Author: sfrarev

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Scientists trying their hand at writing science fiction is certainly not a new phenomenon. However, since the landscape of the physical sciences has been (and to a lesser extent, continues to be) largely populated by white cis-het men, their tales will often be told through the lens of mirroring protagonists. CUNY Graduate Center astrophysics master’s degree student Ness Brown openly explains that one of their priorities in writing their 2023 sci-fi horror novella The Scourge Between Stars was “contributing to black female representation in these genres and specifically queer black female representation” (“Ness Brown”). Accordingly, Brown’s inaugural work features a diverse cast of characters, including a Black LGBTQ female lead and a dark-skinned, female-presenting and identifying android.

In a YouTube interview, Brown offers how they wanted to start the story from “a place of failure,” the crew of the interstellar spacecraft Calypso and the rest of its ragtag fleet fleeing a failed colony on the planet Proxima b, “limping back [to Earth], tail between our legs” (“Ness Brown). Indeed, conditions are painted as extremely grim for the humans aboard this multi-generational retreat to a climate change ravaged Earth. With dwindling supplies and limited means to communicate between ships, their desperation is palpable. Jacklyn “Jack” Albright, second-in-command and acting captain of the Calypso, strikes a precarious balance between pushing the barely functioning technology to its limits and stretching the resources to feed an increasingly agitated crew who are apparently destined to know no other home than this hamstrung ship. It is a powder keg waiting to explode, until they are faced with a uniting enemy, a pack of stereotypical deadly xenomorphs who hitched a ride from Proxima b, hunting down and horrifically disemboweling their human victims.

Brown successfully paints a dark, haunted house atmosphere, one of intense claustrophobia and visceral terror. While the author admits to openly drawing upon works such as Dead Space, Doom, Pitch Black, Alien, and Event Horizon, I also noted subtle echoes of the Cloverfield franchise (Semel). Taking a page from the Alien playbook, Brown wisely shows us mainly glimpses of the creatures, enough to demonstrate their utter alienness and mode of killing but leave sufficient mystery for the imagination to work on. What descriptions we do get are indeed evocative of generic insectoid ETs and the xenomorphs of Alien. However, while this work is obviously derivative of the Alien franchise in some ways (including the strong female lead and the uncannily human android), it sufficiently avoids being a direct copycat.

A scientist’s first fictional work may succumb to several additional traps, for example, a plot slavishly bogged down in the science, stilted and antiseptic writing, or a formulaic and linear plot. To their credit, Brown avoids all of these pitfalls, even while admittedly drawing heavily upon their six years as an instructor of introductory astronomy and astrobiology (Semel). Astronomical accuracy is added in clever rather than heavy handed ways, perhaps so understated that the casual reader may not appreciate them. Discovered in 2016, Proxima b is an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of the nearest star system, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, but as Brown correctly explains, it is subject to intense and possibly fatal superflares (Howard et al. 1). As a planet likely to be tidally locked, the most habitable (in a human sense) area is probably the terminator, the twilight area between the permanently star-facing and sunlit side (in the bulls-eye of said superflares) and the colder dark side. The terminator is precisely where Brown has their failed colony set up shop on this rocky world. While the planet’s atmosphere apparently shields the human residents from the star’s flare-generated ionizing radiation, the orbiting spaceships suffer significant degradation, similar to effects on the electronics of Earth-orbiting satellites from our Sun’s much smaller outbursts. The author expertly (yet, again, subtly) draws upon reasonable science in crafting the evolutionary adaptations found in their monsters, explaining the creatures’ strengths and (as one might expect) exploitable weaknesses.

There are, however, numerous missed opportunities for even more detailed storytelling due to the relatively short length of the novella format. For example, there is minimal information on the colonists’ time on Proxima b and why their colony failed (other than a vague inability to establish self-sustaining food production). There is also limited motivation for the whispered legends of the deadly indigenous life, now relegated to merely scary bedtime stories told aboard the retreating ships. Brown shares in an interview that the novella format was decided upon in concert with their publisher, and “a lot was necessarily cut from the story” as a result. Brown now admits that they would “love to … wax on at incredible length about Proxima b and the conditions of the failed colony” if the opportunity arose (“Ness Brown”).

Despite these limitations, Jack’s past (and present) family drama is treated with sufficient detail to motivate her conflicted emotions and desperate plans of action. She and the handful of characters she interacts with most often (including her lover, Jolie) are described in necessary detail for the reader to have a reasonable sense of their distinct personalities. But in such minimalist storytelling, little flesh is built over the bones of most of the other characters before it is literally ripped off by the monsters. This work could have easily been more fully rounded out as a full-fledged novel, especially as there are at least three distinct mysteries to be solved—the immediate one of the deadly xenomorphs threatening the ship; the disturbing relationship between the android Watson and its creator, Otto Watson; and the intermittent events that, like rogue waves in the ocean, jolt the ship without warning. In terms of the xenomorphs themselves, this astrophysicist was left with multiple questions concerning their biology. Discussions of destroying versus experimenting with the xenomorphs’ eggs are given short shrift, yet such investigations apparently take place off stage (resulting in one of several examples of deus ex machina in the story). The final twist of contact with advanced extraterrestrials (related to the intermittent jostling events) is vaguely sketched out in the finale, leaving the ultimate fate of the Calypso (and humanity more broadly) wide open.

While the novella does a decent job in painting the creepiness of the hubristic robotics specialist Otto Watson, there is no clear motivation to it. In many ways he is a two-dimensional character, when he could have been much more deeply nuanced. In contrast, his creation, the lifelike android Watson, is a fully integrated character that is given sufficient, endearing personality to evoke concern for her safety in the reader’s mind. The disturbing relationship between the android and its creator cleverly draws upon the history of the American master/slave relationship in nuanced ways, including the android’s forced taking of its master’s name, episodes of punitive physical restraint, and nonconsensual sexual attention. The Watson secondary story is creative and meaningful, and could have been easily expanded upon with a longer page count. Turning this limitation into a strength, the story’s relatively short length makes it more easy to include in the classroom, focusing on the Watson subplot in particular, and the experiences of the female/queer/BIPOC characters more broadly.

Brown has divulged that they have a work of “fungal horror” in the works, taking place on an alien world (“Ness Brown”). Hopefully the publisher of that work will allow them to produce a complete novel so that we might have a fuller sense of Brown’s talent as a science fiction writer and world-builder.

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WORKS CITED

Howard, Ward S., et al. “The First Naked-eye Superflare Detected from Proxima Centauri.” Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 860, 2018, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/aacaf3.

“Ness Brown author of The Scourge Between Stars.” YouTube, uploaded by UpperPen Podcast, 25 Apr. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBEJwfuRVPo.

Semel, Paul. “Exclusive Interview: ‘The Scourge Between Stars’ Author Ness Brown.” PaulSemel, 1 May 2023, paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-scourge-between-stars-author-ness-brown.

Kristine Larsen, Ph.D., has been an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University since 1989. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections between science and society, including sexism and science; science and popular culture (especially science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien); and the history of science. She is the author of the books Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19th Century, Particle Panic!, and Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters.

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Corroding the Now is a chapbook, based upon the conference of the same name held at Birkbeck College, London in 2019, and consisting of essays on a wide range of SF-related topics and linguistically innovative poetry. These are not the kind of poems that might feature on the Rhysling Award or which we might associate with the genre of SF poetry (as, for example, in the work of Steve Sneyd and Jane Yolen). Instead, they are in direct descent from such avant-garde groupings as the Black Mountain School and the Cambridge School, in particular such complex poets as Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne, whose verse intersect multiple discourses – political, sociological, economic, technological, historical, and ecological. On occasion, the worlds of SF and linguistically innovative poetry have rubbed shoulders: Philip K. Dick was friends with both Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer (the latter a big SF reader); Samuel R. Delany was inspired by John Ashbery to write Dhalgren (1975); and J.G. Ballard’s friends in later years numbered the poets Jeremy Reed and Iain Sinclair.

However, as co-editor Francis Gene-Rowe argues in their introduction to the book, the affinity between SF and linguistically innovative poetry should go much deeper than that: both actively desystematise habitual ways of thinking which, in their routinisation, replicate the hegemony of a “Now” that Gene-Rowe characterises as “a tawdry work of dystopian science fiction”. This desystematisation is posited by the editors as a “corrosion” and ultimately a re-worlding; a dissolving of current political and intellectual regimes in order to unearth a latent utopianism. Although the approach here is thoroughly aesthetic, it complements wider attempts to decolonise the curriculum and to use science fiction as a survival tool as in the recent essay collection Uneven Futures (2022). By necessity, though, such an approach is selective: it’s hard to see what the military SF of Neal Asher would have in common with the kinds of SF represented here, while much of the poetry tends to side with the neo-Marxist rhetoric of Prynne’s successors: from Andrew Duncan and Ben Watson to John Wilkinson and Keston Sutherland. As with any anthology, there were pieces I preferred more than others, a tendency exacerbated by my sense that responses to poetry are more emotionally subjective than responses to prose. I will admit, therefore, that my preference in linguistically innovative poetry tends towards the less doctrinaire—poets such as John James and Douglas Oliver—and to the great wealth of women’s experimental poetry, beginning with such writers as Denise Levertov, Elaine Feinstein and Veronica Forrest-Thomson, all of whom encountered antagonism from their male-dominated coteries.

To that end, the editors are mindful of the historic biases within the experimental poetic tradition, and their contributors present a range of genders and sexual orientations, as well as abilities and ethnicities. Although there is no strict order to the contents, the arrangement displays a number of intersectional interests, ranging from neurodiversity to climate change to gender politics to Afrofuturism. Indeed, one of the stand-out sequences is “We Spiders” by the writer, artist and composer Amy Cutler, whose rhizomatic piece, consisting not only of the main poem but also a series of footnotes followed by a further poem that acts as a commentary, embodies both the interdisciplinarity of her work and the book’s intersectional aims. As Gene-Rowe suggests in their introduction, Corroding the Now constitutes an act of deterritorialization: a reclaiming of SF from its precorporation into technomodernity and a repositioning in terms of a poetic artifice that foregrounds process, fragmentation, dialectic, permeability and situatedness. This is a mighty claim, but it is pleasing to see a poetry anthology in step with contemporary protest movements, inspired by such poet/activists as Sean Bonney, rather than the backs-against-the-wall negative dialectics of the 1990s.

A suite of poems by, amongst others, Charlotte Geater, Jonathan Catherall and Chris Gutkind introduces the dystopian Now that the book seeks to corrode, often via metaphors drawn from the worlds of finance and computerisation. Iris Colomb’s visual poem and Suzie Geeforce’s AR text offer other ways of embedding and appropriating technological systems as poetic resource. These are followed by the first of the essays, Naomi Foyle’s wide-ranging proposal of an ecotopian SF poetics and Peter Middleton’s analysis of autism in poetry by Ron Silliman and science fiction by Ann Leckie. Foyle, inspired by such critics as Vicki Bertram and poet/activists as Sandeep Parmar, delineates a binary opposition (at least in the public imagination) between poetry as “soft” and “feminine” and SF as “hard” and “masculine”. She argues that an ecotopian, as opposed to utopian, SF practice could exist somewhere between these binaries, deconstructing their opposition in the process. Middleton’s account, superbly detailed and sensitively written, is one of the book’s highlights and, I would suggest, essential reading for all further attempts in thinking through disability both in poetry and SF. Drawing in particular upon the work of Erin Manning and Laurent Mottron, Middleton suggests that autism might be best understood as “an entirely different processing system” that produces a “complex network” of sensory perceptions. Using this model of autism as a critical lens, Middleton applies it brilliantly to Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) and the characterisation of Breq, a ship-sized AI downloaded into a single human form. Middleton then finds a similar conceptual framework at play in Silliman’s sequence Ketjak (1978) before concluding that the conceptual schema, which we call poetics, could be regarded as being already a science-fictional discourse.

The next set of poems takes a more political turn. Verity Spott offers an Acker-esque sexual fantasy; Jo Crot (presumably another pseudonym for Jo Lindsay Walton) really, really hates Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye and establishment satirist. Co-editor Richard Parker also offers a surreal fantasy but one in which anarchic notions of community are juxtaposed with genocidal images of state oppression. The following essays focus on the politics of the Anthropocene. Josie Taylor compares Fritz Leiber’s “The Black Gondolier” (2000) with Philip Metres’s poetry sequence, Ode to Oil (2011), in which both texts figure oil as a living, sentient substance. Meanwhile, Fred Carter explores the landscape poetry of Wendy Mulford, a key figure in the development of linguistically innovative poetry during the 1970s and 1980s, and a writer, like Olson, drawn to the history, politics and geography of place, not least the abandoned tin-mines and fragile coastline of Cornwall or the glacial impact upon the shaping of Somerset. Although at first glance Carter’s essay might have little to concern the SF reader, his superb examination of how Mulford handles differing timescales and the relationship between the human and non-human, as in Taylor’s essay, has much to say to SF’s treatment of alterity. Moreover, whereas so-called “new nature writing” has been dominated by the solipsism of male explorers such as Robert Macfarlane or by Mark Fisher’s neo-Marxist rendering of “the weird and the eerie”, Carter points to a woman writer in Mulford who preceded them both and who approached the subject of landscape from an explicitly materialist and feminist perspective.

The essays of Carter and Taylor announce an ecocritical turn in the following poetry by Cutler, Kat Dixon-Ward and Liz Bahs. Kate Pickering’s “Plot Holes”, meanwhile, subjects the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden to the quantum mechanics of Max Planck, playing upon the serpent’s intervention as a singularity—a wormhole—in space and time, which also suggests the possibility for a heretical reading of this key foundational narrative. Pippa Goldschmidt, too, commits a kind of heresy in recounting how she dropped out of astrophysics but discovered another way of making sense of phenomena in the form of poetry. Goldschmidt and Pickering’s contributions inaugurate another shift in the collection towards questions of space, where the radically indeterminate yet entangled relations of quanta (as indicated in Allen Fisher’s somewhat opaque series of prose and poetry observations) are contrasted with the instrumental usages of space travel for personal gain as embodied in the figure of Elon Musk. Unfortunately, although there is much to be criticised about the proposed new era of space exploration, I find that the poems in this section, as well as Robert Kiely’s polemic on SF and poetry, tended towards the doctrinaire and to playing to the gallery. To be really effective they required more of the elegance that Jo Crot displayed (à la Wyndham Lewis) in his take-down of Hislop as a “pseudo-Enemy”.

Instead, a more thorough riposte to the new space economy is advanced in the book’s final essays on Afrofuturism. Sasha Myerson and Katie Stone alternate in leading the reader through the poetry of Sun Ra in order to reveal the unity of thought that emerges through his written fragments, and in their oblique relationship to his wider body of work. Matthew Carbery, too, takes Sun Ra as his starting-point to reflect on the roles of time, history and futurity in the work of the Black Quantum Futurism collective, and in Camae Ayewa’s solo work as Moor Mother. This excellent pairing of essays not only expertly contests the instrumental ownership of space travel but also ends the collection on an optimistic note, by arguing that there has always been, and will always be, Black people in the future no matter the entrepreneurial visions of a Musk or a Bezos.

Overall, then, Corroding the Now is, as in the nature of a chapbook, a somewhat idiosyncratic affair which nevertheless captures a moment where we might see SF and poetry as sharing a common “taproot” (in John Clute’s terminology) or conceptual schema in Middleton’s vocabulary. Despite the attempts of the editors to supply an overriding thesis, readers may tap into either the poetry or the essays, or roam freely between them. Either way, there is much here to enjoy and be stimulated by; it is much more than the curate’s egg that it could have been. In particular, academic readers of SF criticism should note how little the contributors refer to what we think of as our common critical tradition—no mention at all of journals such as Foundation, Extrapolation or Science Fiction Studies—but, instead, they take their inspiration from sources far wider than what we assume to be the critical domain. Indeed, as SF expands into the cultural field, its tropes becoming indivisible from the lived contradictions already experienced by writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from genres not traditionally regarded as “SF”, so we should also pause and reflect on the continued relevance of some of our most cherished critical shibboleths. Although Delany is approvingly cited on several occasions, not once does Darko Suvin appear. Who needs cognitive estrangement when life, as lived, is already sufficiently estranged and in dire need of an art various enough to represent it?

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Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-founder of the feminist imprint Gold SF. In another life, he was Curator of the Eliot Modern Poetry Collection at the University of Kent. He is currently writing a study of J.G. Ballard’s Crash.

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In essence, the process of terraforming is quite simple: find an inhospitable planet and change its ecosystem to transform it into a garden. The existing planet, be it Venus, or one of the seven theoretically terraformable planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, or the planet called Sask-E in Newitz’s text, maintains its motion about its sun, but everything else about it becomes new, different, better. Yet this process is in fact complex, difficult, tedious, and requires a tremendous amount of work and even more time. Moreover, it renders extinct the existing ecosystem, which may well not have been hospitable to humans, but was unlikely to have been entirely devoid of life. To actually terraform a planet requires vast resources of time, capital, and labor, in addition to the continuity of focus and organization necessary to maintain the process over a timescale likely longer than that of recorded human history.

Anyone reading this review is likely to understand that SF outside of pure adventure stories generally works on more than one level: it provides us with an engaging story about a world different from our own and permits us to read that world as an estrangement of our own as a means of critiquing or reframing some aspect of our societies. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has its inhospitable planet right in its title: it uses the Moon as a penal colony in order to describe the conditions under which an anarcho-libertarian society might evolve. The engaging story of how a computer repairman is led by an artificial intelligence to help direct a revolution against Earth also enables us to explore anarcho-libertarianism from the perspective of its adherents; the novel shows us that nearly anyone who has the opportunity to escape anarcho-libertarianism does so at once, but compels us to infer this while at the same time having its narrator extol its virtues. It’s quite possible to read Harsh Mistress as promoting rather than critiquing the political system it examines, because of the layers of subtlety in the text. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed performs through its own engaging story a structurally similar and even more nuanced presentation and critique of anarcho-communism with its inhospitable planet and the intense and less than totally successful attempt to terraform it over the decades since its colonization. The Terraformers, at its heart, is a fascinating piece of science-fictional metafiction: it compels us as readers to perform the complex, difficult, and time-consuming work of transforming over a hundred thousand words into an interlocked ecosystem of text hospitable to meaning.

The text presents us, in the year 59,006 of a calendar that we’re told began somewhere around now, with the planet Sask-E, whose terraforming is in its final stages. The Verdance Corporation, over the course of forty thousand years, had first seeded the oceans with blue-green algae to transform its atmosphere, then worked on seeding and maintaining a new ecosystem so as to create a version of Earth from the Pleistocene—i.e., the period of glacial cycles between c. 2.6 million and 11,600 years ago, during which hominins developed into anatomically modern humans. Verdance plans to profit from this by selling plots of land to the idle rich, who can then decant themselves or remote-operate human bodies in order to enjoy the unspoilt/created wilderness or life in the cities prebuilt by a different, subcontracted corporation. The ecosystem is maintained/expanded by a cadre of rangers, from which our initial protagonist Destry is drawn. She spots an anomaly, which turns out to be a squatter: someone off-planet operating the body of a human enjoying the Pleistocene by building a shelter and eating and skinning animals, the last of which horrifies Destry. She eliminates and recycles the remote body, then returns to base only to find that the Verdance VP in charge of the project is furious with her: the squatter was in fact a potential customer.

The desire to get away from direct supervision leads Destry to a distant location where Verdance is having a river rerouted to make an area more attractive to potential clients. She finds a community of Archaeans, the original rangers, who seeded the oceans and were then discarded by Verdance and supposedly left to die in the new atmosphere inhospitable to them, but who instead created an underground and hitherto fully concealed city near a volcano. The rerouting of the river will cause them huge problems, so they ally with Destry: because the Archaeans have (an also hitherto fully concealed) system of machines with which they can manipulate Sask-E’s plate tectonics, they are able to threaten Verdance’s profits to the point where Verdance is compelled to negotiate with them. The first and longest of the three sections of Newitz’s text ends with a treaty whereby the inhabitants of the underground city are recognized as self-governing. The second two sections address conditions after the planet has come to be inhabited by those to whom Verdance has sold the experience. At no point does the text raise the question of what the original ecosystem of the planet might have been like.

A primary novum of The Terraformers is that technology enables the creation of sentient nonhuman animals: in the text, larger herbivores such as cows and moose (though in fact neither animal is a pure herbivore here on Earth), then smaller ones such as cats and naked mole rats, all the way down to earthworms in the later sections. Verdance limits the sentience of animals and even some humans, in order that they have only enough to do their jobs properly. When a group of rangers including a sentient cow encounter a corporate dairy farm in the second section, great hay is made of the horror this evokes in the characters, both in that one might choose to drink milk from cows rather than almonds or oats and also in that animals’ potential sentience would be as limited as that of these cows clearly is. Later, a means is found to cancel the limitations on sentience and further the treatment of nonhuman animals as people. This is the closest The Terraformers comes to a traditional presentation of SF: we can read this particular story, engaging or not, and also understand the hypocrisy of how we in the West in the 21^st century treat nonhuman animals. There is cow’s milk in the coffee I’m sipping as I write this, and when I’m done, I’m going to use the beef I bought at the farmer’s market to make tacos, but I would never even consider exploiting or mistreating the cat currently on my lap and whom I absolutely treat as capable of understanding what I say to her. I’m well aware of my own hypocrisy, but another reader might well be moved by Nemitz’s portrayal of how Verdance bottlenecks the intelligence of nonhuman animals and thereby re-examine their own practices or beliefs.

This serves as an example through which we as readers can understand what must be done to most of the rest of the text. With respect to characters, Harsh Mistress and The Dispossessed give us detailed background material on how Man and Shevek came to be: their childhood and young adult experiences determine their perspectives, their politics, their very language. Heinlein and Le Guin give us characters who have evolved inside their hothouse environments, in such a manner that they are not only vivid and engaging characters, but also represent their political perspectives from the point of view of natives of those societies. The Terraformers is metafictional: it compels us to extrapolate from the characters’ words and actions what made them come to take these positions. Destry is the only one of a couple of dozen speaking parts who gets any background at all, and it’s quite minimal. It’s up to us as readers to infer, or to create out of whole cloth, the societies or particular circumstances that might have created the other characters such that they all—humans, Archaeans and sentient animals alike—have essentially the same attitudes as very self-consciously progressive young Western people from our own century, even though the book is set on another planet, fifty-six millennia in the future. It occurred to me as I wrote the characters’ names and species on an index card in order to keep track of who they were, that Nemitz’s near-total lack of differentiation among them was part and parcel of the metafiction: it is as if the text were the blank planet upon whose new ecosystem was the complicated and time-consuming work I was doing to formulate species, societies or families that might have generated such convergent characters.

This same metafictional trope of terraformation exists on many other levels of the text, as well. We are told by Destry that the sort of ranger she is generally has the protection of the ERT, an interstellar umbrella organization of rangers, but that Verdance has cloned, or built from scratch (it’s not clear) rangers not subject to this protection. Destry knows this despite the repeated statement that Verdance prevents its on-planet employees from accessing interstellar networks. It’s left to us as readers to build the network of whispers or samizdat that might have clued Destry and her fellows into the knowledge of this protection coupled with the inability to (e.g.) signal the organization that might come to their aid. We are entirely left to infer, or to build for ourselves, what society might exist so far in the future that still has corporations controlling planets yet permitting something akin to free will among human employees, instead of using drones or AI to maintain their new ecosystem. We’re told the controller of the squatter body destroyed by Destry is thinking about taking Verdance to court, but entirely left to build what a society that still had courts this far in the future might be like. We’re told that Verdance has been at this for at least forty thousand years, but left to build from the ground up an economic system where corporations, which are governed by the constant desire of their investors for short-term profit increases, not only exist over that long of a timespan but also are able to justify to those investors the tremendous work and cost involved in terraforming a planet in terms of its distant future profit. Perhaps this is a deflationary universe, where the value of a given sum of money increases rather than decreases over time. We don’t know! We get to impose our own ecosystem upon the text, and thereby replicate the process of terraforming.

We’re constantly told things, rather than shown them: it’s up to us to terraform this text. Whereas Heinlein or Le Guin might have a character tell us one thing and show us another, The Terraformers leaves it up to us to show what might have happened. Very early in the text, the narration tells us that:

The ancient order of environmental engineers and first responders traced their lineage all the way back to the Farm Revolutions that ended the Anthropocene on Earth, and started the calendar system people still used today. According to old Handbook lore, the Trickster Squad—Sky, Beaver, Muskrat and Wasakeejack—founded the Environmental Rescue Team 59,006 years ago. That’s when the legendary heroes saved the world from apocalyptic floods by inventing a new form of agriculture. The Great Bargain, they called it. A way to open communication with other life forms in order to manage the land more democratically. (13)

We’ve already explored the question of how Destry knows this yet remains essentially a slave to Verdance, unable both to access networks and receive help from the ERT. But there’s more metafiction to this. Imagine this story in the hands of Heinlein, where some grizzled old Loonie would be telling the narrative with some detail to an audience, likely with sardonic commentary by some equally cantankerous author insert. Imagine it in the hands of Le Guin, who would show it to us through a tapestry or interpretive dance, complete with storytelling that made the legend meaningful (and plausible) and also included the distortions imposed by the vast timescale of the novel. But instead, we’re simply handed this story, and then the text essentially never touches upon it again other than to use the phrase Great Bargain every so often. What did the Trickster Squad actually do? What is the new form of agriculture? The text shows us multiple examples of farm fields: wheat, sugar, lavender, and somehow the fifty-Xth millennium still has people growing and using tobacco. How did this save the world? How did the Trickster Squad overcome the modern corporate state yet still preserve for aeons a corporate state? Or is this a new corporate state, and if so, how does it differ from our own? The text of The Terraformers does not show nor tell us any of this, and while at first this might be frustrating, it may eventually dawn upon other readers that it’s metafictional. We get to terraform the text: it’s almost literally a whole blank new world. It’s tremendously exciting.

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Ian Campbell is the editor of SFRA Review.

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The trope of the city as a literal living, breathing entity is not new: it appears in the weird sci-fi of H. P. Lovecraft (whom Jemisin mentions in The City We Became) and Jeff VanderMeer to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino’s postmodernist narratives. However, what makes Jemisin’s cities stand out are their manifest avatars—human beings. Her Great Cities duology, The City We Became and The World We Make, is set in contemporary New York. It revolves around New York/Neek and his boroughs/avatars as they try to take back control of the city from an extraterrestrial entity that threatens to consume New York.

N. K. Jemisin is a multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winning sci-fi and fantasy author, best known for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her protagonists are trapped within a constant struggle against alien power structures that are usually thwarted via the use of fantastical elements. Great Cities is then comparable to a dystopic world ruled by utter chaos, anarchy, and totalitarianism that the Other entities try to impose upon New York and the rest of the world. The human manifestations of the boroughs must now wage a war for a normal world order free of surveillance and xenophobia. The juxtaposition of the alien world onto New York can be read as the literal descend of a totalitarian regime.

The first part of the duology ends in a promising note as the boroughs struggle and almost succeed at keeping “the Woman in White” at bay. The second part, however, is where things spiral as four of the boroughs—Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens—and New Jersey are forced to encounter the Woman who strives to get rid of them one by one. The novel follows the first-person narratives of each of them, and of Staten Island, which is exiled in The City We Became and subsequently aligns with the antagonists in their personal and multi-versal fights. The World We Make is Jemisin’s attempt at creating a world that lives and breathes on its own, full of cities that are constantly born and reborn with the help of their human manifestations. Employing the usual trope of good vs. evil, Jemisin stages a fight against xenophobia and gender inequality as the cities must fight with an alien entity that threatens to literally consume the earth.

Being a Butler scholar, Jemisin has always expressed a deep interest in Octavia E. Butler’s fiction. The premise of The World We Make, for instance, is comparable to Butler’s 1977 novel Mind of My Mind where Butler imagines an interconnected world in which telepaths are connected to each other via threads and patterns, constantly drawing energies from each other. It is this kaleidoscopic world that determines the future of humanity, a telepathic network that exists because of intricate mental connections and is ultimately controlled by a “patternmaster” who can mentally control/kill each of the participants. Jemisin’s avatars, then, behave in a similar fashion. They draw energy from abstract concepts such as mathematical equations or rap music or from concrete phenomena such as credit cards and souvenirs in order to amass enough power to fight their common enemy.

By creating a world that functions on proximity and the need to connect and cohere, Jemisin proposes the need for communication and community in our real world. This is not to say that Jemisin’s cities are free of racism, sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy. She advocates a world where multiversal corporate companies that enforce deep rooted misogyny and xenophobia can be fought with the help of goodwill and community. For instance, the extraterrestrial entity appears in the form of an impeccably dressed white woman who inadvertently captures human beings by attaching a small, white, fleshy tentacle into their bodies. Once you have this tentacle sprouting out of your body, you are under the absolute control of the “Woman in White” (Jemisin does not shy away from using conspicuous tropes of race and surveillance here).

Though she employs fantasy and speculation, Jemisin’s novel is steeped in realistic representations of the world. Neek notes at one point,

Periodically R’lyeh [Woman in White] sends forth a hollow, tooth-aching, atonal song that echoes across the whole city. The song’s a problem; listen to it for more than a few minutes and you start thinking Mexicans and birth control are what’s really wrong with the world, and maybe a nice mass shooting would solve both problems. (10)

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WORKS CITED

Butler, Octavia E. Seed to Harvest. Grand Central Publishing, 2007.

Sreelakshmy M is Visiting Faculty (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India. She recently submitted her doctoral thesis titled “Reproduction, (M)Othering and Multispecies Community: A Study of Octavia E. Butler’s Select Fiction” at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. Her areas of interest are speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, and fantasy studies. She has published in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS).

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The winner of the 2021 Otherwise Award (previously known as the Tiptree Award) that “celebrates science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of speculative narrative that expand and explore our understanding of gender,” and a nominee for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Light from Uncommon Stars was published at the end of September 2021. The breathtaking cover design, with an elegant koi fish swimming in space, sets the reader up for an unexpected science fictional journey.  

In the beginning, we meet Katrina Nguyen, a young trans woman running away from trauma and abuse. Then quickly, in a parallel story, we meet Shizuka Satomi. We know little about her other than the fact that in comparison with Katrina, she is privileged and lives in a comfortable neighbourhood in Monterey Park, Los Angeles with Astrid who looks after her. This little introduction of both characters frames chapter one, and already, we are treated to perspectives of Asian-American communities—the big white Asian bus system, convergence of Asian languages, pentatonic folk songs, and more—that are very rarely seen in science fiction. But is Light from Uncommon Stars science fiction?

Soon after we meet the two main characters, we learn that Shizuka needs to find a seventh prodigy to be trained and have their soul delivered to the devil—she has already delivered six!—to escape damnation. On a drive, she gets lost in her own thoughts and finds herself needing the restroom, having missed several exits on the highway in San Gabriel Valley. She pulls off the next ramp, but comes to a residential area with only a big donut peeking over the trees. It is at Starrgate Donut that Shizuka meets Lan Tran, a retired alien starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. And it is afterwards, by a pond that is within walking distance from the donut shop that Shizuka meets Katrina, shares half a donut with her, and hears her play the violin for the first time.

In a Barnes & Noble interview with Miwa Messer, Ryka Aoki explains that these three women characters, she feels, would not normally have met, but when she throws them together on the page, they find companionship, unexpected family, and love, even though they might not feel they deserve it. The chance encounters are what propels the story forward, and each character questions not only their goals, but also their limitations: how they have limited their dreams in what they wanted to do. As they learn this of themselves and each other, it drives them to be more.

Light from Uncommon Stars is a story of relationships and of relationalism, as introduced by zoetology—the philosophy derived from ancient East Asian teaching that is grounded in the knowledge that association is a fact (Ames 87). These women—all heroes—are not portrayed as binary heroes. They are full characters who are aware that there is no end to the end, where the story doesn’t stop once they have reached their goals. Aoki describes this as a trait of the women she admires who have a realism with them. Ambition becomes much more nuanced because they realise that it is always balanced by repercussions, or damage one might do to the world, or even just remembering that even if they climb Everest, after they come down, they will still need to wash dishes (Messer).  

This associativeness explored through the characters’ journeys that are full of love, kindness, hardship, and difficulties, flows deeper yet into the core of the story itself as it balances genre-defying juxtapositions with the devil and a curse, aliens, interstellar travel, classical music, and American fast food as prominent features. Readers used to mainstream science fiction that provides clear binary storytelling, might question whether the book best belongs to fantastika, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres. Or it might even be perceived to be kitsch. However, the onslaught of concepts is there to show us that there is a world (and indeed, our world is one of them) that can be a loving home to such diversity. It is crucial for creating the space to make the story work. Borrowing Seo-Young Chu’s informal definition of science fiction as “a representational technology powered by a combination of lyric and narrative forces that enable SF to generate mimetic accounts of cognitively estranging referents,” Light from Uncommon Stars’s cognitively estranging referents create such a distracting scene that it forces us to accept the Asian characters, transgender narrative, even the classical music theme, as the realism needed to ground the mimetic accounts (73). This goes beyond its representation of minority communities: it normalises the reality of these communities’ lives.

In A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, David Mura points out that “for most Asian Americans, American culture provides two unsatisfactory identities”: 1) one that is “perpetually foreign”; 2) a second described as the “model minority”, and a third that allows Asian Americans to understand that their “experiences are far more complicated than white Americans understand, and, indeed, than even [they themselves] may understand” (11).

Aoki sees writing as a public act; as an introvert—she is usually a very private person—it is a way for her to take part in society (Messer). With this skill, she deftly spins these complicated experiences into the story that is Light from Uncommon Stars because of, and for, her own experiences as an Asian American trans woman growing up in San Gabriel Valley.I am a British East and Southeast Asian woman, a classically-trained musician, a migrant, a teacher, a writer, a geek, and more. When I finished reading the book, I cried. I felt acknowledged, loved, and seen, not realising that these were things that I have been craving. Light from Uncommon Stars is a wonderfully entertaining, heartfelt, and wholesome novel, and if you give it more time and space, you will find yourself learning from it. Learning, as Aoki tells us, involves facing parts of the world that we are not able to change, and we might not be able to experience things the way we wish them to be (Messer):

‘When you’re trans, you’re always looking and listening,’ Katrina explained later. ‘It’s following, but it’s more than that. You need to see what might be coming, hear the next danger ahead.’

Shizuka nodded. So it wasn’t merely follow – it was follow and predict. Perhaps even follow and perceive.

This was an entirely different level of skill. (Aoki 130)

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WORKS CITED

Bartter, Martha A. “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1986, pp. 148-58.

Anders, Charlie Jane. “Ryka Aoki with Charlie Jane Anders / Light from Uncommon Stars.” YouTube, uploaded by The Booksmith, 28 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsCI7jjIX6k.

Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Messer, Miwa. “#PouredOver: Ryka Aoki on Light from Uncommon Stars.” YouTube, uploaded by Barnes & Noble, 4 August 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze_thqxXNdY.

Mura, David, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing. University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Yen Ooi is a 2023 Hugo Awards finalist writer-researcher whose works explore East and Southeast Asian culture, identity, and values. Her projects aim to cultivate cultural engagement in our modern, technology-driven lives. She is currently completing her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London looking at the development of Sinophone science fiction by East Asian diaspora writers and writers from Chinese-speaking nations. Yen is narrative director and writer on Road to Guangdong, a narrative-puzzle driving game. She is author of Rén: The Ancient Chinese Art of Finding Peace and Fulfilment (non-fiction), Sun: Queens of Earth (novel), and A Suspicious Collection of Short Stories and Poetry (collection). She is also co-editor of Ab Terra, Brain Mill Press’s science fiction imprint. When she’s not got her head in a book, she lectures, mentors and plays the viola. www.yenooi.com