sfrarev

From the President

From the SFRA Executive Committee

From the President

Hugh O’Connell

Last week (July 30^th–August 2^nd), science fiction scholars from around the world gathered virtually and in-person for the 2025 SFRA conference “Trans People Are (In) the Future,” hosted by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester in New York. Remarkably, it was our first continental North American conference since 2018 (with 2019 taking place in Hawai’i). Every conference is an exercise in teamwork and immense coordination, and as this was my final conference as President, I want to make sure to thank everyone involved in making it such a success. First, my sincere thanks to the University of Rochester administration for their support and for welcoming us and making us feel at home. I especially need to thank the rest of the SFRA executive committee for all of the behind the scenes conference work that they do: our Immediate Past President, the unflappable Gerry Canavan, who continues to offer important guidance to the organization; Vice President Chris Pak, who stepped into his role halfway through the planning of the conference and dove headfirst into organizing the SFRA-sponsored panels for envisioning the future of the field and our organization; Secretary Sarah Lohmann who, among other things, organized the Travel Grants that helped members attend the conference; Treasurer Joshua Pearson who, like Chris, only came on at the start of the new year and has been working overtime to resolve multiple frustrating issues with our various payment systems; At-Large Officers Helane Androne and Kania Greer who organized the early career panels; and the SFRA’s new Web Director, David Shipko, who had to contend with a site that has for far too long been held together with the coding equivalent of duct tape and bubble gum.

And, of course, I need to give a huge thank you to conference host Stefanie Dunning. After a series of false starts, Stefanie stepped in at the 11^th hour to make sure that there would in fact be an SFRA conference this year when I was beginning to fear that it wouldn’t happen. Not only did Stefanie just begin a new job last fall as Director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute, but she managed to organize a conference in less than half the time that it usually takes—all while learning to navigate a new institution. I can’t imagine what a trial by fire it has been. I also need to thank Jane Bryant, the Program Manager for the Institute, for all of the extraordinary organizational work that they’ve done. Finally, I would be severely remiss if I didn’t extend my sincere gratitude to all of the tech, facilities, catering, and custodial staff for all of their labor. So much of their work goes unseen; however, it’s directly responsible for allowing all of us to experience the fantastic facilities, to do our work, and to enjoy ourselves and each other’s company.

This year’s conference theme was necessarily multivalent in its aims. On one hand, it served as a critical lens for and intervention into sf studies. Many presentations delved into texts and subgenres that center those who are all too often marginalized within sf production. Similarly, other scholars peered under the hood of sf studies itself, noting its exclusionary tendencies, as well as its possibilities and proclivities for liberation. In these ways, many of the presenters looked at the way that sf provides a means for speculating and imagining about our collective future, opening up radical new possibilities over and against the narrowly humanist and heteronormative fetters that shackle the imagination. This important work of ruthless critique opens up new perspectives and alter-futures that empower our present and assess our failings. As our keynote speakers, Ryka Aoki and Rivers Solomon attested, these interventions are vital especially at a time when so many of our seemingly ready-made futures have been revealed as not only bankrupt, but truly inimical.

Indeed, while a powerful critical lens for our scholarly work, over and over again we were reminded that this theme continuously slips out of the speculative register and functions more importantly as a non-speculative statement of fact: despite our current administration’s efforts, trans people will be in the future, just as they were in the past, and are in the present. This is not to dismiss the increasing precarity and danger their lives are in, but instead to continue to insist on their rights for equity and equality, both socially and politically. And in this sense, as far too many obvious statements of fact seem to be these days, the conference theme served as a provocation: a stand against erasure and oppression, against the transphobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny, and ceaseless exploitation that define our system and that make it so physically and materially difficult—yet therefore imperative—to hold this conference here, now. So finally, the SFRA would like to thank everyone who joined us in-person and virtually to share their work on this important conference theme, who continue to push sf studies beyond its limits and towards better, more inclusive and critically-informed horizons, thus culturally and materially attesting to the multiple ways that Trans People Are (In) the Future.

Summer 2025

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55 no. 3

From the SFRA Review

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Summer 2025

Ian Campbell

The best SF holds a distorting mirror up to our own world and induces us to reflect upon the artificiality of what we think natural. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, for example, puts a woman from the late twentieth century into the worst of antebellum chattel slavery, in order both to tell a compelling story and also to expose us to what our history books typically gloss over or deliberately misframe. Of course, now we live in an era where our history books are being rewritten in order to make it seem as if the Confederacy was the natural state of humanity. Much of my own work centers around SF in Arabic, where estrangement and distorting mirrors are quite useful, because of the lack of formal protections for freedom of speech; I rather expect that Americans will become increasingly familiar with having to read between the lines in order to understand critique.

A vast supermajority of Americans loathe the new normal, but there are just enough cultists (and billionaires) to hold it together with duct tape and bullshit for now. The central issue of the moment is that there is no consensus alternative to fascism. Almost literally nobody wants what the sclerotic leadership of the Democratic Party is proposing, but not all that many people want the Full Bernie, either. What does a durable consensus on what an antifascist society looks like entail? And how can that consensus be reached without oligarch-controlled algorithmic social media putting its thumb on the scale, or how can that thumb be counteracted? We’re right on the cusp of an age where all photographs and video can be perfectly faked: is the answer a retreat to small, in-person communities where trust is earned, or (e.g.) the Fair Witnesses of Stranger in a Strange Land, or (heaven forfend) strict regulation of verified content and news organizations independent of corporate control?

In this issue of the Review, we as the Editorial Collective take on the Hugo and Nebula novel nominees and ask two questions: why has SF appeared to retreat into fantasy, and why in particular was this suite of mostly mediocre novels chosen as representative of the best the genre has to offer? Spoiler alert: we only have partial answers to each question. We would very much like to hear your thoughts on the matter: send them to icampbell@gsu.edu.

Binary Classification of Science Fiction: Examining Hard and Soft SF

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55 no. 3

Features

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Binary Classification of Science Fiction: Examining Hard and Soft SF

Enze Shi

Science fiction (SF) is a relatively new literary genre with contributions from many new authors. Due to this, it has lacked a consistent definition amongst readers as compared to other genres like horror and drama. SF emerged from base fiction and is differentiated by its involvement of science and realism. For some, SF is defined as the straightforward combination of science, imagination, and fiction. However, there are also more theoretical approaches. For example, Darko Suvin defines SF as a literary genre whose necessity is the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition (372). Paul Kincaid stated that “the inability to define science fiction” has been long recognized (409). This definitional ambiguity has created ongoing debate within SF scholarship. This controversy has its benefits; it has helped redefine the boundaries between SF and the other genres, allowing scholars to examine why this genre emerged from conventional fiction.

SF had rapidly grown since the early 19^th century. Two centuries of development created a huge catalog in SF. This proliferation not only made this genre more prevalent but also let readers and scholars develop an internal classification: hard and soft SF. In simple words, hard SF adheres to science and reality to a higher degree than soft SF. While the binary classification of SF into hard and soft creates a convenient framework for understanding, it ultimately oversimplifies the genre’s rich complexity. Overemphasizing categorizing hard and soft SF leads to misplaced attention and distorted interpretation in SF criticism. Instead, SF criticism should prioritize its primary purpose: exploring universal questions, challenging readers’ perspectives, and influencing reality. A more meaningful application of the hard and soft classification is through relative comparison; stating a work is “harder” or “softer” than others, rather than assigning absolute labels. This approach acknowledges the interdependent and overlapping nature of this category, allowing for a more comprehensive evolution without forcing a reductive classification onto complex work.

Defining Hard and Soft Science Fiction

Hard and soft SF have subjective and vague guidelines: hard SF adheres more precisely to scientific principles and realism, while soft SF has more imaginative elements. However, these guidelines often overlap, making it possible for a work to qualify as both hard and soft SF simultaneously. Thus, scholars have attempted to define them more accurately. Allen Steele, for instance, defined hard SF as “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone.” (4) Meanwhile, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction offers two complementary definitions of soft SF; first, as fiction emphasizing the social science and focusing on societal, cultural, or political development rather than natural science and technology; second, as SF where scientific elements serve as the background rather than central focus (Prucher 191). Nevertheless, in practice, many SF narratives still contain elements of both categories, challenging this binary classification.

Dune as a Case Study of Classification Tension

A prime example of the hard and soft debate is Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), a novel that defies simple categorizations and illustrates the limits of binary classification. Dune can be credibly placed in either category, leading to debate over its hard or soft classification. Examining how scholars justify each side, we can see how such rigid distinctions often fail to rigorously and objectively define SF works.

Many scholars argue that Dune contains strong elements of hard SF. John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, where Dune was originally published, specifically referred to it as “hard science-fiction worked out in meticulous detail.” (592–3) In speaking of Villeneuve’s 2021 film adaptation, Burgett argues that it is much harder and more grounded than most other SF films. Their justifications are particularly adapted from Dune’s ecologically grounded world-building and plausible technologies. Frank Herbert’s detailed explanation of Arrakis’s water cycle, sandworms’ biology, and desert climate reflects scientific realism. Gerald Jonas noted that Herbert “so completely worked out the interactions of man and beast and geography and climate,” that Dune became the standard for ecological SF. While some may argue that ecology belongs to the soft sciences, proponents of the hard SF justify its classification using Herbert’s logical consistency from real environmental science. In addition, the technologies in Dune, while not heavily described, also reflect real scientific concepts. Devices like stillsuits that recycle water and ornithopters that mimic bird flight are theoretically possible to create (Kennedy). Thus, Herbert’s attention to scientific possibilities in his setting is a crucial justification. Altogether, these elements provide strong arguments for critics and readers who believe Dune is a valid candidate for hard SF.

On the other hand, many scholars believe that Dune is a soft SF work by definition, not primarily because it lacks scientific detail, but because it focuses more on social, cultural, and psychological exploration. For example, Xu Tengyue explicitly analyzes Villeneuve’s Dune as an example of a “soft science fiction film,” noting that soft SF film “pays more attention to the expression of human values and story lines” rather than elaborate special effects or technical applications (82). In other words, Dune emphasizes “soft” science (anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, ecology) over the “hard” sciences like physics (Kennedy). Soft SF deals directly or indirectly with anthropology, ecology, psychology, and sociology (Nicholls). By this criterion, Dune fits the soft SF genre. Moreover, its plot centers on culture (the Fremen society), politics (imperial and feudal power struggles), religion (Messianic prophecy and mythmaking), and psychology (Paul’s mental training and prescient visions). Additionally, some argue that the deliberate suppression of science in Dune makes it soft SF. Herbert does introduce devices such as stillsuits and ornithopters, technologies grounded in plausible engineering. However, his deliberate omission of computers, robots, and artificial intelligence reflects a larger thematic purpose: to emphasize human evolution, religious myth, and political systems over technical advancement. By intentionally downplaying certain advanced technology, he focused on the essence of humanity. These approaches align with soft SF, offering strong arguments on the side of the debate that supports Dune’s soft classification.

This debate over Dune reveals a deeper issue: hard and soft classification often reflects personal interpretation more than objective analysis. It highlights its fundamental inability to rigidly classify any work of SF. Whether labeled hard or soft SF depends largely on which elements a critic chooses to emphasize. To justify their argument in this debate, the interpreters spend a great deal of time finding and analyzing the scientific connection, which is not the primary focus of SF.

Examining SF’s Focus in Global Contexts: Western and Chinese SF Evolution

Overemphasizing the hard and soft debate often leads critics to hyper-fixate on a work’s scientific accuracy. However, solely integrating science into fiction has never been the primary focus of SF. Instead, its primary focus lies in its potential to address broad social, ethical, and philosophical questions. To understand these deeper focuses, we better step back from rigid classification and examine how SF has developed across different cultural contexts. A comprehensive examination cannot focus solely on Western SF works such as Frankenstein, The Foundation series, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although Western SF is fundamental to the genre, there are other major players in the larger world of SF. Chinese SF is one of these significant contributors. Liu Cixin’s novel The Three‑Body Problem (2008; Eng. trans. 2014) and his novella The Wandering Earth (2000; film adaptation 2019) have both achieved international acclaim. Shaped by distinct political, economic, and cultural histories, Western and Chinese SF provide broader and unique insights into the primary focus of SF through a holistic analysis.

Starting with Western SF, it is widely believed that Western SF emerged with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which used scientific curiosity to examine the ethical and moral dilemmas of its time (Ellis 27). In the late 19th century, the genre expanded with Jules Verne’s adventurous voyages and H.G. Wells’s cautionary tales, which both integrated new scientific ideas with speculation, but Verne leaned toward scientific fantasies while Wells leaned toward scientific romances (Ege 93). Entering the early to mid-20th century, the so-called “Golden Age of SF” had authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, whose works not only entertained but also reflected contemporary issues and ideas related to scientific progress. Nowadays, SF books and films vary greatly in topics and settings, addressing complex societal, environmental, and technological issues. Its greater flexibility in world-setting and range of topics reaches a larger audience. Throughout these periods, Western SF evolved not merely to speculate on technological advancements, but to reflect contemporary messages and issues.

Besides Western SF, in Raphals’s deep study, Chinese SF development can be generalized into three distinct phases: the utopian phase in the late Qing dynasty; the pedagogical phase in the 1950s; and the speculative phase since 1989 (82). The utopian phase began with the translation of Western literature and the sparking of innovative thought among the populations instead of having captive minds. The scholars proposed that mass translations would help spread advanced Western knowledge into China (82). Additionally, some representative indigenous SF works, for example, Liang Qichao’s Future of New China, commonly involved the prediction of China having a bright future after adopting science (83). The formation of the pedagogical phase aligns with the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949). Here, SF’s main role was to promote and cement the ideas of Marxism and Maoism, shaping the population’s ideology (Raphal 84). In this phase, SF was integrated into education, which is the most effective approach to control and shape ideology. Lastly, the phase currently ongoing, the speculative phase, began the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 1989 (85). The restrictions on speculative literature were eased by the government, allowing a flowering of Chinese SF that directly grappled with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. This phase answered the rapid technological growth, greater openness, and the evolution of public thought. Across all the phases, Chinese SF has been a mirror of the nation’s ideological shifts and social anxieties.

SF as a Medium for Message, Not Just Method

Examining the evolution of SF across both Western and Chinese contexts reveals a consistent pattern: SF has always assumed multiple unspoken roles, such as conveying messages, examining dilemmas, and critiquing ideology. While scientific concepts provide the framework, they do not have to be the message itself. Instead, they serve as a platform upon which the deeper messages are built. Thus, SF’s focus is on utilizing scientific concepts as a gateway to explore deeper societal and philosophical questions, often imagined through future worlds. This broader function of SF is what critics overlook when they fixate solely on hard or soft classification.

In the case of Dune, the argument about its classification as hard or soft obscures its deeper literary value. The excessive focus on the debate over its binary identification can overlook the work’s rich exploration of themes like political corruption, religious manipulation, and messianic power. These messages are the primary focus and crucial to its literary value. However, they could not be spotlighted while solely focusing on the narrative’s scientific connection.

When Labels Limit: Cognitive Heuristics and Reader Bias

The debate over Dune is just an example. Similar debates emerge whenever a popular SF work is released, which reflects a broader cognitive tendency to simplify complex information. The frequent use of hard and soft labels in marketing and reviews of SF has led many critics and fans to support keeping and promoting this distinction in SF. They argue that the binary labels encourage more audiences who lack deep knowledge in SF to step into this field. The human brain tends to break down complicated and multifactorial entities or problems into a few numbers of ramifications to generalize and make it easier to understand. When presented with only two clear options, as with the binary classification of hard versus soft SF, our brains can more easily process and understand the information, analogous to the binary 0 and 1 mechanism in computer science. This quick and straightforward determination is also called the one-reason decision-making heuristic. This heuristic shows that by focusing on a single, decisive cue rather than an exhaustive set of details, individuals can achieve surprisingly accurate judgments quickly and with minimal cognitive load. As Todd and Gigerenzer argue, heuristics, some in particular, produce accurate decisions by exploiting the structure of applied information and environment (167). Consequently, using a broad, easily digestible label invites non-experts into the field by applying our natural tendency to reduce complex information into clear categories.

In fact, the use of heuristics in SF criticism does make SF more accessible and appealing to a broad audience to some degree. However, it not only generates simplicity and popularity but also preconceived notions or bias. In their influential study, Tversky and Kahneman illustrate that people often rely on heuristics, such as the representativeness heuristic, to make judgements, even when they lead to “systematic and predictable errors” (1131). In terms of SF, that means once a reader or viewer approaches a work with a preconceived perspective that it is either hard or soft, they are more likely to unconsciously focus on the elements that confirm their assumption. As a result, they might overlook other significant elements that are against their assumption, leading to an incomplete and biased interpretation.

Thematic Depth and Real-World Influence in SF

In practice, authors generally do not begin the creative process with a determined intention of making a work that strictly adheres to one sub-genre over the other; instead, they weave together various ideas, techniques, and influences that challenge binary categorization. Like all literature, SF is built on complex narratives, themes, and elements, and rarely do all aspects of a SF work align perfectly within the confines of either hard or soft. This reality makes the argument that justifies a SF work being classified as hard or soft problematic, as it tends to selectively extract supporting elements from throughout the book or film. Therefore, when critics or readers rely solely on these binary classifications, they lack an overview of the work’s whole picture. It ultimately compromises the possibility of a holistic, objective review, which then causes bias and distorted interpretation.

Therefore, rather than sticking with rigid labels, SF criticism should shift toward evaluating the themes, messages, and real-world impact of these works. We can see some of the ideal approaches that have been made while reviewing famous SF works like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest (sequel to The Three-Body Problem). Through their comprehensive analysis, we can see the valuable insights it brings.

Specifically, both have conveyed profound messages and challenged readers’ understanding. For instance, in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, science serves as the framework for exploring the rise and fall of civilizations through the emergence of psychohistory, a kind of mathematical sociology. Here, the scientific elements are not the core focus; they are the platform that supports challenging questions about human destiny and social organization. Similarly, Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest uses complex scientific theories and the vastness of space to showcase humanity’s vulnerability, existential risks, and the consequences of our technological development. Importantly, he proposes a hypothesis among universal civilizations—the Dark Forest hypothesis. In both examples, the quality of science, whether perceived as strong or weak, is subordinate to the larger narrative. Psychohistory and the Dark Forest hypothesis represent two notions in SF theorizing by Asimov and Liu, respectively. Psychohistory is Asimov’s purely fictional mathematical system, while the Dark Forest hypothesis, though dramatized by Liu, reflects real scientific speculation about the Fermi Paradox. However, both authors demonstrate the logical consistency of these concepts within their created, reality-analogous worlds. These theories—one fictional, one speculative—challenge readers’ understanding of society and science and offer provocative predictions about humanity’s future.

Another crucial criterion for SF criticism is examining works’ capacity to indirectly bring influential impacts to reality. Kevin L. Young and Charli Carpenter investigated whether and how popular SF media influence public attitudes toward emerging military technologies, specifically autonomous weapon systems (AWS). Individuals who report higher consumption of SF—measured by the number of iconic killer-robot franchises they have viewed—are significantly more likely to oppose the development and deployment of AWS (573). The direct impact SF has brought into the world is just a mere example of how imaginative narratives can shape reality.

Conclusion: Toward a More Holistic SF Criticism

If SF criticism consistently centered on the purposes that have been presented above, Foundation, The Dark Forest, and SF’s impact on the public opinion about AWS, then the authors’ creative intentions could be more accurately understood and appreciated. This shift not only reduces misinterpretation caused by the rigid hard and soft classification but also creates a more dynamic and meaningful environment in SF. While the binary classification may serve as a helpful guideline when used for relative comparison, it must not overshadow the SF’s larger literary and philosophical contributions. Encouraging such an evaluative approach would push the authors to produce more thoughtful and thematically rich SF works, which focus well on the primary focus and unspoken rules. It could ultimately push the SF community to grow more receptive to diverse voices and exploration, promoting the genre’s continued evolution.

WORKS CITED

Burgett, Cole. “Dune and the Future of the Science Fiction Epic.” Christian Research Journal, vol. 44, no. 4, 10 Nov. 2021.

Campbell, John W., Jr. The John W. Campbell Letters. Volume I. Edited by Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr., Tony Chapdelaine, and George Hay, AC Projects, 1985, pp. 592–3.

Ege, Sema. “Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.” Ankara Üniversitesi Dil Ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi, vol. 35, no. 1, 1 Jan. 1991, pp. 91–6.

Ellis, Markman. “Fictions of science in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” Sydney Studies in English, vol. 34, no. 2, 1999, pp. 27–46.

Jonas, Gerald. “The Sandworm SAGA.” The New York Times, 17 May 1981.

Kennedy, Kara. “The Softer Side of Dune: The Impact of the Social Sciences on World-Building.” Exploring Imaginary Worlds: Essays on Media, Structure, and Subcreation, edited by Mark Wolf, Routledge, 2021.

Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Extrapolation, vol. 44, no. 4, Winter 2003, pp. 409–19.

Nicholls, Peter, and John Clute. “Soft Science.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Edited by John Clute and David Langford, Ansible Editions, 9 Apr. 2015,

Prucher, Jeff, editor. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 191.

Raphals, Lisa. “Chinese Science Fiction: Imported and Indigenous.” Osiris, vol. 34, 2019, pp. 81–98.

Steele, Allen. “Hard Again.” The New York Review of Science Fiction, no. 46, Jun. 1992, pp. 2–4.

Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English, vol. 34, no. 3, Dec. 1972, pp. 372–82.

Todd, Peter. M, and Gerd Gigerenzer. “Environments That Make Us Smart: Ecological Rationality.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 3, Jun. 2007, pp. 167–71.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science, vol. 185, no. 4157, 27 Sep. 1974, pp. 1124–31.

Xu, Tengyue. “Research on Soft Science Fiction Films Based on the Movie Dune.” Frontier in Art Research, vol. 4, no. 13, 2022, pp. 82–6. Francis Academic Press. Young, Kevin L., and Charli Carpenter. “Does Science Fiction Affect Political Fact? Yes and No.” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 3, Sep. 2018, pp. 562–76.

Enze Shi is a researcher who focuses on science fiction, translational, and outcomes research. Being an immigrant from China, both Chinese culture and Western culture had a significant influence on his academic and personal growth. Integrating the perspectives and contributions of both Chinese and Western SF allows him to bring notions with novel approaches. Shi is a student of the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas. There, he conducts chemistry research and is involved in Chinese philosophy classes, being active in both STEM and humanities fields.

Navola

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Navola

Ian Campbell

Bacigalupi, Paolo. Navola. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

This competently written pseudo-historical fantasy novel is a textbook example of essentially everything that’s wrong with book publishing under late capitalism. I’m going to thoroughly spoil the novel here and also likely make it appear that Bacigalupi is my primary target, but he’s not: it’s the industry, the structure, not the individual. The story is set in an alternate-world version of the Italian Renaissance. Davico di Regulai is the only son and heir to a great and powerful banking house. The first three-quarters of the text centers around Davico’s being simply too nice and decent a person for the role that has been chosen for him by his patrimony. He’s kind, sensitive, naïve and open in a culture that values viciousness, indifference, cynicism and duplicity. He rather wishes he could become a physician and help people: he’s quite aware that he’s a bad fit for what he’s supposed to be. This is in no way a terrible setup for a good story. Either Davico is going to find a way for someone else to replace him so he can go pick mushrooms and heal people, or he’s going to grow into the role, lose just as much of his naïveté as he needs to in order to thrive, and take the banking house one step closer to domination. Or he’s going to grow into the role of patriarch/CEO but do it in a kinder, gentler fashion. But none of this happens; in fact, by the end of this 200k-word novel, we only get to the first couple of scenes of Act Two of how this sort of story typically works. I found myself nearly finished, thinking “well, this is all going to need to get wrapped up in a hurry, here”, and then it… doesn’t, really.

The initial chapters foreground a magical artifact in this otherwise non-magical world. Davico’s father has acquired at tremendous expense the eye of a long-dead dragon and has placed it on his desk as a symbol of his power and wealth. Davico comes to view the eye differently: he can sense the dragon’s dormant power and consciousness and is constantly fascinated by the glowing orb. The text does not explain why Davico in particular senses power through the eye, when neither his father nor any of the minions, allies, and rivals who sit across the desk from his father look at it as anything more than a trophy. We’re to infer, I suppose, that his sensitivity is the reason for why the eye reacts differently to him, but like many things in this story, we don’t get a clear explanation. Were I feeling charitable, I’d argue that Davico’s general head-in-the-clouds demeanor prevents him from looking too closely into the matter, and this is reflected in the text. The eye does enter into the final act of the story, or rather, what would be the final act were it a complete story.

Yet, aside from the eye, this world is mundane. Herein lies the true problem with Navola: it is much too close to our own world and yet too different to be literature worth the name. When I first picked up the book, I flipped to the first pages of actual text and so missed that there was a map before the first chapter. As I worked my way through the first third of the text, I kept thinking “this is a pastiche of our own world”. I was willing to accept pseudo-Italian city-states separated by rough terrain, on the premise that this was going to be an estrangement of the Italian Renaissance, and the developments in the book were going to defamiliarize me just enough with our own world to give insight into… any number of aspects of the time and place, such as how and why art flourished so much or how modern banking arose, etc. Compare Navola to, e.g., Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which hews closely to our own world save for a few characters and does real work in not only telling a banger of a story but also providing a great deal of food for thought about how attitudes toward science and economics shifted during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Bacigalupi’s story takes so very long to get going, and is so filled with endless, loving detail about how this society functions, that an experienced reader of SF or fantasy is going to expect a similar payoff, only maybe with a dragon. But “the Italian Renaissance was real cutthroat” doesn’t justify a buildup this long. Why was it cutthroat? What was it about the city-states’ relative freedom from domination by larger imperia or kingdoms that produced such an environment? How did the flourishing of arts and culture dovetail with politics and economics? None of these questions is answered or meaningfully addressed by the text.

It was at this point that the kingdom of “Cheroux” to the northwest is introduced, and some part of my eyeroll made tangible led me to finding the map in the front material. Oh, look: it’s the Mediterranean, only some catastrophic event, distant enough in the past to be mostly legendary, has erased Greece, Turkey and the Balkans and left empty sea in their place. The city-states look more or less like Italy; Cheroux is in the place of France. Navola is simultaneously too close to and too uninvolved with our own world to function as a work of literature. The first three-quarters of the text is constantly filled with pseudo-Italian words for things. I’m proficient enough in Italian to be able to read a book or hold a conversation in the language, and nearly everything was just the regular Italian word but with one or two letters different: this was both very distracting and, like most of the rest of Navola, fundamentally very lazy writing, though in fact the sentences are lovingly constructed and very smoothly edited.

There are two effective ways to write a fantasy novel that estranges the Italian Renaissance and makes us rethink what we understand about the time and place. One of them is to do what Stephenson did with northwestern Europe during the Baroque period: carefully research everything, get the times, dates and personalities right, then insert fictional characters through whose points of view the action takes place, all as a means of showing us what it was like for the dominant paradigm to shift from ancien regime to something approaching the Enlightenment. There are ample sources on the events and personalities of the Italian Renaissance and the long history of French meddling in the affairs of northern Italy for Bacigalupi to have done this. The other way to write such a novel would be to give us some completely different world, mundane or magical, that reproduces the conditions of existence of the Italian Renaissance: geography gives rise to city-states whose main source of income and power is trade and banking rather than production, and while their internal rivalries usually dominate, they can unite to fend off larger powers. They might even have dragons. Consider, for example, the Song of Ice and Fire series, which Martin has stated has its roots in the real-world Wars of the Roses, but is its own, internally-consistent world (with dragons) that can be read as its own world without reference to its estrangement of English politics of the era, but which becomes that much better if you’ve read too many of Shakespeare’s history plays.

Yet, Navola does neither of these; rather, it’s a (very) thinly disguised version of our world without the depth, and it’s one that doesn’t give us any meaningful insight as to what the Italian Renaissance was really like. The real Renaissance gives us all kinds of vivid, three-dimensional people about whom quite a bit is known, but in Bacigalupi’s text the only person we get to know is Davico, who in fairness is a carefully drawn and internally consistent character. His father is a caricature; he has friends who each have one trait; the family’s household is generic but perhaps for the spymaster. The actual de’ Medicis were much more interesting. The text makes constant reference to the Navolese being “twisty” people, always concealing their true plans, but the novel doesn’t go anywhere with this: there’s no reflection on what it means to be twisty other than that Davico can’t pull it off, and the text isn’t twisty in form nor content, either.

For example, one way in which this world does differ significantly from ours is that it’s a fundamentally pagan society. There’s a monotheistic church, but it’s more first-among-equals than truly dominant: there’s also a whole pantheon of gods that have magisteria and mythology that is both detailed within the text and referenced by the characters. And to Bacigalupi’s credit, this is all done quite well. It just doesn’t go anywhere. The real Italian Renaissance was dominated from top to bottom by Catholicism: look at the intrigues of the Borgias to make one of their own the pope. Look at the art. If a fantasy novel that is a work of literature is going to change this and make its analogue of Italy polytheistic, that needs to tell us something about the role of monotheism in the events and paradigm of the time and place. But it doesn’t: it’s just lore and worldbuilding. It’s actually interesting and plausible, but irrelevant to any estrangement value the novel might have. The same goes for the giant gaping hole where Greece, Turkey and the Balkans used to be, which is not detailed with the same care as the polytheism. Remove those lands from the world, and then the novel can estrange how much of the Italian Renaissance had to do with refugees from recently conquered Constantinople fleeing to Italy. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Children of Earth and Sky series actually does this, though it too suffers from being both too close and not close enough to our world. But in Navola, the Italian traders and bankers just do business with the lands on the periphery of the sea.

There’s also a long subplot in the novel where Davico grows up with a “sister”, Celia, who is in fact the daughter of a family his father has removed from the power structure. It’s never clear quite why his father brings her into the family: is she a hostage, or the natural child of the father? Throughout the first three-quarters of the book, we consistently see that Celia is far better at twisty intrigue than Davico is. It’s easy to think “oh, they’re going to get married, and Davico can be the genial patriarch while Celia is the power behind the throne with a knife up her sleeve”, or else have the two of them think this and then we find that they’re actually half-siblings.

But none of this happens at all: the novel plays with our expectations, but very poorly. At the three-quarter point, Davico’s father’s adversaries pull off a surprise plot, and nearly every character we’ve met gets killed, including the father. Celia pulls a Villainous Heel Turn out of nowhere and blinds Davico, then completely disappears from the book. The adversaries put Davico in the oubliette, from which he gradually plots a way to get close enough to the dragon eye and use it to see through to effect his escape. The novel then ends rather abruptly with his riding off into the woods to plot his revenge. And it becomes clear that Navola is not a story at all, but rather the first installment in a cash-cow million-word series.

This is what I mean when I say that this novel represents everything that’s wrong with modern publishing. Somewhere out there, an unpublished writer has meticulously researched the Italian Renaissance and written a wonderful stand-alone historical fantasy about it: Lorenzo de’ Medici, Action Hero. Somewhere else, a different unpublished writer has written a wonderful fantasy novel with city-states and bankers and so forth, set in its own world that doesn’t look like Italy. I want to read both these books. Yet they won’t be published, because their authors have no track record and those two novels are both outside the bounds of easily-categorizable marketing copy. Rather, the publishing industry, concerned only with shareholder value, has let Bacigalupi publish a long prologue, and then marketed it with “by the Hugo and Nebula award winner.” I’ve read The Windup Girl, and while it evidently gets some details about Thai culture wrong, it’s a remarkable text that deserved the awards. I’ve taught it to undergrads three times now, and it’s a real, complex estrangement of colonialism, climate change and a host of other things. So, when I needed a beach book a couple of weeks ago, I thought “this will be good”, and it’s… not. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s basically the notes for an undergrad’s D&D campaign. I want to be clear here that I don’t blame Bacigalupi. It’s difficult to write award-winning literature, and were I such a writer, I’d absolutely jump at the chance to write something much easier and know I’d make a lot of money from it because of my past writings. I blame the industry that only answers to the profit motive and puts sales over quality.

Ian Campbell is the editor of SFRA Review.

Alien Clay

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Alien Clay

Zorica Lola Jelic

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Alien Clay. Tor, 2024.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer whose series The Tyrant Philosophers and recent novels Service Model and Alien Clay are among the 2025 Hugo Award finalists. Alien Clay is a dystopian vision of future Earth. This is a work of science fiction that falls within the subgenre of exploration. Dr. Arton Daghdev lives in a country that is ruled by a totalitarian regime called the Mandate. Tchaikovsky traverses not only through alien space and biology, but he also pushes the boundaries of the human capacity to let go of individual freedom for the prosperity of the group or humanity as a whole. Admittedly, this novel was written in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is difficult to avoid making that connection while reading it since the narrator is a scientist. Nevertheless, the reader embarks on this strange journey across time and space guided by Daghdev, an ecologist who researches exoplanets and alien life forms (albeit theoretically). However, Daghdev finds it difficult to conform to the Mandate’s one-minded political agenda. Therefore, he is forced to become an underground rebel who is, ultimately, convicted of high treason, imprisoned, and shipped to a penal colony located on planet Kiln, which is located fifty light years away from Earth. The beginning of the novel tugs at the readers’ political strings, challenging them to think about how far they would go to defend their beliefs. Furthermore, Tchaikovsky entertains the notion that suppressing academic freedom will undoubtedly lead to an Orwellian future.

As all admirable authors of science fiction do, Tchaikovsky introduces not one but two nova in order to lure the reader into the interestingly crafted Kilnish world. The first novum is the process of dehydrating the body in order to create body husks that are preserved for the remainder of the journey. Once the ship reaches its destination, the husks are re-hydrated and dropped in pods to the planet’s surface. This first novum is very much reminiscent of the old science fiction novels in which the technology is not exhaustively explained, and the workings and details are left to the reader’s imagination. The second novum is planet Kiln. Tchaikovsky uses his imagination, skills, and abundance of biological knowledge to describe an alien world that builds, destroys, and rebuilds itself. The Kilnish microorganisms and macroorganisms are by far the most amusing part of the novel. The world building is done in a satisfying way and is better developed than the characters. Even though the focus of the writing in the novel is on the object, as it should be in science fiction, Tchaikovsky does not leave his characters flat, and the readers are able to empathize with Daghdev and his companions as they endure the perils on Kiln. The readers do not have a problem with sympathizing with Daghdev during his plight; still, the last chapters of the novel oscillate between sympathy and empathy. At certain points, it is simply impossible for the reader to feel what the main character is feeling and emotionally going through.

Tchaikovsky writes the novel in such a way that every part of the journey, every day of life on Kiln is a game of Russian roulette, and the prisoners are, regrettably, less fortunate if they win. For the most part, the story unfolds in chronological order, while the last third of the novel is different since it presents current events in the camp with frequent flashbacks of the last seven days the group spends in the Kilnish wild. The flashbacks also show the Kilnish ecosystem in more detail, how life works on the planet, and how and why it slowly assimilates human biology into its own. Evolution on Kiln does not follow the Darwinian pattern, but this is not uncharted territory for Tchaikovsky since he already experimented with the merging of alien and human biology in Cage of Souls and simian and alien biology in Children of Time. This hybridization introduces an unachievable utopian thought because it is not in human nature to willingly submit to complete altruism. In the end, all of humanity may be assimilated by the Kilnish civilization. Daghdev’s utter elation is juxtaposed with the reader’s sheer horror of such a possible outcome and the unparalleled devastation that could happen to people on Earth. Tchaikovsky leaves it as a possibility; although, it seems that there is little to doubt when it comes to Daghdev’s determination to free humanity and give it the ultimate gift any scientist can bestow upon his people—the gift of infinite knowledge.

Tchaikovsky addresses some of the topics that he has written about in his previous works: rationality, volition, freedom, and individualism. He also addresses the posthuman in the biological sense, which differs from the traditional writings of posthuman technology. In this novel, readers can see an example of complete altruism and what it means to willingly let go of all individuality and any sense of personal freedom for the greater good. He challenges readers to let go of their anthropocentric arrogance and envision a world in which becoming a part of the Kilnish civilization means embracing collective life, thinking, and purpose. When it comes to literary theory, Alien Clay is also presentist even though it happens in the future. One cannot read it without thinking about various “mandates” that exist in today’s world, political hypocrisies, and all the freedoms that democratic societies promise but somehow fail to truly deliver. Toward the end, the reader circles back to establish answers to the elementary musings of science fiction (and philosophy) concerning what it means to be human and free. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the most appealing part of this novel is that Tchaikovsky adhered to the basic rule of this genre and took the “what if” and, just for a moment, let it become a “why not.”

Zorica Lola Jelic, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor at the faculty of Contemporary Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. She teaches English as a Foreign Language, Business English, Shakespeare, and English Drama. She earned her degrees in Shakespeare studies but also loves to write about presentism as a hermeneutical approach and science fiction. She has published scholarly papers, coursebooks, and enjoys attending professional conferences.

Alliance Unbound

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55, no. 3

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Review of Alliance Unbound

Edward Carmien

Cherryh, C J, and Jane S Fancher. Alliance Unbound. DAW Books, 2024.

In this second book of the “Hinder Stars” sub-series, C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher pick up the story as the merchanter super-ship Finity’s End (with guests from Galway aboard) arrives at Pell, the star system home to Downbelow Station and a key location of future history told later in the timeline of the Company Wars. Readers wishing to skip directly to this novel find a thorough recapitulation of Alliance Rising early in the novel (62-77).

The Neiharts of Finity’s End embody merchanter royalty of unimpeachable lineage, descended from the pre-FTL crew of a famed sub-light “pusher” ship. They arrive to accustomed luxury at Downbelow Station, including shopping, extensive gardens, and even the “Downers,” a sapient humanoid species acting as part of the station’s workforce. Their guests from Galway experience the sights as “rustic cousins in the big city.” Their home station, Alpha, seems rustic by comparison. Ross Monahan, escapee of the Earth Company thugs who pirated Galway at the end of Alliance Rising, faces sensory disorientation as holograms, part of the theme-park atmosphere at the “sleepover” (hotel) where the spacers reside on station, cause issues of concern for the navigator.

One part vacation spree and one part investigation leads to fun but also an abridged stay as trade goods come to light that strongly suggest a trade route not among the known paths trade takes here in space far from Earth (Sol system). Finity’s End hands off its cargo duties to other ships and heads for the unknown, bringing to bear classic tropes of earlier Cherryh novels, such as the dangers and stresses of space travel found in Pride of Chanur. They collect an ally in the shape of another merchanter, and counting Galway crew onboard Finity’s End this constitutes a deliberative body for the new Alliance, a union of merchant ships devoted to the idea that ships trading among the various stars inhabited by humanity be crewed by merchanter families, not Earth Company employees or Azi (cloned humans) from Cyteen.

Dangerous FTL travel leads the Neiharts and their Galway guests to an abandoned station in risky space at a binary star system. But Olympus Station, no longer abandoned, hosts no fewer than four ships: two mystery merchanters (the remaining holdouts who haven’t signed with the Alliance), a pusher ship that took a decade or more to get to this station (which isn’t the first to have done so), and a mystery FTL vessel of unusual design, evidently hauled here at sub-light speed by the pusher ship, a vessel ominously named not after a famous Earth explorer as with previous pusher ships, but after the Wellington that beat Napoleon. And here Cherryh and Fancher drop a shoe familiar to longtime Cherryh readers: the family names of the two merchanters. Bellagio rings no bells for this reader, but Mallory certainly does.

Signy Mallory, the captain of the Earth Company carrier Norway, leads a storied existence in the years to come. As one of Cherryh’s standout characters, along with Morgaine, Emory, and Pyanfar Chanur, the simple mention of the name “Mallory” in this historical context raises hairs on the back of the knowing reader’s neck.

The crisis of the novel brings together the senior captains of Finity’s End, Ross Monahan, who is cosmically sensitive to the moods of stars and how they impact FTL travel, and his lady love, Jen Neihart. The mystery merchanters don’t sign on with the Alliance: to them, any connection with Cyteen is too much connection. Then, the captain of the pusher vessel attempts a coup de main independent of the otherwise non-violent “big meeting” that closes the novel. The mystery FTL ship undocks and Ross Monahan’s quasi-supernatural ability to hear the stars speak reveals much about that experimental ship’s fate. The novel closes as the Alliance ships head back to familiar ports with the extraordinary news of their discovery, and the Earth Company’s continued and expected treachery, in hand.

The obvious theme of “colonialism is bad” carries on in Alliance Unbound. The significantly named Rights of Man from the previous novel is invoked in the “big meeting” that closes this novel. Joined by the resonant phrase “Mother of Mankind,” meaning Earth, the ongoing demands of the Imperial Center toward the colonies remain clear. Between the “rights” Earth, or Sol holds dear, and the implied parental role illustrated by “Mother of Mankind,” no outcome appears possible other than war. This makes sense, as the history of that war, written and published decades ago, stands canonically in previous publications such as Downbelow Station. In Cherryh and Fancher’s “Hinder Stars” background, ownership posited as consequential to the origin of the colonies vies with theories of self-determination consequential to those who own the means of production.

That these works represent Space Opera seems obvious. Yet, Cherryh and Fancher’s evocation represents a pleasantly intellectual take on the genre. In exploring Downbelow Station’s gardens, which include actual trees, the authors convey the essential difference of humans adapted to life as merchanters, hauling essential cargos using FTL “jump” technology. Even more than humans adapted to life in space stations, these adaptations make Ross Monahan reflect how “He didn’t belong to this place, didn’t want to belong. It was beautiful… but as far from his experience as the void of space” (110). To this character these natural, organic elements alienate as much as fascinate. In this “history of the pre-war period” novel, weapons seem rare and on a human scale. When one ship wishes to damage another, it uses a tool meant for another purpose. Those hoping for a ripping space battle leave disappointed. Readers who enjoy bathing in well-reasoned science fiction rejoice.

Alliance Unbound reads better than the award-winning book that comes before it, but as a series novel (and not a standalone work, as many are in the larger Company Wars context) readers may find it difficult to see its qualities standing on its own. Characters do more interesting things in more interesting environments. Ross Monahan takes on qualities of damaged but interesting Cherryh characters from prior books such as Rimrunner’s Ramey, Sandor Kreja of Merchanter’s Luck, or Heavy Time’s Dekker, and his ability to hear the stars echoes the almost witchy abilities of Capella from Tripoint. As a text in a literature class, the connections relevant to Alliance Rising apply here: colonialism writ in the stars and a hint of the social stresses on human relationships among spacers who experience time-dilation as part of their ordinary working lives. If the human relationships in Alliance Rising were tamer than in other Company Wars novels, then in Alliance Unbound they are tamer still, if only because fewer pages carry such interactions.

“To our patient readers…you know why.” This dedication follows the previous novel’s dedication to editor and publisher Betsy Wollheim. It makes sense, then, that this second novel contains helpful inclusions such as a map and a list of stellar coordinates and lists of distances from sundry relevant stars in light years. Headed “For Our Fellow Nerds,” this material delights. In the text itself such distances rarely appear in the text: “It’s a long jump,” or “It’s a short jump” might, and the essential distance in light years between Earth and Alpha station represents a key plot point. Do readers need this information? No. The narrative provides all a reader needs. But this peek behind the curtain entertains nevertheless. Cherryh, and now Fancher, show us how it’s done. Immersive science fiction, with every speculative detail honed and clear and sharp, gifts readers with maybes, what ifs, and who-da-thunk-its, all done so realistically that after a few days’ immersion one looks around and carries the story in one’s own mind, guesses where it might go, or ponders elements not narrated. May we see ever more.

Edward Carmien, Ph.D. teaches writing and literature at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. He started his academic journey as a member of the Popular Culture Association, but soon found a truer home in the SFRA. A lapsed poet, short story writer, game designer, and novelist, his first publications were game-related working as a freelancer for TSR, Inc. After appearing in the fiction anthology EARTH, AIR, FIRE, WATER he earned membership in the SFWA. He has won awards for his fiction and non-fiction, edited a volume of essays about writer C.J. Cherryh, and lives with his family near Princeton, New Jersey.

Alliance Rising

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55, no. 3

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Review of Alliance Rising

Edward Carmien

Cherryh, C J, and Jane S Fancher. Alliance Rising. DAW Books, 2019.

C.J. Cherryh, recipient of the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, Locus, and others, joins her spouse and longtime partner Jane S. Fancher, winner of the Prometheus Award, in a return to the Alliance-Union universe. In this set of dozens of novels, short story collections, music, and a tabletop wargame, Cherryh and Fancher recount a history over vast ranges of time and space. Humanity’s extra-planetary colonization and inevitable loss of control of these colonies makes up a significant focus of the series. Sequences of the narrative lacking a focus upon humans are common in these texts, which act as a variant of Larry Niven’s “known space” but include far greater detail and stylistic and content variety. Part of the Alliance-Union universe presents stories related to the Company War. These novels range from Devil in the Belt (in which Earth system asteroid belt miners are recruited into new Earth Company warships) and the much-awarded Downbelow Station to 1997’s Finity’s End. 2019’s Alliance Rising and 2024’s Alliance Unbound, dubbed the “Hinder Stars” sub-series, serve as prequels to the Company Wars.

Cherryh and Fancher’s world, always complex, focuses on socio-economic stresses in a system undergoing radical change. Centuries of commerce and exploration under control of the Earth Company using sub-light ships (an extensive history of ship comings and goings exists online) alter in mere years as Faster than Light (FTL) ships, invented far from Earth, increase the tempo of change. Earth, already isolated from colonies it no longer really controls (and some it never controlled), will in decades begin constructing a fleet of FTL warships… but those are other stories. Three factions vie for control over Alpha Station, Earth’s second extra-solar station: loyalists of the Earth Company (one inescapably thinks of the East India Company), a powerful faction of FTL merchanters, and local Alpha Station merchanters and administrators who understand the local economic environment and who are Earth Company only in theory.

The Earth Company officials want their expensive FTL ship The Rights of Man, a ship name redolent with symbolism as the thing does not work, to continue receiving maximal resources and be retained under the control of the Company. The merchanters seek signatories to a new treaty as they form an Alliance. Cherryh’s readers know what’s coming in the chronologically later Downbelow Station. Alpha Station merchants and executives seek a way forward in challenging economic times; at their “Hinder Star,” they stand to be bypassed like Radiator Springs or any of the dozens of real towns left high and dry by the Interstate system in the United States. The complexities of the three-way struggle play out in adminstrivia, in dockside brawls and assignations, and in the creation of a self-perpetuating merchanter culture, one which will in future forestall any challenge to their “families run ships, not governments” credo. In typical Cherryh, and now Cherryh and Fancher fashion, complexity heats until the pot bubbles over, all with the promise of future crises to resolve in later texts.

Is this Space Opera? Calling this and other books in the common background Space Opera does them some disservice. Here, spaceships do not make noise in space; if their engines quit, they do not coast slowly to a stop, and delta-V really means something. This is not Star Wars. Yet we are concerned at least in some part with the princes and chieftains, kings and queens, appointed administrators and ship captains, the elite of the societies enmeshed together here, a signal of the Space Opera genre. Cherryh appears in Hartwell and Cramer’s 2006 The Space Opera Renaissance and arguably strides across much of the definitional space it creates with her 80-odd book publications (17-18). That she often eschews the rippin’ space battle—her Merchanter’s Luck takes place at a time when the turncoat Signy Mallory takes on the remnants of the Earth Company fleet gone piratical and abandoned by Earth, but the battle on display is psychological and takes place inside the main character’s head—is well known, and Alliance Rising follows in those footsteps. There is drama aplenty, but at the human level, in the romance and bureaucratic infighting and let’s-make-a-deal venues, not in the maneuver and missile venues. Characters sweat their big decisions in bed, at their desks, or gathered together in a bar, not in glowing, high-tech nests of screens or Jefferies Tubes.

Liz Bourke ably reviewed this text in 2019 for Locus, noting some issues with diversity, that the book seemed rooted in an 80’s sensibility, with limited variety of perspective (“Liz Bourke Reviews Alliance Rising by C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher”). Certainly, the novel is less interpersonally adventurous than other work by Cherryh. Devil in the Belt stands as a clear inspiration to the Expanse books and series, with its polyamorous spacer humans (though as one might expect, given the publication date, without contemporary poly terminology) and matrilineal merchanter clans. The people of Alliance Rising form tamer relations, though the “sailors in port” aspect of the FTL ship crews is in full flow. Accidental or purposeful? The cultural markers of later books also come later in the in-universe chronology, making it possible for Cherryh and Fancher to gauge social evolution at a more traditional stage in the history they recount here.

The text could serve in a college-level literature course, particularly an advanced level course able to undertake the more advanced themes of colonialism, the rights of those who do the work vs. the rights of capital, and the matters William H. Stoddard raises in his appreciation of Alliance Rising, which won the 2020 Prometheus Award for best novel. “The rights of man, in a nonfigurative sense, are what this novel is about,” he observes (“Liberty, evolving self-government and the Rights of Man”). Whether undergraduates can be tempted by a work so focused on the internal remains to be seen. The dedication suggests why this novel exists at all: Cherryh and Fancher celebrate Betsy Wollheim, still at the helm of storied DAW Books (which, in days of yore, was a publisher of distinctive, yellow-spined paperbacks), reflecting a fifty-year plus friendship and professional association. May their work continue ever after.

The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55, no. 3

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Review of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF

Paromita Sarkar

Samuel, R.T., Rakesh Khanna, and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, editors. The Blaft Book of Anti‑Caste SF. Blaft Publications, 2024.

The big blue stature of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF (2024), lined up on any shelf, cannot go unnoticed. The moment you pick it up, Priyanka Paul’s beautifully illustrated Mecha Ambedkar—set against a background of circuit networks—greets you, carrying the iconographies of the Indian anti-caste movement on its back, moving toward Begumpura, the utopian casteless city envisioned by Saint Ravidas. In the next few seconds, as you flip through the pages for a quick glance, you’re likely to stop and look—either because of the comics strewn in between, the unexpected mix of established and emerging writers, or simply because the story titles are so compelling. If not the playful ‘Meen Matters’, then the solemn and arresting ‘In the Extreme Silence of Agrahara’ is bound to intrigue you.

The 428-page anthology, edited by R.T. Samuel, Rakesh Khanna, and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, and published by Blaft Publications, is a riot. It stares back at you. It jolts you. It urges you to read it. The unabashed attention the book’s visual aesthetics demand is matched by a form and content that refuse to be “structured” or “formal” in any traditional sense. Disrupting the standard idea of an anthology, this collection seeks to expand beyond the textual, including works that interrupt any illusion of narrative unity—graphic stories, a speculative magazine, and stories that refuse closure. The visual and the textual intersect through audacious ideas, opening up a new form of anti-caste thought and resistance. This form does not rely on a retrospective historicization of Dalit movements, nor is it a speculative veneer imposed artificially upon them.

The violence of caste is crucial in understanding the radical potential of the anthology. The caste system, a form of systemic violence and social stratification, has long afflicted South Asian societies, such as India. These social stratifications, historically codified in ancient texts like the Manusmriti or The Laws of Manu, have been used as methods of marginalizing and humiliating various Indigenous and caste communities under the umbrella term ‘Dalits’ or the Broken—a term used by Jyotirao Phule, a historical anti-caste writer and activist from Maharashtra, India. The term has historically been contested. Kanshi Ram, for instance, referred to such communities as ‘Bahujans’, the Marathi word for majority (Chandra 148).

Akin to experiences of African American communities in the United States, both caste in India and race in the US have been prevalent sites of comparative scholarship, building an ‘afro-dalit’ scholarship (Prashad), present in interactions of anti-race activists like W.E.B. DuBois and anti-caste activists like B.R. Ambedkar. These experiences have been vocalized and politicized often in fiction and autobiography. The civil rights and anti-racism group Black Panthers from the U.S., in fact, was a key inspiration in the formation of Dalit Panthers, an anti-caste organization founded by JV Pawar and Namdeo Dhasal, in the 1970s (Satyanarayana and Tharu 61). Writings from or about such communities have relied on an ‘authentic’ aesthetic, as Sharankumar Limbale, another prominent Dalit writer and activist, suggests. Many of these works have utilized realism or the autobiography as a mode. For those interested, a powerful and prominent example is Joothan (1997) by Om Prakash Valmiki as well as the anthology of Marathi Dalit voices, Poisoned Bread (1992) edited by Arjun Dangle. The Blaft Book continues vocalizing such experiences of caste and of pitting oneself against the system of caste. The anthology moves away from an apparent ‘authentic’ and ‘realistic’ mode to an exploratory one, like speculation or science fiction—similar to the practices of Afrofuturism (continuing political solidarities across cultural movements) and the works of Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor that reconfigured Black histories and futures. Recent scholarship on other marginalized futurisms such as Chattopadhyay’s “Manifesto” suggests a rising pattern of works and movements that vocalize marginalized experiences while reorienting the SF form: a new form of possibilities and ‘playfulness’ emerges where SF and its tropes too become suspect (17). The anthology’s publication adds another dimension to the scholarship on Futurism. It tackles the problem of introducing these historical and political experiences into the speculative mode and vice versa, bringing forth a collection that is expansive in frame.

As an experimental and pioneering anthology, the mix of writers is particularly interesting, with about thirty-two writers across boundaries of space, time, and languages. The inclusion of writers like Bama, Gogu Shyamala, Gouri, and P.A. Uthaman gestures toward an already extant speculative imaginary within works of Dalit and anti-caste writers, though they are rarely read as SF writers in India, which (popularly) remains shaped by a Hollywood-inflected Sci-Fi temperament. Through this anthology, Blaft reorients how we read these writers, even as it expands the contours of the genre itself. Speculative fiction here becomes porous, leaking across literary categories, voices, languages, and temporalities. The very form of the anthology resists any settled or stable identity. Jumping across writers—past, present, and emerging—the book traces the evolving possibilities of writing anti-caste thought into the speculative, the fantastical, and the futuristic.

This porosity is not just temporal but spatial. The collection moves across terrains: from Dalit subjectivities in the rural settings of Bama’s “Korali” or Gogu Shyamala’s “The Phantom Ladder” to the urban nightmares and dystopias of Gouri’s “The Demon That Sits On Your Chest” or Yukti Narang’s “Kitchen Glob”; from the spectral silence of an afterlife Agrahara by Aswathy K. Raj to the nightmarish vision in Snehashish Das’ “Death of a Giant in a Godless Country” or Gautam Vegda’s short story series from ‘Supernova’ to “Vultures on Mars”; from the digital and outer spaces of comics like Yeswanth Mocharla’s “Looly Cooly”—featuring a delivery-boy with “monster-anger”—to Bakarmax’s (alias Sumit Kumar) “Spacewali,” about a “kaamwali” in India’s space lab and to Kunal Lokhande’s provocative take on a gaming channel turned religious sect in ‘Sanatan Gaming’. Even when it comes to stringing together an SF adventure, the anthology does not disappoint; the Birthday Gurlz in “Meen Matters” by Rashmi Ruth Devadasan remain memorable in a post-apocalyptic zombie-filled Chennai.

In all these stories, caste is constantly altered and ridiculed to expose its structures. These distinct spaces do not function as sites of just cognitive estrangement, as they might in traditional SF. Rather, they are loud, grounded anti-caste assertions that echo beyond the present—to ridicule, mourn, rage against it. It is bleak, yes, but it is also powerful: a declaration that caste does not dissolve even in outer space, or in death, or in data. Instead, its haunting continues.

The peculiar thing about caste in today’s digital India is this: to envision a caste-free space, one must first speak of caste. Yet, to speak of it is often seen as propagandist, anti-meritocratic, or non-factual—unless, of course, it comes in the form of a popular casteist slur, an endogamous matrimonial startup, or an innocuous display of caste pride masked as ancestral heritage. Over the past decade, caste has steadily permeated the digital space—through both subtle gestures and overtly violent threats. In parallel, affirmative caste conversations and movements have continued reclaiming these spaces, resisting the overwhelming presence of digital Brahmanism with counter-assertions, memorialization, and imaginative world-building. Artist-activists have become ever more present—and ever more vulnerable—but they persist, intervening nevertheless.

The rise of Dalit and Bahujan creators within these popular digital and speculative spaces points toward new futures for the anti-caste movement. It is into these popular terrains that The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF enters—not merely as a literary or political intervention, but as a disruptive method of imagining caste itself. At one of the book’s launches, Rahee Punyashloka, one of the authors, used the term, “audacity” when talking about the anthology. Later that evening, of all the things I remembered when reading the recently bought anthology, the term “audacity” stuck around. To play “audaciously” in these spaces is not just stylistic—it is tactical. This anthology is not just an intervention into the publishing sphere of Indian science fiction; it is a conceptual reorientation of how caste is written, imagined, and published. It shifts from the realist or life-writing modes traditionally associated with Dalit literature, toward a poetics of speculation, friction, and rupture. Here, the anthology hits its mark most forcefully.

The comics embedded within the prose narratives do not simply supplement the written word—they interrupt it. They disrupt the expectations of the reader, and in doing so, make visible an imaginary of anti-caste possibilities that refuses to conform. The fictional magazine insert—“Margin Mag” by Sudarshan Devadoss and MK Abhilash—and Punyashloka’s piece further challenge the anthology’s unity, by functioning as a meta-text that speaks both within and beyond the volume. “Margin Mag” imagines a future in which Dalit history is publicly commemorated with hopeful anti-caste/anti-discrimination WhatsApp updates and ads for anti-bias devices like “FairEar”, while Punyashloka in “The R.V Society for Promotion of Underground Sci-Fi Writings” talks about encountering the anthology’s call for stories and journals the intimate, messy process of writing anti-caste speculative fiction itself. These disruptions are not digressions; they are structurally integral to the work’s method of expression.

Blaft Publications is one of the few independent publishers in India committed to bringing regional pulp and popular fiction into the literary mainstream. In the past, titles like The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction and Ghosts, Monsters and Demons of India have foregrounded the mythic, the folkloric, and the marginal in English translation—reclaiming stories that have long existed outside elite literary circles. Their latest anthology of anti-caste speculative fiction, a community project clearly put together with care, extends this legacy with quiet precision. The anthology does not seek to offer narrative closure or stable resolutions. It resists unity, embraces disorder, and insists on the porousness of genre, of time, and of caste itself. Its stories speak from and across differences of borders, languages, and spaces—from the ghostly rural, to the fragmented urban, to digital futures, and imagined post-caste presents often encountering, embracing or enduring science and technology. It opens up not only what caste has been but what caste could mean in speculative registers—how it might linger, mutate, or be abolished in these worlds we have not yet built. The promise remains, though only partly fulfilled. Blaft’s new anthology is a groundbreaking chapter in South Asian SF and anti-caste literature; the full potential of the endeavor awaits to be realized, hopefully further opening up dialogues between anti-caste thought and speculative fiction across contexts and borders.

WORKS CITED

Ambedkar, B. R. Letter to W.E.B. Du Bois. Circa 1946. W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), digitized by Gary Tartakov, https://www.saada.org/item/20140415-3544.

Chandra, Kanchan. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. “Manifestos of Futurisms.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, vol. 50, no. 2, 2021, pp. 8–23.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Letter to B.R. Ambedkar. 31 July 1946. W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. South Asian American Digital Archive, digitized by Gary Tartakov, https://www.saada.org/item/20140415-3545.

Prashad, Vijay. “Afro-Dalits of the Earth, Unite!” African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1, 2000, pp. 189–201. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/524727. Accessed 9 June 2025.

Satyanarayana, K., and Susie J. Tharu, editors. The Exercise of Freedom: An Introduction to Dalit Writing. Navayana Publishers, 2013.

Paromita Sarkar (she/her) is a writer and a researcher based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. She explores the intersections of speculative fiction, anti-caste thought, and media in India. Her areas of interest include Science Fiction, Marginality Studies, Futurism, Cinema Studies, and Popular Culture. She has presented her research on Afrofuturism, marginality, science fiction, and popular culture, at national and international conferences

Daredevil: Born Again

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55, no. 3

Media Reviews

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Review of Daredevil: Born Again

Jeremy Brett

Scardapane, Dario, Corman, Matt, and Ord, Chris, creators. Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1. Marvel Studios, 2025.

The themes of Marvel’s restarted gritty superhero show Daredevil are made manifest (indeed, quite unsubtle) in the opening credits, which depict (to the strains of contemplative theme music that quickly grow pensive) the crumbling away of the old—images of Daredevil’s iconic horned helmet, Daredevil’s criminal archenemy Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), Lady Justice, the steeple of Matt Murdock’s beloved church, a sign for ‘Nelson Murdock Page, Attorneys at Law’, the Statue of Liberty—only for the fragments to reassemble into a reborn Matt /Daredevil (Charlie Cox). What was, now passes away as both Murdock and Fisk look to reidentify themselves both within and beyond traditional systems of governance and control.

But the central theme of the show is not merely resurrection, but instead a revolving and returnto the same point of existential origin as multiple characters attempt to remodel themselves but find, in doing so, that efforts at personal transformation often expose the adamantine and unchanging core of one’s character, motivations, desires, and vulnerabilities. For both Murdock and Fisk, a jarring act of personal violence inspires a personal reexamination of themselves and the worlds in which they have traditionally moved. In Fisk’s case, it is his having been betrayed and shot in the face by his protégé/ward at the conclusion of Marvel’s Echo (2024) —that trauma caused him to temporarily abandon his criminal career and his beloved wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), rethink his life’s priorities, and inspire an ultimately warped and misguided need to “serve the city”. For Matt, this process begins in the opening minutes of the show, where his best friend and law partner Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is gunned down in front of their mutual friend Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) by Matt’s old adversary Benjamin Poindexter/Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). An enraged Matt, clad as Daredevil, violates the traditional superhero code of restraint by deliberately tossing Bullseye off a roof and nearly killing him. It is a moment of existential crisis for Matt, a character already known (as a practicing Catholic) for his frequent wrestling with guilt and angst. Gone from this series is the lighter and more comical, yellow-suited Matt viewers enjoyed briefly in 2022’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

The series asks us to consider whether we can truly escape our deepest motivations, the things that drive us to be who and what we are. In the remaking, do we reveal our actual selves? Both Matt and Fisk want to be ‘better’ than they were, but whether they can in such an imperfect world that both produces and rewards moral compromises becomes the through-line theme. Master criminal Fisk runs for and becomes the Mayor of New York City, and he does so at least in part with the sincere motivation of helping the city he loves to reach a place of safety, citing the growing presence of masked vigilantes as a symptom of NYC’s illness. No one in this political climate will miss the relevance of a felon gaining vast political power in part by finding scapegoats to blame for a supposed breakdown in law and order. But though Fisk may act with legitimate concern for the city’s welfare, he also manipulates the city’s government and political processes to serve not only his and Vanessa’s criminal empire but his internalized hatred for Daredevil and, by extension, all costumed heroes who work outside the system and therefore his iron control. Fisk’s innate need to dominate curdles his better impulses and by the series’ conclusion drives him to overtly license police brutality, stage a societal breakdown via cutting power to the entire city, and finally, declare martial law. As he notes to Vanessa, “I ran to serve the city, but…opportunities present themselves.”

Matt’s attempts to change are even more profound. His near-murder of Bullseye and the tragedy of Foggy’s death drives him to permanently eschew his Daredevil identity in favor of pursuing justice through more traditional means, within the established legal system. But the system is profoundly broken, prompting an inquiry into the role of superheroes in a world where the justice and political systems can be so corrupted that they no longer serve the innocent. Captain America: Civil War (2016) introduced, through the Sokovia Accords, the idea that powerful people might require institutional control to prevent mass casualties and destruction caused by their actions, but Daredevil: Born Again suggests a necessary role for extralegal protectors when the law or system fails. Of course that role is integral to the image of the superhero and has been at least since Superman’s debut in 1938, but it takes on a special significance now, at this moment in US history when social and economic inequality are at dismayingly high levels and police violence criminally so—should people with powers circumvent established avenues and become, as Fisk calls them, purposely using a loaded term, “vigilantes”? Matt over the course of the series returns to this question, at first fervently denying the necessity for a masked hero when the legal system he serves as an attorney is in place, but by the conclusion this denial has crumbled. The series shows audiences the reality of an unequal system in a powerful scene in episode 4 (“Sic Semper Systema”) between Matt and one of his indigent clients, who is angered by the unfairness of a structure that grinds up people like him and denies them dignity, autonomy, or fair chances at rehabilitation. And late in the series Matt returns to being Daredevil in order to stop serial killer Muse (Hunter Doohan), a murderer that Fisk’s cops cannot find. But the primary reason Matt finally accepts his inner drive to do right and protect the people of his city is Fisk’s weaponizing of corrupt elements of the NYPD by creating an Anti-Vigilante Task Force—ostensibly to capture criminals like Muse—that answers only to him. People sworn to serve justice willingly bow instead to corrupt power and give themselves over to Fisk in exchange for free reign to exercise brutality against perceived enemies of Fisk, the city, and themselves. Crises bring forth the heroes needed to fight them.

The ‘street-level’ Marvel heroes have almost always been set apart from the world-threatening or cosmic levels of narrative that dominate the MCU; though Matt during Daredevil’s Netflix years fought his share of faceless ninjas and a mystically resurrected Elektra, his most savage battles have always been against the ruthless and violent criminal appetites of the all-too-human Fisk. That dynamic is characteristic of the MCU in general, where the most chilling and emotionally complex villains have never been Thanos, or the Kree, or Cassandra Nova, but human beings with familiar motives such as Fisk, Kilgrave, “Cottonmouth” Stokes, or Erik Killmonger—people who operate (to a degree) on our own recognizable and relatable levels and utilize casual, up-close cruelty against fellow humans. That sort of ground-level intimacy also provides additional dimensionality to another of Daredevil’s concerns: the moral complexities of heroism. Like anything else, heroism can be a corrupting and corruptible idea: a number of NYPD cops in the series wear the skull insignia of their ironic folk hero the murderous Frank Castle/Punisher (Jon Bernthal), seeing Frank as a legend and a role model for stopping crime. These heroes of their own stories commit vicious assaults—including the shooting of masked hero Hector Alaya/White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes)—even in the face of Frank’s clear and utter contempt for them. Despite Matt’s offering that Frank might truly be of service to people by saving lives, Frank knows himself and his broken nature, and is not nor ever will be a hero. But tragically, other people desiring to free their inner savagery will always find models on which to imprint, and can always weave false heroism out of selfishness.

But more positively, Matt reframes the concept of hero to center it not around a single costumed figure, but as a collective popular phenomenon. At the series’ conclusion, with Fisk exercising draconian control over the city, Matt decides not to attack him in traditional superheroic fashion and, rather, begins to raise an army of resistance among the ordinary people of New York. Instead of a lone hero, he embodies a call to mass heroic action. As he says in his final words of the season,

I can’t see my city. But I can feel it. The system isn’t working. And it’s rotten. Corrupt. But this is our city. Not his. And we can take it back, together. The weak… The strong… All of us… Resist. Rebel. Rebuild. Because we are the city. Without fear.

Daredevil: Born Again argues that heroism is not, indeed, should not, be the province of a single powered individual (nor even an elite team like the Avengers), but the collective effort of people working together to resist corrupt institutions and to change them to better suit the societies those institutions were created to serve. One important detail of the series is that, more so than any other MCU production, it is marked by frequent shots of New York City streets and people, with frequent commenting (via the website reporting of BB Urich [Genneya Walton]) by New Yorkers about Fisk, Daredevil, and their own fears about/faith in the city. New York City and the people who make it what it is are equal participants in the series with Matt, Fisk, or anyone else. There is a popular sentiment in Daredevil that we have not yet seen in the MCU, and that sentiment and its concomitant social relevance gives the series particular significance. It should prove a profitable source of study for scholars studying the evolution of the superhero trope or those interested in the ways in which popular culture reflects and amplifies the concerns of our time.

Jeremy Brett is an archivist and librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, Texas A&M University. There he serves as Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. Both his M.A. (History) and his M.L.S. (Library Science) were obtained at the University of Maryland, College Park. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

Dune: Prophecy, Season 1

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 55, no. 3

Media Reviews

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Review of Dune: Prophecy, Season 1

Giaime Lazzari

Adapted for television by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker. Legendary Television / HBO, 2024..

Legendary Television / HBO’s Dune: Prophecy series expands the universe created by Frank Herbert with a prequel set 10,000 years before the events of the first Dune novel, focusing on the origins of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood during the tumultuous period following the Butlerian Jihad. Based on Sisterhood of Dune (2012) by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (who also serve as executive producers) and positioned as a prequel to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies (2021 and 2024), the series explores the early machinations of the enigmatic order of women whose genetic breeding program and political manoeuvring would eventually shape the destiny of the known universe. The series’ narrative centers on sisters and Reverend Mothers Valya and Tula Harkonnen (played by Emily Watson and Olivia Williams) and their involvement in the nascent Bene Gesserit, tracing how personal vendettas and political necessities transform into the cold, calculated practices that define the sisterhood in Herbert’s original novels. In the course of season one’s six episodes, Valya and Tula must overcome social and supernatural forces that threaten the stability and the political prominence of the Sisterhood: the growing suspicions of Emperor Javicco Corrino (interpreted by Mark Strong), the rift between the Harkonnens and the other Great Houses, the haunting violent legacy of the Sisterhood itself, and a new enemy who seeks to oust them from the Imperium (played by Desmond Hart).

Dune: Prophecy enters a television landscape already transformed by prestige science-fiction series based on classics of the genre, such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (Apple TV, 2021) and Liu Cixin’s 3 Body Problem (Netflix, 2024). However, the series positions itself not merely as a television adaptation, as it was the case for previous Syfy-produced series Frank Herbert’s Dune (2000)and Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (2003), but an expansion of the Dune universe itself by focusing on aspects only alluded to in the original hexalogy as well as in the current cinematic revival of Dune. For this reason, Prophecy is in itself a valuable addition for any scholar working on the Dune universe, particularly when inscribing it in a multimedia framework. Spawning licensed game boards (six, as of 2025), video games (six, as of 2025), graphic novels adaptations and expansions, Dune has established itself as one of the most relevant and successful multimedia franchises in decades, particularly after 2021 Villeneuve’s adaptation, and Dune: Prophecy offers new material to consolidate and expand it.

Within the Dune world, Prophecy’s positioning is particularly significant as the narrative navigates the aftermath of the Butlerian Jihad—humanity’s rebellion against thinking machines and a foundational event in Herbert’s universe. The series contextualises the rise of the Sisterhood precisely as the human response to the banning of the rebellious intelligent machines: faced with the impossibility of omniscience and objectivity, and thus of avoiding deceptions and intrigues, the Great Houses of the Imperium employ—or deploy—the Sisterhood-trained Reverend Mothers as ‘truthsayers’ capable of discerning truth from lies. This post-Butlerian setting allows the series to explore themes of technological ethics and societal reconstruction that may resonate with contemporary political and societal anxieties around artificial intelligence as well as broad epistemological concerns on the relationship between truth, post-truth, and political power.

What distinguishes Dune: Prophecy within the science fiction contemporary television landscape is its deliberate centering of female power structures within an feudal interstellar society. Where Herbert’s original novels presented the Bene Gesserit as an already-established force operating in the shadows of a patriarchal empire, Prophecy examines the sisterhood’s formation as a response to and subversion of male-dominated, patrilineal power structures. The series thereby engages with feminist science fiction traditions established by SF writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Élisabeth Vonarburg, and Margaret Atwood, who, among others, similarly explored how female-centered societies might evolve within—or against—patriarchal frameworks. However, rather than creating a straightforward utopian feminist vision, Prophecy portrays the early Bene Gesserit as morally complex, violent and manipulative, and their accumulation of power as driven more by survival necessity than by altruistic concerns for humanity’s future. In this perspective, the show’s exploration of the Bene Gesserit’s evolution offers particularly rich ground for academic analysis of gender and power in SF.

The Bene Gesserit occupies a paradoxical position, wielding immense influence through their manipulation of bloodlines and politics while simultaneously presenting themselves as merely ‘servants’ (truthsayers) to the great houses. Prophecy illuminates the origins of this strategic self-effacement, depicting how the early sisterhood learns to transform apparent submission into covert domination precisely by being able to recognise—and to effectuate—the distinction between truth and lies. Within this scheme, the series’ portrayal of the tension between the exclusively patrilineal noble houses and the matriarchal Sisterhood raises questions about how women’s bodies and minds become sites of political contestation, and how genetic lineage intersects with gender in determining authority.

Dune: Prophecy is not without flaws. At times, for instance, it sacrifices Herbert’s philosophical depth for more conventional television tropes, such as plainly explanatory dialogues, unnecessary cliffhangers, overuse of dramatic music to signal suspense. At times, it also feels burdened with overly ambitious, almost cinematic, shots. While this provides visual continuity with Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films, Prophecy seems to resort to these techniques in order to complement its lack of interest for material environments the characters inhabit. Where Herbert’s original work meticulously detailed the ecological systems and physical environments of planets like Arrakis, Prophecy offers sweeping cosmic vistas without grounding them in tangible planetary contexts. This environmental disconnection represents a significant departure from one of the most distinctive aspects of Herbert’s universe, where human politics are inextricably shaped by their material surroundings. The series also exhibits the fundamental tension between expositional density and narrative propulsion that characterizes adaptations of Herbert’s work—an inherent challenge when translating the encyclopaedic world-building of the Dune universe into the temporal constraints and visual grammar of episodic television.

Giaime Lazzari is a translator and a PhD candidate in French Literature at Trinity College Dublin, recipient of the Claude and Vincenette Pichois Research Award (2024-2028). His research focuses on language and space in the works of David Bunch, Joanna Russ, Daniel Drode, and Monique Wittig. He previously earned joint Master’s degrees from University of Bologna and Université Paris-Nanterre, with a dissertation on ecology and geophilosophy in Frank Herbert’s Dune. His professional experience includes serving as Junior Lecturer at Université Paris 8 Vincennes—Saint Denis.