began as an underground art form in the USA, most famously in Harlem. Its pioneers were Black and Latine queer artists who took part in categories dedicated to fashion, dance, and lip syncing. Being led by non-white voices, it was a direct response to the racism that was still prevalent in mainstream queer cultural spaces like drag pageants and nightlife. It also nurtured found family dynamics, including pooling resources to rent houses together (the origin of the House system), allowing for safety from estrangement from biological family, transphobic violence on the streets, and homelessness.
Voguing was birthed in this space as a way to reframe the prejudice directed at effeminate movement into a dance of power and precision. Runway categories that awarded marks for “realness” (the term used to indicate how convincing a competitor looks in their ensemble) allowed trans and gender-diverse people to safely explore their gender presentation and to practice the ability to ‘pass’ in wider society (i.e., be visually accepted as their actual gender instead of their gender assigned at birth). The House structure within this scene brought together artists who shared a common identity and/or performance ethos, adding a layer of community cohesion on top of the practical safety that Houses provided.
These elements are still present in the short story, with House Valenziaga acting as a surrogate found family and safe haven for Virtus, despite the toxicity of their House Mother. Amidst these more recognisable trappings of ballroom and urban life is the occasional cataclysm that breaches through the fabric of space and time to wreak havoc on Virtus’s city. Described as “edges”, these events send debris from other worlds hurtling to his own, but they also provide an opportunity for scavenging materials and resources by so-called “Edgerunners”, of which we learn Virtus is one. Another fantastical element is how each character seems to have some form of incredible ability, with Virtus himself having the power to create adornments like specific flowers or crystals that sprout from his mouth depending on the emotion he is feeling.
The story goes back and forth between his weeks-long preparations for the ball and the immediate backstage drama just before he walks onto the stage, climaxing with the grand debut of Aurora Thunder. Unsure at first, Aurora wins over the crowd by dramatically unveiling the otherworldly costume that has been fashioned from the ruins of another world, with “fabric woven of dawn itself, the last light of a world now dead and gone.” (195) As Aurora recites the dying moments of Targadrides and its unnamed emperor, great care is given to describe the intricacies of the costume:
“Flakes of gold as fine as ash crumbled from her words as she spoke. […] Layer after layer of the dress was transformed, a slow but steady glow creeping up the dress like the rising of the sun. […] The dress blazed like a rough-gilded rose, pink and gold as the dawn. The only spot of darkness left was the coiled tresses crowning her head. […]” (196)
At this point, the costume becomes more than just an item of clothing and, indeed, more than just Virtus (as Aurora) laying claim to his own worth as a performer. It shines with the history of Targadrides, a foreign land lost to time and tragedy. The fabric transcends the physical space which it inhabits, no longer confined to the cramped floor of the stage or the ballroom, but instead holding the light of a dawn that will never be seen again – and, crucially, would never have been seen at all were it not for Virtus’ use of the material in his costume.
The dress ceases to be just artifice; instead, it is a physical archive that holds a tangible history of a community. It carries with it the death of an entire world, now immortalised for others to see and admire and mourn. Where many repositories are littered with gaps in their historical records (many of which are artificially imposed to hide crimes of coloniality and oppression), the costume here becomes a way to prevent historical erasure. It becomes a statement of resilience and survival, and perhaps even of sustainability, with one world’s loss fuelling emancipation in another.
When Costume is Political Action
Where ‘The Last Dawn of Targradides’ is entirely in the written word, my other example has more visible representations of the costumes I am going to discuss. As a side note, this means that I will not be providing quoted descriptions of costuming in this section. The X-Men comics are a longstanding staple of the publisher Marvel Comics, following the struggles of superpowered mutants as they fight to save themselves and to protect humanity at large, while still facing regular discrimination from ordinary humans. The Hellfire Gala arcs that I will be discussing take place during the comics’ Krakoan Age, published between 2019 and 2024.
This era of the famous heroes takes its name from the fictional island of Krakoa. Within the mythos of their world, Krakoa is an uninhabited, partially sentient island which becomes a new homeland for all mutants around the world. Seeking a formalised community but rejecting attempts at settler colonialism, Krakoa becomes a fresh start where mutants are able to build their own nation-state from the ground up, with the world-building explicitly touching on aspects such as forms of government, crime and rehabilitation, familial and romantic dynamics, trade, healthcare, education, and international relations.
It is part of this last strand of world-building in which the Hellfire Gala takes place. It is an event that sees mutants inviting diplomats from non-mutant nations to visit Krakoa, share resources, and finalise foreign policy. As part of this diplomatic endeavour, the Krakoans aim to show off their newly consolidated culture and wealth. (The gala takes its namesake from a prior event in the X-Men chronology, but that is not the version that is discussed in this essay.)
The real-world comparison for this event is the annual Met Gala, which takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute in Manhattan, New York. Formally called the Costume Institute Benefit, the Met Gala is a fundraising event for the institute, the theme of which ties in with the museum’s major yearly exhibition. Designers are invited to bring celebrity guests wearing haute couture ensembles that respond to the theme in some form or another. There is a similar level of exclusivity in both the Met Gala and the Hellfire Gala, and both focus on high fashion and the use of resources to highlight culture.
Interestingly enough, the theme for the 2008 Met Gala was dedicated to Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy. Through a curation that mixed original comic issues, film and television costumes, and high fashion interpretations, the Costume Institute’s exhibition considered the cultural impact that superhero stories have had on real-world styling. Of particular note is how the exhibition considered superhero costume as a means of making statements against prejudice and bigotry through high camp. In the companion artbook by curator Andrew Bolton, the nature of the superhero body – especially that of the mutant superhero – becomes a site of upheaval thats ubverts the status quo:
“Mutant bodies are explicitly analogized to Jewish bodies, gay bodies, adolescent bodies, Japanese or Native or African American bodies – they are, first and foremost, subjugated and colonized figures. If they are victims, however, they are also valuable sources of disruption and challenge – transgressive, uncontrollable, and alternative bodies.” (131)
It is in this mode of disruption that the Hellfire Gala and its fashion becomes such a powerful narrative space. Unlike the majority of X-Men eras, the Krakoan Age is notable for giving mutants a more proactive and autonomous role in world affairs through the creation of their own nation-state (instead of largely reacting to prejudice that was directed at them in the past). Mutants have created a just and equitable society from the ground up. As the most visible and glamorous cultural export of this society, the Hellfire Gala takes the transgression of mutant bodies and redirects it to become the new – and fabulous – norm. Of particular note is that non-mutant heroes who are invited to attend the event (such as Captain America, Iron Man and Spider-Man) are provided haute couture costumes made by the mutant designer Jumbo Carnation. Thus, even guests who are welcomed into the space are outfitted in regalia made in the mutant atelier.
The fashion itself is diverse. In sharp contrast to the occasional uniformity seen by superhero teams, including several iterations of the X-Men themselves, each attendee wears a look that is tailored to their powers, personalities, and complex histories. Thus, Emma Frost is bedecked in luxurious fabrics which highlight her affinity with the figure of the femme fatale; Cyclops channels strategic thinking in looks shaped by military history; Mirage includes adornments that pay homage to her Cheyenne Nation heritage; Manifold wears an outfit that is painted to reflect the cultural heritage derived from indigenous Dreamtime spirituality; and Iceman explores his recently-found queerness with corsetry and androgyny. (Note that these are just some of the looks that are worn by these characters as they had different costumes for each edition of the Hellfire Gala.)
The in-universe visual references to oppressed histories are explicit and intentional . As shown in the companion anthology Marvel Voices: Pride (a collection of short comics which focuses on queer characters written and drawn by queer creatives), Jumbo Carnation makes it a point to celebrate the specific heritages and identities of some of the queer heroes getting ready for the then-upcoming Hellfire Gala. He does so as a means of reclaiming painful pasts that were used to engender fear and shame, taking sources of pain and violence and using them to create pride and self-worth. As Carnation himself says: “[…] at least once a year, I am reminded that there is a group where I will always belong.” (no page numbers, emphasis from the original text)
From an authorial and artistic perspective, this is equally important. The designs for the Hellfire Gala costumes were created by a range of queer and racially minoritised artists, such as Russell Dauterman, Luciano Vecchio, Kris Anka, Javier Pina, and RB Silva. The comic book industry is known to be majority white and cisheterosexual. While its inception owes a lot to the creativity of members of the Jewish diaspora fleeing persecution in Europe, it has grown to become a space that is dominated by individuals with systemic and identity-based privilege. Thus, having artists who are still underrepresented in the industry – and some of whom would likely not have even been welcome to contribute to X-Men stories in the past – ensures that the centring of diversity at the heart of the Hellfire Gala is also reflected in its creative team.
The costume work in these issues makes a strong political statement towards listening to previously silenced voices. Community becomes a space of healing from traumas of the past, and the extravagant haute couture weaves in elements of suppressed cultures that loudly challenges oppression. The exclusivity of the event is catered towards prioritising and lifting up stories that had been hidden away in the past (which stands in contrast to other forms of high fashion exclusivity, including in the Hellfire Gala’s real-world inspiration), which leads to a community that is not only built on inclusion but proudly proclaims it as one of its strengths.
An Artistic Response
As explored through this essay, costume in science fiction is a nuanced space that can be used to explore stories of liberation, inclusion, and empowerment. When used by minoritised and marginalised creatives to tell stories of minoritised and marginalised characters, it becomes a powerful means of challenging the continuing sidelining of many community experiences in both fiction and the real world. As a multiply marginalised scholar, it is always a joy to be able to write down these reflections.
As a multiply marginalised artist, these incredible stories are also a wonderful source of inspiration. My artistic work involves showcasing my heritage – as a queer Bangladeshi migrant living in the UK – in spaces that are still largely white and overwhelmingly British. I like to wear fabrics and costumes from my home country whenever possible, and my performances in lip sync categories usually involve miming to English-language music in the style of jatra folk theatre and kathak classical dance.
In its own way, marginalised artistry can be seen as an act of speculative world building, where the stage becomes a space of re-envisioning and redefining norms. It is in this spirit of world-building that I include a sketch of an idealised costume in this essay.
The costume would need to entail a level of science fictionality as the methods of fabrication and textile I imagine at its heart have been lost. The bulk of the outfit is made of delicate Dhaka muslin, a fabric made using a 16-step crafting process with a rare type of cotton by skilled artisans, and with a weave so fine it is almost transparent. While modern artisans and researchers have rediscovered parts of this process, to the point that a variation of Dhaka muslin now exists again, the specifics of the full process have been destroyed due to the ravages of British colonialism – through the enforcement of industrialisation in the textile industry which pushed out hand-woven fabrics; through the hyper competitiveness of capitalism that valued quantity over quality which prompted artisans to abandon their skills; through unequal trade practices that stole resources and skills away from the peripheries of the empire; and through increasingly oppressive clothing and cultural laws which made it effectively illegal to promote local forms of dress.
These colonial policies had a devastating effect on the region’s textile production. Prior to British colonisation, the region produced a quarter of the world’s fabric; by the middle of the 20th century, this share had become ten times smaller. Governments and colonial administrators ensured that textile production had shifted to enrich new industrialists which, incidentally, also destroyed local workshop-based production in Britain itself, in favour of factories. An additional act of colonial brutality in this process was how South Asia was forced to forego necessary food production so that cotton could be prioritised as a key resource for the British manufacturing industry. It is no exaggeration to state that millions of lives were lost due to the move away from local artisans to machine-heavy mass production. It is because of this lost heritage that the asymmetrical train in my costume is made of frayed layers of the fabric, speaking towards the violent interruptions that cut the continuation of my heritage.
The neckpiece and headpiece are primarily made of gold filigree, a technique that is still practiced across South Asia (including Bangladesh). The technique ties my look in with a wider tradition of craftsmanship across the region, bringing in an element of solidarity with other oppressed histories, while the silhouette and designs harken to a specifically Bangladeshi experience.
The rainbow colours in the feathers of the headpiece and the small jewels in the neckpiece weave my queerness into the look. Erroneously, queerness can be seen as a modern Western imposition in cultures considered conservative in their traditions. The truth is that diversity in sexuality and gender identity had always been present in what is now Bangladesh – and, indeed, across the world – before the Christian mission at the heart of British colonialism outlawed such identities as immoral. The rainbow symbolism is a modern creation, but placing it in prominent positions in my costume indicates how intrinsically linked my queerness is with my geo-cultural identity.
Considering that my performance work – where this fantastical costume would be worn if it could ever be made – takes place in the UK, the very country that outlawed parts of my identity and destroyed multiple histories of craftsmanship, the sketch feels like a particularly strong statement. As in ‘The Last Dawn of Targadrides,’ it alludes to a repository of lost knowledge and resilience. As in the Hellfire Gala, it celebrates a multitude of oppressed identities as a clear political statement. As in both, it allows for an imagination of (science) fictional community, liberation, and joy.
References
Bolton, A., 2008. Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy. Yale University Press.
Duggan, G., Anka, K., Dauterman, R., et al., 2022. X-Men: Hellfire Gala – Immortal. Marvel Comics.
Duggan, G., Dauterman, R., Vecchio, L., et al., 2023 X-Men: Hellfire Gala – Fall of X. Marvel Comics.
Galey, T., 2020, ‘The Last Dawn of Targadrides’, in Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die. Edited by dave ring. Neon Hemlock Press.
Hickman, J., Duggan, G., Dauterman, R., et al., 2021. X-Men: Hellfire Gala Red Carpet Edition. Marvel Comics.
Various, 2023. Marvel Voices: Pride. Marvel Comics.
Bio
Ibtisam Ahmed (he/him) is an independent scholar who received a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant in 2022-2024 to complete a project on queer performance history. He performs on-stage as Indigo Spice as part of the House of Spice, a Queer Brown Performance Collective in the UK. Prior to that, he completed a postgraduate degree at the University of Nottingham with a focus on decolonial utopianism. His work has been published in different formats and platforms, including a chapter on superhero bodies as queer immigrant utopias in the book The Politics of Culture (2020, Cambridge Scholars Publishing), which he also co-edited. He is a massive nerd and a lover of costume design.
Tony Conn Interviews Catherynne M. Valente
Catherynne M. Valente has packed a lot into the first 20 years of her career. Her genre-busting work runs the gamut from alternative history to fairytale fantasy to cosmic horror. In addition to writing 27 novels and novellas, she has multiple collections of short fiction and poetry. She is also the creator of a six-year-old human, but motherhood shows no signs of slowing her down. Space Opera, her 2018 bestseller about an interplanetary Eurovision Song Contest, was shortlisted for Best Novel at the Hugo Awards. Her new novel, Space Oddity, picks up where Space Opera left off and reflects contemporary concerns like pandemics, online misinformation, and the threat of all-out war. https://www.catherynnemvalente.com/
Tony Conn is a writer and filmmaker with an interest in all things strange. He is perhaps the world’s leading expert on the Megatron, a flying saucer-shaped restaurant that used to adorn the Cambridgeshire countryside and now features in Space Oddity. https://tonyconn.com/
TC: Could you tell us about your background and early influences?
CV: My parents met at UCLA and divorced when I was very young. I had two stepparents most of my childhood and went back and forth between Seattle and northern California. My dad was an aspiring filmmaker who went into advertising instead, which is very much a family thing on my father’s side. A lot of them intended to be artists and ended up in the family business. My mother is a retired political science professor. She was in her master’s and PhD programmes through almost every portion of my early life that I can remember. She was working for the mayor of Seattle, getting her degrees in public policy, doing advocacy work, and she’s a pretty hardcore statistician as well.
They were in their early twenties when they had me. They had no sense of what was appropriate for a child. I had no boundaries as to what I could read, or watch, or anything. I just had to be vocal about when it was too much for me, which is kind of a modern parenting idea. My mother read Plato’s Republic to me as a bedtime story, specifically The Myth of Er, which is this allegory about what happens when we die. At five, she had me read The Breasts of Tiresias by Apollinaire. It’s above the pay grade of adults, let alone a small child. My mother had no sense of that. In my mom’s house, there are stacks of books that are now end tables. Cairns of books everywhere.
Both of my birthparents are big musical theatre people, so I grew up seeing musicals all the time. I’ve always had this really low voice, since I was ten. I wanted to be a singer, but there weren’t any parts for somebody with a voice like mine. My mom also has a master’s degree in drama, so I remember when Beaumarchais was a big thing in our house. At eleven, all that anybody talked about was The Barber of Seville.
I had a lot of influences from my parents. My mom read every murder mystery. My dad is hardcore science fiction. And then, my stepmother Kim is the world’s biggest Stephen King fan. Horror was my first love, both as a reader and a writer.
TC: Is it a coincidence you ended up living in Maine?
CV: I would like to pretend I did not move to Maine because I got obsessed with Stephen King as a small child, but that would be a lie. I read Stephen King by the time I was nine. I found Salem’s Lot in the garage and sat down on the floor to read it. I was obsessed with Maine as a child. To me, it seemed like that’s where they kept the magic. In all the books I read, the magic is in Britain, or Europe, but in Stephen King there was this place in America where horrible but magical things could happen. Recently, I was invited to contribute to an anthology of new stories set in the world of The Stand called The End of the World as We Know It, so I got to write in Stephen King’s universe as a grown-up.
TC: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that you have ADHD. Does that go some way to explaining how prolific you are, and the way you jump between genres and styles?
CV: Yeah. I really can’t do the same thing twice in a row. It nearly kills me. Part of my brain is desperately trying to wander off and find something new to do, so I do jump genres a lot. Maybe I would’ve had a more successful career if I had stuck to one thing, but I just can’t do that. The thing that I enjoy the most is writing something unexpected, that people think I would never write. I’m always looking for that thing that kicks off my imagination, that hyperfocus.
Honestly, it’s not good for me to take a long time to write a book. The best way to do it is to have between eight and twelve weeks, and produce an entire manuscript in that time, all the research having been done. I can believe in myself and the project and everything else for about that amount of time before it all crumbles and falls apart. I didn’t know I had ADHD till I already had several books out, but I do think The Orphan’s Tales (2006), which was my first big New York book, I should have been able to give to a doctor and receive a prescription.
TC: One strand that runs through your work is remix culture – turning genres on their heads, taking new perspectives in stories that might seem familiar. Do you think that reflects the times we live in?
CV: Yeah. We’re pretty far past postmodernism. We screwed up by calling it postmodernism, and now nobody knows what to say next about that kind of thing. I remember, in creative writing classes in college, being told to not use modern pop culture references because it dates your work. I think that, for science fiction people, it’s just not the same. Using modern cultural references in order to introduce something totally alien as a culture is really helpful, and we would be loath to give it up. I think a lot of that has changed with things like Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I’m not a huge fan of, but it’s impossible to argue it’s not totally seminal. I think it certainly changed with the advent of the internet. We’re constantly making memetic references to the point where we sound like that Star Trek episode with Darmok and Jalad. The progress of memetic culture is fascinating.
TC: Were you surprised by how successful Space Opera was?
CV: I think we all were. It was supposed to be a novella, for one thing. We all thought it was going to be pretty niche. No Americans knew what Eurovision was at the time. Thank you, Will Ferrell, for that movie (Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga). I no longer have to give a short TED talk on what Eurovision is before I give a reading. The idea of an American writing a comedy about Eurovision for Americans, which would appeal to neither Americans nor Europeans, who don’t want to hear an American’s opinions on Eurovision – none of us really thought it was going to be a big hit.
Then, that first print run sold out weeks before the book came out. We went through something like nine editions in the first six weeks because we just couldn’t keep it in stock. Popular Mechanics had it on their Father’s Day gift guide, so it was: whiskey, knives, boots, book with a disco ball and girl whose name is spelled funny on it. Just wildly strange. Almost no publicity was done for it. It was all word of mouth. We were all very shocked, and it sold movie rights right away. Unfortunately, Covid killed that project, but it is under development as an animated series right now.
TC: I was going to ask about that…
CV: Yeah, so Universal picked it up almost immediately, less than a month after the book came out. There was a whole team. We had songwriters. It was a going thing, and then, you know, Covid killed a lot of things. Everybody involved still wants to do it, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Never before have I had an option expire and attached to that email was the next option offer, because they’d been waiting for it to expire.
I think, in retrospect, that an animated series is a better destiny for it. It doesn’t cost nearly as much to animate all those aliens as it does to CG them, and I think that you can do a lot more with the structure of an animated series than you can with a two-hour feature film. For the same kind of reason, it’s always been so difficult to adapt Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The nub of Hitchhiker’s Guide, and it’s true of Space Opera as well, is those expository comedy bits explaining some little aspect of the world. That’s most of what people remember, not necessarily the plot.
Lower Decks has been great at doing good science fiction while still being comedy. I think we have a lot of examples of how to do more elevated animated series these days than back when I was a kid, and it was The Simpsons or nothing.
TC: Space Opera and Space Oddity contain a lot of British references, like Douglas Adams, Doctor Who, Monty Python, David Bowie. Would you describe yourself as an Anglophile?
CV: I think it’s a complicated thing. We are taught so much British culture in America, to the point that it can feel like American literature, even in our own colleges, is a secondary concern. Britain, and British culture, has been excellent at spreading and taking root all over the place, for good and for ill. I guess I’m an Anglophile, but when you grow up on fairy tales and King Arthur, you end up having this idea about the UK.
I went to university in Edinburgh, and that’s part of why the band in Space Opera and Space Oddity is British. At the time, I thought it would be funny because of the UK’s traditional placement in Eurovision. Then, of course, a few years after the book came out, it’s hosted in Liverpool with a song called Space Man, because of course.
And good Lord, who doesn’t love Douglas Adams? I wouldn’t want to meet that person. When I wrote the first chapters of Space Opera, I wrote it very quickly, and I was really happy with it. I’d never done anything that was first and foremost a comedy. But I had to sit back and say, “Alright, so you have Brits in space, and you’re writing it like this. You’re going to get compared to Douglas Adams. Are you comfortable with that? Are you cool with hearing how you didn’t live up to Douglas Adams?” I decided that I was okay with that, and to some extent it took some pressure off. Was I going to sit down to write the great science fiction comedy novel? Absolutely not. I could shoot for the bronze, and it would be fine.
There are several references to Douglas Adams throughout both books. He’s a brilliant and unsurpassable talent, and I adore his work. Terry Pratchett as well. All of the things that you mentioned. To be allowed to hang out outside the house where they all once lived is fine for me. I can hang out in the garden.
TC: Did you have to do a lot of research into British slang and regional dialects?
CV: Not really, because I did live there. I think I made it harder for myself, because there are things that bother me when Americans write British characters. I didn’t want to overuse “bloody.” I didn’t want to use “Oi, guvnor!” I didn’t want to do any of that stuff. I gave myself three “bloody”s per book and had to be a little bit more creative with my intensifiers.
TC: I believe all the members of the band are of mixed heritage…
CV: They are, which is important to me, and very deliberate.
TC: Did that involve a lot of research, into British-Asian culture, for example?
CV: Yeah, that did involve more research. That was more for the first book, because those characters are defined by the second. Richard Ayoade has the same kind of cultural background that Decibel Jones has, so I listened to a lot of interviews with him. There’s a lot of Ayoade’s voice in Dess.
You always want to do the absolute best you can, even in comedy. I’m sure that there are mistakes. There’s always mistakes. But it was important to me to have this plucky, punky band that is made up of Britons who have a heritage that is not just of the British Isles, because that’s such a huge part of Britain’s history and heritage.
TC: You have a playful attitude towards gender and sexuality in the Space Opera books. Was that something you consciously wanted to explore? Do you think science fiction is a good way to do that?
CV: I think it’s a great way to explore that. There is no reason an alien species should conform to our ideas of gender. Much of the animal kingdom doesn’t. Once you get outside mammals, you have all kinds of different combinatory ways of reproducing. I wanted to be honest about how weird aliens should be. My rule was: You must be at least as weird as things we already know about.
Within the alien species, I wanted to have a huge variety of gender expression, and then rock stars have always been a little bit exempt from the kind of judgement that us normal people get. Freddie Mercury and David Bowie were totally acceptable to play in straight, regular households, and they were wildly nonconforming. I wanted to have a lot of fun with that. I’m queer myself and I felt like, particularly in this day and age, if you’re going to do Brits in Space, there’s no reason not to push it a little further, make it a little gayer and younger and stranger, particularly because two of the genres of cultural expression that often get exempt from prohibitions against your own expression are comedy and music.
The other way that the species’ anatomy came about is reverse-engineering it from the kind of music that I wanted them to represent. Music has a lot to do with our anatomy. The beats that feel natural to us. Our own heartbeat, that’s the beat that we have in our bodies all the time. We have ten fingers. It determines the kinds of instruments that we play. If we had twelve, we’d be playing different kinds of instruments. The resonance chamber created by our inner ear and skull determines the range of sound that we enjoy and don’t enjoy. If you have a completely different anatomy, it would be a completely different kind of music.
TC: Is there an overarching narrative to the series?
CV: I very rarely have an overarching plan. It’s that ADHD again. I want to keep myself surprised constantly. I try not to plan prescriptively too much, because then my brain thinks it’s already done this book and will go on permanent hiatus.
TC: You said you hate to do the same thing twice. Did you feel under pressure to recreate the first Space Opera book in Space Oddity?
CV: Sure, a little bit. I knew when I finished writing Space Opera that I would probably want to go back to that world. The first one doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but there’s obvious threads to another story there. I didn’t really want to commit to it until I had an idea for what book was going to be. It was about a year before we sold the sequel, and then it was like, “Well, can I get back into that voice?” I ended up folding it into the sequel, that anxiety about your difficult second album, and what happens to the Hero’s Journey when you’re done with it.
When I first started writing it, Covid had happened. I had Covid in February 2021, when I was finishing the book. We are very fortunate it’s in English and paragraphs because I was completely delirious. I went and quarantined at a friend’s house for eight days and, even in my feverish brain, I thought, “I will never again have eight days to myself, so if I’m going to finish this book, I have to do it now.”
Because Eurovision was cancelled, it seemed to me that’s what the book had to be about on some level. But by the time that I was editing it, Russia had invaded Ukraine and then removed themselves from Eurovision, and I felt like what the book was about had to change a little bit too.
TC: Did it feel cathartic to write this satire of what was going on at the time?
CV: Yeah. Covid was really rough for writers. You need to experience things. It’s a real part of the process, at least for me, and to suddenly have no input but your own four walls made it so strange. I live on a little island in Maine. I couldn’t even get food delivery. We have one store that everyone goes to and one boat that you have to take to get to the mainland. People lost their minds. It was really hard to make something that’s new and exciting when nothing was new and exciting.
TC: You wrote a touching dedication to Christopher Priest in the new book. You also lost a lot of family members while writing it. Can you tell us how that affected you?
CV: Between the start of lockdown and the end of 2021, my husband and I lost 13 family members. It was gruelling. There were times when it was just month by month. My husband’s grandmother died during my grandfather’s funeral. It’s hard to write comedy when everyone around you is suffering. I think the books that I wrote during this time, Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods (2022), which is literally a book about death, and Space Oddity, are lobbed into the future to explain what we were all going through. It’s weird when your own life starts to fall apart at the same time the world is falling apart, because you can’t tell which of that is your problem and which of that is that everything’s messed up.
The world has gone absolutely spare in the last several years. I don’t like people pretending that it’s not unprecedented. It is. None of us experienced a pandemic before. That’s new for all of us, and no-one’s getting therapy about it. I think Space Oddity is partly me working through it. It takes time to make art out of trauma, because the trauma has to stop before you can make art. There has to be a minute where you’re not being actively traumatised to process all of that into art. I think we will see everybody’s Covid novels over the course of the next 10 or 15 years, as people have different speeds of processing and writing.
TC: Does having a child mean that you see literature through a new lens?
CV: In some ways. The thing that is bringing me a lot of joy right now, as my kid’s just turned six, is sharing some of the more complex young reader books that I loved as a kid, between The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There’s this book called Seaward, by Susan Cooper, that most people have never heard of, but it was absolutely my favourite when I was little. A lot of the fiction that I’ve been taking in is rediscovering those things that I loved so much as a young reader.
In Space Oddity, there’s the whole bit in the beginning about the Blowout, which is what happens to first contact cultures when they finally get a chance to process what they’ve gone through, and they all lose their minds. The comparison is to a baby’s blowout diaper. It’s obviously right from my kid. Also, for a long time, I couldn’t read or watch anything where bad things happened to children. I just couldn’t handle it. I’m starting to get over that now, but I still am a lot more squeamish about that than I used to be. It does change your perspective somewhat.
I still think of this child as like a rogue AI that I’m slowly programming. You will tell them something and they will take it completely literally. When they were a little younger, we said, “This is your body. It belongs to you. Nobody can do anything to your body that you don’t consent to.” So, I get a phone call from daycare because my son has pushed a little girl off a chair into the gravel, and nobody knows why it happened. The minute we walk away, the three-year-old tells me, “Brooklyn would not stop singing Let It Go into my ear, and my ear is part of my body, and I get to say what happens to my body, and nobody can do anything to my body that I don’t consent to.” I’m like, “Okay, well, thank you for listening to that lesson. You still can’t push somebody. That means you’re doing something to her body.” It’s the most perfect example of how a robot would interpret that instruction. How I think about AI and how people learn things has certainly changed a lot, watching this ball of id slowly grow a superego.
TC: Do you have any other projects that people should look out for?
CV: Space Oddity is the big thing. I’m coming up on finishing a new novel for Tor called Nobody But Us. I have a number of short stories coming out in quick succession in 2025, including the Stephen King anthology, The End of the World as We Know It. I have stories coming out in Uncanny and an anthology called The Book of the Dead.
Space Oddity is released on 9th January 2025 in the UK.
Torque Control 300
I am sixteen, in a secondary school ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ class, and I am learning of Solipsism for the first time. For the uninitiated and/or the non-skeptics, the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy defines it as follows, at least in its most radical iteration:
[Solipsism posits that] one’s own immediate experience has a fundamental, self-certifying reality and that comparable knowledge of ‘physical’ or ‘public’ items is unobtainable. (Honderich, ed., 1995, p.218).
I am terrified, as any introvert often overwhelmed by the intensity of their inner life would be terrified. The ‘physical’ and the ‘public’ instantly became concepts of doubt, and objects of fallibility. Such concepts are of course cliché in the world of SF: a genre that has, for decades, explored the paradoxes of the self, and the strange new worlds that could exist at the limits of our perception. Drugs, religion, virtual reality, dimensional travel, mind-transference: these are just some avenues via which the self may be expanded—and sometimes even obliterated—in service of access to a greater, or somehow ‘truer,’ experience.
…Of course: you know I don’t romanticize my beloved genre that easily.
SF narratives don’t always elicit the oohs and aahs of cosmic collectivity, as often as we might wish them to. For every astral reunion through realities separated as breath between lips, there are genocidal boys’ stories of colonial derring-do that exterminate entire alien societies; for every mind-altering encounter with an astral god, or any other form of divinity, there is invoked the (laughable) threat of enforced homosexuality, used as a foil to ‘prove’ the degeneracy of human civilization across time. I could go on. For its touted expansiveness and offerings of pleasurable escape, science fiction, as I always tell my students, is perhaps the most nakedly political of all literary genres.
But when we read or watch ‘escapist’ stories, what, exactly, is it that we wish to escape from? It seems to me that to seek escape from something implies at least implicit awareness of one’s guilt. For what reason should we feel guilty? For what, and for whom, should we feel?
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker opens with arguably one of the loveliest lines in science fiction: “One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out onto the hill” (Stapledon, 1987, p.1). This ‘bitter’ sensation has spoiled the “decade and a half”-long relationship with the narrator’s wife, and even the births of their two children, in spite (or perhaps because of?) the ghost of divinity, something transcendent in their pairing, in contrast with the banal coziness of their existence together: “There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life, than either alone” (Stapledon, p.2). Star Maker’s narrator has done everything right: made a home, borne children, become something larger than himself, his relationship, the quartet of ‘I’s’ that form the core of his world. And yet: recalcitrance, unease, even “horror,” lingers.
After traveling through the cosmos and encountering a bewildering array of nonhuman lives, the narrator meets the titular Star Maker—the grand dreamer of the whole universe—and finds, among the love, that there is cruelty, and sympathy, and passion, all “contemplated” by some vast and inscrutable mind. The being is beyond ethics, somehow, having witnessed myriad forms of sentience (including bird-like telepaths that wheel in huge flocks across a planet’s skies), and offers, I suggest, an answer to the question I asked earlier: for what, and for whom, should we feel?
Everything, and everyone.
But the narrator is dissatisfied. Afraid, even. It is perhaps too much to bear witness to, and certainly too much to ask of a human organism.
Talking of fear: I am thirty-seven, and too sad to be concerned by ‘dead internet theory’ that suggests that, in the en-shittified 21st-century internet, the majority of content is produced and consumed by bots ‘speaking’ to one another. The promise of a vast ‘web’ of human consciousness—akin to the multitudes of sentient lives held in Stapledon’s narrative—doesn’t even provide human dross anymore, only dross; language is ingested, hacked up, repeated and linked and relinked to nothingness, speaking of nothing, only making-the-motions-of.
I am thirty-seven, and too amused to be terrified at the Tesla-unveiled robotic companions that may or may not be voiced remotely by an operator responding to vocal inputs, becoming nothing more than humanoid cyberpunk telephones.
I want to be overwhelmed by the conviction of other minds, and their assurance that everything will be alright in the end—and even if it won’t be, I want another human being to tell me that.
This is, of course, a classic philosophical problem—and each of the authors in this landmark issue explore, in their own ways, how knowledge of and connection with others is obtainable. Can reading give us irrefutable access to other minds, and even generate empathy? Is the idea of generating empathy for (especially marginalized) others in fact a “grotesque dynamic,” after Namwali Serpell (The New York Review, 2019)? Do capitalist-alternative video games hold insights into how we can exist without exploiting one another? How does a necktie consolidate community history? What can the horror genre offer to allay (or amplify) our anxieties, and what monstrosities can it bring to light in a Freudian excision of the fears of the id?
This is issue 300 of Vector, on the theme of Community! It should be a celebration! And make no mistake—it is a celebration of that. Community. The people who make, and made, literary life-worlds. It is also a lament at the relentless change that follows us across the years: change that sees friendships cement and fall apart, that sees creative idols shape entire generations and then fall in disgrace, that sees spaces—both physical and ideological—inched open by cracks and then blown open, wide, seemingly overnight, and precious groups forming and falling apart as their members age and pass. It is younger generations struggling to keep alive the physical meeting spaces of conferences and conventions when expenses are so high, and wages are so low. It is a yearning for persistent physicality, because despite the hours we spend straining our eyes ‘connecting’ with others on screens we realize, profoundly, that the screen is not enough.
So: out with it! Let’s have the pages. We are three hundred issues of scholarly inquiry, of impassioned creation and reviews and conversations. (We have the screens, of course, too, as our lively blog attests to). I hope we will be three hundred more issues.
We celebrate community. We celebrate the joy we can bring to each other even as we hold, in our other hand/s, the damage we can do to one another: the bitterness and the spark. I’ll leave you with Stapledon, again, this time with words from his moving novel Death Into Life (Stapledon, 1946, p.48):
“As centers of awareness we remain eternally distinct; but in participation in our ‘we,’ each ‘I’ awakens to be an ampler, richer ‘I,’ whose treasure is not ‘myself,’ but ‘we.’”
Warmth and light,
Phoenix
ReferencesHonderich, T. (1995) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA.
Serpell, N. (2020) The banality of empathy. http://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/.
Stapledon, O. (1987) Star Maker. J P Tarcher.
Stapledon, O. (1946) Death Into Life.
Vector 296 SFF and Justice
Vector 296,SFF & Justice, is guest edited by Stewart Hotston. Arriving November 2022. Featuring Stewart Hotston’s guest editorial on SF and justice, reviews by Arike Oke, Geoff Ryman, Phil Nicholls, Andy Sawyer, and Maureen Kincaid Speller from The BSFA Review, an interview plus article from Gautum Bhatia, interview plus book excerpt from Roman Krznaric, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne interviewed, BSFA Diversity Officer Ali Baker interviewed, Jo Lindsay Walton on art and artificial intelligence, Áron Domokos on the representation of the Roma in Hungarian SFF, Charne Lavery, Laura Pereira, Bwalya Chibwe, Nedine Moonsamy, Chinelo Onwaulu, and Naomi Terry on the use of Africanfuturist SF in rethinking how we value and care for nature, Guangzhao Lyu reporting on this year’s Science Fiction Research Association’s Futures from the Margins conference in Oslo, and a tribute to Maureen Kincaid Speller.
Jean-Paul Garnier interviews A. D. Sui
A.D. Sui is a Ukrainian-born, queer, disabled science fiction writer, and the author of THE DRAGONFLY GAMBIT and the forthcoming Erewhon novel, THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA (2026). She is a failed academic, retired fencer, and coffee enthusiast. Her short fiction has appeared in Augur, Fusion Fragment, HavenSpec, and other venues. When not wrangling her two dogs you can find her on every social media platform as @thesuiway – https://thesuiway.ca/
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
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JPG – The Dragonfly Gambit has all of the elements of space opera: a big story, politics, empire, worldbuilding, etc., but unlike most modern space operas the book is short – how did you manage to create such a large-scale story in so few words, and what are your feelings on space opera as a sub-genre?
A.D. S – First, thank you so much! I want to say that space opera has a long-running tradition of glorifying empires. They’re almost the natural default government system in far-future science fiction, which positions them as a sort of inevitability. But historically, we know this isn’t true. Empires fall all the time. That’s the whole point. So, I really wanted to focus on a time of an empire falling.
As far as the structure goes, I can’t remember who said it, it might have been one of my agency siblings, but in a novel, each scene fights for its right to exist. In a short story, every sentence does. A novella is somewhere in between, so my editing wasn’t as ruthless as it would have been for a short story, but I was definitely focusing on each sentence delivering either character development or new information, and preferably both. Also, as much as it is a space opera, it also has *one* location where most of the action takes place. So, I could really go into a lot of detail about the world/order of things by describing this one place instead of jumping between locations.
JPG – One of the themes in the book is sacrifice and martyrdom, sacrifice being an arcane tradition to the culture in the book – can you speak about the nature of sacrifice and weighing individual characters against large-scale problems?
A.D. S – It’s a bit of a pipe dream to think that one person can shift the tides of history. I don’t think anyone is that special. It’s one of the reasons why, as a genre, science fiction and fantasy are moving away from, or challenging, the Chosen One narrative. But how often do you see a disabled protagonist who is a woman, in her thirties, and by every marker, a failure, be The Chosen One? That was fun to write, and yes, very self-indulgent.
Now, sacrifice and martyrdom were two themes that felt natural when having a conversation about militaries. Martyrdom is baked into military culture, you can’t escape it. Historically, militaries uphold and immortalize those who lose their lives in combat. We label these people as heroes while simultaneously treating them terribly while they’re still alive or if they remained alive (see the utter lack of any decent veterans’ services). It’s easier to herald someone as a hero than to actually treat them as such. There is a tension in there between the shine of heroism, and the loss of life and the absolute meaninglessness of it while it’s still there.
JPG – Many of the characters are fighter pilots, and there some epic dog fights in the novella. Can you speak about writing action scenes in space?
A.D. S – Oh, so much fun! I am notoriously not great when it comes to writing action scenes and things get even trickier in space. Where is up in space? Who knows, not me. There was a lot of ‘paperclip flying over my laptop’ involved in developing those.
Fun fact: since there is no air resistance in space those fighters don’t need to be aerodynamic at all. They can just be cubes. That’s a fun thought!
JPG – The book is written in a casual tone which emphasizes the confidence of the protagonist, Nez. Can you speak about her self-assuredness amidst disability and being ostracized?
A.D. S – That’s my Eastern European sense of humor coming through. The logic behind gallows humor goes as such: if you can laugh about it, then it’s not so bad, and Nez has had a lot of bad stuff happen to her and a lot of people treat her poorly. In many ways, it’s a wall she places between herself and everyone else. A few times during the story you see the cracks form and you peek inside and see how these insults get to her, how difficult it is for her to execute her plan, how much her disability frustrates her even as she believes herself capable. But to the outside observer she’s calm and confident. It’s all a ruse, one she keeps up until the very end.
JPG – Similarly, the antagonist, Rezal, masks weakness with bravado – can you speak about this choice and how she counterbalances Nez?
A.D. S – Rezal is an interesting character because she has just as much to lose as Nez if she is found out, but where Nez can use the image of the “poor, disabled woman” to her advantage to get people to underestimate her, Rezal can’t. Her whole persona is built around the image of perfection and indestructibility. One of the games that Nez and Rezal are playing is the assessment of how capable each one is. Each one knows the other’s secret and tries to force their hand to reveal it.
JPG – Even though most of the story takes place on a spaceship, the decadence of power is vividly described, as are the unnecessary accouttrements of power. Tell us about using setting to explore power dynamics.
A.D. S – So many of the visual elements in Rezal’s living quarters are inspired by Russian aristocracy. I’m Ukrainian, so we’ve been fed this idea of the “superior Russian culture” for a very long time. Progress was positioned as gold-framed oil portraits and heavy, long, dining room tables. Carpets and applique wallpaper. This comes up several times in Rezal’s and Nez’s conversations about what progress is and what the colonies were before the Rule. Nez, and her people are positioned as “uncivilized” before the Rule and suggested that they should be grateful to assimilate into a prosperous empire.
We also see that this decadence of décor does nothing to stop the ultimate fall. From her “shithole” apartment and then her equally unimpressive quarters aboard the mothership, Nez manages to achieve her goal, even if she never improves her “status”. The shiny things mean nothing to her, same as the “Great Russian Culture” means nothing to me.
JPG – One aspect of the characters that stuck out to me is the tenderness between adversaries, how did you use this to heighten the drama of the story?
A.D. S – I’ve heard a number of times now that Dragonfly is an enemies-to-lovers story, and it’s not! There is no love there. There are many people who have complicated and mainly negative feelings towards one another. They also have sex.
The moments of tenderness serve a purpose. I didn’t want to write characters that were all bad, comedically bad even. Plenty of terrible people in history had soft spots for family members, for their pets. I wanted to highlight that, specifically in Rezal. There is no redemption for her, she is borderline evil, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want connection. That’s the most awful part of it, I think, that people who commit horrible atrocities are also people who want to be loved and cared for. Those two drives don’t cancel out one another. They co-exist, and that’s why we should always be careful. It’s not the comedically evil people that are the most dangerous.
JPG – In relation to the previous question, tell us about using sexuality as a weapon, seduction versus betrayal, and how the corruption of power plays into this while personal feelings are also on the line.
A.D. S – I think at some point Rezal buys into the idea that Nez is into her, and Nez really *is* into Rezal. But this is more of a “game recognizes game” scenario than genuine affection. It’s all part of them trying to get the other to slip, just another technique. I also think sex is a great opportunity to demonstrate the ways in which power might shift even if for a moment.
*shout out to my editor, dave, who didn’t edit the sex scene in the book because if he did I would have shriveled up and never written anything ever again.
JPG – In some ways this book is about revenge, but it didn’t feel like the classic revenge tale – how did you navigate this trope while keeping it fresh?
A.D. S – I never thought of Dragonfly as a revenge story. To me, it’s a redemption story of how Nez figures out what she stands for and how far she’s willing to go for her convictions. Shay rightfully calls her out on her moral high ground early in the book. Even given the circumstances, she had participated in the very structure she is attempting to bring down. She even wanted to thrive within its parameters without challenging them. That’s a fact. She has to reckon with that before she can move ahead.
Shamefully, I hadn’t read that many classic revenge stories, so I am largely unfamiliar with the tropes!
JPG – What’s next for you, and what are you currently working on?
A.D. S – I recently announced that I’ll be having not one, but two whole books coming from Erewhon. So, I’m currently in editing land, trying to keep my search history from placing me on a watch list. (shameless plug) I’d encourage anyone curious about what’s coming up to subscribe to my newsletter, Facts for Fiction [https://thesuiway.beehiiv.com/subscribe].
Vector 295 Greek SFF
Vector 295, Greek SFF, is guest edited by Phoenix Alexander. Arriving April 2022. Featuring interviews with Nick Mamatas, Yanis Varoufakis, Polis Loizou, Mikhail Karikis and Alexis Panayiotou and contributions by Christos Callow Jr, Dimitra Nikolaidou, Paul Kincaid, Vasso Christou and others.
Cover by Mikhail Karikis.