Author: sfrarev

SFRA Review is the flagship publication of the Science Fiction Research Association since 1971.

SFRA Awards Presented at the 2026 “Into the Slipstream: Watering Futures” Conference at Michigan State University

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56 no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

SFRA Awards Presented at the 2026 “Into the Slipstream: Watering Futures” Conference at Michigan State University

Student Paper Award
Committee Chair: Yilun Fan

We are delighted to present this year’s Student Paper Award to Franklin Mitchell for “‘I Must Put Things in My Mouth’: Loving Trans Children in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites”.

How might we better understand and care for trans children? And in what ways can science fiction intervene in and illuminate these urgent questions? This paper addresses these concerns through a nuanced and well-developed reading of Butler’s novel, engaging closely with its themes of temporality, autonomy, and care. Bringing together textual analysis and theoretical insight, it foregrounds the concept of chrononormativity and its implications for trans childhood, demonstrating how science fiction can open up alternative frameworks for thinking about these questions.

This paper makes a strong contribution to science fiction studies while also speaking to broader concerns reflected in last year’s SFRA theme. It is both timely and deeply considered. Our hearty congratulations to Franklin Mitchell for this excellent work.

We would also like to recognize Shaoni C. White with an honorable mention for her paper examining the eighteenth-century it-narrative and its significance for contemporary science fiction studies. Her work demonstrates how questions of gender fluidity, material identity, and subject formation were already being explored within early modern literary forms shaped by colonial and capitalist circulation. By tracing these historical foundations, the paper offers an original  analysis that thoughtfully situates itself within current scholarly conversations on speculative fiction and political economy.

Franklin Mitchell’s response: I am deeply grateful to accept this award from such an important organization as SFRA, but more importantly I feel humbled to be honored by such a wonderfully warm and thoughtful community of scholars. I often joke that my job amounts to reading books about aliens and thinking about them so hard that I get headaches, but occasions like the annual SFRA conference are a stark reminder of how important the work we do really is. Gathering with all of the attendees and presenters makes it crystal clear how worth it all of those headaches are. I cannot express how proud I am to be associated with an organization like SFRA that continues to affirm the existence and importance of trans lives now and in the future. I want to thank everyone who was involved in last year’s conference. In a time when transgender people are experiencing organized violence and calls for social death that rise to the level of genocide, every planner, presenter, and attendee coming together to boldly and unequivocally declare that “Trans People are (in) the Future” not only usefully intervenes against that violence, but also fills me with a profound sense of hope as a trans person myself. Thank you all very much.

Lastly, I want to specifically thank Dr. Benjamin Robertson. Ben not only encouraged me to

submit an abstract for last year’s conference, he also urged me to submit my paper for this award. I am lucky to have a mentor like Ben who is so deeply dedicated to demystifying the world of academia and insisting on seeing the value of my work, even when I don’t. Thank you so much Ben, and thank you again to SFRA and the student paper award committee.

Mary Kay Bray Award
Committee Chair: Dennis Wise

The year 2025 was exceptionally strong in reviews for the SFRA Review, but one that stood out especially was Paromita Sarkar’s review of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, edited by R.T. Samuel, Rakesh Khanna, and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, and which appeared in issue 3.  A good review must always describe the item under discussion, but a stellar review does more. It must also, without being obvious about it, display the reviewer’s thorough familiarity with the subject at hand. It must situate the reviewed item into larger conversations possibly unknown to the general reader. Sarkar does that and more with The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, contextualizing “digital India” for the lay reader as well displaying her familiarity with the work of Blaft Publications. At the same time, from the opening paragraph to Sarkar’s conclusion, her writing style sparkles with liveliness and clarity. For all these reasons, the Mary Kay Bray Committee is proud to select Paromita Sarkar as the 2025 award recipient.

Paromita Sarkar’s response: I am extremely grateful to the SFRA committee for this honor. It truly feels like a full circle moment to have encountered Professor Bray’s writings during my MA thesis on Samuel R. Delany and now, to receive an award bearing her name on my very first review publication. In countless conversations with my peers and my PhD Advisor, Dr. Sami Ahmad Khan, I was quite hesitant about submitting this review to SFRA given the novelty of this research. Dr. Khan and my peers, it turns out, were right to push me. I am grateful they did. Anticaste SF has had a growing presence in South Asia and continues to hold potential for the field at large, making this acknowledgment and recognition of the review special and quite validating. Thank you so much.

SFRA Book Award
Committee Chair: Sean Guynes

The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF studies published in each calendar year. It’s judged by a committee panel of sff scholars representing a range of research specialties and currently includes Karen Hellekson, Amy Butt, and Sean Guynes (chair).  

In our approach to the SFRA Book Award, we read and consider monographs against the idea that the winner would ideally be considered future required reading for scholars in the field. Our selection should also keep in mind that some of the best sf scholarship moves beyond the field and offers insights for broader critical inquiry. 

Looking back at the relevant books published in the field during 2025, the committee read and considered twelve monographs from six publishers. Each book was the author’s first book-length work in sf studies. There were, of course, many critically exciting and theoretically energizing books on our nominee list that collectively testify to the vibrancy of sf scholarship today.  

The winner of the 2026 SFRA Book Award is Tavia Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World published by the University of California Press as part of the American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present series. The book series is dedicated to scholarship that explores “historical cultures of power and protest” and highlights “the political importance of cultural practices.” Tavia Nyong’o is William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University and his theoretically rich scholarship focuses on Black queer performance and speculative aesthetics. His first two books were The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018). 

Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse extends his work in Black queer studies and speculative aesthetics by turning to the increasingly prominent role of Afrofuturism as a cultural practice of resistance, a tool for reading the polycrisis of the present. At the center of Black Apocalypse is the often noted tension between, on the one hand, the historical concerns of Afropessimism and, on the other, the speculative imaginaries of Afrofuturism—two projects that address the fundamental question of anti-Blackness in American and global histories, literatures, and cultures. Nyong’o handles the tension between these two approaches to anti-Blackness by breathing new life into Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement,” suggesting a kind of “Black counter-speculation” whereby the reality that cognitive estrangement extrapolates from is the reality of anti-Blackness. In his critical reading of Black queer theory, Afrofuturist cyberpunk, episodes of Black Mirror, and work by Octavia Butler, Nyong’o shows how Afropessimism is itself an agent of Afrofuturism and they both, together, offer a necessary basis for countering, dismantling, and reimagining an anti-Black world. 

There’s no doubt among the committee members that Nyongo’o’s Black Apocalypse is required reading for the field. It’s a short, snappy, theoretically rich, and necessary challenge to the siloing of sf studies at a time when the work of speculation has never been more important. 

Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service
Committee Chair: Stina Attebery

The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service is presented for outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations. This year’s committee, Keren Omry, Alison Sperling, and myself, are delighted to be able to present the award to Patrick Sharp. Patrick was a standout in all of the categories the Clareson Award celebrates. Here are only some of the accomplishments we listed when deciding on a winner:

Patrick is an incredibly accomplished scholar and editor in our field. He has published two monographs (most recently Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction), and co-edited three collections (often working with people in this room). He’s the Founding Book Series Co-Editor of New Directions in Science Fiction, and an Editorial Advisory Board Member for Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Science Fiction Film and Television. He’s written 15 articles and book chapters, and numerous reviews for SFRA Review, Extrapolation, the LA Review of Books, and other publications.

Patrick’s teaching and mentorship are also extraordinary contributions to our field. He developed the curriculum for the science fiction minor at Cal State LA. He’s also written A Brief and Practical Guide for Writing Critical Analysis Papers in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Contexts—a book that is genuinely both brief and practical, and that I regularly use in my own teaching. One of his colleagues at Cal State LA has recently spearheaded a program teaching cultural studies to inmates in the California prison system, so he now divides his teaching time between the college and the prison, teaching science fiction stories to both underserved populations. I had the opportunity to teach part time for Patrick’s department while I was a grad student, which was the first chance I had to develop a course that wasn’t composition, and Patrick was a wonderful resource for figuring out how to structure a class, although his influence has left me with the lingering feeling that I really should start any syllabus with Darwin.

Since 2013, he’s been the Director for Eagle-Con, a convention that connects the diverse student body at Cal State LA with Hollywood industry folks—students get the opportunity to both hear panels from industry professionals working in costuming, special effects, art direction, and other areas, and to present their own academic work. And I believe Patrick has fundraised over $15,000 annual support from the Art Director’s Guild (and other Hollywood guilds) for the event. And if that wasn’t enough work, he also co-organizes the new Speculative Fiction Across Media conference that meets annually in LA.

Patrick Sharp’s response: I want to thank the SFRA and the members of the Thomas D. Clareson Award committee for this amazing honor. My first science fiction conference was a joint SFRA/Eaton event in 1997 that was held on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach. It was interesting. It was weird. And I loved it. Since then, I have attended whenever possible. For the past twenty-five years I have been teaching in East LA, bringing the many things I learn from my SFRA colleagues to my teaching, research, and editing roles here. I was fortunate to serve for the last fourteen years as the faculty director of EagleCon, a student-focused conference devoted to diversity in speculate genres across media on the Cal State LA campus. Many of my SFRA colleagues have come to EagleCon and presented their work to our campus community. More recently, I have worked with some of my SFRA colleagues on the Speculative Fiction Across Media conference, which looks to expand the engagement between SF scholars and the entertainment industry. I have been elated to have so many of my SFRA colleagues – and scholars from across a number of disciplines – come out to join us in LA for these conversations.  

What many of you may not know is that I have also been centrally involved in the Prison Graduation Initiative for the past four years, and teach regularly in the Liberal Studies bachelor’s degree programs at the men’s and women’s prisons in Chino, California (and starting next year, in San Quentin). Teaching the work of my SFRA colleagues to incarcerated students has only reinforced my belief in the transformative potential of the arts and humanities, and the power of science fiction to change people’s perspectives on the past, present, and future. We are living right now in what Josh Pearson calls the stupidest possible timeline, and the attacks we are facing on many fronts can be truly disturbing and disheartening. I am grateful to be part of a community that provides so much intelligence, clarity, and support in the face of such abject stupidity.  

I want to thank my wife Sharon – who has also been a part of many SFRA conferences – for all of her support throughout my career. I also want to thank my many friends and colleagues in this organization for your inspiration and comradery. Reading through the list of previous Clareson awardees is truly humbling: it has so many people I admired when I first came into the field, and also so many great colleagues, collaborators, and friends I have come to know and respect over the past three decades. I am thankful to be counted among them.  

Innovative Research Award
Committee Chair: Sümeyra Buran

I am Sümeyra Buran, chair of the SFRA Innovative Research Awards committee. Regrettably, due to unforeseen family and health emergencies, neither my fellow committee members nor I are able to attend this year’s conference. We are deeply grateful to Stina for stepping in to read this statement on our behalf.

I want to thank my fellow committee members, Ciarán Kavanagh and Agnieszka Kotwasińska, for their dedicated work in reading, evaluating, and judging the many excellent essays nominated for this award. Thanks also to everyone who nominated an essay; it is your engagement that ensures this award remains a vital recognition of excellence in our field. This year, we were particularly impressed by the caliber of submissions, which led us to not only select a winner but also to recognize three exceptional works with Honorable Mentions.

Our choice for the 2025 Innovative Research Award is Regina Wang’s ”Growth, Resource, Population: The GRP Triangle in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction by Female Writers.”

As the chair of this committee, I found Wang’s work to be a standout example of what this award represents: true innovation in scholarship. Wang’s article is a timely and profound intervention in contemporary Chinese SF scholarship. As the committee highlighted in our review, Wang brings into sharp focus “the often-overlooked Chinese female SF writers who, shaped by China’s demographic policies at socio-economic and psycho-physiological levels, foreground demographic concerns as a central thematic axis of their narratives” (Wang 324). Also, what makes this paper so compelling is how it bridges the gap between sociological data and literary imagination. Wang doesn’t just analyze fiction; she uses it to critique the very structures of our global reality. In my view, her articulation of the ‘GRP Triangle’ serves as a vital intervention, reminding us that science fiction is not just about ‘what if’ but a profound reflection on the material constraints of our world.

This perspective was shared by my colleagues. Agnieszka emphasized the critical acumen with which Wang foregrounds the “embodied, material aspects of literary production,” showing how the lived experiences of female writers who came of age during China’s one-child policy are “crucial for understanding their narratives.” On the methodological side, Ciarán noted that Wang’s combination of “distant reading, industry data, interviews, and gendered environmental critique” is not only contextually rich but “methodologically fresh and intellectually generative.” He observed that the GRP triangle offers SF scholars a new way to consider futures projected not just by literature but by states ascribing to a belief in “permanent, or simply necessary, economic growth.” As Wang herself argues, these narratives “challenge the simplistic masculine pursuit of unlimited growth,” offering instead a nuanced, gendered critique of our current trajectory. In Wang’s own words, this pattern serves as a tool to examine the limits of a “simplistic masculine pursuit of unlimited growth.”

Before I present the main award, the committee also wishes to recognize three scholars with Honorable Mentions for pushing SF scholarship in exciting new directions:

  • Kiana T. Murphy, for productively bringing Black girlhood studies into dialogue with SF: “Bending Black girlhood Spacetime travel and the gendered calculus of anti-Blackness in See You Yesterday.”
  • Christina Lord, for her vital work in recovering the frequently overlooked influence of Francophone comics on mainstream SF: “Valérian et Laureline and Twentieth-Century Countercultural Shifts.”
  • Ali Riza Taskale, for his fruitful merger of SF studies, economics, and urban theory: “Subverting speculative urbanism: Cityscape in New York 2140.”

It is my great honor, as the Chair of this committee, to award Regina Wang the SFRA’s Innovative Research Award for 2025.

Regina Kanyu Wang’s response: It is my great honor to receive the SFRA Innovative Research Award this year for my paper “Growth, Resource, Population: The GRP Triangle in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction by Female Writers”. 

I want to thank the award committee and the SFRA executive committee for this incredible honor, and thank the hosts for organizing the conference this year, though I cannot be there in person. I was among the organizing team back in 2022 when the SFRA conference was held in Norway. Believe me, the behind-the-scenes work is immense, so the committee and hosts deserve a round of applause. 

Looking at the list of past winners, I realize how many of them have actually inspired my own research. I was born in 1990, the same year the award was established. And the very first winner of this award (when it was still named the Pioneer Award) happens to be Veronica Hollinger, the editor of Science Fiction Studies, who worked with me on this paper. My deepest thanks to Veronica, who offered tremendous help with revising and polishing this paper before it was published. My thanks also go to the reviewer (whom I now know is Cara Healey) for all her suggestions, and to Sherryl Vint, who helped during the journal publication process. They are all women scholars whom I deeply admire, and I could not be more delighted to receive this award for a paper on female writers, made possible with their help. 

I also want to thank all my CoFutures crew, without whom none of this research would have been possible. Bodhi, Sami, Jomy, Merve, Bergsveinn, Marta, Patrick, Joel, and Ingri, thanks for all the discussions of ideas, for reading through my drafts, and for making the triangle chart look better. I feel so lucky and proud to be part of this team, and to have had you by my side throughout my PhD years. 

This paper is part of my article-based PhD thesis, so I want to thank the University of Oslo and the ERC as well for supporting my research, and thank all the writers, editors, researchers, and industry practitioners whom I have interviewed for the PhD project. As you can see, interviews and industry data play a big role in this paper. 

I myself am the only child of the family, just like many of the writers I write about in this paper. I want to dedicate this award to my mom, who just passed away last month on Mother’s Day. She endured so much in bringing me into this world and raising me, and she always supported me in pursuing my dreams. She was, and always will be, the best mother in the world. 

If I’m not mistaken, I am the third person from Asia and the first person from China to win this award. Next year, the SFRA conference will come to Asia for the first time in history. I hope to see many of you in Seoul, and I do hope that the conference can travel more in the future. 

As someone who has moved across many disciplines, from business administration to creative writing, and from fan to industry practitioner, I really appreciate that SFRA is inclusive enough to accept my research that does not fall into any traditional disciplines. As someone who writes SF stories, works in the SF industry, does SF research, and has stayed in SF fandom for the majority of my life, I sincerely believe that SF has the power to make our world a better place. And it is the collective efforts of everyone in this community that bring this vision to life. Thank you all, and to our shared CoFutures! 

SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship
Committee Chair: Steven Shaviro

Award Winner: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr’s response: Stina’s e-mail to me with the news of this award came as a wonderful surprise. Not only for the honor of joining so many powerful and original predecessors that have been chosen by the SFRA. For me personally, it represents a kind of closure for a career as an editor and scholar that I didn’t have much distance from while it was happening. Since my retirement from teaching in 2020, and as co-editor at Science Fiction Studies in 2025, I have unmoored my boat and drifted off to other shores. In my post-professional rustication, my main connections with sf have been editing my old correspondence with Stanislaw Lem, keeping abreast of the Nerd Reich, and watching daily doses of Angine de Poitrine videos.  But viewed from a greater distance, I’ve never been so immersed in sf – the actually existing kind; as many of us speculated back in the day, social reality and sf have interfused materially to a degree that even we, who used that interfusion as a guiding imaginative trope, did not imagine. 

The honor you are bestowing is also important to me because the course of my career in sf research was completely unforeseen, and even accidental. I came of age in an unlikely environment for it.  I grew up thoroughly bicultural. My parents were not just Hungarian refugees from Communism; they were almost religiously devoted to the high culture of pre-World War II Europe. By day, I attended Virginia public schools, listened to rock and roll that my parents forbade, played sports that my parents didn’t understand, and watched American TV, which my parents restricted mercilessly. At night, when they came home from work, they home-schooled my sister and me in Hungarian, using my father’s old textbooks; in many ways, we endured a more sophisticated education in our living room than in our American schools. In the house, we were forbidden to speak English, we were taught to revere classical literature and art, and to disdain popular culture altogether.  

By the time I got to college, I was more European than American. I studied the classical European literature and philosophy that I was trained to value as the highest forms of culture. What I emphatically was not trained to value was technology, the supposed enemy of idealist aspiration. I entered college basically as a technoscientific illiterate. SF held little interest for me; national and ethnic literatures were my portals to the exotic.  When I got to grad school in 1972, it was in a Comp. Lit. program of a distinctively conservative European sort. 

Then it all changed. In the bowels of the Princeton library’s reading room, I came across an early volume of Science Fiction Studies. Bolts of lightning. The first bolt was seeing Fredric Jameson as a contributor. At the time, Jameson was one of my idols, and here he was, implicitly giving his imprimatur to the genre. Then things picked up speed. In the next few years, through the journal I learned the theoretical underpinnings of the SFS founders – the ideas of Darko Suvin, Peter Fitting, Marc Angenot, Joanna Russ, the New Left and feminist models that SFS never abandoned. And I was also introduced to the writers that shaped my understanding of the heights sf could aspire to reach – Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Russ, Ian Watson, Samuel Delany, and their like – the founders, in my view, of critical sf.  

And most of all, Stanislaw Lem. Lem, whom I knew nothing about before I read his essays in SFS and Suvin’s commentaries, was my gateway drug. A writer of imaginative genius equal to Borges and Calvino, a Central European to boot, familiar with the history and philosophy of science, and respected throughout Europe as Nobel material. I picked up two of his axioms early as guideposts for my own thinking. First, that sf is the philosophical literature of the technological age – even though, as he put it, its potential was hopelessly squandered by commercial pulp. The other: that every history from now on must include a futurology – there can be no valid historical understanding without including histories, philosophies, and models of the future. 

My first attempts to make myself known to the editors of SFS came with translations from Hungarian versions of some of Lem’s essays that had not yet been rendered in English. My advantage through much of my career was that so much of Lem’s work was unavailable in English, while most of it had appeared in the languages of the so-called “fraternal nations” of the Soviet bloc. It was also a fortunate time for the internationalist Suvinian direction of SFS, the period of détente, when many important works of Soviet sf – that great body of sometimes mystical, sometimes discreetly critical sf – were made available in English. 

I was invited to be a consulting editor during the journal’s Montreal years – and basically went to grad school a second time, this time in sf studies. Needless to say, there were no university positions in the genre, and I took a job teaching World Literature and critical theory at DePauw. And then it all changed again. 

When SFS returned to Indiana under Dale Mullen’s head editorship, Dale chose a new editorial board including Art Evans, Veronica Hollinger and myself, soon to be joined by Carol McGuirk, Rob Latham, and Joan Gordon. What evolved was not so much a braintrust, as the most efficient and collegial anarchist collective I have experienced. Almost all functions were equally distributed, mutual aid was freely given. We taught each other – humanities scholars all – about editing, about technoscience, about politics, and about the evolving genre. The internationalist focus that had been established by Suvin and Marc Angenot was massively reinforced. It looked like the urbane New Left, liberationist identity of the journal was assured.  

Up to that point, my bailiwick, such as it was, was mainly Central European and Soviet sf. Then cyberpunk happened, like a bullet through a windshield. Cyberpunk appeared to synthesize vanguard sf, new social understanding, and technoculture that changed the landscape of sf scholarship. The writing was often artistically ambitious, we were young enough to appreciate its visions of culture, and most of all, c-punk seemed to open up new ways of thinking theoretically about both sf and the culture at large. We published and wrote some strong critiques of the new direction, but we—especially I – had a lot to learn. My first frame-breaking project as an editor was a special issue in 1991 on what we called “SF and Postmodernism.” It included contributions by J.G. Ballard, Katherine Hayles, Scott Bukatman, Roger Luckhurst, and others – and an essay by myself on sf ideas in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway, where I tried to identify ways in which some of the most sophisticated contemporary social theorists were beginning to use sf not only to illustrate ideas, but as models for designing visionary theory in a world saturated by digital technologies. Here were Lem’s axioms in practice: sf as philosophy, history as futurology.  

From that point on, the journal’s whole project seemed to coalesce around that conjunction of critical theory, the analysis of the ever-deeper penetration of digital technologies into social life, and cyberpunk’s ambivalent concept of contemporary reality as inconceivable except as sf. None of us believed we had abandoned the journal’s origins – but now we had new critical tools and concepts, in tandem with new forms of sf, influenced by digital technoculture. Sherryl Vint and Lisa Swanstrom, who were especially informed about that technoculture, joined us to help shape that direction. For me personally, still retaining an old-school sensibility, it led to an expansion of the transnational historical perspective. I submerged myself in sf’s role in colonialism and imperialism, and worked especially to emphasize non-European traditions and connections of the genre. That led to, among other projects, the special issue on Japanese sf that eventually became the critical anthology, Robot Ghost and Wired Dreams: Japanese science fiction from Origins to Anime. 

In the midst of all this, my traditionalist, humanist side became anxious that the tsunami of new technologies and theories would sweep away the older perspectives that I loved, and whose language was, essentially, my scholarly mother-tongue. For the first seven, magical years of the 2000s, I worked on my first book, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, which Peter Nicholls in the Encyclopedia of SF accurately calls an “anatomy of the SF megatext.” My education in Comp Lit revered especially the great male, Anglo-European historical synthesizers – Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and most of all, Northrop Frye. I hoped in 7 Beauties to formulate ideas that would help the inclusion of sf into the great literary culture of the world – expanded into our age. In other essays, which I later included in my recent Mutopia, I proposed ideas that would allow folks to see how much science-fictional thinking penetrates not only technoculture, but the physical and social sciences too, and – following Lem’s axioms – even philosophy and religion. 

In the Oxford Dictionary’s special book on sf neologisms, Brave New Words, published in 2007, the editor attributes one of the first uses of the term “science fictionality” to me, which I had defined as a way of perceiving and conceiving reality as if it were a work of sf. (Fwiw, the word was actually first used in print by my friend David Pringle in the UK.) Science fictionality can be active, too, as when sf provides explicit models for how reality should be shaped. In other words, “science fictionalization,” the materialization of fictive science-fictional ideas.   

We now inhabit such a world, and thinkers such as Steven Shaviro and Seo-Young Chu, among others, have articulated how sf has been the main vehicle for making it visible.  It’s a world that poses distinctive challenges for the generations of artists, historians, and critics that are succeeding mine. We live in a world in which sf is no longer treated as an art or an industry, but a grounding discourse, a source of blueprints for quasi-utopian material projects, core structures of business prospectuses, material prophecies inspiring investment strategies, economies, and political projects. I won’t dwell on things you know too well, like the notable adoption of visions from sf like Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Mars fantasies, Thiel’s Palantir and materialized Antichrist, technofascist dreams of immortality, the visions of plutocratic thinners and world devourers evoking Philip Dick’s villains, and the institution of new forms of plantation slavery straight out of Octavia Butler’s Parables. Blueprints drawn from reading sf with what Charlie Stross calls “irony bypass.” Cohorts from now on will have to accommodate sf as an actually existing sf, political realities based on its fictions. 

But there’s another important challenge. My focus throughout my career was first on sf as a kind of art. I like to think of myself as a literary historian in an old-school tradition. When I dealt with sf’s political and social history, I was dealing with the power of an art. Surprisingly, my fields of literary history and theory have not devoted much effective attention to what fiction actually is, its ontology, its specific relationship to the real that it always levitates over. In this time, when the fate of the humanistic and scholarly institutions in general is in crisis, when matters of social justice on a worldwide scale urgently impinge on us, scholars of sf have to understand and explain how sf can lead both to violent distortions of thought, but also to freedom, where the great perspectives of art – irony, play, thought experiment – assert their autonomy from the language of real despots. 

And on that note, allow me to suggest a sneaky hope. As idiotic, reactionary vandals labor to dismantle the humanities in our schools, sf may be the Trojan Horse that can defeat them. SF can be presented as an auxiliary vehicle for critical and humanistic thought in mercenary curriculums. Since sf prefers parable, indirection, and ironic vision to direct ideologizing, many of the concepts being banned by our contemporary barbarians can survive and prosper under the radar. Many folks have thought we could develop whole curriculums out of sf. Never before has that thought been more relevant. 

Thank you again for honoring me with this award, but as you can see, I really should share it with the many brilliant colleagues I have had the privilege to work with along the way. A special shout out is due to the new editors of SFS, who will carry the project in this challenging new age, and especially to Sherryl Vint, who almost single-handedly saved the journal and its project, continuing the work of her predecessors, Dale Mullen and Art Evans, in piloting the ship to shore in troubled waters. 

Summer 2026

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56 no. 3

From the SFRA Review

download

Summer 2026

Ian Campbell

It is likely that most of you who read this journal have also seen Ali Rıza Taşkale’s recent Aeon article, “The Looting of Science Fiction”, but if you have not yet had the opportunity, please take the time. The article gives a number of excellent and well-sourced examples of how our unelected tech overlords consistently take the form and aesthetics of influential works of SF to create or frame their endeavors, but they completely miss the points these works make about power, corruption and collaboration, to the extent that it cannot be anything but deliberate.

Taşkale quotes Peter Thiel, last seen in the pages of SFRA Review giving us his blueprint for the transformation of what remains of American democracy into a violent white supremacist “Christian” corporatocracy, from a 2009 essay where he writes, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” More than half the population needs to be suppressed, which in SF usually only happens in the kinds of evil empires that plucky heroes overthrow, yet Thiel, Musk, Bezos and our other unelected, unaccountable and child-raping overlords clearly fancy themselves the plucky heroes. Most quality SF would subtly point out that libertarians are driving on public roads.

As another of these many examples, Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook and other platforms enable us both to connect and share with friends and also to recoil from AI slop feeding right-wing propaganda directly into our Boomer relatives’ minds, took the inspiration for changing the company’s name to Meta from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash, set in a world where corporate control is so complete that “the Metaverse is a consolation prize for a society that has collapsed”:

Stephenson intended the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads. Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy—where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while providing essential services—echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and Zuckerberg read it as inspiration.

Taşkale has other examples to give, so he does not comment on how Stephenson himself rapidly descended into a libertarian caricature. His overall point, that these oligarchs consistently misread SF, remains solid and well-sourced throughout: “The aesthetics got materialised. The warnings did not.” He says much the same of William Gibson’s Neuromancer:

Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.

One can only hope that none of these evil clowns has read Gibson’s 2014 The Peripheral, which gives us “Party Time”, an aerosol drug that transforms its victims into ax-crazy combat sadomasochists, though undoubtedly there is a Thiel- or Musk-adjacent laboratory working hard on this right now for use on protestors. It’s highly unlikely that those among the oligarchs who have read or watched The Peripheral regard “The Jackpot” in the same ironic light Gibson and the rest of us do.

There are two points to be made here, above and beyond what Taşkale has to say—and what he says is very much worth reading, so please take the opportunity. One is that for those of us who have spent our adult lives with literature and literary criticism, it’s far too easy to look at the oligarchs and call them bad readers: they understand only the surface of SF, not the estrangement, allegory, irony or actual political message. They’re clueless; they don’t get it. This is something I certainly used to think.

But it’s not true. They’re excellent readers: they’re just reading SF for completely different reasons than those for which it’s written and we critics and fans read it. We look to the message; they’re just looting it. They understand the message, and disdain it. We can look at Musk naming his seagoing ships and exploding rockets after ships in the Culture novels and facepalm, because Musk is Culture villain Joiler Veppers from Surface Detail, and then groan further when he baldly states that Iain M. Banks was not a socialist. Yet we do this at our peril: he and his cronies own the media, and he can loot the Culture while deliberately ignoring its message. He can make his own truth, and we have perilously little with which to oppose it.

The second point is more of a question: what are we, insofar as “we” represent SF, going to do about it? This looting is an existential threat to human society: the oligarchs think of Skynet as a stretch goal, not a warning about AI. But in the nearer term, it’s also a threat to SF. The general public is already agitating against data centers, AI in everything, Flock cameras, and all the other SF-adjacent means by which we’re surveilled and controlled. It’s not inconceivable that soon, the public will sour on anything SF or SF-adjacent, because it too clearly reminds them of the extent to which our oligarchy uses technology to surveil, manipulate and control us. It’s no wonder fantasy is becoming the dominant mode in speculative fiction.

Perhaps it’s a reading comprehension problem: too many people don’t see the estrangement or irony or allegory, and miss the message of SF. If you’re currently teaching in a university environment, you’ve likely witnessed the sharp and catastrophic decline in reading skills, reading comprehension and attention span since the pandemic. This process is also driven by deliberate action by our oligarchy: a massive, coordinated assault on education so as to produce voters easily fooled by propaganda. Perhaps we all need to shift to today’s dominant mode, which is 40-second videos of questionably-informed and overconfident people speaking forcefully from the driver’s seat of their car. Perhaps we need to be less subtle.

I don’t have the answer, or even really an answer. I’m not an SF writer, just a guy with a quarterly column in an obscure journal. Yet I think it’s a question worth pondering. In an age where there’s so much pressure to accept the dominant (and comprehensibly false, and racist, etc.) narrative, maybe it’s the duty of SF to oppose it more forcefully. Or at least more directly. Share your thoughts on the matter or any other at icampbell@gsu.edu. Enjoy this issue of the Review, where in addition to our usual compendium of reviews, we have statements from the SFRA award winners and a thoughtful article on work in the age of AI.00

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56 no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Greetings all! It has been an incredibly busy and hot summer, but I hope it has been treating you well. We’ve had our amazing SFRA conference at Michigan State University last month and I’d like to thank the organising committee and those who provided support, technical and otherwise, for putting together and running such an engaging and thought-provoking event. My appreciation also goes out to everyone who participated in person and online. I’d also like to take the opportunity to congratulate our 2026 award winners and the recipient of our Support a New Scholar (non-tenure track B) award, Orin Posner. Well done to all of you!

Our next round of the Support a New Scholar award will be open to graduate students. I shall be circulating information about this award in due course but please do consider applying if you are eligible or encourage your graduate students to apply. The award is an opportunity for the SFRA to support outstanding scholars so that they are able to engage more fully with the organisation. To that end I’d love to hear from as many graduate students as possible.

This year’s Vision and Support session involved a discussion about futures thinking and public engagement. One of our panellists, Petranka Malcheva, a policy lead at the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, provided a number of resources about futures thinking and public engagement that I’d like to share with the wider membership. These include links to the work on Culture and the Welsh language by the Future Generations Office, the projects Communities and Climate Change in Future Wales, the Bannau Brycheiniog harnessing futures storytelling, the Engagement Institute’s IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation, and the National Infrastructure Commission Wales’ Toolkit: Engaging Diverse Communities in Climate Adaptation Conversations. Sonja Fritzsche also mentioned that Megan Halpern at Michigan State University runs a community engagement speculative design workshop as part of her Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement (CIRCLE). If you find these resources useful or are working on sf, public engagement and policy I would love to hear about it and to correspond to keep the conversations going.

As I mentioned above, it has been a busy summer. I attended the fantastic inaugural symposium of the Zurich SF Network, which was organised by Sarah Lohmann and Simon Spiegel. Our country representatives have also reported on a number of events that have taken place this summer, particularly in Germany, including Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic, the International Symposium of the German Inklings Society, and Metropolcon 2026 (Eurocon 2026). In September the annual Elstercon conference will take place in Leipzeig, while Situating Energy, the forthcoming PetroCultures conference, and “Data↔Worlds” are being held at TU Dresden in September.

With that update, I wish you all the best for the remainder of the summer.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56 no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

From the President

Stina Attebery

This summer we gathered in person and virtually for the 2026 SFRA conference on the theme “Into the Slipstream: Watering Futures” in East Lansing, Michigan. I want to thank the conference organizing team for all the amazing work they put into the event, especially the work they did to make the conference virtually accessible to those of us unable to travel. My thanks and appreciation to Sonja Fritzsche, Brian deVries, Eric Aranoff, Blaire Morseau, Jessica Stokes, Michael Stokes, and Vered Weiss for organizing a really special conference.

I’m struck by the way the cover image from the program captures this conference’s negotiation between virtual access and physical embeddedness in place. The image, modified from Rob Beck, USBS Land Processes Data Center, features a vibrantly blue bloom of color representing Michigan’s waterways superimposed over a satellite image of East Lansing. As an organization, we were also both together and telepresent at this conference, experiencing the waters of Michigan in person and learning about them remotely. While the experience of virtual and in-person attendance is necessarily different (I’m afraid virtual attendees weren’t able to visit the MSU Museum Exhibit “Blurred Realities” and the tours organized for the Comic Art Collection, marvel at the amazing science fiction bookstore in town, or navigate around the geese populating this beautiful campus), the conference team made sure that our main keynotes and events were accessible for everyone through the distributed, virtually-connected (and only sometimes buggy) spaces of the internet.

All of the keynotes were navigating virtual and physical spaces in different ways, and not only because Damian Duffy was very generously able to present remotely around travel delays and then follow up with an in-person Q&A after arriving. Duffy’s explanation of his and John Jennings’ process behind adapting the Parable graphic novels was fascinating, and the decisions to represent Lauren’s embodied journey through California through maps, journals, and botanical illustrations, as well as her daughter Larkin/Asha Vere’s reimagining as a virtual reality creator, resonated with the conference’s own negotiation of the virtual and the physical. Petra Kuppers’ keynote on “Eco Soma” and drifting in disability art and culture similarly explored the affordances of virtual spaces and embodied practice in her work around Michigan water activism and community opposition to data center construction in the region. Her work made me feel very connected to and appreciative of the lands and waters hosting us. Kinitra Brooks gave a fascinating talk about Black women’s conjure practice in history, contemporary practice, and pop culture examples like Sinners, connecting the physicality of these material histories and spirit work, reminding us that the slipstream can also create other forms of remote connection across time and space. Finally, the Roundtable on Ancestral Futures: Indigenous Speculative Storytelling, Repatriation, and Slipstreaming Archival Time with Debra Yepa-Pappan, Zack Khalil, Kai Recollet, and Jason Wesaw (hosted and moderated by Blaire Morseau) brought together Indigenous artists and scholars from Michigan and from other unceded and occupied native land, emphasizing the shared politics and artistic practices needed to protect the different spaces we live. My thanks to everyone who attended in whichever format, and I hope that this conference was as productive and joyful for you as it was for me.

Call for Co-Editors of the SFRA Review

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56 no. 3

From the SFRA Review

download

Call for Co-Editors of the SFRA Review

The Editorial Collective

The SFRA Review is seeking two scholars to serve as co-editors of the journal. Both will work together with Ian Campbell over the course of two quarterly issues to gain experience with the details of how the issue is edited and assembled, before taking over as senior editors.

The duties of the co-editors include:

  • determining foci for special issues/sections and the overall direction of the journal
  • proactively seeking content, especially long-form essays
  • working with the team of section editors to maintain high standards of contributions and to encourage healthy submission/rejection rates
  • acting as a point of contact for scholars, reviewers and the general public
  • layout, typesetting, and maintenance of both web and print versions
  • writing quarterly editor’s column
  • representing the Review at conferences and other academic and professional meetings

The Review is of course uninterested in discriminating against anyone based on demographics, education level, professional titles, etc. That said, this is an excellent opportunity for early-career scholars or even graduate students, both in the practical sense that most institutions view journal editing as research work and also in the more abstract sense of giving the new co-editors the opportunity to interface with more senior scholars and the overall discourse in SF criticism.

Please send your contact details, your most recent CV, and the names of two references to Ian Campbell (icampbell@gsu.edu) with the subject line SFRA Review Co-Editor. Please also include in the body of your email a brief statement detailing your experiences as an editor (if any) and your thoughts on the directions in which you might wish to take the journal. We look forward to reviewing your application.

Work in the Future: Technological Opportunity or Human Obsolescence in Science Fiction and Reality

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56 no. 3

Features

download

Work in the Future: Technological Opportunity or Human Obsolescence in Science Fiction and Reality

Tiff Graham

Everybody knew what was supposed to happen. Technological forecasters predicted it. Economic prognosticators confirmed the warnings. Politicians viewed with alarm. The displacement of flesh and blood works by ugly, anthropomorphic machines meant violence! The Luddites would rise again, and the factory aisles would run sticky with lubricating oil. But it didn’t happen.

–Frederick Pohl’s Midas World (1983:29)

Conversation starter questions such as “what kind of work do you do?” or “what do you do for a living?” are commonplace as people often assume a person occupies time with some sort of work activity. Why that work is performed may be due to financial security, a sense of purpose, a need to serve/help, or simply the work opportunity arose (Duncan; Gross). Initially, a person will learn specific jobs tasks and often spend years maintaining employment in a particular occupational field. Yet with the introduction of new advanced technologies meant to provide greater efficiency, reduction of the more repetitive and mundane job tasks, and safer working conditions, it is possible that various forms of work will be transformed or at risk for elimination in the future. None of this is new knowledge, as history has shown technological advancements often reshape how people work and live. From the First Industrial Revolution (mid-1700s to early 1800s), the use of steam engines and mechanization increased productivity, making some manual labor jobs no longer needed; to the Second Industrial Revolution (late 1800s to early 1900s), where electricity, telephones, and automobiles created new job positions and simultaneously eliminated other ones (Olsen). The Third Industrial Revolution, referred to as the Digital Age, from the 1960s to 2000s, brought in computers, various electronics, automated processes, and the Internet which altered how jobs were performed, while also creating a more globally accessible job market and eliminating occupations that a computer could do more efficiently. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, referred to as the SecondMachine Age, from 2010 to our present, has introduced the world to more advanced AI, robotic machines, smart technology, and other scientific innovations that are currently reshaping work experience in both beneficial and problematic ways (Byrnjolfsson and McAfee; Penprase; Schwab).

By focusing on AI and robotic machine technology associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), this paper draws attention to the transformation of jobs across the business, healthcare, entertainment, restaurant, and government sectors as expectations and anxieties arise with the evolving relationship people have to their new technological collaborators and potential rivals. Reality based examples and science fiction/speculative fiction stories of mundane, utopian, and dystopian futures provide evidence and possibilities of what job seekers of tomorrow may need to consider.

Hype, History, and the Current State of Technology

As societies are becoming more attune to these new 4IR technologies reshaping work and everyday life, the voices of the corporate tech leadership are also gaining attention. There are frequent announcements of the inevitability of AI and robotic tech reach; technologies’ beneficent power to improve the world; and, in some cases its dangers to society while concurrently gaining more publicity. When Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, was interviewed on a late-night show in 2025, he said that AI would “solve problems, enable us to work fewer days, and offer free and commonplace medical advice and tutoring.” He also suggested that we will “not need humans for most things, but we will decide what those things are” (Gates). Other tech leaders have proclaimed AI agents, also called Agentic AI systems, are the future of personal assistants and members of the workforce (Huskins). These autonomous AI entities will work for us using all the available Internet data, software tools, and personal information gathered to meet any business needs in order to serve us better (Metz and Weise). And Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, has suggested that tech will increase human labor and opportunity, though his distribution centers seem to do the opposite as robotic automation replaces human jobs (Bezos; McCallum; Weise).

With much of the techno-optimism rhetoric, there is a great deal of utopian thinking around the new technologies, though some are cautioning governments, businesses, and society to consider the potential unwanted consequences. In the book The Workplace of the Future: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Precariat and the Death of Hierarchies, it’s suggested that we are entering a more insecure job market as robotization and digitization replace the human workforce. We could say that job displacement due to new technologies has always been a concern from the earlier industrial revolution with the Luddite Movement (1811-16) to Karl Marx addressing the impact of industrial capitalism (Das Kapital, 1867), and 19th and 20th century laborers protesting railroads, assembly lines, and other machine technology impacting traditional forms of work of the time (Johannessen). There is even a 1930s term, ‘technological unemployment, coined by the economist John Maynard Keyes to describe the effect, though in his essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” he also envisions an optimistic future where this technology replacing human effort is a temporary step to a better standard of living with humans working less (Schwab; Keyes 1930:363).

Many technological advancements have historically led to changes in the workspace, yet this technological age is different for some critics. It has been described as more disruptive because it can transform jobs associated with creativity, knowledge, and information processing, once a domain of mainly human minds. In books such as Only Humans Need Apply, Winners & Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Davenport and Kirby, concerns are raised about jobs associated with “knowledge workers” that include lawyers, accountants, doctors, scientists, and various white-collar professions. And now, due to the generative AI text and image programs, even creative artists are feeling their occupational livelihood threatened.

Are these alarm bells we should pay attention to, or is it just a matter of perspective? For example, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, has an optimistic spin on the AI revolution, suggesting it is not a new industrialization period but should be seen as more of a renaissance, a time of enlightenment (Barlow). Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, expects that AI will continue to do things better than humans and his humanoid robots like Optimus Bot will be deployed everywhere in society and many industries (Elon Buzz; Carter). Tech leaders often talk favorably about these new AI and robotic machine technologies, referring to the machines as collaborators, assistants, and agents that will augment us and make the world better. I’ve also heard educators, professionals from various fields, and everyday individuals refer to AI positively as a partner, therapist, mentor, companion, and even as a friend (Brockes; Tangermann; Williams). In addition, educational institutions and cities are championing greater investment, knowledge, and skill building with AI tools and technology company partnerships. For example, The Chronicle of Higher Education articles and webinars feature AI-themed literature and virtual forums (e.g., “AI on Campus”; “New Academic Programs”). Florida State University has promoted an Artificial Intelligence Initiative across the curriculum with donor support from NVIDIA (Southworth et al.). Harvard Business School’s online blog includes advice about the future of AI-powered businesses (Gibson). California State Universities have joined numerous leading tech companies (i.e., OpenAI, Intel, Meta, etc.) on advisory boards “to help identify AI skills needed in the California workforce and provide advice on how best to teach them” (Watanabe). Cities such as Palm Springs, California have hosted an annual AI Expo (2025-2026) to “explore artificial intelligence’s potential to reshape the desert community’s economic future” (Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce; Valley Voice Media) and according to a World Economic Forum article, various global cities in Argentina, Netherlands, Singapore, United States are incorporating AI strategies for projects (North).

As AI and robotic technologies become more embedded in every aspect of work and social life, opting out might prove increasingly difficult (Bilton). In the book Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration (2022), Davenport and Miller identify a number of employers who have adopted AI-based systems. For example, in the underwriter profession, where customers apply for life insurance policies, these businesses can use an AI system that automatically reviews applications and client information, simultaneously cross-referencing data about risks and underwriter rules, enabling a quicker turnaround (Davenport and Miller 36:2022). This process allows the business to reserve human labor for the more complex decision-making, something often repeated when advocating for AI (Davenport and Miller 37:2022). While the cost-saving benefits are present, there are downsides, such as what if people are not given entry-level work, how will they gain the experience to become the experts who deal with complex decision-making. And when AI and robotics are used in workplaces, it does raise the question of who truly benefits in the long term. Will we all benefit from the outsourcing, augmenting, and leveraging of new technologies to solve problems or are there consequences we should pay attention to? In the marketing and creative industry field, producers of generative AI content iterate quicker, with multiple versions/designs/ideas delivered to customers and consumers, but at what point do the graphic designers, writers, and marketing individuals no longer have their jobs or find themselves in lower pay or lower skill jobs monitoring AI systems versus engaging in creative thinking. In addition, in the health industry, AI systems are employed in diagnostic imaging, medical transcription, and other services, which seems promising alongside human expertise, but does it mean radiologists and therapists need to reconsider their job market opportunities along with hospital nurses who may find their duties shifted to more management of technologies (Ackermann).

Futuristic Scenarios Sprinkled with Reality

Possibly, this is all just another stage in human evolution where we will adapt and carry on in the 4IR-Renaissance age outsourcing, augmenting, and leveraging our new technologies to solve problems before we enter Ray Kurzweil’s 5th and 6th epoch stages of the singularity; or maybe we should pay attention to what may become irreversible consequences of these technological advancements (Kurzweil 2005). By building a futures focused mindset that includes some science fiction and speculative fiction stories, it may help us better envision those preferrable, probable, possible, or seemingly impossible scenarios associated with work in the future (Balagtas 2024:78).

In the short video, “TempBot” (2006), directed by Neill Blomkamp, a humanoid robot is trucked in to perform temp work at a credit union. Human office workers barely pay attention to the walking metal robot as it uses the copy machine and types on a computer while sitting in a cubicle. As the audience, we see the robot’s perspective through its computer screen vision, a Version 3.02 model, overlayed with task commands and drop-down menus of information interpreting human words, actions, and materials. The workload and productivity speed for the humans and robot are initially equivalent. Then one day, the robot speeds up its productivity as it becomes obsessed with the new human HR manager who pays attention to it. It works faster to impress her while also stalking her like a jealous romantic mate, that is until a work social event when it inappropriately touches the HR manager’s breast, leading to a demotion back to the realm of robots-only offices. This particular story of a robot working in an office is humorous and not too spectacular nor much to fear, apart from its unexpected sentient misconduct.

From a real-world perspective, maybe robots will take on human jobs, but is it something we should be more worried about? In a 2025 news story/podcast from the NPR Short Wave science program, it mentions that humanoid robots are not actually at this level of functioning independently, as it takes many hours to build and train due to changing environments (Brumfiel et al.; Brumfiel). A Berkeley scientist and cofounder of Ambi Robotics, Ken Goldberg, further suggests that with robots, it’s not the same as with the AI chatbots where “they scooped up pretty much the entire Internet to train themselves how to write sentences and draw pictures,” whereas with robot data, it is limited (Brumfiel et al.; Brumfiel). However, there is plenty of robot hype in the news with robotic demonstrations, tech conferences, humans reclassified in jobs as robot wranglers and robot trainers/cyber-laborers in arm farms, along with the extensive research presented in Morgan Stanley’s financial investment report about the top 100 companies that could contribute to advanced humanoid development (Christopher “Delivery robots”; “Why hundreds”; Morgan Stanley; Zhou and Lo). On the other hand, with the generative AI programs, it does seem that knowledge workers should be worried as AI systems often can research, reason, compute, and output patterns and decisions based on data much more efficiently than humans.

If this is a harbinger of the future, what can humans do to save their jobs from machines in the future? In the science fiction animation, “Seniors 3000” (2022), directed by Julien David, the solution for technology taking jobs is to adapt oneself into a robotic cyborg. The story opens with an office boss requiring his employees to be digitally savvy, and if they can’t, then they need to retire. Marlene, an older office worker cannot handle the Bluetooth element of the newest copiers. She is forced to leave her job. She finds her old printer which somehow alters her DNA, transforming her into a printer cyborg that can scan, copy, print, upload .pdf copies, and spit out paper copies instantly through her mouth. The boss then greedily profits from her robotic adaptation. He soon realizes that Marlene can also transform others into cyborgs. He markets her to the French government’s Minister of Work and Profit, saying that he can create workers “requiring no payroll taxes, no paid vacations, and it’s all voluntary.” More retirees are transformed into cyborgs as TVs, floor fans, robotic surgeons, and other technology. But soon after, Marlene’s tech body disfunctions, and she is disposed of with other obsolete humans who have become cyborgs. Eventually, Marlene fights back, leading these obsolete cyborgs in a revolution against those in power. A science fiction story like “Seniors 3000” visually entertains, while also engages audiences to reflect on the embedded social commentary related to themes of aging, human obsolescence, and worker resistance.

Another speculative example is “B.E.N. Bionically Engineered Nursing” (2016), sponsored by the Society of Saint-Vincent-De-Paul. This short video raises the question, what jobs should be given over to AI and robots? On-screen, we see B.E.N., a white, puffy humanoid robot with big, circular, dew-drop black eyes, wearing a blue nurse’s shirt. It cares daily for an older woman named Claudine in her family home, providing nutritious meals, administering medicines, and even entertaining her with dancing. One morning, we see Claudine lying in bed and staring absently ahead in a way that could be interpreted as feeling sad and lonely, as the night before we saw a picture on her nightstand of what could have been her former husband. Upon seeing her in bed, the robot repeatedly says, “Claudine, would you like to get up now, I am here to assist you” and Claudine, physically unresponsive, maintains her absent stare. Later, at the breakfast table, Claudine tells B.E.N. she needed that quiet moment earlier in the morning. The robot, while helpful, doesn’t seem to provide nuanced emotional support apart from what it’s programmed to do. At the end of the short video, a service message appears on the screen displaying the text, “Today, companion robots are being introduced to assist lonely people,” followed by “At Society of Saint-Vincent-De-Paul, we think that only human beings can help in fighting loneliness.” This speculative public service announcement in 2016 reflected a particular perspective of the times, but we can now see more recently that attitudes are changing in the healthcare sector as various AI and robotic models are utilized in reality.

Robots are currently featured in healthcare articles about medical care facilities and home healthcare services. In a Nurse.org article, “This Humanoid AI Robot Is Being Tested in Hospitals-Plus 7 More Transforming Healthcare” by Sarah Falcone, the robots are described as “collaborators, not replacements” and are said to “free up nurses to perform specialized interventions.” One robot featured was Moxi from the US-based Diligent Healthcare, which is said to roam autonomously, deliver lab specimens, and greet patients (Burke, Falcone). Other types of robots mentioned help answer people’s questions, provide emotional support (e.g., robot seal Paro and robot Pepper) and transport supplies, food trays, and samples in the healthcare setting (Burke, Falcone). And for seniors needing home healthcare, the ElliQ by Intuition Robotics is promoted as a social and health coach device initially provided to healthcare organizations (Broadbent et al.). Some recent testimonies by customers in health news websites and on the ElliQ company site suggests a digital companion can help with loneliness and overall wellbeing (ElliQ, Lynn).

In a different work sector, the restaurant industry, AI and robotic implementation is also being promoted. The Spoon, a food technology podcast and website, has featured tech innovations, from AI drive-thru translator assistants at Wendy’s fast food to other robotic AI culinary technology (Wolf). While it’s not clear if everyone welcomes the AI and robotic technology in the kitchen, it is used in some restaurants. A restaurant in South Korea called Munmak uses a ramen-preparing robotic machine. A worker interviewed said, ‘It reduced the workload,” but also suggested there is a “loss of feeling pride in cooking the food” (Kim, “Robot Chefs”). In Japan, the DAWN Avatar robot café uses humanoid robots to serve, greet, and make food recommendations. These robots are not autonomous, but rather, are operated remotely by disabled humans (Steen). With this interconnectedness of AI and robotic machines in the food industry, it seems possible that humans in the future could work alongside robots or in some situations be replaced by them.

The science fiction short video “The Chef” (2021), directed by Hao Zheng and written by Ithaca Deng and Leqi Vanessa Kong, challenges this use of robotic technology and the potential replacement of humans in restaurants. It begins with a restaurant owner escorting William, a humanoid robot, to the kitchen to train under the older chef named Chef Pu. Initially, the chef is reluctant in teaching this machine as he says, “Chinese cooking is not science; it’s a feeling” as William asks for specific measurements in cooking braised meatball and tofu dish and other recipes. Meanwhile, the young human cooking assistant to the chef glares repeatedly at this humanoid assisting the chef. Later, the chef joins the human kitchen staff outside and comforts the younger assistant saying, “Don’t worry, cooking is meant for humans… just work harder, you won’t be replaced.” We soon overhear in a broadcast news story that humans are being replaced as “factory workers, farmers, and truck drivers protest worsening conditions” and others are organizing protest movements that advocate destroying robots in order to get jobs back. As time passes, we see the chef taking a liking to William as it is shown to be more reliable, curious, and attentive than the human assistant. In a scene at the food night market, the chef and William walk together while the chef cheerfully and nostalgically talks about ingredients and recipes. He also seems to be considering William as his eventual replacement when he retires. Shortly after the walk, protestors see the chef with William and attack and destroy the humanoid William. One of these protesters is the chef’s human kitchen assistant, who afterwards offers a saddened chef a ride home on a motorbike.

It’s a little confusing in the story and in a real-world sense whether we should welcome or despise these AI and robotic machines. What do we want from our machines? Maybe it’s efficiency and reliability, or perhaps it fills an emotional void where humans feel neglected. For a business owner, the financial cost-saving aspect of machines prevails. For others, it may be that AI or robotic machines provide something else, such as assistance and companionship, where humans are not as dependable. A story like “The Chef” draws attention to many of these issues as well as the concern about robots taking jobs of younger workers and how human attitudes may change with time and perspective.

A science fiction story about a different work sector, the arts industry, is “Real Artists” (2017), a short video directed by Cameo Wood and written by Cameo Wood and Ken Liu. The camera follows a young twenty something female filmmaker/graphic designer/storyteller interviewing for an entertainment industry job. It seems like a promising opportunity until she learns the film process involves an AI machine called Big Semi. The machine collates the emotional data of people in order to generate multiple film versions that eventually becomes what is considered the best film version. Upon seeing these other creative types sitting in a dark screening room, digitally connected to the AI machine via external body gadgetry on the temple and wristband, the interviewee incredulously comments, “I’m sorry all of Semafore films are essentially made by an AI?” The executive proudly responds, “It’s a process that works–nudging responses to fit a known emotional cord is nothing more than an optimization problem, and Big Semi is excellent at solving them.”

This filmmaking process depicted in “Real Artists” involves humans as mere cogs in an AI machine, no longer individuals but instead part of a hive mind linked to the AI machine. It’s explained to the interviewee that the human mind is repeatedly erased to create a tabula rasa, a blank slate. This process enables the machine to collect fresh, emotional data daily to generate multiple iterations of a story concept and basic plot all rendered using stock characters and dialogue till the best film is statistically achieved.

By reflecting on today’s real-life generative AI software landscape in the U.S. and globally, we can see how these tools are becoming more widely accepted in creative fields like the entertainment and marketing sectors. And for many, this technology is eagerly welcomed. For example, in a MIT Technology Review issue about creativity in the age of AI, the South Korean cartoonist Lee Hyun-se envisions AI giving his archival data of 5000 comics a “kind of immortality” in that AI can be used to develop future iterations of his characters and worldview (Kim, “Generative AI”). For other visual artists and writers, these large language model systems that generate AI art forms are useful but it has been suggested they are not as personally gratifying when art is reduced to an AI calculation (Kim, “Generative AI”). In recent years, writers, actors, animators, and artists have even reacted by protesting and boycotting AI work (Lee).

Maybe this is the future we can’t avoid. Plenty of science fiction and speculative fiction stories show us these utopian and dystopian versions of a world where AI and robots are in the workforce, and some of these scenarios reflect a bit of our reality. Though I hope we are not on the road to Frederick Pohl’s Midas World (1983), but it might be helpful to familiarize oneself with the literature where human adoption of AI and robotics ultimately leads to a government run by machines and humans no longer needed. From simple factory and household chore robots to doctors and government leader robots, the robots in this book are shown displacing humans. In chapter 3, “Servant of the People” of Midas World, originally published in Analog magazine, a human Congressman named O’Hare believes a human touch will always be needed, even with the abundance of robots. He’s unconcerned about his competitor, a small city robot Mayor campaigning for his seat. In a debate, O’Hare believes he is winning over voters; however, the robot seems to appeal to the crowds equally and can even switch out its data modules for whatever knowledge or memory reference is required. The robot, at one point, praises its human opponent for sponsoring Robot ERA rights and the elimination of mechanical and organic status in the voter records. It comments on how human beings have been freed “from one more onerous and difficult task–namely, the job of selecting their elected officials” and if a robot is elected, “human life can be pure pleasure!” (Pohl 101). This robot politician, having learned everything about human communication, emotion, work, expectations, and way of life, is adept at using whatever mode is needed to win votes. The oblivious O’Hare, physically and mentally limited by his humanness and blinded by his past record of success, continues to campaign without realizing that not only is his competition a highly adaptable robot, but many of his constituents are now also robots.

Is This the End or Is it the Beginning of Something Else

Are we living in a time in which our technology could lead to such an existential threat? While humans have often dealt with vulnerabilities around job security, a robot government as described in the Midas World isn’t a reality-based worry. Yet, there are those, such as the late Catholic Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) and the recent Pope Leo XIV, who have raised concerns about how technological shifts can upend different forms of work and society (Esparza; Hamilton). In Pope Leo XIV Encyclical Letter 2026, it offers guidance around AI, acknowledging the need to develop safeguards for humanity as technological growth is rapid (Leo XIV 106). In contrast, many technology companies are looking for worldwide adoption of AI with an attempt to encourage more positive examples of the advanced technologies. For example, a Google AI Initiative program encourages short film development of stories about the coexistence of AI and humans that may counteract the more dystopian versions commonly referenced in popular culture (Lane, Lee). In the US, the government is trying to integrate AI tools in defense, law enforcement, and administrative work (Hooshidary et al.). The US House of Representatives governing branch passed a bill that would “ban states from enforcing laws regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years” as a way to give breathing room for innovators and the AI marketplace, and then the Senate dropped it after complaints from states (Hendrix and Lima-Strong; Brown and O’Brien “House Republicans include”; “Senate pulls AI”). Internationally, countries are taking steps to promote greater incorporation of AI such as with Japan initiating strategies to build more AI into their Society 5.0 vision; South Korea promoting AI development with AI Basic Act to reduce regulatory guardrails; and China developing their AI + plan to help them “create higher-quality, beautiful lives” through increased AI productivity ability (Spremberg et al; Kim “Why do South Koreans”; Wang).

While some societies and work sectors are optimistic about recent technological innovation in AI and robotics, there are others voicing concerns about the growing technological reach. It might prime the questions, should people be worried about the technologies and possibilities of growing dependence on machines; or with governments advocating more use of it; or should our concerns be directed at the tech leaders profiting and claiming their technology will solve all problems. If job opportunities are limited and economic security is impeded, it may be time to consider a combination of future solutions such as, regulating tech companies, requiring a percentage of human labor for jobs, or government financial supplements like Universal Basic Income for people, though even these potential safeguards are flawed in their application if moral responsibility is overridden by special interests or funding is unavailable. On an individual level, the onus might be on the worker who will need to be prepared to upskill, reskill, augment with technologies, and stay cognizant of how jobs could be restructured and what new jobs are accompanying the technological changes. So, how do we best navigate the future of work? We can try not to inflate or overestimate the potential of AI and robotic technologies. At the same time, we should not ignore its growing impact on society and the workforce; but rather prepare ourselves for potential futures we want or don’t want by consuming and/or creating more science fiction and speculative fiction that gives us a taste of what might be possible.[1]

NOTES

[1] The author thanks Otis College of Art and Design and SEIU Local 721 Faculty Union for financial support that enabled presentation and discussion of this work at the Cultural Studies Association and Science Fiction Research Association conferences.

WORKS CITED

Ackermann, Rebecca. “Your Boss Is Watching You.” MIT Technology Review, Mar./Apr. 2025, pp. 39-45.

Balagtas, Phil. Making Futures Work: Integrating Futures Thinking for Design, Innovation, and Strategy. O’Reilly Media, 2024.

Barlow, Graham. “ChatGPT Just Leveled up–so Why Is Sam Altman Comparing AI to the Renaissance, Not a Revolution?” TechRadar, 22 Apr. 2025, https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-just-leveled-up-so-why-is-sam-altman-comparing-ai-to-the-renaissance-not-a-revolution.

Bezos, Jeff. “LIVE: Jeff Bezos speaks at the VivaTech conference in Paris” YouTube, uploaded by Viva Tech, 17 June 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho_ZmwgvDdM

Bilton, Nick. “Artificial Intelligence May Be Humanity’s Most Ingenious Invention—And Its Last?” Vanity Fair, 13 Sept. 2023, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/artificial-intelligence-industry-future.

Blomkamp, Neill, director. “Tempbot.” Vimeo, uploaded by Spy Films, 4 Oct. 2013, https://vimeo.com/76179487.

Brockes, Emma. “Do You Trust Mark Zuckerberg to Solve Your Loneliness with an ‘AI Friend’? No, Me Neither.” The Guardian, 15 May 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/15/mark-zuckerberg-loneliness-epidemic-ai-friends.

Broadbent, Elizabeth, et al. “ElliQ, an AI-Driven Social Robot to Alleviate Loneliness: Progress and Lessons Learned.” Journal of Aging Research & Lifestyle, vol. 13, Mar. 2024, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10917141/. Accessed 20 May 2025.

Brown, Matt, and Matt O’Brien. “House Republicans Include a 10-Year Ban on US States Regulating AI in ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill.” AP News, 16 May 2025, https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-congress-39d1c8a0758ffe0242283bb82f66d51a.

—. “Senate Pulls AI Regulatory Ban from GOP Bill After Complaints from States.” PBS News, 1 July 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-pulls-ai-regulatory-ban-from-gop-bill-after-complaints-from-states.

Brumfiel, Geoff, et al. AI Is Great at Predicting Text. How Well Can It Guide Robots? NPR Shortwave broadcast, 31 Mar. 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/31/1241892528/ai-chatgpt-software-robots-tasks.

—. “ChatGPT Can Help Write an Essay. Scientists Want It to Start Folding Laundry.” NPR, 17 Mar. 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5323897/researchers-are-rushing-to-build-ai-powered-robots-but-will-they-work.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Burke, Bridget. “Humanoid Robots in Healthcare: The Future Is Here—But Are We Ready?” CAHL-California Association of Healthcare Leaders, 10 Mar. 2025, https://ache-cahl.org/articles/humanoid-robots-in-healthcare-the-future-is-here-but-are-we-ready/.

Carter, Alex. “2025 Optimus Robot: 20 Industries Tesla’s AI Will Disrupt First.” Capitaly, 28 July 2025, https://www.capitaly.vc/blog/2025-optimus-robot-20-industries-teslas-ai-will-disrupt-first.

Christopher, Nilesh. “Delivery robots have his old job—and now they’ve created a new one for him.” LA Times, 25 Feb. 2026, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-02-25/theres-job-that-ai-isnt-eliminating-robot-wrangler

—. “Why hundreds of people in L.A. are strapping cameras on their bodies to do chores.” LA Times, 12 Mar. 2026, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-03-12/why-people-in-la-are-strapping-cameras-on-their-bodies-to-do-chores.

Davenport, Thomas H., and Julia Kirby. Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. Harper Business, 2016.

Davenport, Thomas H., and Steven M. Miller. Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration. The MIT Press, 2022, https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5393/Working-with-AIReal-Stories-of-Human-Machine.

David, Julien, director. “Seniors 3000.” Vimeo, 23 Mar. 2023, https://vimeo.com/810841993.

Duncan, Rodger Dean. “The Why of Work: Purpose and Meaning Really Do Matter.” Forbes, 11 Sept. 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rodgerdeanduncan/2018/09/11/the-why-of-work-purpose-and-meaning-really-do-matter/.

ElliQ. “ElliQ User Stories.” Intuition Robotics, 2025, https://elliq.com/pages/testimonials.

Elon Buzz. “Tesla Bot: The Future of Work and the Rise of Humanoid Robots.” Elon Buzz, 10 Feb. 2025, https://elonbuzz.com/tesla-bot-the-future-of-work-and-the-rise-of-humanoid-robots/.

Esparza, Daniel. “Pope Leo XIV and the New Industrial Revolution.” Aleteia, 8 May 2025, https://aleteia.org/2025/05/08/pope-leo-xiv-and-the-new-industrial-revolution/.

Falcone, Sarah. “This Humanoid AI Robot Is Being Tested in Hospitals-Plus 7 More Transforming Healthcare.” Nurse.org, 1 April 2026,  https://nurse.org/articles/nurse-robots/.

Gates, Bill. “Bill Gates Joked with Steve Jobs About Taking the Wrong LSD, Talks AI and Optimism for the Future.” YouTube uploaded by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, 4 Feb. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHY5i9-0tJM&t=1s.

Gibson, Kate. “5 Key Benefits of Integrating AI into Your Business.” Business Insights, Harvard Business School Online, 1 Aug. 2024, https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/benefits-of-ai-in-business.

Gross, Jessica. “What Motivates Us at Work? More than Money.” Ideas.Ted.Com, 21 May 2015, https://ideas.ted.com/what-motivates-us-at-work-7-fascinating-studies-that-give-insights/.

Hamilton, Matt. “Why ‘Leo’? New Pope Shows Support for Workers, Labor Unions.” Los Angeles Times, 8 May 2025, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-05-08/whats-in-a-name-with-leo-new-pope-shows-support-for-workers-and-labor-unions.

Hendrix, Justin, and Cristiano Lima-Strong. “US House Passes 10-Year Moratorium on State AI Laws.” Tech Policy Press, 22 May 2025, https://techpolicy.press/us-house-passes-10year-moratorium-on-state-ai-laws.

Hooshidary, Sanam, Chelsea Canada, and William Clark. “Artificial Intelligence in Government: The Federal and State Landscape.” National Conference of State Legislatures, 22 Nov. 2024, https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/artificial-intelligence-in-government-the-federal-and-state-landscape.

Huskins, Grace. “Are We Ready to Hand AI Agents the Keys?” MIT Technology Review, 12 June 2025, https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/12/1118189/ai-agents-manus-control-autonomy-operator-openai/.

Johannessen, Jon-Arild. The Workplace of the Future: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Precariat and the Death of Hierarchies. Routledge, 2019, https://atelierdesfuturs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The_Workplace_of_the_Future_The_Fourth_Industrial.pdf.

Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930, N&A).” The History of Economic Thought Website, https://hetwebsite.net/het/texts/keynes/keynes1930grandchildren.htm.

Kim, Michelle. “Generative AI Is Reshaping Korea’s Webcomics Industry.” MIT Technology Review, May/June 2025, 22 Apr. 2025, https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/22/1114874/generative-ai-south-korea-webcomics/.

—. “Why do South Koreans love AI so much.” MIT Technology Review, 15 June 2026, https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/15/1138983/why-do-south-koreans-love-ai-so-much

Kim, Michelle. “Robot Chefs Take Over at South Korea’s Highway Restaurants, to Mixed Reviews.” Rest of World, 14 May 2025, https://restofworld.org/2025/robot-chefs-south-korea-restaurants/.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near. Penguin Group, 2005.

Lane, Mira. “A Short Film Program to Explore AI on Screen.” Google Blog, 10 Apr. 2025, https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-on-screen-short-films/.

Lee, Wendy. “Hollywood Writers Say AI Is Ripping off Their Work. They Want Studios to Sue.” Los Angeles Times, 12 Feb. 2025, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-02-12/hollywood-writers-say-ai-is-ripping-off-their-work-they-want-studios-to-sue.

Lynn, John. “ElliQ Review–A Robot for Healthier, Happier Aging.” Healthcare IT Today, 4 June 2024, https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2024/06/04/elliq-review-a-robot-for-healthier-happier-aging/.

McCallum, Shiona. “AI will create more jobs for humans, not replace them, Amazon founder Bezos says.” BBC News, 17 June 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqdrw2yy3vo.

Metz, Cade, and Karen Weise. “How ‘A.I. Agents’ That Roam the Internet Could One Day Replace Workers.” The New York Times, 16 Oct. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/technology/ai-agents-workers-replace.html.

Morgan Stanley. The Humanoid 100: Mapping the Humanoid Robot Value Chain. 6 Feb. 2025, https://advisor.morganstanley.com/john.howard/documents/field/j/jo/john-howard/The_Humanoid_100_-_Mapping_the_Humanoid_Robot_Value_Chain.pdf.

Musk, Elon. “Elon Musk JUST Dropped Massive Bombshell on Tesla Bots, Neuralink and Major Tesla Updates | CES 2025.” YouTube, uploaded by Verbal On Life, 12 Jan. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlhTvNFxCkk.

North, Madeleine. “These 5 Cities Are Making Innovative Use of Generative AI.” World Economic Forum, 24 July 2025, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/07/generative-ai-smart-cities/.

Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce. “Palm Springs AI & Creativity Expo 2025.” Palm Springs Convention Center, Palm Springs, CA, 23 June 2025, https://pschamber.org/aiexpo/.

—. “PS/NExT Summit 2026.” Palm Springs Convention Center, Palm Springs, CA, 23-24 June 2026, https://www.palmspringsnext.com/.

Penprase, Bryan E. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Higher Education.” Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, edited by Nancy W. Gleason, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 207–229, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0194-0_9.

Pope Leo XIV. “Magnifica Humanitas.” The Holy See, 15 May 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence

Pohl, Frederik. Midas World. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1983.

Spremberg, Felix et al. “Constructing an ‘AI-driven Society’: Idealization and Anxiety in Japan’s National AI Strategy.” DIGITAL CULTURE & SOCIETY, edited by Jascha Bareis et al, vol. 11, no.2, 2025, http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-01KH8Z88MRM7N1GGGV2GPA2C98.

The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Virtual Forum: New Academic Programs for AI Driven Work Force.” 5 June 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/events/virtual/new-academic-programs-for-an-ai-driven-work-force.

—. “AI on Campus: Its Impact and Its Implications.” 2020, https://connect.chronicle.com/rs/931-EKA-218/images/AIonCampusv6.pdf.

University of Florida. “AI Across the Curriculum: University of Florida 2024-2029 Quality Enhancement Plan.” University of Florida, 2026, https://ai.ufl.edu/.

Valley Voice Media. “Palm Springs Launches Inaugural AI and Creativity Expo to Establish Tech Industry Foothold.” The Palm Springs Post Newsletter, 24 June 2025.

Wang, Vivian. “Where are China’s A.I. Doomers?” The New York Times, 4 March 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/world/asia/china-ai-enthusiasm.html.

Watanabe, Teresa. “Tech Giants to Offer Free AI Training at Cal State Universities.” Los Angeles Times, 8 Feb. 2025, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-02-04/california-state-university-unveils-massive-ai-venture.

Weise, Karen. “Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs with Robots.” The New York Times, 21 Oct. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/technology/inside-amazons-plans-to-replace-workers-with-robots.html.

Williams, Rhiannon. “The AI Relationship Revolution Is Already Here.” MIT Technology Review, Mar./Apr. 2025, pp. 20–27.

Wolf, Michael. “Food AI Bulletin: Google’s Robot Breakthrough & Wendy’s Spanish-Speaking AI Drive-Thru Bot.” The Spoon, 7 Aug. 2024, https://thespoon.tech/food-ai-bulletin-googles-robot-breakthrough-wendys-spanish-speaking-ai-drive-thru-bot/.

Wood, Cameo, director and writer. “Real Artists.” Charming Stranger Films, 2017, https://www.realartists.film/.

Zheng, Hao, director. “The Chef.” YouTube, uploaded by Dust Channel, 13 Dec. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBGZaZmqs74.

Zhou, Viola and Kinling Lo. “In Chinese Data Factories, Workers Teach Humanoid Robots

Boring Tasks.” Restofworld.org, 7 Jan. 2026, https://restofworld.org/2026/china-robots-training-centers-workers/.

Tiff Graham teaches cultural anthropology, foodways, occupational culture, science fiction, and futures thinking topics at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. She holds a Ph.D. in Culture from University of California Los Angeles, M.S. in Occupational Health from Medical College of Ohio, and B.A. in English from University of Missouri Columbia. Her research interests in labor, resistance, technology, and economies are shaped by her varied work roles in the U.S. Department of Labor and in retail, hospitality, agriculture, education, entertainment, B2B, web design, and after-school/summer programs. Her published and presented work ranges in topics from outer space foodways, post-apocalyptic meals, and community gatherings to broader interests in health, technology, and foresight. She attributes her wide-ranging interests to autodidact tendencies and a need to have a fuller understanding of human experiences.

The Invincible

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Media Reviews

download

Review of The Invincible

Jules Otero i Besolí

The Invincible. Directed by Marek Markuszewski, Starward Industries / 11 Bit Studios, 2023. Played on Windows PC.

Screenshot

Made up of veteran developers coming from teams such as CD Projekt RED and Techland Games and having worked on titles such as The Witcher (2007), Dying Light (2015) and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), Starward Industries was always expected to deliver a solid story and player experience in their first game, The Invincible (2023). However, what they attempted to do was no small feat: to adapt the hard SF novel by the same name written by Stanisław Lem, The Invincible would require a masterful command of pacing, atmosphere and dialogue, all essential to deliver and sustain the classic hard SF ‘feel’ which is often difficult to accomplish in audiovisual media.

In both the novel and the videogame, a spaceship crewed by researchers lands in a largely unexplored desert planet and quickly finds that, although there are no terrestrial life-forms, something dangerous has attacked some of the crew and rendered them incapable of remembering anything, not even how to communicate or take care of themselves. Rather than simply adapting the story of the novel into a videogame, however, Starward Industries chose to create their own characters. They wanted to create a story that was more intimate, Markuszewski told Rock Paper Shotgun in an interview, so they reduced the immense crew of the Invincible in the novel to the six-person crew of the Dragonfly in the game. Of this crew, the player embodies the biologist Yasna (voiced by Daisy May) as she explores the mysterious Regis III with help from the astrogator Novik (voiced by Jason Baughan) who guides and helps her from the ship. Throughout her adventure, Yasna finds the remains of a ship she thinks is the Invincible although it turns out to be a different ship that will later require the Invincible’srescue (effectively making the events of the game a prequel, albeit an inexact one).

Within both Stanisław Lem’s story and the genre of hard SF in general, The Invincible stands its own admirably. Although the videogame medium may not seem the best suited for scientific discussion and hypothesizing, long conversations between characters or the extended build-up of atmosphere with a distant payoff, this game uses all the tools at its disposal to keep the player engaged throughout a version of Lem’s story that doesn’t shy away from being wordy or scientifically fanciful. Instead, it plays into its own and the players’ awareness of the conventions of hard science fiction, making them an active participant in the scientific discussion through dialogue choices that feel impactful and character-building, reveal different bits of information and give the player access to eleven different endings, enhancing the replayability of the experience. Formally, too, in a moment where hard SF has lost some of its former acclaim and readership to more fantastical stories, The Invincible proposes a new way to experience theory-heavy narrative: the audience may choose to deeply engage with the dialogue, but the gaming experience offers the alternative of simply letting it fill the silence as the player explores or interacts with the environment, and the oft-criticised lack of strong female characters and emotive plotlines in hard SF is amended through Yasna’s characterisation and her compassion and camaraderie towards the rest of the crew. 

The choice to make Yasna a woman (there are no women in Lem’s original text) and one that has concrete, explicit political opinions regarding the intervention of humanity in space (she is a ‘galactocentric’, believing the needs of the galaxy outweigh the needs of humanity), makes the story feel far from outdated, a modernisation that is further noted in the additions of many discussions regarding the differences between human and artificial consciousness and intelligence and the dangers the latter may pose to the former. Moreover, while the theme of artificial intelligence has certainly been expanded upon, the other themes present in the novel (the horror of losing oneself completely, the uselessness of vengeance against forces of nature, the importance of resilience and care for others) are well-presented through dialogue, actions, and choices for the player to make, especially in the way the endings are approached and the moral judgements they impart. In general, narratively speaking, the impression is that the development team has managed exactly what it set out to do: The Invincible is an example of how a videogame may tell a complex, compelling story with emotional weight, deep relationships between characters and grand ideas (although those were provided mostly by Lem) while keeping the audience at the edge of their seats with the same artful mastery of storytelling of a novel or a film.

This narrative strength does come, however, at the expense of some of the gaming aspects that players traditionally expect. Some reviews by users on Steam point out that it is essentially a ‘walking simulator’ where the central action of the player is to move the character around, and that the non-narrative mechanics of the game (items used to orient oneself and some minor puzzles) are limited and far-between. Another aspect that may drive players away is that, despite having different possible endings, these do not manifest as real differences until the last twenty minutes of the game, while the rest of the content leads the player through a fairly narrow narrative path (a practice often known as ‘railroading’) with some optional stops and detours for additional content. This animosity towards ‘walking simulators’ and, especially, the yet unsettled debate on whether they ‘count’ as videogames at all is an interesting part of the gaming community and, I think, one that impoverishes our understanding of videogames as a medium to explore a story, since it is unavoidable that some stories require linearity and, more practically, smaller studios may not have the resources to create an ‘open-world’ game as is often expected from larger companies in the current videogame industry. In the case of The Invincible, a linear plotline is undoubtedly the right choice, as the hints and clues needed for the scientific hypothesizing of the story to progress need to remain quite similar in content and order to those in the novel.

This brings me to the one fault I found with the game’s storytelling, which is that sometimes it is very heavy-handed with its references to Lem’s novel. Certain quotes, of great weight in the novel, are repeated in the game not one but multiple times, and certain scenes which worked well on paper struggle to impress through the screen. The strongest parts of the game are, I think, the ones that innovate and continue on Lem’s story, adding to it the modern sensibilities and concerns which the novel could not predict.  I suggest that scholars wishing to write about The Invincible may find it valuable to analyse those moments of narrative innovation as well as how they may serve the evolution of hard science fiction as a subgenre and its translation into various forms of media. Other interesting avenues of research for The Invincible could be the way dialogue is used to establish a connection between Yasna and Novik, since they never appear in the same place throughout the game and must use only verbal communication to establish their relationship throughout, making the voice-acting take centre stage, or the way the game handles horror elements without becoming a horror game through careful tone-setting and trope subversion.

Jules Otero i Besolí [they/he] is a PhD Student in the Autonomous University of Barcelona and holder of a FPU scholarship. They have a Bachelor’s degree in English Studies with minors in Engllish Literature and Compared Literature and a Master’s degree in Advanced English Studies. Their in-process dissertation explores the role of non-normative embodiment in postmodern space opera universes through a post/transhumanist theoretical framework.



Orwell 2+2=5

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Media Reviews

download

Review of Orwell 2+2=5

Alfredo Suppia

Orwell 2+2=5. Dir. Raoul Peck. Velvet Film and others, 2025.

Version 1.0.0

Raoul Peck, the director of the acclaimed I Am Not Your Negro (2016), delivers a deeply moving and intellectually sharp account of recent history and the contemporary world, drawing on the life of George Orwell (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) and his most famous—and perhaps most distorted—novel: 1984 (1949).

Science fiction forms the backbone of the film. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, in their audiovisual adaptations, feed a torrent of images drawn from documentary and fiction alike, weaving together dystopia and contemporary barbarism into a sustained essay-film. The multiple adaptations of 1984 for cinema, television, radio, and theater provide the refrains of the symphony of images and sounds orchestrated by Peck, while excerpts from photojournalism and television news cement the cruel face of dystopian fiction surpassed by reality. This constant movement between fiction and documentary, far from disorienting the viewer, sharpens the perception of how closely contemporary barbarism resembles—and is at times indistinguishable from—the dystopian imagination.

One of the film’s most intellectually provocative moves is its treatment of Orwell’s “Newspeak” as a heuristic tool rather than a literary trope or poetic license. This is epistemologically delicate terrain. There is no scholarly consensus on the extent to which natural language decisively shapes the political organization of human societies, notwithstanding the findings of sociolinguistics and structuralist semiology—including Barthes’s own formulation of the subject who speaks or is “spoken” about by discourses that precede their own existence. What the film presents, particularly in its final third, is essentially a catalog of euphemisms: a “stimulus package” as cover for bailing out financial criminals and a “military operation” as a sanitized label for territorial invasion. These are real and important examples. But the film risks conflating the existence of euphemism with the more radical—and unproven—claim that language itself restructures political reality, thereby naturalizing Orwell’s fictional device as empirical diagnosis. The argument would be stronger, and more faithful to the complexity of the subject, if it engaged with the limits of its own linguistic determinism.

Orwell 2+2=5 is one more essay-film that demonstrates—happily or otherwise—the growing prominence of science fiction in the contemporary political agenda and the genre’s susceptibility to both capitalist co-opting and genuine critical subversion, as in Orwell’s own hands. But the film could have been even more powerful had it resisted a certain relativism endemic to the present moment—most visibly expressed in the unfortunate “horseshoe theory,” the thesis that the extremes of political Left and Right ultimately converge. They do not, and Orwell himself recognized this at key moments in his life and work.

The film handles with considerable skill, drawing on Orwell’s writings and his two most notorious novels (Animal Farm and 1984), the exposure of Western crimes. Footage of Nazi SS officers being executed by the Red Army in the aftermath of the Babi Yar massacre is among the film’s most harrowing moments. Yet for each crime committed by Western fascist leaders and the film scores a significant point in showing that even within democracies the “serpent’s egg” can hatch—Peck inserts references to non-Western governments: Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Donald Trump ultimately emerges as the quintessence of Orwellian evil. But none of these governments are alike or straightforwardly comparable, and leveling them as equivalent distorts more than it illuminates.

The film’s predominantly Western vantage point—acknowledged in some of Orwell’s own recorded comments reproduced by Peck—becomes its most visible limitation. A lone image of Xi Jinping at a military parade floats without context or commentary; one is reminded of Chris Marker’s observation in Letter from Siberia (1958) that a cinematic image is inseparable from its context or voiceover. In this light, certain silences become difficult to ignore: Hiroshima and Nagasaki—unparalleled in the history of mass destruction—go unmentioned. The storming of Brazil’s Praça dos Três Poderes on January 8, 2023—strikingly similar to the Capitol insurrection that features prominently in the film—is also absent. The parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff (2016) and the forced removal of President Evo Morales in Bolivia (2019) receive no mention. Nor does MINUSTAH’s role in Haiti, a significant omission for a filmmaker who is himself Haitian and served as his country’s Minister of Culture. The film does make one pointed and welcome gesture: the inclusion of Brazil’s Marinho media dynasty among the moguls and tech billionaires constituting the architecture of twenty-first-century authoritarianism.

Alfredo Suppia is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil, where he teaches Brazilian cinema, scriptwriting, film theory, and science fiction film for both undergraduate and graduate students. He is the author of books such as Brazilian Science Fiction Film: A Critical History (NYC: SUNY Press, 2024), and Atmosfera Rarefeita: A Ficção Científica no Cinema Brasileiro (São Paulo: Devir, 2013), in addition to numerous articles on Latin-American cinemas, world cinemas, and world science fiction cinemas.



Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

download

Review of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

Andrew Sztehlo

Barsukov, Yaroslav. Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory. CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, 2024.

Version 1.0.0

Much has been made of the prophetic nature of Yaroslav Barsukov’s 2021 novella Tower of Mud and Straw, an expanded version of which forms the first half of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory. Contemporary reviews noted that it anticipated the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is unfortunate that both works have been pigeon-holed as predicting or commenting on this specific conflict, much in the way that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was seen as a response to his experiences in World War I or as an allegory for the dangers of atomic power, a reading that Tolkien famously resisted (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, xxiv). Whilst Barsukov’s fascinating novel does draw on recent Russian history, going so far as to model his protagonist Shea Ashcroft on Alexei Navalny (Barsukov, Fantasy Book Critic), to misread this work as being just about Russia and Ukraine would be to miss one of Barsukov’s main themes: the terror of living under multiple forms of oppression within the shadow of empire(s). As Barsukov stated in a recent interview, “Russia doesn’t have a monopoly on imperialism, though, as many of my dear friends in India and Africa will attest. I feel our fight should not only be against Putin, but rather against the very concept of empires–and if we go one step further, nations” (Barsukov, Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine).

Barsukov’s novel draws on rich traditions, specifically of American science fiction and fantasy, to craft a genre-bending novel dealing with misinformation, political intrigue, oligarchical power, colonialism, and the very nature of (un)reality itself. It is no surprise that Barsukov claims writers as diverse in their approaches as Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, China Miéville, and Ted Chiang as influences (Barsukov, Fantasy Book Critic; The Fantasy Hive), taking something from all their styles and themes and sprinkling in his own viewpoints as a Russian emigre to Vienna: “We’re boats perpetually tossed between currents. And our future is a reflection of our past: I left one former empire only to settle in another, trading the dead USSR for the westernmost splinter of Austria-Hungary” (Barsukov, Rising Shadow).

Barsukov’s chief protagonist, Shea Ashcroft, is also a man caught between cultural currents. After Shea refuses to gas a crowd of protesters, Queen Daelyn strips him of his ministership and sends him to the border town of Owenbeg to oversee a massive construction project: an anti-aircraft tower, over a thousand meters tall, designed to protect the kingdom against the neighbouring imperial power of Duma. Whilst Shea’s exile is first understood as the death of his political career, he soon realises that this could in fact be a test, with further rewards to come. Shea soon meets a gauntlet of political rivals, diplomats, spies, and assassins. There is the Duke, who holds brutal power over the region, practically salivating at the idea of regional autonomy from the far-away crown; then Brielle, the chief architect of the tower, who sees the successful completion of the project as her own personal mission; and finally Lena, the Duke’s lover, who bears a striking similarity both in name and appearance to Shea’s older sister, who died in a freak accident in childhood. Lena is also one of the Drakiri, a race that whilst passing for human, is markedly taller, stronger, and faster than the average person. Despite their agility and scientific progress, the Drakiri have suffered genocides in the past and their diaspora is spread across the realm. Further characters appear, who alternately desire to move against Shea’s influence on the project, to usurp it for their own ends, or even to stop its completion. The project, for all intents and purposes, is a ticking time bomb.

There are three challenges in particular that Shea faces in Owenbeg. First, there is the debate over whether Duma will actually invade, and if the tower is even necessary for defence. Second, the rarity and temperamental nature of Drakiri anti-grav technology, taken from Drakiri refugees in exchange for land, is as likely to aid in the construction of the monolith as it is to maim and kill all those who do not understand how to use it. And lastly, there is the legend that the Drakiri tell in whispers: the completion of the tower will open a portal and manifest a second tower, dubbed the Mimic Tower, from some hellish dimension, unleashing nightmare forces, destruction, and slaughter on all. Whilst Shea is skeptical of the truth of this legend, the evidence of its reality grows harder and harder to ignore. To navigate even one of these could be deadly; to navigate all three, Shea will have to find friends quickly, reconcile with his past, risk everything he has, and trust his conscience absolutely above all else to see the conflict through.

Much like Barsukov’s named influences, Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory blurs the line between the science fiction and fantasy genres. There are many points in the novel where the reader feels the heavy influence of earlier works. It borrows the dynastic power struggles of Frank Herbert’s Dune; the multiversal conflicts of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion sword-and-sorcery stories, particularly his Corum books; and the tenuous nature of reality from writers such as Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin. Most apparent of all are the parallels between Barsukov’s novel and works of the New Weird movement, particularly China Mieville’s Bas Lag trilogy and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, in its attempts to blend different genres and literatures into a new, nebulous form, and the aesthetics of the Mimic Tower and its hellish landscape.

Barsukov also directly challenges commonly accepted notions of worldbuilding within genre fiction, intentionally using anachronism to complicate and muddle our ideas of his world. The realm of Sleeping Worlds leans heavily on the aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries: its class tensions recall the French Revolution, whilst the political culture and imperial might of Duma channels memories of Tsarist Russia. However, this sense of the milieu is permeated by a modern understanding of misinformation and the rewriting of history, holding obvious parallels to the political allegories of George Orwell and other dystopian fiction writers, the history of the Soviet Union, and our own present-day challenges in an oligarchical techno-capitalist post-truth era. There are many moments where Ashcroft struggles to establish a common understanding of the basics of reality with other characters; is Pangania, the ancestral home of the Drakiri, a peninsula, or an island? According to Lena, a Drakiri, it is definitively an island (45); to the Prince of Duma, it is definitively a peninsula, and any suggestion otherwise would be farcical (266). Complicating the sense of unified world-building even further is the fact that most characters speak with a modern, Americanized English, contrasting greatly with the decadent palaces, or the grimy villages filled with the laborers who build the tower. Technology is also remarkably inconsistent; cities do not seem to have advanced beyond a gas-powered energy system, and yet skyrafts (zeppelins) dot the skies of multiple metropolises. The Drakiri technology, never fully explained, also complicates the sense of this technological epoch, being even further ahead than our own. This fractured sense of reality, obviously intentional from Barsukov, is worth exploring further, especially considering the central reveal of the last segment of the novel.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, which Barsukov says is the first part of a larger narrative (although, in this writer’s opinion, stands perfectly well alone), has plenty of academic and scholarly potential. The fractured world-building, and a general study of the emptiness of certain fantastic and science fictional lifeworlds, is worth considering. The placement of this work within the broader context of Russian SF is also worth exploring, as whilst it predominantly draws on American science fiction traditions, it does continue considerations of Russian contributions to the genre. Whilst Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are not named in interviews with Barsukov, their oeuvre casts a shadow over the text, sharing concerns with the place of the individual within larger authoritarian societies and the moral responsibilities that go with it. Likewise, considering Barsukov’s repudiation of the invasion, both through his work and in interviews, it would be worth comparing Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory to other writers of contemporary Russian SF. Sergei Lukyanenko, famously imperialist in his views, would be worthy of a comparison, as well as Dmitry Glukhovsky and Dmitry Bykov, both of whom have spoken out against the invasion (Barsukov, Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine). Similarly, the novel’s preoccupation with colonialism could be further explored in connection with American SF writers, as well as larger world literatures, as pigeon-holing Barsukov’s work as purely “Russian” has been a recurring problem amongst reactions to the novel; it obscures Barsukov’s own complicated national identity, and also resists the novel’s evident connections to other literatures and its own larger concerns about the idea of empire as a whole.

WORKS CITED

Barsukov, Yaroslav. “An Interview with Yaroslav Barsukov.” Rising Shadow, 22 Feb. 2021, https://www.risingshadow.net/articles/interviews/1053-an-interview-with-yaroslav-barsukov. Accessed 17 June 2026.

—. “Author Interview: Yaroslav Barsukov, the Author of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory.” Fantasy Book Critic, 6 Sept. 2024, https://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2024/09/author-interview-yaroslav-barsukov.html. Accessed 18 June 2026.

—. “Genre Grapevine Interview with Yaroslav Barsukov.” Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine, 9 Sept. 2022, https://www.patreon.com/jasonsanford/posts/genre-grapevine-71744175. Accessed 18 June 2026.

—. “Interview with Yaroslav Barsukov (Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory).” The Fantasy Hive, 8 Nov. 2024, https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2024/11/20557/. Accessed 17 June 2026.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London, Harpercollins, 2005.

By day, Andrew Sztehlo is an academic librarian at York St John University, and has previously managed high school and college libraries in Manchester. He has presented on the intersection of neurodivergence and librarianship across three different sectors at the 2026 NLISN conference. By night he is a cartoonist, creating the anthology comic Tales from the Border and illustrating the horror/comedy mini-series Chimpanzee with a Razorblade, written by Tim Vargulish-Chow. He is currently working on a graphic novel based on the occult history and folklore of northern Italy.

Spread Me

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

download

Review of Spread Me

Shannon Blake Skelton

Gailey, Sarah. Spread Me. Tor Nightfire, 2025.

Version 1.0.0

Popular discourse surrounding body-horror is often situated around cinema, notably horror films that depict the dread and terror of the transformation and loss of agency of one’s own corporeal form. The term body-horror can be traced to Phillip Brophy’s 1983 essay “Horrorality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film” in which the scholar notes that certain contemporary fear films are focused on “the destruction of the body” and that the films “play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it.” In A Dictionary of Film Studies, Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell note that body-horror focuses on “human bodies that are subject to torture, mutilation, mutation, decay, degeneration, and transformation, usually shown in graphic detail” while also probing concerns of embodiment, bodily autonomy, and decay. Sarah Gailey’s brilliantly inventive and squeal-inducing science-fiction horror novella Spread Me seeks to merge the cinematic traditions of body-horror with engaging speculative literary approaches.

Gailey (they/them) has gained acclaim over the past few years not only for their SF/F endeavors, but also for fan writing and contributions to comics in the Buffyverse along with original comic titles such as Eat the Rich (2021) and Know Yor Station (2021). Their 2017 American Hippo pair of novellas (River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow) pose an alternate history in which the semi-aquatic massive mammals imported to the United States in the 19th century have run rampant and must now be exterminated by a group composed of various identities, including non-binary and Queer characters. River of Teeth was a 2017 Nebula Award Finalist for Best Novella, a 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Novella, and the 2018 Locus Award Finalist for Best Novella. Their 2020 Western novella Upright Woman Wanted centers queer librarians who travel the American Southwest under a totalitarian regime. Gailey also authored the 2019 fantasy/mystery Magic for Liars and 2021’s The Echo Wife, which concerns a scientist who abandons his spouse for her clone.

Spread Me, published by Tor’s newly established horror imprint Nightfire, takes cues from both cinematic and literary precursors. Certainly, we can sense the presence of John Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There? as well as the 1954 Jack Finney novella The Body Snatchers. Yet, the influence of these literary works is less than the impact of their various big screen adaptations upon the novella. In particular, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is repeatedly referenced in Spread Me. At the station, if any member of the team even mentions the film or accidentally repeats a line of dialogue from the Carpenter classic, the offender must deposit money into a jar. In addition, Spread Me mirrors many elements of Alien (1979) but spins and re-spins these scenarios into intriguing, inventive and fascinating moments of tension and ghastly contortions of the human form.

Spread Me depicts a group of six researchers inhabiting a compromised scientific outpost in a desolate, desert region far from other humans or cities. On a survey to catalogue lichens, members of the field team undercover a seemingly deceased, animal-like “specimen”, break protocol, and bring the body back into their cramped lab space. The specimen, described as a “six-legged multi-segmented coyote” with three tongues, fascinates them, but this grotesque creature is much more than they first suspect. Once the team examines the specimen, they all develop various illnesses and isolate from one another. Kinsey, unknown to the others, has not fallen victim to this mysterious virus that has spread amongst the crew. But Kinsey is plagued by unquenchable sexual urges focused on images of bacteria. Following quarantine, the various members exhibit bizarre behavior focused on unyielding perversity and begin to physically transform. As the novella progresses, characters must determine who has come under the influence of the invasive “fungus” transmitted by the specimen, resulting in paranoia, metamorphosis, and body-horror in its most visceral form.

Spread Me’s non-linear structure alternates between chapters. The reader encounters a chapter set in the present, then a chapter detailing the early days of the outpost, and so forth. Though Spread Me on its surface may seem too reminiscent of its cinematic predecessors, this is a wholly new vision and inventive take on these tropes. The inciting incident mirrors Alien, and the paranoia vaguely resembles The Thing, but Gailey’s execution of speculative science, character, and suspense marks Spread Me as a novella worthy of recognition.

Beyond the structure, which compels the reader to consider the larger ramifications of the narrative and subsequent mystery of these terrifying transmutations, Gailey’s array of characters stands as a fascinating, multi-dimensional group of humans who speak and act as individuals. With six characters within the novella form, there is little time or space to differentiate this crew, but Gailey succeeds without tiresome monologues, obvious character ticks, or insipid commentary from bystanders. This crew, with all their boredom and obsession with sleeping one another before the arrival of the “specimen,” reflects the monotony of science labor counteracting the vision of science often romanticized in the SF genre. The unique descriptions of the body transformations are gut-churning and effective, truly expanding the reader’s imagination of what a human body can become. The suspense and terror further pull the reader along; yet, the narrative remains unpredictable, never sacrificing fealty to character for action and plot convenience.

Though we have had contemporary media iterations of “the fungal threat” as science-fiction horror (such as the videogame and streaming series The Last of Us and Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris trilogy), Gailey takes these properties and reformulates the mechanisms of fungal infestation for shocking, yet thoughtful, effect. In all, Gailey’s deft handling of plot, character, and action–carefully balancing horror and speculative science–marks Spread Me as one of the most enjoyable and effective science-fiction horror works of the past decade.

Shannon Blake Skelton (he/him) is a teacher, professor, author, and researcher located in the Midwest. His scholarship, fiction, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals. His volume Interviews: Wes Craven was published by The University Press of Mississippi. He is a proud contributor to the Ad Astra Institute: https://adastra-sf.com/about.htm#about.