From the SFRA Review
Summer 2025
Ian Campbell
The best SF holds a distorting mirror up to our own world and induces us to reflect upon the artificiality of what we think natural. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, for example, puts a woman from the late twentieth century into the worst of antebellum chattel slavery, in order both to tell a compelling story and also to expose us to what our history books typically gloss over or deliberately misframe. Of course, now we live in an era where our history books are being rewritten in order to make it seem as if the Confederacy was the natural state of humanity. Much of my own work centers around SF in Arabic, where estrangement and distorting mirrors are quite useful, because of the lack of formal protections for freedom of speech; I rather expect that Americans will become increasingly familiar with having to read between the lines in order to understand critique.
A vast supermajority of Americans loathe the new normal, but there are just enough cultists (and billionaires) to hold it together with duct tape and bullshit for now. The central issue of the moment is that there is no consensus alternative to fascism. Almost literally nobody wants what the sclerotic leadership of the Democratic Party is proposing, but not all that many people want the Full Bernie, either. What does a durable consensus on what an antifascist society looks like entail? And how can that consensus be reached without oligarch-controlled algorithmic social media putting its thumb on the scale, or how can that thumb be counteracted? We’re right on the cusp of an age where all photographs and video can be perfectly faked: is the answer a retreat to small, in-person communities where trust is earned, or (e.g.) the Fair Witnesses of Stranger in a Strange Land, or (heaven forfend) strict regulation of verified content and news organizations independent of corporate control?
In this issue of the Review, we as the Editorial Collective take on the Hugo and Nebula novel nominees and ask two questions: why has SF appeared to retreat into fantasy, and why in particular was this suite of mostly mediocre novels chosen as representative of the best the genre has to offer? Spoiler alert: we only have partial answers to each question. We would very much like to hear your thoughts on the matter: send them to icampbell@gsu.edu.
SFRA Review 