Category: 54.2

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Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory takes a classic science fiction premise and scrambles it. What if there was an all-knowing artificial intelligence that could help us decide which actions would be serve the most people? What if we had a calculus for the greatest possible happiness? Valkyr—or Kyr—a young woman and warrior for humanity, lives in the shadow of just such an intelligence, an ultra-powerful, reality-bending force called the Wisdom. The major problem? Humanity did not invent this superpower, and the civilization that did, the majo, follows the Wisdom’s advice to destroy the Earth. Kyr is a warbreed, a genetically modified weapon for humanity’s revenge, born on Gaea Station decades after the death of her planet. She is a special favorite to her mentor and the station’s de facto leader, “uncle” Aulus Jole, and a clear frontrunner for a glamorous assignment in one of the combat wings. When assignments arrive, however, Kyr finds herself placed in Nursery, the child-bearing and rearing sector, a wing with all the fatality of combat but none of the glory. Reeling from this shock and the defection of her twin brother, Mags, Kyr takes the ultimate risk and leaves Station Gaea to prove herself and to find out the truth about her place in the universe.

Some Desperate Glory is Tesh’s best-selling first novel, following Silver in the Wood (2019) and Drowned Country (2020), the two novellas of the Greenhollow Duology that marked her dark fantasy debut. In a departure, then, from her previous works, Some Desperate Glory employs many of the familiar elements of high concept science fiction: a young hero with a singular goal, an alien enemy, and a slew of new combat-driven technology. Yet, the initial set-up belies the narrative’s complexity. Some Desperate Glory expands into a tale of manipulation, where coming of age includes shattering a worldview on multiple fronts and in multiple universes. Like many young heroines, Kyr learns that her world and her place in it could have been otherwise; furthermore, she is allowed to live the alternatives, in a fragmented and sweeping narrative that allows the reader to enjoy multiple facets of Tesh’s deep world-building.

Reminiscent of Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man (1995), Some Desperate Glory takes two wildly conflicting worldviews and smashes them up against one another, with interesting implications for gendered representation. While gender roles on Gaea are so strict as to control literal lifetime assignments, the majo have an entirely different understanding of physiology and procreation. What makes Some Desperate Glory a uniquely queer tale is the gendered deconstruction that comes from both the humans central to the novel and from an outsider’s perspective. The majo have a difficult time understanding Gaean concepts of gender and must puzzle over what they’ve learned about human physical markers to tell them apart. Majo themselves use agender pronouns to make themselves legible to humans, but they don’t seem to use these words to describe themselves in other contexts. On Gaea, there is no recognized form of life partnership, and sex is, ostensibly, reserved for reproduction, focused on meeting the station’s population targets. Queerness, then, is something Kyr can’t seem to properly process. Two of the girls in her mess are known to kiss and couple off, but Kyr doesn’t understand what is so important about “a sex thing;” to her, romantic attachment means distraction. As long as it doesn’t get in the way of Gaea’s operations, it’s harmless and unimportant. These multiple views—represented in Kyr, her companions, and a majo interloper—constantly collide to refresh Kyr’s worldview, providing constant revelations that alter her perspective.

While Some Desperate Glory is concerned with gender inequality and reproductive decision-making, it is unlike more common reproductive dystopias. Kyr’s concern is not primarily for her own fate or the fate of any potential children she might have; rather, as Kyr discovers the depth of the deception surrounding her, her greatest goal is to shut the system down altogether. Some Desperate Glory has all the brutality of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) or Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) and a similar pre-occupation with how birth and controlling leadership can circumscribe a life. The novel, however, reserves a special place for tenderness and community where little would seem to exist. Finding the capacity to turn a novel about militarization into a tale of friendship, collaboration, and daring, Tesh crafts a unique story, which is as mind-bending and fast-paced as it is enjoyable and kind.

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Sarah Nolan-Brueck is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California where she studies how science fiction interrogates gender. Currently, she is researching the many ways science fiction authors critique medical legislation that restricts diverse gendered groups in the United States and how the genre collaborates with activism in this arena. Sarah was recently awarded the University of Oregon’s 2024 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship. She has been previously published in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, the SFRA Review, Femspec, and Huffpost, and has work forthcoming in Utopian Studies and ASAP/J.

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Separated into three islands—the main island, the Annex, and the Nursery—Prospera is a utopia cut off from the rest of the world. Created by the Designer to shelter the best of humanity, the inhabitants of the main island live paradisaically, pursuing whatever passion or desire drives them. This paradise does not mean that they do not work or live as mere mortals—they still age, if slowly; still work, just not menial labor jobs; and still die. But their death and birth are unique: they arrive by ferry from the Nursery in a body in its late teens, capable of basic human functions but also able to avidly learn new things, and they leave by ferry to the Nursery when their health number on their monitors reaches a low count, meaning they no longer enjoy life. This cyclical nature of existence is guided by Ferrymen like Proctor Bennett who lead those at the end of the cycle back to the ferry.

Proctor’s life in Prospera is idyllic. He has a good fifteen-year contract with his current partner, Elise. Although their relationship is cooling after many years together, they still are happy and content. His job is fulfilling, challenging, and a point of personal pride. He wouldn’t do anything to change his life. This changes, however, when he takes his father to the ferry and his father has a catatonic breakdown, telling his son, “The world is not the world. You’re not you… Oranios. It’s all Oranios” (62). His father leaves by ferry, but Proctor’s world is forever changed. As he searches for the answers to his father’s mumblings, he faces off against bureaucratic corruption bent on stopping him, class warfare building between the Annex and the main island, and the possibilities of what his life for the last hundreds of years really means.

Utopia, space exploration, climate fiction—Cronin writes the genre tropes well. I connected to each character as their backstory was revealed, and I lingered over sentences meticulously crafted to enhance the experience. The sentences are lyrical and whimsical; at times I thought I was moving through an ethereal dream only to be reminded that pain and strife still exist. Cronin’s use of the English language is his crowning point in this novel. But where I get stuck is there is no innovation with the tropes: each reveal is satisfying, but it is also predictable, if one knows science fiction well enough. This critique does not necessarily diminish the book. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Cronin’s goal in the project is to subvert or expand tropes or send the genre along a new path. It is a text that is beautifully written, like Samuel R. Delany’s work, but also one that is not so concerned with generic questions, unlike Delany’s work.

Cronin’s exploration of utopia, turning point theory, simulation theory, climate catastrophe, and space travel are not meant to explore new depths in the subject; instead, he centers, and this is the beautiful part of the book, these grand ideas not around the ideas themselves but around the characters that enact them. His book becomes a meditation on relationships (parent to child, person to person, manager to employee) that left me re-thinking my own relationships and approaches to them. The central struggle of the book is with the loss of loved ones and not just a fight with authority, a quest for truth, and the revelation of survival.

However, after reading the book twice, I’m not entirely sure what the central message of the project is when it comes to the larger, systemic issues it presents. Along with its meditation on relationships, the book presents messages about class struggle, environmental destruction, and existence through mediations on simulation theory. These systemic questions become lost in the deployment of the tropes because Cronin does not emphasize one over the other; instead, he lets the tropes play out as they normally might in a blockbuster science fiction story. The critique of class, for example, is limited in its execution because it presents the same rich-vs.-poor dynamic that many utopias and dystopias exacerbate. The struggle leads to action—the oppressed in the Annex begin marching on the privileged on the main island—but Cronin doesn’t provide readers with enough paratextual information to give this struggle any heart or depth. A scene between the main character and his housekeeper illustrates this reading: Proctor converses with his housekeeper from the Annex about her son. He realizes that he barely knows anything about the son, even though he promised to take the son sailing. The scene shows the class separation and inhumanity between the wealthy of the main island and the working class of the Annex, but it barely goes beyond that presentation. His housekeeper is used later to smuggle Proctor information to sneak out of the Nursery, but beyond that, the book leaves this class relationship alone, thus leaving the message of class itself aborted in many ways. The final message on class, with the climactic reveal at the end, seems to be that class struggle brings about social change, since the Annex’s revolution against the main island ends in a social upheaval, but I am still unsure what the little moments about these broader, systemic arguments mean.

Even as I struggle with how Cronin does not do a lot with the tropes he’s working with, I also think that this deployment of tropes could be seen as a good part of the text: it is marketed toward a wider audience than academics discussing genre, and as such, the use of the tropes makes it easier to use The Ferryman as a starting point into the genre of the science fiction epic. When I went to the local Barnes and Noble to ask about Cronin, the bookseller took me to the horror genre bookshelves, because “that’s where Cronin is usually shelved” even though there is nothing remotely close to the horror genre in The Ferryman. The bookseller was thinking about Cronin’s earlier work, especially the 2010–2016 Passage trilogy, which is a post-apocalyptic, zombie-vampire series. But in shelving The Ferryman in this genre, I believe its use of utopia and climate fiction as a genre is a way to introduce this side of genre fiction to readers. Thus, I recommend The Ferryman as a strong entryway but not as a complication of science fiction. It can begin conversation rather than continue it, a good place to start an undergraduate or graduate course talking about utopia, futurism in science fiction, or climate fiction and space expansion.

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Adam McLain is a Ph.D. student in the English department at the University of Connecticut. He researches dystopian literature, legal theory, and sexual justice.

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After enough time, one might be forgiven in thinking that there can be no new First Contact stories to tell. It’s a truly singular event when an author takes a classic sf trope and spins it in a new direction infused with existential social and political relevance. This sort of literary shift was already accomplished by author Ruthanna Emrys in her “Innsmouth Legacy” series, in which she infused the classic Lovecraftian universe of cosmic horror with empathy and feeling for the marginalized in opposition to the racism endemic to Lovecraft and his era. With A Half-Built Garden, Emrys brings modern and lasting concerns for the future of humanity and Earth (which the novel takes pains to point out are not, to certain people, the same thing at all) to a wholly unusual and thoughtful story of alien encounter.

In 2083, the Earth has been engaged for several decades in a radical moment of social, political, and corporate restructuring. Nation-states have been replaced or supplemented by networks centered on the maintenance, restoration, and care of environmentally critical watersheds. The rampant capitalists that ravaged the planet in the 20^th and 21^st centuries have for the most part been reduced to small island enclaves, connected to the watershed networks and traditional governing structures in uneasy alliances of trade and supply. The networks, which sprung into existence as part of the Dandelion movement (the image, of course, suggesting seeds being spread by the free flow of the wind) govern themselves through collaboration, consensus, and intimate communication rooted in problem-solving. The Dandelion networks devote themselves to repairing what had been so desperately, horribly broken in the world by capitalism and nationalism. Adaptation and harmony are increasingly default human values, and for the first time, despite ongoing struggle, there is hope.

And then the aliens landed. So goes the cliché, but one thing that makes Emrys’ novel so particularly remarkable is the response from this altered world. The novel avoids chronicling an all-out defensive reaction from the militaries of the world, frenzied government scrambling, mass panic (in fact, among the most striking aspects of the book is the immediate acceptance by humans of the aliens as they walk among us), or the complete absence of panic or fear. Those responses are replaced instead with curiosity, acceptance, honest attempts at connection and friendship, attempts at exploitation (by the capitalists), and even sexual exploration (by protagonist/narrator Judy and her wife Carol with the alien representative Rhamnetin). Alien encounters, Emrys posits, bring out the full range of human behavior in people; we are not limited to our most atavistic responses. This attitude of optimism denotes the novel’s true throughline. We see it from the very opening, in which Judy notes “In the bad old days (the commentary said later), nation-states had plans laid in for this sort of thing. They’d have caught the ship on satellite surveillance. They’d have gotten in the ground with sterile tents and tricorders and machine learning translators, taking charge. In a crisis, we still look for the big ape.” However, “instead of a big ape shouting orders, the world got me.” (1) Humble Judy, of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, becomes the Earth’s first ambassador to alien life after stumbling across a crashed spaceship – and, as she points out “That would have been a good time for cynicism – for someone to ask if we believed them, or if their definition of peace looked anything like ours. But no one wanted to spoil the moment of joy. We didn’t want to play nation-style realpolitik, or be properly mature and suspicious. We wanted to talk. However complicated things got afterward, I still can’t regret that.” (6)   In Half-Built Garden, hope in peaceful connection is a precious resource and a defense against a hostile universe.

And that hope is crucial, because the aliens have brought a choice that seems to be no choice. The aliens are comprised of multiple species (represented on this mission by the spider-like “tree folk” and the more insectile “plains folk”) from the Rings, a system of artificial worlds that exists because the Ringers have determined that all intelligent life inevitably destroys its own homeworld and must go into space to survive. Having discovered humanity before it’s too late, they bring an offer—really, more of a predetermined conclusion—to evacuate the planet and move humans out to the stars. The corporates jump at the chance, ready to leave Earth and reestablish their shattered traditions of dominance and power among new, alien markets. Nation-states (represented here mainly by NASA as the avatar of a reduced American government) are driven by curiosity and excitement to see what’s out there. However, the Dandelion networks have invested decades of rescue in trying to stabilize and repair the environment, and Judy, Carol, and the people who comprise those networks are not prepared to surrender their home for which they have fought so hard. The novel turns on this existential-level decision, and on the multiple conversations between and among humans and Ringers on humanity’s future. Emrys places the need for radical and trusting connection at the story’s center, the crucial importance of reaching for understanding across vastly divergent mindsets and motives.

A debate between the Ringers and Dandelion representatives towards the end of the novel summarizes these differing views of the universe that each party holds. Judy, the descendant of a traumatized humanity that teetered on the verge of self-destruction (as well as being Jewish and therefore a custodian of a tragic tradition of forcible wandering), points out that “It’s good to live in a time when we have a time we can love. Someplace we can afford to grow attached to.” One of the Ringers, Glycine, responds “But many of us believe you have to drag people out of a burning building, whether they love the building or not. The question is whether Earth is burning.” Judy’s friend and colleague Atheo fires back, “It’s burning…Well, it’s true. But we’re getting the fire under control. It’s a matter of whether you trust us to know the resilience of our own home, whether you treat us as adults who can calculate our own risk rather than kids who don’t know any better” (256). Emrys follows the traditional pattern of a story of alien contact in casting it as a moment for exploring the nature of humanity in the face of an overwhelming and world-changing event; her twist is presenting it as a time of choosing, not merely whether humanity will survive at all, but how and where. She asks the questions: is our home planet, the only home we have ever known as a species, integral to our identity? Will we be the same, and if not, how will we change, if we actually leave Earth and become part of a wider universe? Most critically, if motives are so different, can a true symbiosis between species and the creation of new families and alliances be achieved?

The novel proposes that an informed exchange and sharing of ethical values, together with recognition of differences among ourselves, is the key to effective symbiosis and the bridging of ideological divides. Judy at one point speaks of “the value and the means to achieve it. I’m trying to tell you [the Ringers] that we share the value. Our ancestors either didn’t share it, or didn’t act on it, but we do. And we do because we’ve developed technology for not only identifying our values, but for consistently acting on them” (318). And the trans character Dori offers her coming out as a gift to the Ringers, noting that her parents loved who and what she was more than what they expected her to be. She tells the Ringers that “we can use your gifts in ways you don’t expect, too—if you can cope with us using different means to achieve our shared values. Your technologies for making habitats livable could help save Earth…Symbiosis with Ringers could give us both new tools, new ways to survive in a cold universe” (319). The Dandelions ask an alien society averse to risk and afraid of catastrophe to take a chance on humanity’s potential and its promise, to let systems go unconstrained. In that request lies the continuation of the hope and determination that brought humanity out of its age of power into the late 21^st century age of nature. The “half-built garden” of the title in the end, we find, is not only an Earth slowly and gradually being wrested from destruction, but a species just beginning to understand its possible role in a new and symbiotic galaxy.

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Jeremy Brett is a Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is, among other things, the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

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“Cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like… like black holes, maybe”. The opening words of N. K. Jemisin’s 2020 novel The City We Became provocatively hint at the liminality of the spaces occupied by people and cityscapes. The very essence of a city is created by the nuances of its residents and the ways in which they interact with each other and the material objects that make up the topography of that specific space. Jemisin often addresses this interdependent tension in her works by implementing a kind of literary stratigraphy, uncovering layers of complex systems and external factors that determine the identity of any given city. In The City We Became, Jemisin develops her original short story, “The City Born Great,” which was published in her 2018 collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?.  

The protagonist in the short story, an unnamed, black, homeless youth is chosen by the city as a midwife to assist in New York’s birth. The City We Became picks up the narrative after a difficult and not entirely successful birth, leaving the character in a coma-like condition hidden beneath the surface, both literally and in terms of plot. While this character remains fragmentary and elusive, five avatars, each representing a different borough of New York, take center stage in the quest to deal with postpartum complications. These avatars each capture the diverse collective characteristics of the sum parts that make up the whole city, and, although they are drawn together to defeat the mysterious and menacing enemy who appears in the guise of an almost translucent “woman in white,” their individual differences cause friction as they are territorial and defensive.

These differences are identified in the way they communicate: Bronca (Bronx), speaks through art; Brooklyn (Brooklyn), via political language and the rhythm of hip hop; Padmini (Queens), utilizes mathematical equations; Manny (Manhattan), employs violence, particularly in his previous iteration, and the language of economics; and Aislyn (Staten Island), lacking a voice, has no means of communicating effectively and is easily manipulated by the enemy

Jemisin draws on the familiar tropes of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism—supernatural beings, myths, and spatio-temporal liminal gaps, in this case portals to multiverses—to reveal the fragile nature of this emerging city and the potential for other histories, existences, and futures. Interestingly, the avatars have hallucinatory visions of another reality of New York, although they don’t physically enter it. Jemisin plays with the theory of multiverses attempting to overlay each other in a palimpsestic manner. Bronca, the First Nation character, is used as storyteller to explain the idea of many worlds, which resonates with Neil de Grasse Tyson’s explanation of the hypothesis (Science Time); she then goes on to outline how worlds are constantly created through imagination (Jemisin 302).

The topography of the boroughs, islands separated by water and bridges, mirrors the flickering, “peculiar dual-boot of reality,” whereby people and places are connected and disconnected by perspectives (32). It is this apparent glitch between worlds or realities that is presented as being dangerous to the city’s “becoming” and the population who make up the city’s identity. Tendrils of white ominous nubs rise from cracks in the asphalt and seep into the “normal” New York, threatening to contaminate and obliterate that version of reality.

Explicit references to H.P. Lovecraft’s bigoted view of non-white people are made through an alternative reality, a city whose identity is produced by a specific, limited worldview represented by the sinister “woman in white” (the embodiment of Lovecraft’s demonic R’lyeh). The only avatar to align herself to this perspective is Aislyn (Staten Island) as she is already stunted by fear and self-imposed isolation. It is not surprising that Aislyn is the only white avatar as she represents the insidious effects of racism that run counter to and are threatened by the diversity of the population.

The woman in white determines that the “acculturation quotient is dangerously high,” and this is the sticking point for those like Aislyn whose phobias close off their minds to embracing difference (96). A city is born when “enough human beings occupy one space, tell enough stories about it, develop a unique culture, and all those layers of reality start to compact and metamorphose” (304). Jemisin draws on the history of Staten Island to highlight its arbitrary and tenuous connection to the city, hence its resistance to support the other boroughs and protect the vulnerable, primary avatar. The enemy, which is a city itself from an alternative reality, eventually becomes caught between realms. This sense of in-betweenness is the crux of the narrative, what could or would be if other dynamics were more dominant. In a final attempt to anchor itself into existence, the enemy clings to Staten Island, thus opening the way for the second book in this series, The World We Make.

Jemisin expertly captures the essence of what makes New York the city it is and creates complex, imperfect characters that embody that spirit. Her insight into the relationship between humans and the cityscapes they occupy is unique, thereby positioning her as an award-winning, leading author in this genre. Not only has she been nominated for and won numerous awards, including Locus, Nebula, and Tiptree, Jemisin is the only recipient of three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards and the recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program (2020). Jemisin deftly incorporates her observations and experience of living in New York to reveal possibilities and challenge realities. The City We Became addresses many of the issues that are faced by modern-day populations in a way that is familiar, understandable, and raw, but, importantly, hopeful. The energy that overcomes the enemy emanates from the city itself, its sights and sounds mimicking a heartbeat. Once again, Jemisin adeptly peels back the layers to reveal the soul of the city in a way only she can.

WORKS CITED

“The Multiverse Hypothesis Explained by Neil deGrasse Tyson.” YouTube, Uploaded by Science Time 28 Nov 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6OoaNPSZeM.

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Heather Thaxter is a PhD candidate by published works which include book chapters in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler and Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape of Black Literature and Arts. Heather’s research interests are Afrofuturism, postcolonial studies, and speculative fiction with a special interest in Octavia E. Butler. Currently employed as a lecturer, Heather is also on the Editorial Review Board of Essence and Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies. ORCID number: 0000-0001-9473-6200.