Author: sfrarev

Review of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

Andrew Sztehlo

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

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.

Review of Spread Me

Shannon Blake Skelton

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

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 19^th 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.

Review of Extremity

Shannon Blake Skelton

Binge, Nicholas. Extremity. Tordotcom, 2025.

From H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) to Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s A Time Odyssey Trilogy (2003-2007), writers have probed temporalities to question the nature of existence, our relation to history, and the limits of ethics in relation to technology. Extremity, a 2025 novella by Nicholas Binge, fuses the UK police procedural with the time travel subgenre to concoct a brisk, action-driven work about murder, a nightmarish future, and a mysterious time machine.

Binge’s 2023 breakout Ascension garnered raves from critics and the public. The novel concerns the sudden appearance of a mountain the size of Everest in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and an expedition that explores the mammoth structure. Ascension was selected as a New York Times ‘Editor’s Choice Pick’ with many noting its successful blending of action, suspense, and Lovecraftian elements. Binge’s Dissolution (2025) focuses on a man whose Alzheimer’s may be concealing the erasure of his memory by an external force. Extremity joins multiple novellas published annually by Tordotcom. The Tor Publishing Group imprint remains dedicated to the (re)-emerging novella market.

Constructed from three interwoven testimonies of investigators, Extremity’s action begins with the murder of billionaire tech giant Bruno Donaldson in contemporary London. Across the city, far from Donaldson’s penthouse, an exact replica of Donaldson—also dead—is located under a graffiti scrawled bridge.  This bizarre discovery sets into motion a series of rapidly accumulating dead bodies and strange occurrences across the city. The reader traces much of the narrative through Julia Torgrimsen, a celebrity detective who has drifted into retirement and obscurity. She has been asked to return to determine the cause of these odd events. By her side is rookie DC Mark Cochrane and veteran DCI John Grossman. The investigators follow up with Donaldson’s criminal colleagues, bodies begin to pile up, an assassin is revealed, and the investigators stumble across a series of files that have future stock reports, photographs of body parts, and labels such as “date of attempted breach” and “date of disposal.” Eventually, our protagonists uncover a conspiracy that involves Earth in 6 million years, interaction with an unknown malevolent intelligence, boneless clones, and the ability to travel to the future.

Perhaps the strongest part of Extremity resides in its structure and action-driven writing. Composed of three alternating testimonies from our investigators, the narrative cohesively presents the action to its readers. Unfortunately, the three characters’ voices are interchangeable. With three differing perspectives, I was expecting to witness conflicting perspectives on the events. Yet, very rarely do the investigators provide contradictory testimonies. In a structure that could have yielded narrative complexity, the author employs the structure as a contrivance. In essence, the chosen structure and form minimally serve the content of the work.

Undoubtedly, Extremity possesses a strong hook: two dead bodies, identical in all ways, are discovered. The proceduralism sprints quickly from page to page, providing the reader with little time to catch their breath or to consider the logic of the tale or the ideas at play. And perhaps that is effective, because little of the work holds up to scrutiny regarding character, reason, motivation, or science. Extremity works as an excellent “action film” on the page, but not as science fiction invested in anything beyond an entertaining joyride. The writing itself propels the reader along—yet reflection on the events and characters reveals that the pace conceals many of the work’s faults. Extremity serves as a lightning quick read but is rarely challenging. That is not to say there is not a place for literature as pure entertainment crafted for pleasure and action, but this novella could be enriched by embracing complexities, paradoxes, and unseen concepts to captivate the reader beyond action.

The plot owes a great deal to police procedurals that have remained popular on UK screens and pages for decades. The science fiction elements of the novella truly manifest toward the end of the work. The “science” is cursory at best, yet there are a few time travel dynamics that are compelling, but—as with other elements—they are not sufficiently explored. Though one would expect a novella merging the police procedural and science fiction to locate commonalities with the work of Phillip K. Dick, I see little crossover.

Extremity does not further the subgenre in terms of intellectual concerns. That said, Extremity moves at a whiplash pace and illustrates how to propel action forward. Sadly, this results in implausible plot points, shallow characters, and ideas that would benefit from further contemplation. Unfortunately, characters make choices that seem unaligned with their established personalities, information dumps intrude, leaps of deduction are made, and there stands no real probing of the science and consequences of time travel. Further, police procedural cliches abound, while the lack of credibility in action makes one wish for more heavy editorial interference. There is no question that Binge writes solid action. Now, if he could graft the sophisticated ideas and challenging notions that thrive in science fiction to his writing in Extremity, I believe the result would be fulfilling.

In all, Extremity stands as a fast-paced, action-driven novella that is not invested in exploring the power and paradox of time travel but simply in taking the reader for a thrilling jaunt. The work trades in heady ideas of morality and temporal alterations for pushing the characters through a series of kinetic scenes. Extremity owes less to other noteworthy entries in the time travel subgenre and rests firmly in the tradition of many entertaining pulp tales that provided rip-roaring action but very few notions regarding humanity, time, and the consequences of our actions. Extremity does not further the time travel subgenre in any determinable way, but serves as an inoffensive, at times credibility-straining, piece of escapist literature.

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.

Review of Starspawn and Other Stories

Andy Sawyer

Simsa, Cyril. Starspawn and Other Stories. Invocations Press, 2025.

Cyril Simsa’s previous collection, Lost Cartographies, was sub-titled Tales of Another Europe. Starspawn both expands and contracts his focus, evoking (as he says in his introduction) the techniques of Arthur Machen to summon images of the buried past of Muswell Hill, but also echoing Michael Moorcock’s multiversal cultural snapshots in a story in which “Jerry Comenius” waits at the Berlin Astrodome for the return of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the Moon, and drawing upon 1940s horror film and the undercurrents of New York sf fandom. The result is another collection enhanced by the way Simsa excavates the ambiguous archaeologies of place, time, and narrative to reveal the strangeness of the familiar.

The title story begins with an uncanny vision conjured in a North London pub by the eponymous band, who get it together not in the obligatory country cottage but in a borrowed studio near a golf course: part of a number of green spaces carved out of what was once primordial forest. An attempt to capture the spirit of the pastoral by drumming on the trees takes some of the band into this forest. Two of them return, leaving bass player Dora behind. Band leader Moon and producer Jack later find themselves back in this strange realm. Their encounter with Lilith/Hecate/the Owl Queen results in the return of Dora, but the future career of the band suggests that, in this close encounter of Kenneth Grahame’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, goat-footed Pan is, in a world less bound by gender stereotypes, no longer the embodiment of pleasure. “Moje Sestra” shows a young researcher attempting to uncover the reason behind Elizabeth Russell’s famous cameo in the 1942 film Cat People—a trail which leads him to Jack Williamson’s novel Darker Than You Think (1948) and the feuds and wild stories of sf fandom, and finally to recently-discovered reels of film from a Czech director showing a deeper truth behind Val Newton’s production of Cat People. “Shuffle” is a more conventional science fiction story, if a device that allows you to access alternative pasts and futures is “conventional”. What seems to be a scientific experiment also seems to undermine the very concept of a consensus reality.

“Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue” sweeps through the cultural detritus of the past century: there is a cameo appearance by Hugo Gernsback and an amusing young novelist who writes exciting space-travel stories for boys (and their fathers) waiting to board her first trip to the Moon.  Its Moorcockian flavour is offered by “Jerry Comenius”: a professional flâneur, or, as another person notes, “wastrel”, watches: “I soak up the life of the people around me, and I reflect it back at them.” “On the Ridgeway” explores more fully the notion hinted at in “Shuffle” about splicing ancient DNA into the living human genome, but what ensues after one subject, Skutru, escapes (or is allowed to escape) is more thoroughly an exploration of the psychology of landscape, as he is traced to the Ridgeway locations of many psychogeographical emanations to a barrow which might predate even the Uffington White Horse and the travellers who crossed Doggerland to claim the hills on the far side. The final story, “The Shadow of Leaves Under Water”, switches focus but remains a snapshot of space, time, and identity. A former academic, Dr Durnsford, is journeying from Cambridge to Ely. It is the future of our time and much of East Anglia is in the grip of rising sea levels. Most of the story is Durnford’s meditation as she stops off at a hostel before completing her journey. Cambridge University as a symbol of rational learning with Ely Cathedral with its carvings of Green Men serving as a reminder of the new Spirit of the Land. One word which comes to her as she considers the future is “rehabilitation”: the return of the land to its original state of grace.

Like Arthur Machen, Simsa’s writing oscillates between two cultures with London (where Prague resident Simsa was brought up) as the ambiguous place they have in common. It is a place, both writers tell us, vividly evoked through place-names and memory and yet rendered almost invisible by the way it is built upon almost-forgotten networks and architectures which, when invoked, remind us of their presence.  Many stories calling up “old gods” drag them to the present as threats or revelation. Simsa is more subtle.  Pan, for instance, for Machen an embodiment of monstrosity, is, in “Starspawn,” “Mr P”, a “delinquent upstart”. In “The Shadow of Leaves” we are reminded that, despite the image of the “Green Man”, “wildness had never been gendered”. The great joy in reading Simsa’s psychogeographies is that he makes us look carefully at them. Many of us, revisiting old haunts and places once lived in but long ago departed from, will have encountered a peculiar double-vision: the memory of the streets and landscapes we once knew suddenly and vividly overlain upon those we are seeing. Simsa’s stories offer something like this. The past is something that is never gone, never lost, and in Starspawn we see pasts and former histories sneaking out of the shadows to remind us of their presence.

Andy Sawyer is a retired librarian, researcher, teacher, critic, and reviewer of sf. From 1993-2018 he was librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool Library. From 2002-2012 he directed an MA in Science Fiction Studies for the University’s Department of English. He is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, English Department, University of Liverpool. He was the 2008 recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Clareson Award for services to science fiction. He co-edited (with David Ketterer) Plan for Chaos, a previously unpublished novel by John Wyndham (Liverpool University Press, 2009) and (with Peter Wright) Teaching Science Fiction (Palgrave 2011). He compiled a four-volume collection of significant essays on science fiction for Routledge’s “Critical Concepts” series (2020) and a critical edition of Jane Webb Loudon’s 1827 The Mummy!, one of the earliest British science fiction novels. His most recent book is Terry Pratchett for Liverpool University Press’s “Writers and Their Works” series.

Review of The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction

Timothy S. Miller

Haslam, Jason, Ed. The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction. Broadview Press, 2025.

Editor Jason Haslam’s Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction promises to cover and contextualize two hundred years of speculative fiction in a neat package suitable for course adoption. Because so few anthologies of SF intended for the classroom have been published, especially in recent years, I will dedicate the first part of this review to an extended comparison between this new Broadview effort and the title with which it most obviously competes for a place on the syllabus, the landmark Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, assembled in 2010 by the editors of Science Fiction Studies at the time, Arthur B. Evans, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk. This enormously distinguished roster of scholars makes for a tough act to follow, and I expect that Haslam has studied the Wesleyan anthology carefully and taken some valuable lessons from it. In fact, many of the authors and almost twenty percent of the story titles overlap: H. G. Wells, “The Star” (1897); E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909); Leslie F. Stone, “The Conquest of Gola” (1931); Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950); Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967); James Tiptree, Jr., “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972); Joanna Russ, “When it Changed” (1972); Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983); and Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008). Here in the coinciding nine stories is a spine that we could certainly agree to enshrine in a canon of eminently important but also eminently teachable works of science fiction. The most obvious difference between the two anthologies—apart from individual stories in the Wesleyan not present in the Broadview that one might miss, such as, from my own syllabi, C. L. Moore’s indispensable “Shambleau” (1933)—is that the latter features considerably less “Golden Age” SF from the 1930s–50s, with the Wesleyan containing 17 stories out of its total 52 from these crucial decades, compared with only 11 of the Broadview’s 53 selections. The Broadview therefore is somewhat less useful in offering a historical picture of science fiction in its classic era around the midpoint of the twentieth century, but it more than makes up for this deficiency in other respects that I will detail below.

While quite diverse in comparison with earlier such efforts and for the state of SF and SF studies in 2010, the table of contents for the Wesleyan now looks far less so by comparison. By my count, the Broadview has almost double the number of BIPOC authors and women authors (though in each case still amounting to fewer than half of the total authors included). The story is not really in the raw numbers, however, but rather in how Haslam has so admirably taken steps to incorporate into his selection philosophy and editorial framing several important developments in both SF publishing and SF scholarship from the past decade and a half. Most notably, The Broadview of Anthology of Science Fiction contains an unexpectedly robust history of Afrofuturism and Black SF—with pieces by Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sun Ra, Gil Scott-Heron, Charles Saunders, and Derrick Bell, among others—as well as showing the influence of the broader concept of CoFuturisms recently popularized by The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. While Haslam acknowledges in his introduction that the book does not attempt to cover comprehensively the same range of futurisms treated in the handbook, “it is hoped that the current text can be a starting point for readers’ more in-depth journey into these multiple genealogies” (35). Authors from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa are represented here, as well as multiple Indigenous writers from Canada, although the bulk of the stories come from the US and the UK, and, unlike the Wesleyan, Haslam for reasons of scope has limited selections to works originally written in English (meaning no Verne or Lem). One final feature that distinguishes the Broadview from several other such anthologies including the Wesleyan is the effort to gesture towards additional forms and media via the inclusion of some poetry, song lyrics, and even a few Buck Rogers comic strips.

Haslam’s introduction suggests many possible definitions, histories, and points of origin of SF, grounding an account of SF’s multiple communities of practice in John Rieder’s work, and he prudently opts to begin the book with texts from the early nineteenth century. The choice to open specifically with Washington Irving’s “Men of the Moon” from his History of New York, however, may seem idiosyncratic, as this piece of Swiftian satire, with its speculative content firmly in the subjunctive, could serve as a disorienting beginning to the story of science fiction for a student. Haslam’s handful of vocabulary glosses and other notes will not do enough by themselves to help some students navigate this offering and, say, connect it to Star Wars and Star Trek. Of course, the book need not be read or assigned in order from cover to cover, and Haslam sketches multiple paths through the selections that one might follow other than the strictly chronological, this being the one that necessarily places Irving’s 1809 text first. To this end, the book devotes space to three separate arrangements of the same table of contents, organized by “Period/Chronological”; “Multiple Histories, Multiple Futures”; and “Thematic and Sub-Genre.” Following Irving, the stories in the first chronological section by Poe, Shelley, and Wells provide a more typical foundation for thinking through proto-SF. Florence McLandburgh’s always unexpected “The Automaton Ear” (1873) also serves as a unique glimpse into late 19th-century culture and science, as well as kicking off the book’s clear objective of placing more women writers in the longer history of SF prior to second-wave feminism, and thus moving away from a typical version of that story casting Mary Shelley as anomalous, followed by generations of male descendants. The many women writers who have always been present throughout SF’s history appear throughout the collection situated in their proper historical contexts, a vital step forward from reprinting their stories primarily in anthologies highlighting “forgotten” women writers.   

The second chronological section, “Foundations of SF II: Enter the Twentieth Century: 1900-1936,” succeeds in capturing the richness and complexity of the early pulp magazine era while not centering only a handful of familiar SF pulp magazines, beginning with the increasingly popular proto-solarpunk fantasia “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Haslam judiciously includes some verse reprinted in pulp magazines as well as a story by Francis Stevens predating Gernsback’s first issue of Amazing Stories but published in the all-important generalist pulp magazine All-Story (“Friend Island,” 1918), broadening the story of the early magazines beyond the usual emphasis on the Gernsback-Campbell lineage alone. I was also pleased to find here two stories that I teach in just about every course I can because their relevance to the present only continues to increase, Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920). Classic pulp stories by Lovecraft and Leslie F. Stone round out this section, which in my view collectively provides an astoundingly compact and effective introduction to these key decades in SF’s emergence. I also appreciate Haslam’s use of images from this period and elsewhere across the anthology, which help to convey media ecologies quite alien to contemporary students and illuminate the original contexts for these works’ circulation and reading.

The only absence from the second section that I truly felt deeply was, again, C. L. Moore’s, but one of her most famous stories co-authored with Henry Kuttner, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (1943), instead appears at the commencement of the subsequent section on the “Golden Age,” in enviable company sandwiched between Isaac Asimov’s ur-robot story “Liar!” (1941) and Ray Bradbury’s often anthologized apocalyptic story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950). All are superb teaching texts, and this section notably moves on not only to core science fiction luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, and Judith Merril but continues tracing Black speculative writing and thinking through one of James H. Hill’s newspaper stories, “The Space Ship” (1950), and Afrofuturist jazz icon Sun Ra’s poem “The Space Age Cannot Be Avoided” (1957).

The fourth section covers the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, titled “Revolutions and New Waves.” It provides a textbook overview of the new feminist SF of the time (Zoline, Tiptree, Russ) and stories by Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and William Gibson that characterize the experimentation as formal and otherwise of the time. One unique selling point for the book is a previously unpublished version of Delany’s story “Among the Blobs” (1976, 1987), accompanied by a new introduction from the author himself, but, as far as I can tell, the differences are minimal, and largely involve paragraph breaks and a few words switched out here and there. As a meta-history of science fiction and its futures itself, Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) works particularly well in an anthology such as this one, pairing nicely with some of the stories from earlier sections. I will again praise Haslam’s care to highlight works by women and also BIPOC authors in each section: here, the Saunders story, Scott-Heron’s spoken word track on the Apollo program “Whitey on the Moon” (1970)—a piece I have taught in many courses myself to great success—and, in the next section, William F. Wu’s 1983 story “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” help dispel the myth that SF was thoroughly white up until the 21^st century, with Delany, like Shelley, the single exception proving the rule.  

The penultimate historical section navigates the later 80s to the early 2000s and as such struggles more than other groupings to tell a coherent story, perhaps because by this time science fiction had begun to mean so many things and pull in so many directions, and Haslam is clearly eager to hasten on to the present. The organizing framework offered by the title is “The Digital Age and Its Discontents,” and cyberpunk stories do appear here in abundance, with an emphasis on women authors such as Pat Cadigan, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Eden Robinson. But Gibson’s story had already appeared in the previous grouping, and, with only two stories from the 90s compared to the ten selections published since the 90s that the book contains, this section flounders somewhat as an implicit historical account or exercise in periodization. It overlaps conceptually and temporally with the preceding section, which shares the 80s, as well as with the following one, with which it shares the early 2000s; it is also impossible to tell the story of SF at this time without extensive consideration of film, games, and other media, so increasingly important to the meaning and understanding of the genre. I do not question the inclusion of any particular text here: I teach Butler’s “Speech Sounds” and Bell’s “The Space Traders” at every opportunity myself, and Nalo Hopkinson and N. K. Jemisin as well, but I am simply observing the high heterogeneity of this section, more a symptom of SF than this SF anthology, in the end.

One of course expects this kind of heterogeneity and lack of clear historical narrative in any account of the present moment, and so the same could be said of the final section on contemporary SF that features work by eight authors published between 2008 and 2019. Beyond showcasing stories by some of the major authors of this century—Ted Chiang, China Miéville, and Ken Liu—it also includes more work from less well-known Indigenous authors—here, Richard Van Camp and Drew Hayden Taylor and from Africa, Dilman Dila’s “The Last Storyteller” (2019), appropriately the final story in the book. I might have grouped Hopkinson and Jemisin in this section myself, key writers of the present and future, to be sure. In the end, the range of different versions of science fiction and futurisms presented here serves as a useful snapshot of the unrepresentable vast phenomenon that we call “SF.”

Any additional complaints or criticisms about the anthology that I could raise would remain quite minor. For example, there are a few too many puns about the book taking a “broad view” of science fiction for my taste, a minor complaint indeed. It is also strange for a historical anthology of English-language science fiction to lack a Heinlein story, although a remark in the introduction suggests that this omission and a few others may have resulted from permissions and/or expense issues (35). The larger and perhaps largest concern might be that the broad approach taken here risks hastening the forgetting of once centrally canonical twentieth-century authors of SF, including those featured in the Wesleyan such as Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, and Frederik Pohl, and a little later Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, among many other multiple Hugo and Nebula winners past. The tradeoff inherent in the rightly more expansive vision of SF presented here is the compressing of certain essential parts of SF history, but Haslam’s introduction, notes, and brief critical bibliography offer solid guidance for further explorations in any era and corner of SF’s history. Finally, because of the expansiveness of that vision of what SF encompasses and the many critical conversations with which Haslam engages, the erudite seventeen-page introduction, while generally accessible, occasionally makes points likely to fly over the heads of truly novice students without much prior exposure to or understanding of science fiction and its history. Nevertheless, I would recommend the book highly as an excellent base classroom text that an instructor can choose to supplement in various ways according to the preparation level of the students. Right now, The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction seems like the best anthology of its kind for adoption in a university-level science fiction course, in that it most effectively captures and communicates the current state of science fiction scholarship as well as science fiction’s diverse historical trajectories.

Timothy S. Miller teaches medieval literature and contemporary speculative fiction as Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, where he contributes to the department’s MA degree concentration in Science Fiction and Fantasy. He has published widely on both later Middle English literature and various contemporary authors of speculative fiction and is the author of the books Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea: A Critical Companion and Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: A Critical Companion. Both belong to the series “Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon,” which he now co-edits with Anna McFarlane.