Vector [BSFA] Blog

by Philip A. Suggars

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

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, let’s flip this on its head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

By James Henstock

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

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

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

A new era: the Post-burger 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurturing life in vitro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bioreactor

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

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

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

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

Cut and paste

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

• Let Them Eat Goo, South Park S23E04

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

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

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

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

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

• Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven

Tissue engineering

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

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

• Lazarus (1955) Margaret St. Clair

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above and beyond: Extraterrestrial cultivated meat 

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

‘”Where would they get a real steer?”

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

• Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert

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

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

The cultural negotiation of Alternative Meat

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

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

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

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

“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.

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

• Oryx and Crake (2003) Margaret Atwood

Cultivating the appeal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions: Food of the Future

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

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

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

References

Abmayr SM, Pavlath GK (2012) Myoblast fusion: lessons from flies and mice. Development. 139, 641-56

Asara JM, Schweitzer MH, Freimark LM, Phillips M, Cantley LC (2007) Protein sequences from mastodon and Tyrannosaurus rex revealed by mass spectrometry. Science 316, 280-285

Baum CM, Bröring S, Lagerkvist CJ (2021) Information, attitudes, and consumer evaluations of cultivated meat. Food Quality and Preference 92:104226.

Baker RC, Darrah LB, Darfler JM (1966) The Use of Fowl for Convenience Items. Poultry Science. 45, 1017–1025

Bomkamp C, Skaalure SC, Fernando GF, Ben‐Arye T, Swartz EW, Specht EA. Scaffolding biomaterials for 3D cultivated meat: prospects and challenges (2022) Advanced Science. 9, 2102908.

Bryant C, Barnett J (2018) Consumer acceptance of cultured meat: A systematic review. Meat science. 143, 8-17.

Carrington D (2023) Meatball from long-extinct mammoth created by food firm. In The Guardian Online https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/28/meatball-mammoth-created-cultivated-meat-firm [Online resource]

Castle N (2022) In Vitro Meat and Science Fiction: Contemporary Narratives of Cultured Flesh. Extrapolation 63, 149-179

GFI (Good Food Institute) State of the industry report (2023) Published online at  https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/State-of-the-Industry-Report-Cultivated-meat-and-seafood.pdf [Online Resource]

Greenspoon L, Krieger E, Sender R, Rosenberg Y, Bar-On YM, Moran U, Antman T, Meiri S, Roll U, Noor E, Milo R (2023) The global biomass of wild mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, e2204892120

Gregory-Manning S, Post M (2024) The future of lab-grown meat is promising. Published online at European Science-Media Hub, European Parliamentary Research Service  https://sciencemediahub.eu/2024/02/21/mark-post-the-future-of-lab-grown-meat-is-promising/ [Online Resource]

Ianovici I, Zagury Y, Redenski I, Lavon N, Levenberg S (2022) 3D-printable plant protein-enriched scaffolds for cultivated meat development. Biomaterials 284,121487.

Kateman, B (2022) Cell-cultivated meat could make cruelty-free exotic animal meat a reality. Published online at Fast Company ’https://www.fastcompany.com/90773698/cell-cultivated-meat-could-make-cruelty-free-exotic-animal-meat-a-reality’ [Online Resource]

Mead D (2013) The Reviews for the First Lab Grown Burger Aren’t Bad. Published online at Vice ‘https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-reviews-for-the-first-lab-grown-burger-arent-bad/’ [Online Resource]

Nasa. Growing plants in space. Accessed online 20-04-2025 at  https://www.nasa.gov/exploration-research-and-technology/growing-plants-in-space/ (online resource)

Pang K (2018) Andrew Zimmern picks the best- and worst-tasting animals. In TheTakeOut online, available at ‘https://www.thetakeout.com/andrew-zimmern-picks-the-best-and-worst-tasting-animal-1798251700/- [Online resource]

Pasitka L, Cohen M, Ehrlich A, Gildor B, Reuveni E, Ayyash M, Wissotsky G, Herscovici A, Kaminker R, Niv A, Bitcover R. (2023) Spontaneous immortalization of chicken fibroblasts generates stable, high-yield cell lines for serum-free production of cultured meat. Nature Food. 4, 35-50

Roser M (2023) – “How many animals get slaughtered every day?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day’ [Online Resource]

Soleymani S, Naghib SM, Mozafari MR (2024) An overview of cultured meat and stem cell bioprinting: How to make it, challenges and prospects, environmental effects, society’s culture and the influence of religions. Journal of Agriculture and Food Research 18, 101307.

~

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

By Jo Lindsay Walton

‘Embers’: Stranded Assets

Wole Talabi’s short story ‘Embers’ (2024) explores the potential consequences of energy transition for a rural community in Nigeria, focusing on one oil worker who cannot let go of dreams of petrochemical prosperity. 

Kawashida fuel cells were invented by a team of scientists at the ShinChi Technology Company of Japan […] By using a proprietary genetic modification technique to rewire the metabolism of a heterotrophic bacterial strain, making it autotrophic, and then further splicing the synthetic microbe with a cocktail of high cell density, rapid reproduction genes, Dr. Haruko Kawashida and her team created a living, breathing, renewable supply of energy for the planet. The synthetic autotroph used concentrated sunlight to efficiently consume carbon dioxide and exchange electrons, creating a steady stream of electricity.1

How convenient! And as if its abundant, net carbon-negative energy weren’t enough, Kawashida cell technology also revolutionizes wastewater treatment. It’s a near-perfect deus ex machina for the climate crisis. 

But not everyone is happy. When Kawashida decimates the oil industry, Uduak is abruptly cut off from his sponsored scholarship. Cast adrift, Uduak becomes a kind of inverted solarpunk protagonist—he uses grit and ingenuity not to jury-rig funky green utopiatech, but rather to attempt to revive the village’s derelict oil refinery. Even though clean energy is widely available, Uduak argues that the village’s real needs remain unmet, and he remains hostile to the post-carbon vision laid out by his idealistic rival, Affiong.

The story comes to a grisly and tragic conclusion—murder, arson, suicide. Without excusing Uduak’s rather OTT response, we can see that there is a clear lack of compassion to support him transition to the era of a stabilised climate. One wonders if Uduak might also have a point: will the village as a whole be left behind by government, industry and civil society? Just as Uduak was left behind by the village?

Uduak becomes what is sometimes called a ‘stranded asset,’ something once valuable, whose value has vanished because of a probably permanent shift in its circumstances. The story’s core tension—between his thwarted social mobility and the new sustainable technology—reflects the current dilemma of green transition for petro-states like Nigeria. 

It also implies broader questions about energy transitions. Within science fiction, transformation of the energy system often forms the hard-to-imagine bridge between the dystopian present and the ambiguously utopian future. There are the dilithium crystals and warp cores in Star Trek, there is the Grid in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. But the questions which arise are not just about what energy will power the future. They are also about how societies will allocate and manage such energy.  Could energy itself somehow be the foundation of a just and equitable economy? If the flow of energy were to directly underpin the flow of money, could this support systems that are more cooperative, collective, and liberated, and less exploitative? Systems that are not just energy-based, but also just based pure and simple?

Energy-based currencies in speculative fiction

These are certainly questions which have fascinated science fiction writers, although (spoiler alert) I’m not convinced that their answers are that plausible, at least not in their current forms. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-1996), moneys are developed based on calories or on hydrogen peroxide fuel. His Ministry for the Future (2020) imagines a currency based on atmospheric carbon removed or carbon emissions avoided (not energy-based exactly, but strongly linked with energy). Michael Cisco’s Animal Money (2015) briefly plays with the idea of an active “verb money” as opposed to reified noun money2; Cisco’s title refers (sort of) to money used by animals. Of course, in the real world, cattle have been an early and enduring currency which also constitute a kind of energy currency. Many commodity currencies and social currencies have been tied to animals, plants, or products derived from them, and therefore to the energy metabolisms of the species: grain, tea, firewood, charcoal, peat, beeswax, oil, ethanol.

In a different medium, Jonathan Keats’s Electrochemical Currency Exchange Co. (2012) was a business, or an art project, which exploited “electrochemical arbitrage” between the differences in the metallic content of Chinese and American coinages to generate a faint electrical current. Keats’s entry to the 2016 Future of Money award, which challenged designers to imagine an alternative origin story for money, suggested that money originated in the sun. Keats’s entry also extended this with a ‘solar dollars’ concept, where banknotes would be woven with photovoltaic materials, turning each one into a mini solar panel:

Money originated with the sun. Long before the development of banking, and even before the evolution of the human species, photosynthetic organisms worked out systems to amass, save, and spend solar energy. For many plants, energy earned by collecting sunlight gets banked as sugars, which may be invested in personal growth or spent on sex.

Our economic systems, which emerged with agriculture, merely emulate what we’ve observed in nature. However, we don’t do it as well as the average rhododendron. We expend an enormous amount of energy working for money that has almost no energy value. […]

Humans can do much better by learning from the origin of money. We can reengineer currency not only to store energy more efficiently, but also to continuously generate new energy from sunlight.

The concept is simple: Embedded with flexible solar cells, solar dollars and pounds will become more valuable just by lying around. Thin-film photovoltaic materials will charge a paper-based supercapacitor, which will work as a rechargeable battery. Each note will also include a self-resonant coil to allow for wireless energy transfer from the supercapacitor to household appliances or the grid. Plus, the money will feature a matrix of light-emitting quantum dots to display current value, indicated in watts.3

Sometimes money may be tied to a particular type of energy, kinetic energy, or movement of mass through space. Postage stamps might be considered generalised ‘movement credits,’ and have sometimes historically functioned like money. But they are unlike most commodity moneys, since their ‘intrinsic’ use value is so clearly a creature of law, in a manner resembling fiat currency. Early in the US Civil War, the North switched to new stamps to deprive the South of its stamp stock assets. Later, in response to specie hoarding and inadequate ledger-based money infrastructure, the Post Office issued wartime ‘postage currency,’ some initially featuring perforated edges and images of stamps. Postage currency functioned similarly to ‘shinplasters,’ small dollar denomination notes issued by businesses and local authorities, which were also widely in circulation at the time. Later, email and digital cash would also have entwined histories, through shared concerns with privacy and decentralisation, and anti-spam mechanisms.

The idea that money might be not only a store of value, but a vehicle for moving value to where it is needed—has reappeared in speculative visions of future economies. In The Shape of Things to Come (1933), H.G. Wells envisions a world administered by a unified authority intent on reconstructing civilisation after cataclysmic upheavals. Central to this future is the World Transport Union (WTU), an international organisation that establishes a standardised global transport network. As part of its operations, the WTU introduces the “air dollar,” a form of currency directly tied to physical transport costs. Each air dollar pays for moving one kilogram of goods one kilometre on WTU aircraft. 

Even though Star Trek’s Federation is proudly post-money, its warp drive-enabling dilithium crystals behave suspiciously like a commodity money; there is also at least one mention of rationing the teleportation system via Transporter Credits.4 

In Frank Herbert’s Dune series (1965-1985), the commodity money spice is a potent mélange of time and space; from Children of Dune (1976):

Not without reason was the spice often called “the secret coinage.” Without melange, the Spacing Guild’s heighliners could not move. Melange precipitated the “navigation trance” by which a translight pathway could be “seen” before it was traveled.5

In Charles Stross’s space opera Neptune’s Brood (2014) there are three kinds of money: fast, medium, and slow. There is a sense in which fast money is highly liquid, medium money is somewhat liquid, and slow money is scarcely liquid at all. Slow, in fact, sort of means illiquid. But what is striking about thinking through these currencies is the qualitative shifts involved. Slow money is essentially implicated with a different kind of activity. An economic anthropologist might say that it constitutes its own ‘sphere of exchange’ or its own ‘transactional order.’ That is, slow money is “the currency of world-builders,” used for financing starships and colonies.

Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood: A Space Opera (Ace: 2014)

There’s a lot of diversity here already. What does it really mean for a currency to be ‘based on energy’? Toward the end of Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), the Golgafrinchans—a gang of uncannily familiar bungling interplanetary colonists—attempt to establish a new currency.6

“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn’t grow on trees you know.” 

“If you would allow me to continue …” 

Ford nodded dejectedly. 

“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”

The Golgafrinchans might struggle a bit with inflation, especially during the lush summer months.7 However, the Golgafrinchans have thought of everything.

“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revaluate the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and … er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”

The twist is that the planet settled by the Golgafrinchans is prehistoric Earth. The Golgafrinchans are us. How extravagant is this satire? Is anyone on Earth really reckless enough to burn down trees in an effort to form a new currency? Surely not!

Unless. Unless, of course, those trees decay. And turn to peat. And then compress down into coal. And then, some time later, someone invents Bitcoin.

Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies may be considered energy-based currencies, but in a very particular way. Bitcoin is created by spending money on electricity to power computers that guess the answers to mathematical puzzles (Bitcoin mining). But if Bitcoin is energy-based, it is in roughly the opposite sense from that intended by many science fiction writers and utopian thinkers. Unlike utopian visions where energy-based currencies promote sustainability, the energy that ‘backs’ Bitcoin is consumed and unavailable for other uses. Bitcoin is based on used-up energy, not available energy.

For a currency based on available energy, we might start with the Technocrats. The Technocracy movement of the early 20th century, emerging during the Great Depression, proposed a radical restructuring of society and the economy based on scientific principles and technological efficiency, rejecting both capitalism and democracy. In some Technocrat schemes, we encounter the impulse to base money on something incontrovertibly real. As Howard Scott wrote in 1933, “all forms of energy, of whatever sort, may be measured in units of ergs, joules, or calories […] A dollar may be worth—in buying power—so much today and more or less tomorrow, but a unit of work or heat is the same in 1900, 1929, 1933 or the year 2000.”8 For Technocrat Theodore Bruce Yerke, however, even the term currency carried unwanted connotations. Technocracy would scientifically optimise economic production, Yerke argued in Futuria Fantasia, a fanzine produced by the young Ray Bradbury. “In the TECH THERE IS NO MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE, THERE IS ONLY A METHOD OF TECHNOLOGICAL ACCOUNTING. […] Technocracy is NOT a political or revolutionary movement. It is 100% American.”9 During its heyday in the 1930s the Technocracy movement had links with pulp sci-fi, such as Nat Schachner’s series ‘The Revolt of the Scientists’ (1933), where Schachner depicted the revolutionary destruction of existing money. Technocracy is a little hard to place politically, although there are some unmistakable resonances with  contemporary big tech bumbling into its fash era.

In speculative fiction, Christopher Stasheff’s A Company of Stars (1992) features the energy-based Kwaher. In Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (1994) money is “backed by energy, human and other sorts” and the “basic unit of value is the calorie.”10 

‘Do you use money?’ the woman next to her asked.

‘Our credits function like money, but they’re not backed by gold or silver. They’re backed by energy, human and other sorts, and our basic unit of value is the calorie. So a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production, in terms of labor and fuel and materials that themselves require energy to produce. And part of that accounting is how much energy it takes to replace a resource that is used. Something that works with solar or wind power becomes very cheap. Anything requiring irreplaceable fossil fuels is generally too expensive to think about.’

‘But do you have rich and poor?’ the same woman asked.

‘We’re each guaranteed a share of the wealth of the past and of the resources, which translates into a basic stipend of credits. As I said before, you could live on that, frugally, if you really didn’t want to work. But if you do work, you earn work credits, and the more you work the more you earn, so there’s incentive for those who want personal advancement. And if you do something really spectacular, achieve something fabulous, people bring you gifts.’

‘Don’t people cheat?’ asked a woman at the end of the table.

‘All the accounts are public. Your whole work group sees the bill you put in each week, and believe me, they know if it’s accurate. If not, you’ll hear about it, and if necessary they’ll bring it up before your Guild or council. Of course, some jobs don’t lend themselves to counting hours, like mine, or like being an artist or a musician. We get a fixed stipend.’11

Dave Gerrold’s A Matter for Men (1981), where the currency is the kilocalorie (or KC, ‘casey’), succinctly makes the case for energy-based currencies:

[…] you can only measure your wealth by the amount of difference you make in the world. […] The physical universe uses heat to keep score. […] We want our money to be an accurate measure, so we use the same system as the physical universe: ergo, we have the KC standard, the kilocalorie.12

Of course this is a sleight of hand. The universe doesn’t need to ‘keep score,’ the universe simply exists. As for the ‘amount of difference’ that results from an energy expenditure, this depends on the context: the kWh powering a life support machine is not equal to the kWh powering a brightly luminous billboard selling Coca-Cola to nobody on a desolate rural road. 

Nonetheless, we might suppose that there’s often a rough correlation between energy input and economic value, and in certain contexts—perhaps transport, and some industrial processes like smelting—quite a close correlation. There are also semi-precedents for energy currencies, such as prepaid electricity cards (at the household level), Renewable Energy Certificates (intended to spur investment in renewables), assets in energy derivatives markets (futures, options, swaps), as well as the currencies of oil-producing countries (petrocurrencies) which tend to be tied to the price of oil. 

What is this correlation between energy and value were strengthened? How feasible is a full-blown energy money? 

Is energy-based money possible?

Let’s look at several concepts. Our currency could be structured so that a holder could redeem it directly for a specified amount of energy. Your coin says 10 kWh, so you can get 10 kWh for it. A ‘central energy bank’ would need to maintain sufficient energy reserves to redeem these claims.

This is conceptually simple, like a gold-backed currency. Logistically though, it quickly begins to look like a castle-in-the-sky. Storing vast amounts of energy is far more challenging than storing gold bullion. One might even imagine a literal castle-in-the-sky approach: immense weights suspended at high elevations, descending to turn generators; together with water pumped uphill into tarns, ready to drive turbines; underground caverns tense with compressed air; molten salt and other thermal storage systems; the silhouettes of grid-scale batteries littering the horizons. With all this in place, perhaps enough energy could be stored to back a currency.13 But it surely wouldn’t last long. Inefficiencies in storing and releasing energy would make the system appear extremely wasteful. As the world transitions to renewables, energy storage is already a critical challenge. Intermittent sources like solar and wind depend on precisely these storage systems to balance grids and ensure reliability. One of the reasons gold has sometimes worked well as a backing is that it is mostly useless.14 Diverting energy to monetary reserves would sap resources needed to decarbonise and meet rising demands.

A second, more feasible concept does not maintain reserves centrally. Instead, the currency would be pegged to a basket of energy-related goods, priced on the open market. Traditional monetary policy, including interest rate adjustments, would manage the value of the energy currency so that a 1kWh coin could reliably purchase about an hour’s running time for a 1kW appliance. Fiscal interventions, such as taxes and subsidies applied to energy production, could also help to maintain this peg.

In theory this approach could work, but its benefits are not entirely clear. Perhaps it would strengthen trust in the currency and the broader economy, assuming the peg could be upheld. Psychologically and culturally, a currency denominated in energy might also foreground energy scarcity. Today, people will shake their heads and huff, What a waste of taxpayers’ money! In the world of this energy-referenced currency, they might instead grumble, What a waste of planet-dwellers’ energy! Such grumbles could be especially revolutionary during our current transition era, in which societies built around the expectation of relatively abundant fossil energy suddenly need to use energy much more intelligently. 

But overall, I don’t think this concept would achieve what writers like Stasheff, Robinson, Starhawk, and Gerrold are really getting at with their energy currencies. One might intuit that an energy peg guarantees greater stability compared with ordinary money. As Technocrat Howard Scott wrote, “a unit of work or heat is the same in 1900, 1929, 1933 or the year 2000” (q.v.). But improved stability would actually be unlikely.15 If monetary policy is tied to keeping the currency aligned with energy, it leaves less scope for tackling inflation. Historically, the link between money and energy has fluctuated considerably, so pinning it down may well displace that volatility elsewhere.16

In fact, the real fascination with energy currencies is about more than stability. It’s about justice and truth. We want money to measure the ‘real cost’ of things, yet we know many prices ignore environmental or social harm—‘negative externalities,’ in economists’ terms. We feel that anchoring our money to energy would account for important externalities, the ones tied to energy use.17 For example, an energy money society surely wouldn’t revolve around mass individual ownership of gas-guzzling internal combustion engines, would it? Even better, we wouldn’t need interfering government apparatchiks to break the news to us, because the physical universe itself would be breaking that news. It wouldn’t be Obama or Biden coming for your guns, for your gleaming ’67 Ford Mustang, your sun-scorched stretch of Route 66, your fizzing neon diner sign and your jukebox of dreams, your haze of light and shimmer where the road meets the sky. No, you would simply roll up your sleeves, and contend with the reality before you, finally made plain by honest money. Because the true cost of oil to the climate would now be factored into the price of gas at the pump, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it? Well, no actually! There is a conceptual confusion here. Pegging a currency to the cost of energy has no inherent effect on the externalities of energy production or consumption. In Starhawk’s solarpunk future, “a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production” (q.v.). But the energy peg doesn’t get us even to that, let alone to a sustainability-constrained version of it. Even if all goods and services were priced in kWhs, their actual prices would still be determined in the usual way, by the product’s demand and supply, and a few other factors.18 

An example will help to clarify this. Imagine, say, a hand-woven scarf for sale at a local craft fair. Its energy inputs might be minimal. But because each scarf is lovingly and skilfully crafted by a single artisan, supply is low. These scarves are in high demand for their beauty and glamour, so customers will pay many kWh coins for them, far in excess of the kWh embodied in their production. The reverse is also true: even with an energy peg, energy can still be too cheap in terms of environmental sustainability. 

This means there’s nothing preventing gas at the gas station pouring into gas-guzzling SUVs far too cheaply, except now it’s too cheap in kWh coin. There’s nothing stopping intensive energy crop farming from ravaging local habitats, raising food prices, and polluting waterways. Serried rows of empty skyscrapers can still loom, beautifully lit up and temperature-controlled all night long. Even the crypto rigs can keep churning. The whole fiery, ecocidal kit-and-kaboodle can continue apace, only now gloriously denominated in kWh, with a cool dollar sign logo drawn in fire.

Our instinct tells us that transactions denominated in energy units will automatically reflect underlying physical energy flows. This instinct is wrong. This brings us to the third concept. What would it take for goods and services to reflect an estimate of the energy wrapped up in them, as Starhawk describes? It doesn’t have to be perfect—if a particular pashmina happened to take more energy to make than all the other similar pashminas, we don’t need to know that—but can we have good enough estimates for general categories of goods? 

The key thing here is not so much energy-based money, as energy-based prices. So most obviously, the answer is price controls, as in a centrally planned economy where officials attempt to fix prices based on kWh invested in production. In fact, we can think of two different versions here: one where prices always reflect embodied energy but are denominated in dollars, yen, euros etc., and another version where prices reflect embodied energy and are denominated in kWh or some other energy unit. 

Modelling how much energy is embodied in broad categories of goods and services is challenging but not impossible—there is a very partial precedent in Emissions Factor databases, used in carbon accounting. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the character Vlad gestures toward the complexity of the calculations, especially when putting energy values on services. Vlad is talking about calories rather than kWh, as we have been, but the principle is the same. 

“If you burn our bodies in a microbomb calorimeter you’ll find we contain about six or seven kilocalories per gram of weight, and of course we take in a lot of calories to sustain that through our lives our output is harder to measure, because it’s not a matter of predators feeding on us, as in the classic efficiency equations — it’s more a matter of how many calories we create by our efforts, or send on to future generations, something like that. And most of that is very indirect, naturally, and it involves a lot of speculation and subjective judgement. If you don’t go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all.”

“Sounds about right to me,” John joked […]19

Beyond energy, goods and services also embed other scarce or valuable inputs—labour time, natural resources, etc. Should pricing reflect only total energy input, or should there be some weighting to also reflect the ratio of energy to other inputs? And if those other inputs are themselves valued according to their embodied energy, what recursive dynamics emerge? Different methodologies would incentivise different behaviors. Crucially, energy-based pricing involves empirical data and mathematical modelling, but it also involves political and ethical value judgments.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (Del Rey: 2021)

Let’s imagine an economy where prices reflect embodied energy. We have come a long way since the early Soviet Union’s Gosplan fumbled through its material balances exercises. In our techno-utopian system of embodied energy prices, some form of automated Life Cycle Analysis forms the backbone, while each price carries associated metadata about how confident the system is in its accuracy. Each product or service’s cost is updated based on current data about energy use throughout its supply chain. These prices dynamically account for factors such as changing energy sources, production methods, and transport distances. There is a slight premium associated with uncertainty, so there is an incentive to fill in gaps in the data. There are of course weightings to support the transition to renewable energy. Machine Learning and other statistical techniques track and forecast shifts across the whole system.20

Set aside questions of data surveillance, or how people might hack, speculate on, or game the system. Would it fulfil the basic promise of Starhawk’s energy money (albeit in a very different way)? I’m not sure that it would. These science fiction authors want monetary systems that are rooted more directly in human vitality and in the earth’s ecological resources. They want money that helps to allocate resources well, responsive to both human wants and needs and to the energy implication of those wants and needs. They want something spontaneous, bottom-up, springing from the universe itself, not imposed top-down bureaucratically. The use of AI and sophisticated data analytics might spark a flicker of interest—Perhaps AI is the lens with which we can read the true state of the universe? But ultimately AI is just another layer of human decision-making, akin to opaque bureaucracy.

A fourth concept would be to give up on energy as that ‘special something,’ that ‘unobtanium,’ that can fix money once and for all. Instead, we might tie money creation directly to renewable energy generation. After all, money is a human device, not a property of the universe. Since modern money comes into being through lending, it could instead be lent into existence with strings attached—namely, that it must be used for funding clean energy projects. This dispenses with the idea of a currency that measures value in the same way the universe does, or captures an unfiltered physical reality. Instead, it treats money as something we consciously design and adapts it to accelerate and stabilise the growth of renewable energy. Money creation is very much in demand within the utopian imagination these days. Such a proposal would need to prove itself not only against the status quo, but also against many other proposals for reforming money creation, such as using it to fund Universal Basic Income. 

While we have mostly been occupied with ambitious or fanciful ideas for monetary reform, I suspect that these science fictional imaginaries also strongly inform important ongoing debates in energy economics. Earlier, I briefly mentioned Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), which allow renewable energy producers to register and receive a tradable certificate for each megawatt-hour of electricity they expect to generate. These certificates are tracked in a database and can be bought by suppliers or other companies wishing to label their energy as ‘green.’ When a supplier buys a certificate and provides that equivalent amount of electricity to customers, the certificate is retired from the system. However, unless you have your own on-site renewables, buying green electricity doesn’t change what physically comes out of your sockets; the grid still delivers a collective mix. Rather, by purchasing RECs, your utility company obtains the right—according to established accounting practices—to count your energy usage as renewable.

If it sounds like an awful greenwashing scam, it’s not quite that bad. The purpose is to spur investment in renewable energy. It is almost like a deliberate double-counting: a renewable energy producer can sell their energy to the grid, but they can also sell their RECs based on that production. This means that renewable energy projects that might not have been financially viable suddenly become viable: they have an extra income stream.

However, frustration has been mounting with the unbundled RECs system, with some evidence suggesting that it hasn’t really led to much additional investment in renewable energy. There are parallels with carbon offsetting too: big, rich companies have been able to purchase RECs fairly cheaply. and make technically legitimate claims that they are 100% renewable energy powered, and perhaps delaying much-needed operational changes. Meanwhile, the things they physically do need to be powered somehow, and some of that power comes from coal, oil, and gas. 

Longer-term Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) have been seen as one good antidote to the RECs approach. Another paradigm that is gaining traction is 24/7 hourly matching, also known as 24/7 carbon free energy. This approach requires energy buyers to match their consumption with renewable energy generation in the same region every single hour, rather than simply offsetting total use over a longer period. By making sure electricity is generated locally and at the same time it is consumed, 24/7 hourly matching should prevent companies from claiming green energy sourced from distant places (where all the energy happens to be green anyway, so the additional investment is minimal or nonexistent), or mismatched time slots. It should encourage companies to actually change what they do: for example, scheduling more energy intensive activities for when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and the grid has renewable energy to spare. It may also encourage investment in more robust renewable infrastructure, often supported by energy storage to handle off-peak or fluctuating demand. By tying consumption to real-time local supply, 24/7 hourly matching aims to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, bolster genuine renewable availability, and encourage a more resilient, sustainably powered grid. At the time of writing, in early 2025, there is some beef simmering in the tech world, with Google championing 24/7 hourly matching, and trying to get it written into the influential Greenhouse Gas Protocol, while Amazon wants to double down on an even more liberalised version of RECs.

The criticisms of Amazon’s position are convincing. But what if 24/7 hourly matching involves a kind of unobtanium? In fact, I am suspicious of 24/7 hourly matching, for reasons rooted (partly) in science fiction. I know some brilliant and passionate individuals who are working on it, and in many ways I trust them more than I trust my own paranoid instincts. So perhaps it will be a step in the right direction. But 24/7 hourly matching does feel like yet another expression of that same desire which animates these science fiction stories: to align our economies with an objective, scientifically given reality, and sweep aside subjective value judgments. As we’ve seen, things tend to be a little more complicated, and there is a risk that by burying these value judgments, we place them out of reach of popular scrutiny and dissent. We may also place them beyond more radical possibilities for the democratisation of energy. Energy currencies may have their uses, but they need to be as responsive to the realities of human values, as to the metrics of energy flows.

1.  ‘Embers’ in Wole Talabi, Convergence Dreams (2024), 241-242. An earlier version appears in BellaNaija (2013). ︎
2.  Michael Cisco, Animal Money (Portland: Lazy Fascist Press, 2015), 26.
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3.  Jonathon Keats, ‘Solar Dollars,’ Future of Money (2016). <www.futuremoneyaward.com/2016/project-three-494y8>
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4.  ‘Explorers’, Star Trek: DS9, 8 May 1995. ︎
5.  Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (New York: Putnam, 1976), 147.
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6.  This article is an expansion of a small section of the chapter ‘Other Moneys and Other Worlds.’ Special thank-you to Paul Crosthwaite.
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7. As with the Triganic Pu, another of Adams’s speculative currencies, arguably the problem here is once more with the financial institutions and technologies involved, than with the choice of money-thing per se. Maybe even the Golgafrinchan leaf could be turned into a workable currency, if they had some way of keeping track of whose ten trillion leaves belonged to whom. ︎
8.  Howard Scott, ‘Technology Smashes the Price System: An inquiry into the nature of our present crisis’, Harper’s 166 (January 1933, 129–142), 131-132, emphasis in original.
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9.  Bruce Yerke, ‘The Revolt of the Scientists’, Futura Fantasia, vol. 1, no. 1 (Summer 1939), 3.
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10.  Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), 274.
    ︎
11.  Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing, 274.
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12.  David Gerrold, A Matter for Men, The War against the Chtorr, bk. 1 (London: Futura Publications, 1984), 161.
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13.  And of course, more reasonably, you might have rules around convertibility, such as waiting periods, minimum conversion thresholds, etc.
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14.  Yes, yes.
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15. One reason for this may be, as per the First Law of Thermodynamics, within a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy in the sense intended by the First Law is very different from energy production and distribution, embodied in fossil fuel extractions, nuclear plants, wind farms, solar panels, and so on. ︎
16. One might try weighting the energy basket to favour solar, wind, and wave power, thus placing more emphasis on renewables. But even if this managed to spur investment in clean energy, it would be a rather indirect approach. There are tried-and-true methods—taxes on fossil fuels raise costs and curb consumption, subsidies for renewables do the opposite. Governments can invest directly in renewable infrastructure, or de-risk renewables investments by offering co-financing on favourable terms.
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17.  The monetary authority might make things a bit easier on themselves by setting the window fairly wide, or using approaches such as a ‘crawling peg’ that can adjust gradually over time.
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18.  The extent to which supply and demand actually determines prices is a matter of debate. Other factors include administered or cost-plus pricing (in practice, sellers do often just figure out what it costs them to bring the product to market, and add what seems like a decent margin), as well as social norms, business strategies, and political and institutional bargaining.
    ︎
19.  Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (Harper Voyager, 1992), 351. In later books, Mars eventually adopts a currency called the sequin. 
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20.  And, let’s be honest, we may not want prices to be entirely determined by energy inputs; perhaps this is more likely a highly targeted tax/subsidy component to a price that is also determined in other ways.
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Jo Lindsay Walton is Vector’s Editor-at-Large.

By Marta F. Suarez Dine or Die, with a Pinch of Comedy

Delicious in Dungeon (2024, Netflix). Season 1, Episode 3. Living-Armour Stir Fry and Soup [00:18:57]

Delicious in Dungeon (Netflix, 2024-present) is Studio Trigger’s adaptation of Ryōko Kui’s eponymous manga (2014-2023). The series is set in a fantasy world that merges and echoes different fantasy and manga traditions popular in Japan. The overall setting takes the viewer to the dungeon crawl genre, which recently experienced a resurgence in the country after Etrian Odyssey Nexus (2018). The characters’ races and skills are shaped by influences of Dungeons and Dragons, the Middle-Earth world set by Tolkien, and even the Final Fantasy universe, which itself draws inspiration from these narrative traditions. However, what makes Delicious in Dungeon significantly different is the resonances of cooking series like Mister Ajikko (1986-1989), a manga series that had several sequel runs over the years, including a recent 2015-2019 one, titled Mister Ajikko Bakumatsu-hen. The first season comprises 24 episodes, with a new second season coming soon this 2025. 

In the world of the story, adventuring parties enter dungeons looking for the legendary Golden Country, a kingdom transported by a sorcerer to the depths of an expansive dungeon, which is said to contain the ultimate treasures. Lured by wealth, fame, and adventure, different guilds enter this dungeon with the hope of finding the lost realm. One of these teams is led by Laios Touden, a tall-man (human) Paladin Knight who starts this quest alongside his sister Falin, a magic wielder; Marcille, a half-elf mage; and Chilchuck, a halfling thief. The opening scenes present the party’s encounter with a magnificent red dragon, against which they are losing. As the beast defeats them one by one, Falin uses her last strength before being ingested by the dragon to teleport the other members of the party out of the dungeon. Still alive but on the surface, the party is now several floors above where the battle took place and too far to attempt to rescue Falin. However, due to the magic of the dungeon, Falin could be resurrected if there are some remains and she has not been fully digested. With this in mind, the group decides to return, defeat the dragon and rescue any remaining parts of Falin. However, with time being of the essence, they realise that they cannot afford to stop to resupply and find provisions, as that would risk their chance to succeed. In a conventional dungeon crawl storytelling, the party would possibly open containers to find cheese and fruit, pick edible mushrooms and seeds, or perhaps kill a rodent and eat a left-behind spoiled pie in a moment of necessity. In contrast, Laios introduces the unconventional idea of eating the monsters they encounter, setting the course for the series. With this decision, the party ensures their survival and the journey becomes also one of gastronomic exploration.

The premise adopts a comedic approach, with Laios exhibiting an almost obsessive enthusiasm for consuming monsters, verging on a fixation. Marcille, in contrast, is disgusted by the idea and often protests very vocally, with Chilchuck taking a more pragmatic attitude but also questioning Laios’ desires to embrace monster cuisine. Their first attempt at cooking a monster ends in disaster due to Laios’s inexperience on the matters of the safe handling and preparation of monster meat. It is at this point that they meet Senshi, a Dwarf warrior who has long embraced cooking monsters and joins the party as the cook. Senshi’s expertise crafts delicious recipes using the monsters they defeat. From here on, the episodes include entering a new room or level where there is an encounter with a new monster,  a method to defeat it that considers the best approach to retain flavour or avoid toxins, a detailed recipe explained by Senshi, a commentary on the steps needed or the reasons to cook the monster that way, and the final presentation of the dish to the audience, which include diagrams of the body areas used for that particular recipe and the title (Figure 1). If you have watched any cooking manga series, these scenes replicate the conventions of culinary battles and faceoffs leading to awards, fame and prestige. Yet, this is also a format echoed in contemporary cooking blogs and social media accounts, where a recipe turns into a long post about the memory of a grandmother’s apron, the very special ingredients needed, the precise and unique way to prepare these, and the social-media-ready photos of the result. In this manner, these scenes will appeal to a range of audiences who will find the format familiar for different reasons and will appreciate the humorous tone in which the monster recipe is presented. These scenes become humorous because of the detailed and serious explanations surrounding the recipes, which quite often extrapolate real techniques and advice to soften tough meats, the temperature or timings required in different methods, the way to slice certain ingredients, etc. The series describes real cooking tips with fantasy ingredients and lets the audience linger over the presentation of the final dish with slow panning and close-ups of beautifully presented bowls. And yet, just before risking taking itself too seriously, the group dynamics and reactions to the food smash the exquisite moment with Marcelle’s tantrum about the ingredients, Laios’ overexcitement at trying a new monster, or Chilchuk’s scepticism.

The series makes a case for environmentally sustainable food consumption.  With each monster they slay, the group collects different parts as ingredients, many of which are featured in subsequent episodes as part of their supply pack. Quite often, different body parts are used for different recipes and require different cooking techniques. As they continue to descend to the lower levels of the dungeon, the party acquires knowledge about the monsters’ habitats, their biological traits, methods to defeat them for better flavour, and the processes involved in preparing and cooking their meat. While the characters’ reactions to these unconventional meals provide comedic relief, the overarching theme of survival remains central to the narrative, encapsulated within the ‘Eat or Be Eaten’ premise. This is established from the onset through Falin’s story arc. She is eaten in a self-sacrificing act so the party can escape, but the dragon that consumed her is also finally eaten to restore her life, with some unintended consequences. Beyond the comedic premise, the series explores deeper themes of consumption and survival. Marcille’s aversion to monster meat is framed as naïve and even childish, as sustenance and survival should take precedence. Ethical concerns surrounding food emerge at several points in the storytelling, such as when the characters ponder whether eating carnivorous plants that had consumed people would constitute an indirect act of cannibalism. Further exploring the implications of the food chain, Senshi cultivates mud golems to grow produce, prompting questions about the ethics of using monsters as crops. Furthermore, his personal background story explores guilt about potentially (and involuntarily) having consumed Dwarf’s flesh: a personal trauma that is resolved with further culinary experimentation. Even the central objective of the first part of the series, the rescue and resurrection of Falin, presents a series of twists related to transformation through eating. Questions over what is edible cross over with questions over what is socially acceptable to eat, as it is clear by the reactions of other dungeon dwellers that eating monster meat is not at all conventional. 

The interactions with other guilds and adventurers help construct a wider view of the society and the world of the party. Racial tensions and prejudice are subtly woven into the worldbuilding, shaping interactions between different races without forming a central narrative arc. The story consistently reminds viewers that mistrust and misunderstandings persist, showing how each race holds distinct perspectives on events, differing approaches to situations, and varying degrees of knowledge and historical memory. Rather than presenting feuds or conflicts of major consequence, these tensions emerge organically in dialogue and worldbuilding detail. Characters remark on racial preconceptions, challenge how they are perceived, or reference historical narratives that reflect their community’s perspective. These scenes underscore the lingering effects of prejudice, stereotypes, and the accumulated weight of centuries of assumptions. However, the tensions that these moments could build are turned into comedy relief towards the end of the season, when the characters undergo temporary transformations that change their race after being exposed to a type of mushroom. These moments playfully subvert the prejudices and assumptions established earlier in the story, offering amusing reflections around identity and the self. 

Fan interpretations have highlighted additional layers within the narrative, such as the portrayal of neurodivergence via Laios, or the potential to read characters like Izutsumi as queer or trans coded, a point also made about Lycion, a character in the manga books who could possibly appear in the upcoming season 2. Although these elements have not been officially endorsed and in some cases have been denied, the fanbase attributes these characterisations to the author’s unconscious representation of identities drawn from real-life inspirations. 

Delicious in Dungeon is an entertaining series that uses familiar tropes, genres, and archetypes to playfully twist them for a giggle. The characters are constructed with very defined personalities that are distinctive and endearing, complementing each other and allowing the camaraderie of the party to shine through. The comedy is built around their reactions to situations (and food), which almost work like a hot potato game where emotions are thrown around in the same scene with the shape of shock, laughter, embarrassment, annoyance, and resolve, among others. Contrast is a comedy device throughout, making unexpected conjunctions, epitomised most of all in the development of the culinary art of monster cooking. It is comfort food, a well-seasoned dish of (un)familiar flavours with an extra bit on the side that tastes funny. It might be the monsters.

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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.

By Phoenix Alexander The organism is relentless

Calorie demanding, perpetually in need of hydration, oxygen, and a cocktail of other vitamins and minerals, requiring 4-8 hours sleep a night to repair itself from the ravages of the day, day after day. A lifetime’s worth of consumption. 

This unkind—some might say anti humanist—characterization is famously articulated by the nefarious Agent Smith in The Matrix, where he attempts to psychologically break a human rebel leader, Morpheus, by telling him: 

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. (The Wachowskis, 1999)

The accusation, while effective for cinema, is not quite true. Smith implies that this “consumption” is a species-specific act, and not one located within a complex and interrelated ecosystem of both human and non-human life. If anything, plants should be the focus of his anger: they are the enablers of this “surviving,” this “spreading,” being masterful spreaders and survivors themselves. More radically: even drawing the lines between species may be a spurious rhetorical move. “A leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive,” Zoë Schlanger reminds us in her recent book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Schlanger, 2024). “All the rest of us are secondary users, recycling the stuff the plant has made… Think about it: every animal organ was built with sugar from plants” (Schlanger, 2024, pp. 27-28). Her (admittedly simplified) description is useful in exculpating the human organism specifically from the charge of excessive consumption. It is not our fault; we are enabled, built literally by component organisms and their byproducts, both visible and invisible. 

Nevertheless, the human body and its source/s of sustenance tends to take on the nature of a problem to be solved in many science fictional narratives. From the replicators of Star Trek to the hideous ‘pigoons’ of Margaret Atwood’s Mad Addam series to the equally hideous ‘sligs’ of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe to the more mundane efforts of potato-growing in Andy Weir’s The Martian, authors and film-makers offer the gamut of appealing to radically unethical means of keeping the human organism alive in conditions that, even without the lack of food, threaten to kill it. (I am reminded here of the opening crawl to the movie Gravity: “Life in space is impossible”) (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013). 

Of course, food does more than simply keep us alive. It is a living repository of history, culture, and ancestry; it is the passing on of skills down generations, a special sauce, a secret ingredient. One whiff of a particular dish makes time travelers of us, taking us back to our childhoods or other precious memories; the sight of a baker kneading bread can resurrect the dead, conjuring forth the image of our grandfather’s doing the same thing. Foodways (their ingredients, their technologies, and the cultural rituals around them) render tangible histories of colonialism, exploration, and hybridity. “Cuisines reveal and shape social relations and connect the past with present concerns and future possibilities” (Jane Dusselier, 2009). 

So why is food so often a problem in science fiction? From a writer’s perspective, of course, you have to keep your characters alive. But what else? How does food and foodways contribute to the sketching of a wider fictional universe, and what can it say about economics, social organization, and planetary ecosystems?

Moving away from the unkindness of Agent Smith’s prognosis (and neatly sidestepping the current political issues of ageing populations and hysterical fears of falling birthrates, even as late capitalism, at least in the West, tightens its grip on the human organism, demanding more: consumption, waste, acquisition…) I turn to an unlikely source for a more hopeful solution to food production. 

Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, published in 1957, relatively early in his career, is a poignant character study as well as an early example of ‘cli-fi’ and/or ecological utopia. The novel is set on a near-future Earth organized on a global scale—”a truly democratic government” whereby every person is able to cast their votes for policies electronically—with various ‘Bureaus’ handling different aspects of world affairs. Protagonist and former astronaut Walter Franklin suffers PTSD in the form of “astrophobia,” resulting in his never being able to go into space again. As the novel opens, Franklin and his friend Don Burley, both working for the Bureau of Whales, seek to uncover the cause of an increasing number of whale deaths: a huge problem, given that the animals yield a formidable amount of food products for the world’s populace. Alongside the whale products, Clarke also offers an alternative food source in the novel in the form of processed plankton, a plentiful and efficient source of protein: “the great plankton farms harvested their millions of tons of protein… [and humanity] would never be hungry again…” (Clarke, 314). 

Arthur C. Clarke, The Deep Range (Signet: 1957)

If the problem of food scarcity is solved from the novel’s beginning—where, then, is there left for Clarke to go in the plot? Interestingly, he makes a moral-religious turn, emphasizing the spiritual and moral ‘health’ of homo sapiens as opposed to (merely) the generational continuation of the organism. This collective enlightenment is paralleled with the moving trajectory of Franklin’s own story. In one upsetting early sequence, the character attempts to kill himself by taking a submersible down into the depths of the ocean; upon being rescued, he reforges a new relationship with the ocean as a kind of rehabilitative space. Eventually becoming the Director of the Bureau of Whales, he is inspired by a Buddhist religious leader, Maha Thero, to abolish the fatal farming of whales entirely given their importance as “higher” (aka intelligent) animals (Clarke, 434). Recognizing the necessity for some killing of non-human life, Maha Thero makes the argument that given the state of technological progress, a kind of species maturation is ready to come about: 

The production of all types of synthetic protein from purely vegetable sources is now an economic possibility—or it will be if the effort is made to activate it. Within a generation, we can shed the burden of guilt which… must at some time or other have haunted all thinking men as they look at the world of life which shares their planet (Clarke, 434). 

The less spiritually-inclined Franklin interprets this lack of “guilt” as also readying mankind to present a best possible face to intelligent life beyond the planet: “man might someday come into contact with alien life forms that might judge him by his conduct towards the rest of the animal kingdom” (Clarke, 435). Again: the solving of the problem of global hunger brings with it physical and spiritual health to the species, in Clarke’s novel. 

The contributors to this issue wrestle with similarly intertwined questions of food and/in science fiction. From religious practices and eating in space to the generation of such synthetic proteins; from zombie-killing video games as critiques of consumption to Daoist notions of immortality, the material and immaterial aspects of the human organism alike are considered. It is a feeling-forward and, in my opinion, a satisfying offering of utopian possibilities that sidestep the arguably too-neat utopia of Clarke’s vision in The Deep Range. Not only is his world fully democratic, as mentioned ( a democracy brought about through technological innovation), the global populace as rendered in the novel is described as rarely voting against their interests, excepting the odd particularly emotive issue. That such a populace may be concerned with presenting an image of philosophical decency, of unified, peaceful, and sophisticated planetary culture, to extraterrestrial life runs in startling reverse to Maggie Nelson’s bravura analysis of cruelty in her 2013 book in which she argues that making such a claim assumes that “shame, guilt, and even simple embarrassment are still operative principles” in American cultural life specifically, when the reality is that most people “are not ashamed, and they are not going to become so” (Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: a Reckoning, 2012, 32). 

Maybe Nelson is right. Alternatively, maybe to extrapolate universal human truths from the sample group of one particular nation, at one particular time, is a bad idea. And yet, even if we are relentless, if we do insist on life—as surely we must, always—it must not be indiscriminately. Good eating, like good art, can emancipate us in ways we cannot even fully articulate but will, undoubtedly, recognize when it happens. “The door,” as Nelson insists, “has to stay open.” 

Warmth and light,

Phoenix

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By Matt Finch

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

The territorial body in time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bodies beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate change and the territorial body

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

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

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

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

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

Mutual recognition between the displaced

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The colour of your mouth.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collapsing fantasies of narrative control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Freeman has it, 

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

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

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

Memories of the future, memories of empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: where next for the time-lost body?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Matt Finch

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

The territorial body in time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bodies beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate change and the territorial body

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

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

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

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

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

Mutual recognition between the displaced

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The colour of your mouth.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collapsing fantasies of narrative control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Freeman has it, 

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

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

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

Memories of the future, memories of empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: where next for the time-lost body?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Graham Raven

Column/Vector “Community” Special Issue 300

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Graham Raven

Column/Vector “Community” Special Issue 300

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

Vector 297 Futures is now available to download. Vector297Download

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

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

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

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

Vector 297 Futures is now available to download. Vector297Download

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

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

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

By Cyril Simsa

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karel Brušák, London, 1956

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Utmost Sail: first page of mimeographed libretto 

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

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

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

The Utmost Sail: first page of vocal score

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karel Janovický in his studio, London, ca. 2005

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

By Cyril Simsa

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karel Brušák, London, 1956

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Utmost Sail: first page of mimeographed libretto 

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

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

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

The Utmost Sail: first page of vocal score

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karel Janovický in his studio, London, ca. 2005

§

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