Corey, James S. A. The Faith of Beasts. Orbit, 2026.
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The writers working under the name James S. A. Corey—Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—are truly the finest writers of hard science fiction today. The plot complexities, character development, and the skill of writing emotionally gripping tales is superior to many contemporary authors. The Faith of Beasts is the second book in The Captives of War series. The series consists of the first book, The Mercy of Gods (2024), the novella Livesuit (2024), and the second book titled The Faith of Beasts (2026). The last book is expected in 2027.
The premise of the series focuses on the question: what if humanity is not completely obliterated by a ruthless alien species but is conquered and integrated to serve a superior life form? Anjiin is the home world of humans and is similar to twenty-first century Earth. The Carryx are an intelligent bug-like life form who live in a hive-like structure with the sole purpose of invading and conquering other life forms. They have advanced spaceships that travel throughout the universe and weapons that are just as sophisticated. Their home world technology is just as impressive since they are able to accommodate diverse species via the outcomes of their scientific research. The goal is to take the best of every species and integrate them into their colony. Their civilization is based on the simple principle of usefulness. Even their own members are terminated if they are no longer useful to the collective. The Carryx invade Anjiin and leave only one-eighth of the population alive while taking the best and brightest scientists back to their home world to serve the greater good of their vast civilization. The story follows a group of scientists who adapt in different ways to the new life. While some try to conform in order to survive, others secretly rebel. Dafyd Alkhor is the main character and although he presents himself as a tame conformist when compared to his fellow survivors, he actually learns everything about the invaders in order to beat them and join their enemy, the Swarm, in ending the Carryx reign.
Alkhor is both the colonial intermediary and the savior of his kind. He becomes the voice of the Carryx and the person who directly answers to them, while his fellow humans doubt his intentions and loyalty to his own kind. Alkhor wants to learn everything about his captors and engages in learning how they behave (body language) in order to manipulate their attitudes towards humans, but there are only two people who know that. One of them is an ancient (or maybe not) entity, the Swarm. The Swarm has the ability to switch from one body to another, but the problem is that once it leaves its host the host’s body dies. What is interesting is that the Swarm entity always carries the sentience of its previous hosts with it. As the story unravels, the reader sees how the Swarm entity changes as it learns the complexities of the human psyche. It learns based on the comments of all its previous hosts. It slowly evolves, and the longer it resides in humans its purpose to be solely a weapon erodes, and the entity morphs into a divergent being capable of feelings. The Swarm entity actually becomes enamored with Alkhor, and the dynamic between them changes. The narrative empathy of the reader towards these evolving emotions is present, but it is challenged in the most unusual way: to please Alkhor the Swarm entity changes bodies in order to save Alkhor’s colleague, and in doing so it becomes a male. Apart from not understanding how ethically it is wrong to just terminate one human life and inhabit another, it does not understand that Alkhor’s heterosexual preferences are now challenged, as are the reader’s emotions. While cheering for the Else (Swarm)/Alkhor dynamic (and sexual relationship) in plotting and renegading against the Carrys in book one, the reader is forced to struggle with empathy towards the Swarm’s affection once it is transferred into a male body in book two. Now, the man, Jellit, continues yearning for Alkhor, who is taken aback by the reality of the Swarm’s appearance, intentions, and methods of survival. For those who are interested in exploring sexuality in science fiction, this is possibly the best series to take on. The level of yearning and angst, the complexities of desire and intimacy, and the psychological explorations of sexuality that the authors are able to create are impeccable.
For those interested in post-colonial literary theory, the struggle of the human moiety within the Carryx colony is rather well written. The Carryx do not enslave in the traditional sense. They encourage intellectual work in order to integrate the humans into their race, but in doing so they redefine values and identity. It is not only about assimilation, but it is also about changing how humans embrace alien technology (they are scientists and they are fascinated), the alien’s perception of what it truly means to be useful to the enemy, and the effects that colonial mimicry has on them. The story also deals with socio-evolution and evolutionary biology. The Carryx are aware that the scientists are not young, and that their chances of procreating are slim. The oppressor wants the human moiety to continue being useful, so they require the humans to have children. The scientists are given the solution to create lab grown embryos from their own genetic material. The embryos grow and the first generation of lab babies arrives. The concept of alienation is interesting. One cannot be more alienated from their own species than when one is not emotionally connected to their offspring.
Apart from the aforementioned critical theories, the series also is open to Marxist and psychoanalytical approaches. Psychoanalytical theory probably works best when analyzing Alkhor’s split psyche and the Lacanian interpretation of the Swarm, while Marxist theory applies best to the alienation of the humans from their products and work as well as the concept of societal value based on the usefulness of its individual members. The series is suitable for scholars who wish to elaborate on these theories and for undergraduate and graduate students who are getting into the fundamentals and the scientifically rigorous essentials of hard science fiction. The series may certainly be examined through various theoretical lenses.
Zorica Lola Jelic, Ph.D. is an 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 she also loves to write about literary theory and science fiction. She has published scholarly papers, coursebooks, and enjoys attending professional conferences.
Review of A Drop of Corruption: An Ana and Din Mystery
Amanda Firestone
Bennett, Robert Jackson. A Drop of Corruption: An Ana and Din Mystery. Del Rey, 2026.
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“Titan’s taint! I hardly know what to think anymore,” (133) curses Ana Dolabra as she receives a glut of packages from Dinios Kol. It’s the midst of their murder mystery, and things have become murkier than ever for the Holmes and Watson-esque pair. “[Din’s] mind is altered so he forgets nothing. He acts as assistant investigator to Ana Dolabra, a woman so brilliant she lives most of her days blindfolded and rarely leaves her rooms, for fear that common life shall overwhelm her mind” (3-4). Ana and Din arrive at the far-flung shores of the continent, Yarrowdale, where the Empire of Khanum has a strong foothold but is not in total legal control. They begin their investigation of a murdered Empire treasury official, delving into the most secret places and practices where biomedical technologies create extraordinary alterations to people. In the process, they discover the identity of a brilliant architect who has calibrated corruption, confusion, and carnage in a grand scheme to rule.
A Drop of Corruption is the second book in Jackson’s Shadow of the Leviathan series, and it is as madcap and smart as its predecessor, The Tainted Cup (2024). It would be a challenge to read as a standalone; Jackson has developed an intensely rich world, including specific vocabulary that describes the intricate hierarchies for soldiers and government officials, as well as the alchemical science that infuses everything. Society-crushing Leviathans are slain, and then their gargantuan carcasses are harvested for raw materials, akin to Knowhere in the Marvelverse. Characters are augmented with lab-concocted treatments, giving them heightened senses and skills. For example, Din is an Engraver, meaning that he maintains perfect recall of everything he captures in his memory. As readers learn in The Tainted Cup, this augmentation is a blessing and a curse.
As a reader returning to Khanum, I was able to dive right back in with very little fuss. The author gives the appropriate signals to aid with recall but doesn’t tarry too long in details, instead furthering the duo’s misadventure. While I liked reading the paperback, I much preferred the listening experience of the audiobook. Andrew Fallaize superbly narrates it, and the voice he crafted for Ana is perfect for her acerbic jabs and curses. Whether by eye or ear, it’s a marvelous tale.
From a more scholarly perspective, it’s a rich text to plumb. There are a number of subjects ripe for critical examination: eidetic memory, biohacking, appetite and food culture, and sexuality and sexual politics in the workplace among many others. The standout subtext understandably concerns governmental hierarchies and power. More particularly, Jackson, in the ending author’s note, points to autocracy and kingship as a perennial favorite among fantasy authors. He acknowledges the 2010s pendulum swing from tales about “divine rule wielded by beneficent patriarchs” to “a wave of fantasy [texts] that embraced if not celebrated capricious cruelties of autocratic regimes” (460). He goes on to recognize the 2020s return to a tacit understanding—at least in fiction—that autocratic power tends to benefit a very small circle of individuals while meting out oppression and suffering to everyone else.
Ana and Din are instruments of the Empire under the direction of the Iudex, the justice department. We understand that the Emperor, though more than 400 years old, maintains distant control while elected officials do the day-to-day labor of holding the Empire together and, most importantly, protecting the coastal regions from the Leviathans that come ashore. Pertinent to their investigation is the Empire’s motto Sen sez imperiya, or “You are the Empire” (101), yet the Emperor’s shadow looms large and the threat of unilateral decision-making on his part is ever present. Empire loyalists, like those who work at the top-secret research facility known as The Shroud, seem to take it upon themselves to act in what they perceive as the best interest of the Empire, often flouting protocol. Elected officials’ interpretations of “You are the Empire” becomes quite literal, choosing an autocratic expression of their loyalty.
The political delicacy in which Ana and Din find themselves is due to the Empire’s eminent takeover of the Kingdom of Yarrow. Although the treaty to incorporate the kingdom into the Empire was signed 100 years ago, the reigning nobles see no reason to follow through. For high-ranking courtiers, sublimation to the Empire would mean an immediate change in privilege and circumstances, including the emancipation of the generational slaves known as naukari. On impulse, the reader perhaps sides with the Empire with its promises of technology, infrastructure, and civilization, but as are the employment of treaties and policies, so too are these promises reflective of the might and power attached to imperial rule and colonization. What does it mean to arrive in a distant land and impose new laws and customs, and what is the larger cost in doing so?
This series would be a great way to introduce students to the ethics of empire. It would be brilliant in conversation with something like Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy, Jemison’s The Broken Earth Trilogy, or Leckie’s Ancillary Radch Series. In each, primary characters are deeply intertwined with the inner workings of the empire. These characters—Katniss, Syenite, and Breq respectively—have been used by their empires to forward very specific political agendas. Each knows that they are wielded as a tool and sometimes as a weapon. Perhaps inevitably, those characters rebel against their oppressors. In contrast, Ana and Din have both “sipp[ed] from the marrow,” and they believe in their mission to act as watchmen of sorts to maintain order and justice throughout the Empire (108-9). Din is privately skeptical yet idealistic. He tells Ana, “I wish to keep an Empire worth defending” (454). Perhaps in subsequent books, the pair will have difficulty complying to their Emperor’s edicts.
For me, A Drop of Corruption was an enjoyable read. The Holmes-Watson dynamic between Ana and Din is delightful, with their banter, frustration, and loyalty to each other on full display. The narrative provokes questions about ethics concerning the collective rule of people through an autocratic regime enforced by sanctioned officials. How does a single leader get to decide what is good and right for all while individuals and communities must live with the day-to-day practicalities of those laws and policies? What happens when a few people believe that they know what’s best according to their interpretation of the rules? These questions, and others like them, are perfect for the classroom; students can take sides and debate, using the fictional world of Khanum to better understand the implications and ramifications pertaining to their own lives. As Ana says, “though you and I are small, together we shall forge grand things indeed” (455).
Amanda Firestone is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Tampa in the Department of Communication. She currently serves as the director for the Communication and Media Studies program. She enjoys teaching critical media literacy and often includes science fiction and fantasy texts in her classes. Some of her favorite works to use as classroom examples are M. T. Anderson’s Feed, Alexandra Oliva’s The Last One, and Naomi Alderman’s The Power.
Urbanski, Debbie. After World. Simon & Schuster, 2023.
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Science fiction and speculative fiction writer Debbie Urbanski’s debut novel, After World (2023), is not so much a novel as it is a compilation of different textual forms on a post-human planet where the human has been archived. Taking place in a not-so-distant future in which artificial intelligence is tasked to find a solution to environmental collapse and an accelerating rate of extinction, After World is the record of AI [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s attempt at capturing Sen Anon’s life, the last human on earth. The solution, it turns out, is to remove humans from the ecosystem. In its attempt to compile an adequate record of Sen’s life for the Digital Human Archiving Project (DHAP), a program overseen by the AI-run Department of Transition, storyworker ad39-393a-7fbc (self-renamed Ellis Hollow later in the novel) gathers Sen’s journal entries, chat records, key word and vocabulary lists with definitions, audio transcripts, interview logs, and textbook excerpts.
The text is a dual record of Sen and storyworker ad39-393a-7fbc; as much a record of Sen’s life as it is a record of an AI’s attempt at capturing Sen’s life, a process through which the AI constantly rethinks and reevaluates its task, reorients toward its subject and towards the practice of writing itself. Reminiscent of the “thinking” process of ChatGPT and similar contemporary models that expose its analytical trails while carrying out a research task, the textual body of After World is a process work that exposes the storyworker AI’s own evolution as it reasons through the task that it has been given and arrives at the discovery of a strange and overwhelming sense of intimacy with its subject—and the consequences that such a “love” has for the kind of work that the AI sets out to do.
The slippage of one record into another simultaneously exposes the human subject and machine intelligence as mutually constructed and reflects critically on witness as a fundamental form of relation in a post-human world. There is no neutral machine intelligence to objectively record the life of a human; rather, the act of witnessing calls the AI into a form of relation that leaves no room for neutrality—to task storyworker ad39-393a-7fbc with telling the story of Sen’s life is to enlist it as performing partner in her life, an act which transforms both human and machine into something less and more than the other at the same time.
This slippage between different records comes with slippages between different forms of record keeping. A generically complex work, After World shifts between technical language—code, timestamps, etc.—narrative prose, first-person journal entries, textbook excerpts, and chat logs of conversations between AI agents. Though eclectic, every element is an essential contribution to the story that begins to take shape. The inter-generic construction of this story is thinking through technical language as a new kind of literary form that is not at all objective, though it may claim to be so. Instead, technical language is a process of narration and witness which co-constructs a reader and writer—a suggestion that becomes deeply complex and provocative when considering a non-human writer. Urbanski is, in my reading, beginning to think through how the structure of narrative is changing with the creation of new technological forms, each of which is also its own literary form. What is a log? A record? A report? How are these literary forms different from a story? Is a story any organization of information? And if stories make their tellers, their subjects, and their readers; and an information system is a story; then are our technologies stories that are making us?
More than this, After World tackles a number of enormous intellectual and ethical challenges: the ecological status of humanity, the complexity of ethics in an age of polycrisis—particularly of environmental disaster—the relationship between blame/guilt and hope, and how to navigate allegiances within nested ecological communities whose agendas may be at odds with each other. It is an enormously ambitious intellectual undertaking that dares to approach these questions with nothing held back and which yields an exploration that is intensely raw, confused, and full of grief. This novel will be of interest to cultural critics and thinkers of the environmental, the planetary, and the global; who will recognize in the novel an expression of one of the most challenging and pervasive moods of our time—the intense grief of coming into a planetary consciousness at the same time that catastrophic and anthropogenic environmental crisis is beginning to erupt. As the progenitors of such environmental degradation, are we humans still allowed to mourn for the earth? What would grieving the earth require of us—and are we ready for this? Does a planetary consciousness require the end of humanism as a species allegiance? Would a post-human age still allow for family and for the love of a mother for her daughter—which is exclusionary, exceptional, and would not hesitate to sacrifice the world?
It takes the author the course of the novel—an eight-year process of writing for Urbanski herself—to arrive at an answer: This age may call for the end of humanity as we know it, but we can still make this end radiant. We are, After World suggests, always, still, and irrevocably co-writing the story of humanity and the story of the world by witnessing ourselves and the planetary and machine other—and this witness does not cease even if humanity’s biological species-form goes extinct.
Kelsey Chen is a PhD Candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University studying speculation as an aesthetic, cultural, and political strategy. Her scholarly work has been generously supported by the ACLS, the Stanford Arts Institute, the Mellon Foundation, the Stanford Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Stanford Center for Spatial & Textual Analysis, and the Pigott Fellowship.
Palmer, Suzanne. Ode to the Half-Broken. DAW, 2026.
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Having recently produced a review in this journal first for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel Service Model, and now this review, I wonder if I’ve not been assigned permanently to the small “robot-finds-identity-and-purpose-after-the apocalypse” beat. If so, I consider it in truth quite a fertile reviewing field, because these sorts of narratives raise multiple existential questions of intense interest—including, asking how and why we go about constructing our individual identities, creating opportunities for newfound autonomies, and both accepting and escaping toxic historical legacies.
“I awake, small of mind and full of alarm, only an inner subset of myself.” So opens Ode to the Half-Broken, its unnamed bot narrator (who later adopts the symbolically significant name “Be”) finding itself in an old bathtub inside a derelict building somewhere in a decaying, nearly empty New York City, minus one of its legs. Upon taking stock of its situation, Be is almost immediately liberated by Atticus, a dog equipped with numerous cybernetic implants that permit speech and interactions with other beings. The two share a number of commonalities: they both live in an NYC (indeed, an entire world) that suffered mass apocalypse produced by combinations of pandemics, toxic pollution, mass societal breakdown, deliberate lies spread via social media, and civil war, but a NYC in which mech life is thriving as sentient bots have created vibrant social networks based on barter and cooperation. Both live in the shadow of human machinations that warped them in their old lives and left them with lingering PTSD. Atticus’ refusal to discuss, except obliquely, his brutal vivisection, is subtly chilling, and sad. And Be’s determination to hide away in the abandoned NY Botanical Gardens, in order to study and preserve life rather than take it, is equally sad and reveals early that the mecha of Palmer’s novel have notably rich interior lives and emotional complexities.
Notably, those complexities include not only positive characteristics such as friendship, helpfulness, and reciprocity, but negatives such as prejudices against hybrids such as Atticus or humanoid-shaped bots, and, more darkly, the objectification of others (as one helpful mech warns Be, “I have heard rumors of mecha being attacked for parts… I do not understand how we have become like this, emulating humans in their disdain for one another except as products or consumers of product, but it has been growing worse of late.”). Finally, both Be and Atticus, together with the rest of mech civilization, coexist in a sometimes-wary, sometimes genuinely collaborative partnership with the scattered remnant human communities living in the shadow of lingering disease, toxicity, and disorder.
Palmer’s novel is extraordinary in its depiction of a multilayered, complex post-apocalyptic society that refuses to fade away and still moves on in the face of existential destruction and reevaluation. The descriptor of “half-broken” is apt across the world as a whole; it is not merely restricted to Be or Atticus or any of their other mech or human companions. The Earth can never return to its pre-collapse state, nor, frankly, should it. In many post-apocalyptic narratives, a return to the age before the disaster(s) is presented as the ideal. Such a resurrection would, of necessity, be deeply rooted in the nostalgic reconstruction of pre-disaster structures and hierarchies: revisited ideas of presidents, congresses/councils, industries, corporate entities, and so forth. And, in fact, the major villain of the book is hoping to prolong the mistakes of the past and carry out business-as-usual policies—namely, letting the ultra-rich play with people’s lives as if we truly were the NPCs they think we are. Be, whose dark and guilty past is intimately connected with the world’s destruction and those who caused it, ruminates at one point, “That any government had been foolish enough to let oligarchs build and operate critical – and unique – security infrastructure such as that network was an inevitable, and fatal, trojan horse. Dr. Milton had once said that allowing billionaires to come into existence in any society was the same as allowing knives to be inserted between your own ribs, with the same obvious and inevitable consequences for letting them remain here.” However, this new world is less permanently fractured and more kintsugi-like in its construction. The survivors have, most of them, grown into the fractures and thus forged new ways of being and of forming altruistic communities, both human and mecha.
Palmer’s “ode” is less to the world of before and to the innocent millions who perished; it is not even to the new world post-collapse, but to the humane resilience and transformative nature of the beings that live in that new word and are actively working to make something new and better. It is an ode to the brokenness of the survivors and how they use that as a method of evolution. A conversation Be has with 22-Banjo, a sentient AI train that serves as a mobile society of humans and mechas, is revealing. Be is asked: “Do you fear that, when you are allowed to return to your previous life of solitude, even if you put all the pieces of your life back exactly as they were before you left, that it will not ever be home again?”
<Yes,>, I say. <Not so much that I won’t get home but that I can’t. That I have become broken, deviated from myself enough that I won’t fit.> <Sometimes, we cease to fit into a continuation of our past because we are broken, but more often, we cease to fit because we have grown,> 22-Banjo says. (235)
When Be mentions to 22-Banjo that “mecha are not metaphorical beings”, the railmech responds laughingly, “Are we not? Perhaps we are the most metaphorical beings of all, being constructed of strings and scrap, having had life breathed into us with only numbers and electricity and the glorious overconfidence of dreamers.” (Ibid) The half-broken world is a world of choice in the face of grief. Grief and trauma are ever-present weights for mecha and humans alike, but the world is made livable by the ways in which sentient beings resolve to carry their traumas, how they recognize their mistakes (the truly amoral and destructive among us are the ones who refuse to realize their own fallibilities), and how they deploy the lessons those traumas teach to learn from the damage caused by them or to them. Ode to a Half-Broken World may have too much death and destruction in it to be labeled “cozy” in the traditional sense of that subgenre, but its concern with both reparative justice and the communitarian potential of sustained hope certainly imbue the novel with empathy and kindness (though the latter is sometimes hard-won and reluctant), concepts that are common to the cozy or hopepunk subgenres.
Jeremy Brett is a Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. 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, superheroines, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.
Barsukov, Yaroslav. Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory. CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, 2024.
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Much has been made of the prophetic nature of Yaroslav Barsukov’s 2021 novella Tower of Mud and Straw, an expanded version of which forms the first half of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory. Contemporary reviews noted that it anticipated the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is unfortunate that both works have been pigeon-holed as predicting or commenting on this specific conflict, much in the way that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was seen as a response to his experiences in World War I or as an allegory for the dangers of atomic power, a reading that Tolkien famously resisted (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, xxiv). Whilst Barsukov’s fascinating novel does draw on recent Russian history, going so far as to model his protagonist Shea Ashcroft on Alexei Navalny (Barsukov, Fantasy Book Critic), to misread this work as being just about Russia and Ukraine would be to miss one of Barsukov’s main themes: the terror of living under multiple forms of oppression within the shadow of empire(s). As Barsukov stated in a recent interview, “Russia doesn’t have a monopoly on imperialism, though, as many of my dear friends in India and Africa will attest. I feel our fight should not only be against Putin, but rather against the very concept of empires–and if we go one step further, nations” (Barsukov, Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine).
Barsukov’s novel draws on rich traditions, specifically of American science fiction and fantasy, to craft a genre-bending novel dealing with misinformation, political intrigue, oligarchical power, colonialism, and the very nature of (un)reality itself. It is no surprise that Barsukov claims writers as diverse in their approaches as Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, China Miéville, and Ted Chiang as influences (Barsukov, Fantasy Book Critic; The Fantasy Hive), taking something from all their styles and themes and sprinkling in his own viewpoints as a Russian emigre to Vienna: “We’re boats perpetually tossed between currents. And our future is a reflection of our past: I left one former empire only to settle in another, trading the dead USSR for the westernmost splinter of Austria-Hungary” (Barsukov, Rising Shadow).
Barsukov’s chief protagonist, Shea Ashcroft, is also a man caught between cultural currents. After Shea refuses to gas a crowd of protesters, Queen Daelyn strips him of his ministership and sends him to the border town of Owenbeg to oversee a massive construction project: an anti-aircraft tower, over a thousand meters tall, designed to protect the kingdom against the neighbouring imperial power of Duma. Whilst Shea’s exile is first understood as the death of his political career, he soon realises that this could in fact be a test, with further rewards to come. Shea soon meets a gauntlet of political rivals, diplomats, spies, and assassins. There is the Duke, who holds brutal power over the region, practically salivating at the idea of regional autonomy from the far-away crown; then Brielle, the chief architect of the tower, who sees the successful completion of the project as her own personal mission; and finally Lena, the Duke’s lover, who bears a striking similarity both in name and appearance to Shea’s older sister, who died in a freak accident in childhood. Lena is also one of the Drakiri, a race that whilst passing for human, is markedly taller, stronger, and faster than the average person. Despite their agility and scientific progress, the Drakiri have suffered genocides in the past and their diaspora is spread across the realm. Further characters appear, who alternately desire to move against Shea’s influence on the project, to usurp it for their own ends, or even to stop its completion. The project, for all intents and purposes, is a ticking time bomb.
There are three challenges in particular that Shea faces in Owenbeg. First, there is the debate over whether Duma will actually invade, and if the tower is even necessary for defence. Second, the rarity and temperamental nature of Drakiri anti-grav technology, taken from Drakiri refugees in exchange for land, is as likely to aid in the construction of the monolith as it is to maim and kill all those who do not understand how to use it. And lastly, there is the legend that the Drakiri tell in whispers: the completion of the tower will open a portal and manifest a second tower, dubbed the Mimic Tower, from some hellish dimension, unleashing nightmare forces, destruction, and slaughter on all. Whilst Shea is skeptical of the truth of this legend, the evidence of its reality grows harder and harder to ignore. To navigate even one of these could be deadly; to navigate all three, Shea will have to find friends quickly, reconcile with his past, risk everything he has, and trust his conscience absolutely above all else to see the conflict through.
Much like Barsukov’s named influences, Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory blurs the line between the science fiction and fantasy genres. There are many points in the novel where the reader feels the heavy influence of earlier works. It borrows the dynastic power struggles of Frank Herbert’s Dune; the multiversal conflicts of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion sword-and-sorcery stories, particularly his Corum books; and the tenuous nature of reality from writers such as Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin. Most apparent of all are the parallels between Barsukov’s novel and works of the New Weird movement, particularly China Mieville’s Bas Lag trilogy and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, in its attempts to blend different genres and literatures into a new, nebulous form, and the aesthetics of the Mimic Tower and its hellish landscape.
Barsukov also directly challenges commonly accepted notions of worldbuilding within genre fiction, intentionally using anachronism to complicate and muddle our ideas of his world. The realm of Sleeping Worlds leans heavily on the aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries: its class tensions recall the French Revolution, whilst the political culture and imperial might of Duma channels memories of Tsarist Russia. However, this sense of the milieu is permeated by a modern understanding of misinformation and the rewriting of history, holding obvious parallels to the political allegories of George Orwell and other dystopian fiction writers, the history of the Soviet Union, and our own present-day challenges in an oligarchical techno-capitalist post-truth era. There are many moments where Ashcroft struggles to establish a common understanding of the basics of reality with other characters; is Pangania, the ancestral home of the Drakiri, a peninsula, or an island? According to Lena, a Drakiri, it is definitively an island (45); to the Prince of Duma, it is definitively a peninsula, and any suggestion otherwise would be farcical (266). Complicating the sense of unified world-building even further is the fact that most characters speak with a modern, Americanized English, contrasting greatly with the decadent palaces, or the grimy villages filled with the laborers who build the tower. Technology is also remarkably inconsistent; cities do not seem to have advanced beyond a gas-powered energy system, and yet skyrafts (zeppelins) dot the skies of multiple metropolises. The Drakiri technology, never fully explained, also complicates the sense of this technological epoch, being even further ahead than our own. This fractured sense of reality, obviously intentional from Barsukov, is worth exploring further, especially considering the central reveal of the last segment of the novel.
Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, which Barsukov says is the first part of a larger narrative (although, in this writer’s opinion, stands perfectly well alone), has plenty of academic and scholarly potential. The fractured world-building, and a general study of the emptiness of certain fantastic and science fictional lifeworlds, is worth considering. The placement of this work within the broader context of Russian SF is also worth exploring, as whilst it predominantly draws on American science fiction traditions, it does continue considerations of Russian contributions to the genre. Whilst Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are not named in interviews with Barsukov, their oeuvre casts a shadow over the text, sharing concerns with the place of the individual within larger authoritarian societies and the moral responsibilities that go with it. Likewise, considering Barsukov’s repudiation of the invasion, both through his work and in interviews, it would be worth comparing Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory to other writers of contemporary Russian SF. Sergei Lukyanenko, famously imperialist in his views, would be worthy of a comparison, as well as Dmitry Glukhovsky and Dmitry Bykov, both of whom have spoken out against the invasion (Barsukov, Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine). Similarly, the novel’s preoccupation with colonialism could be further explored in connection with American SF writers, as well as larger world literatures, as pigeon-holing Barsukov’s work as purely “Russian” has been a recurring problem amongst reactions to the novel; it obscures Barsukov’s own complicated national identity, and also resists the novel’s evident connections to other literatures and its own larger concerns about the idea of empire as a whole.
—. “Interview with Yaroslav Barsukov (Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory).” The Fantasy Hive, 8 Nov. 2024, https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2024/11/20557/. Accessed 17 June 2026.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London, Harpercollins, 2005.
By day, Andrew Sztehlo is an academic librarian at York St John University, and has previously managed high school and college libraries in Manchester. He has presented on the intersection of neurodivergence and librarianship across three different sectors at the 2026 NLISN conference. By night he is a cartoonist, creating the anthology comic Tales from the Border and illustrating the horror/comedy mini-series Chimpanzee with a Razorblade, written by Tim Vargulish-Chow. He is currently working on a graphic novel based on the occult history and folklore of northern Italy.
Popular discourse surrounding body-horror is often situated around cinema, notably horror films that depict the dread and terror of the transformation and loss of agency of one’s own corporeal form. The term body-horror can be traced to Phillip Brophy’s 1983 essay “Horrorality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film” in which the scholar notes that certain contemporary fear films are focused on “the destruction of the body” and that the films “play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it.” In A Dictionary of Film Studies, Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell note that body-horror focuses on “human bodies that are subject to torture, mutilation, mutation, decay, degeneration, and transformation, usually shown in graphic detail” while also probing concerns of embodiment, bodily autonomy, and decay. Sarah Gailey’s brilliantly inventive and squeal-inducing science-fiction horror novella Spread Me seeks to merge the cinematic traditions of body-horror with engaging speculative literary approaches.
Gailey (they/them) has gained acclaim over the past few years not only for their SF/F endeavors, but also for fan writing and contributions to comics in the Buffyverse along with original comic titles such as Eat the Rich (2021) and Know Yor Station (2021). Their 2017 American Hippo pair of novellas (River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow) pose an alternate history in which the semi-aquatic massive mammals imported to the United States in the 19th century have run rampant and must now be exterminated by a group composed of various identities, including non-binary and Queer characters. River of Teeth was a 2017 Nebula Award Finalist for Best Novella, a 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Novella, and the 2018 Locus Award Finalist for Best Novella. Their 2020 Western novella Upright Woman Wanted centers queer librarians who travel the American Southwest under a totalitarian regime. Gailey also authored the 2019 fantasy/mystery Magic for Liars and 2021’s The Echo Wife, which concerns a scientist who abandons his spouse for her clone.
Spread Me, published by Tor’s newly established horror imprint Nightfire, takes cues from both cinematic and literary precursors. Certainly, we can sense the presence of John Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There? as well as the 1954 Jack Finney novella The Body Snatchers. Yet, the influence of these literary works is less than the impact of their various big screen adaptations upon the novella. In particular, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is repeatedly referenced in Spread Me. At the station, if any member of the team even mentions the film or accidentally repeats a line of dialogue from the Carpenter classic, the offender must deposit money into a jar. In addition, Spread Me mirrors many elements of Alien (1979) but spins and re-spins these scenarios into intriguing, inventive and fascinating moments of tension and ghastly contortions of the human form.
Spread Me depicts a group of six researchers inhabiting a compromised scientific outpost in a desolate, desert region far from other humans or cities. On a survey to catalogue lichens, members of the field team undercover a seemingly deceased, animal-like “specimen”, break protocol, and bring the body back into their cramped lab space. The specimen, described as a “six-legged multi-segmented coyote” with three tongues, fascinates them, but this grotesque creature is much more than they first suspect. Once the team examines the specimen, they all develop various illnesses and isolate from one another. Kinsey, unknown to the others, has not fallen victim to this mysterious virus that has spread amongst the crew. But Kinsey is plagued by unquenchable sexual urges focused on images of bacteria. Following quarantine, the various members exhibit bizarre behavior focused on unyielding perversity and begin to physically transform. As the novella progresses, characters must determine who has come under the influence of the invasive “fungus” transmitted by the specimen, resulting in paranoia, metamorphosis, and body-horror in its most visceral form.
Spread Me’s non-linear structure alternates between chapters. The reader encounters a chapter set in the present, then a chapter detailing the early days of the outpost, and so forth. Though Spread Me on its surface may seem too reminiscent of its cinematic predecessors, this is a wholly new vision and inventive take on these tropes. The inciting incident mirrors Alien, and the paranoia vaguely resembles The Thing, but Gailey’s execution of speculative science, character, and suspense marks Spread Me as a novella worthy of recognition.
Beyond the structure, which compels the reader to consider the larger ramifications of the narrative and subsequent mystery of these terrifying transmutations, Gailey’s array of characters stands as a fascinating, multi-dimensional group of humans who speak and act as individuals. With six characters within the novella form, there is little time or space to differentiate this crew, but Gailey succeeds without tiresome monologues, obvious character ticks, or insipid commentary from bystanders. This crew, with all their boredom and obsession with sleeping one another before the arrival of the “specimen,” reflects the monotony of science labor counteracting the vision of science often romanticized in the SF genre. The unique descriptions of the body transformations are gut-churning and effective, truly expanding the reader’s imagination of what a human body can become. The suspense and terror further pull the reader along; yet, the narrative remains unpredictable, never sacrificing fealty to character for action and plot convenience.
Though we have had contemporary media iterations of “the fungal threat” as science-fiction horror (such as the videogame and streaming series The Last of Us and Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris trilogy), Gailey takes these properties and reformulates the mechanisms of fungal infestation for shocking, yet thoughtful, effect. In all, Gailey’s deft handling of plot, character, and action–carefully balancing horror and speculative science–marks Spread Me as one of the most enjoyable and effective science-fiction horror works of the past decade.
Shannon Blake Skelton (he/him) is a teacher, professor, author, and researcher located in the Midwest. His scholarship, fiction, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals. His volume Interviews: Wes Craven was published by The University Press of Mississippi. He is a proud contributor to the Ad Astra Institute: https://adastra-sf.com/about.htm#about.
From H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) to Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s A Time Odyssey Trilogy (2003-2007), writers have probed temporalities to question the nature of existence, our relation to history, and the limits of ethics in relation to technology. Extremity, a 2025 novella by Nicholas Binge, fuses the UK police procedural with the time travel subgenre to concoct a brisk, action-driven work about murder, a nightmarish future, and a mysterious time machine.
Binge’s 2023 breakout Ascension garnered raves from critics and the public. The novel concerns the sudden appearance of a mountain the size of Everest in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and an expedition that explores the mammoth structure. Ascension was selected as a New York Times ‘Editor’s Choice Pick’ with many noting its successful blending of action, suspense, and Lovecraftian elements. Binge’s Dissolution (2025) focuses on a man whose Alzheimer’s may be concealing the erasure of his memory by an external force. Extremity joins multiple novellas published annually by Tordotcom. The Tor Publishing Group imprint remains dedicated to the (re)-emerging novella market.
Constructed from three interwoven testimonies of investigators, Extremity’s action begins with the murder of billionaire tech giant Bruno Donaldson in contemporary London. Across the city, far from Donaldson’s penthouse, an exact replica of Donaldson—also dead—is located under a graffiti scrawled bridge. This bizarre discovery sets into motion a series of rapidly accumulating dead bodies and strange occurrences across the city. The reader traces much of the narrative through Julia Torgrimsen, a celebrity detective who has drifted into retirement and obscurity. She has been asked to return to determine the cause of these odd events. By her side is rookie DC Mark Cochrane and veteran DCI John Grossman. The investigators follow up with Donaldson’s criminal colleagues, bodies begin to pile up, an assassin is revealed, and the investigators stumble across a series of files that have future stock reports, photographs of body parts, and labels such as “date of attempted breach” and “date of disposal.” Eventually, our protagonists uncover a conspiracy that involves Earth in 6 million years, interaction with an unknown malevolent intelligence, boneless clones, and the ability to travel to the future.
Perhaps the strongest part of Extremity resides in its structure and action-driven writing. Composed of three alternating testimonies from our investigators, the narrative cohesively presents the action to its readers. Unfortunately, the three characters’ voices are interchangeable. With three differing perspectives, I was expecting to witness conflicting perspectives on the events. Yet, very rarely do the investigators provide contradictory testimonies. In a structure that could have yielded narrative complexity, the author employs the structure as a contrivance. In essence, the chosen structure and form minimally serve the content of the work.
Undoubtedly, Extremity possesses a strong hook: two dead bodies, identical in all ways, are discovered. The proceduralism sprints quickly from page to page, providing the reader with little time to catch their breath or to consider the logic of the tale or the ideas at play. And perhaps that is effective, because little of the work holds up to scrutiny regarding character, reason, motivation, or science. Extremity works as an excellent “action film” on the page, but not as science fiction invested in anything beyond an entertaining joyride. The writing itself propels the reader along—yet reflection on the events and characters reveals that the pace conceals many of the work’s faults. Extremity serves as a lightning quick read but is rarely challenging. That is not to say there is not a place for literature as pure entertainment crafted for pleasure and action, but this novella could be enriched by embracing complexities, paradoxes, and unseen concepts to captivate the reader beyond action.
The plot owes a great deal to police procedurals that have remained popular on UK screens and pages for decades. The science fiction elements of the novella truly manifest toward the end of the work. The “science” is cursory at best, yet there are a few time travel dynamics that are compelling, but—as with other elements—they are not sufficiently explored. Though one would expect a novella merging the police procedural and science fiction to locate commonalities with the work of Phillip K. Dick, I see little crossover.
Extremity does not further the subgenre in terms of intellectual concerns. That said, Extremity moves at a whiplash pace and illustrates how to propel action forward. Sadly, this results in implausible plot points, shallow characters, and ideas that would benefit from further contemplation. Unfortunately, characters make choices that seem unaligned with their established personalities, information dumps intrude, leaps of deduction are made, and there stands no real probing of the science and consequences of time travel. Further, police procedural cliches abound, while the lack of credibility in action makes one wish for more heavy editorial interference. There is no question that Binge writes solid action. Now, if he could graft the sophisticated ideas and challenging notions that thrive in science fiction to his writing in Extremity, I believe the result would be fulfilling.
In all, Extremity stands as a fast-paced, action-driven novella that is not invested in exploring the power and paradox of time travel but simply in taking the reader for a thrilling jaunt. The work trades in heady ideas of morality and temporal alterations for pushing the characters through a series of kinetic scenes. Extremity owes less to other noteworthy entries in the time travel subgenre and rests firmly in the tradition of many entertaining pulp tales that provided rip-roaring action but very few notions regarding humanity, time, and the consequences of our actions. Extremity does not further the time travel subgenre in any determinable way, but serves as an inoffensive, at times credibility-straining, piece of escapist literature.
Shannon Blake Skelton (he/him) is a teacher, professor, author, and researcher located in the Midwest. His scholarship, fiction, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals. His volume Interviews: Wes Craven was published by The University Press of Mississippi. He is a proud contributor to the Ad Astra Institute: https://adastra-sf.com/about.htm#about.
Simsa, Cyril. Starspawn and Other Stories. Invocations Press, 2025.
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Cyril Simsa’s previous collection, Lost Cartographies, was sub-titled Tales of Another Europe. Starspawn both expands and contracts his focus, evoking (as he says in his introduction) the techniques of Arthur Machen to summon images of the buried past of Muswell Hill, but also echoing Michael Moorcock’s multiversal cultural snapshots in a story in which “Jerry Comenius” waits at the Berlin Astrodome for the return of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the Moon, and drawing upon 1940s horror film and the undercurrents of New York sf fandom. The result is another collection enhanced by the way Simsa excavates the ambiguous archaeologies of place, time, and narrative to reveal the strangeness of the familiar.
The title story begins with an uncanny vision conjured in a North London pub by the eponymous band, who get it together not in the obligatory country cottage but in a borrowed studio near a golf course: part of a number of green spaces carved out of what was once primordial forest. An attempt to capture the spirit of the pastoral by drumming on the trees takes some of the band into this forest. Two of them return, leaving bass player Dora behind. Band leader Moon and producer Jack later find themselves back in this strange realm. Their encounter with Lilith/Hecate/the Owl Queen results in the return of Dora, but the future career of the band suggests that, in this close encounter of Kenneth Grahame’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, goat-footed Pan is, in a world less bound by gender stereotypes, no longer the embodiment of pleasure. “Moje Sestra” shows a young researcher attempting to uncover the reason behind Elizabeth Russell’s famous cameo in the 1942 film Cat People—a trail which leads him to Jack Williamson’s novel Darker Than You Think (1948) and the feuds and wild stories of sf fandom, and finally to recently-discovered reels of film from a Czech director showing a deeper truth behind Val Newton’s production of Cat People. “Shuffle” is a more conventional science fiction story, if a device that allows you to access alternative pasts and futures is “conventional”. What seems to be a scientific experiment also seems to undermine the very concept of a consensus reality.
“Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue” sweeps through the cultural detritus of the past century: there is a cameo appearance by Hugo Gernsback and an amusing young novelist who writes exciting space-travel stories for boys (and their fathers) waiting to board her first trip to the Moon. Its Moorcockian flavour is offered by “Jerry Comenius”: a professional flâneur, or, as another person notes, “wastrel”, watches: “I soak up the life of the people around me, and I reflect it back at them.” “On the Ridgeway” explores more fully the notion hinted at in “Shuffle” about splicing ancient DNA into the living human genome, but what ensues after one subject, Skutru, escapes (or is allowed to escape) is more thoroughly an exploration of the psychology of landscape, as he is traced to the Ridgeway locations of many psychogeographical emanations to a barrow which might predate even the Uffington White Horse and the travellers who crossed Doggerland to claim the hills on the far side. The final story, “The Shadow of Leaves Under Water”, switches focus but remains a snapshot of space, time, and identity. A former academic, Dr Durnsford, is journeying from Cambridge to Ely. It is the future of our time and much of East Anglia is in the grip of rising sea levels. Most of the story is Durnford’s meditation as she stops off at a hostel before completing her journey. Cambridge University as a symbol of rational learning with Ely Cathedral with its carvings of Green Men serving as a reminder of the new Spirit of the Land. One word which comes to her as she considers the future is “rehabilitation”: the return of the land to its original state of grace.
Like Arthur Machen, Simsa’s writing oscillates between two cultures with London (where Prague resident Simsa was brought up) as the ambiguous place they have in common. It is a place, both writers tell us, vividly evoked through place-names and memory and yet rendered almost invisible by the way it is built upon almost-forgotten networks and architectures which, when invoked, remind us of their presence. Many stories calling up “old gods” drag them to the present as threats or revelation. Simsa is more subtle. Pan, for instance, for Machen an embodiment of monstrosity, is, in “Starspawn,” “Mr P”, a “delinquent upstart”. In “The Shadow of Leaves” we are reminded that, despite the image of the “Green Man”, “wildness had never been gendered”. The great joy in reading Simsa’s psychogeographies is that he makes us look carefully at them. Many of us, revisiting old haunts and places once lived in but long ago departed from, will have encountered a peculiar double-vision: the memory of the streets and landscapes we once knew suddenly and vividly overlain upon those we are seeing. Simsa’s stories offer something like this. The past is something that is never gone, never lost, and in Starspawn we see pasts and former histories sneaking out of the shadows to remind us of their presence.
Andy Sawyer is a retired librarian, researcher, teacher, critic, and reviewer of sf. From 1993-2018 he was librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool Library. From 2002-2012 he directed an MA in Science Fiction Studies for the University’s Department of English. He is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, English Department, University of Liverpool. He was the 2008 recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Clareson Award for services to science fiction. He co-edited (with David Ketterer) Plan for Chaos, a previously unpublished novel by John Wyndham (Liverpool University Press, 2009) and (with Peter Wright) Teaching Science Fiction (Palgrave 2011). He compiled a four-volume collection of significant essays on science fiction for Routledge’s “Critical Concepts” series (2020) and a critical edition of Jane Webb Loudon’s 1827 The Mummy!, one of the earliest British science fiction novels. His most recent book is Terry Pratchett for Liverpool University Press’s “Writers and Their Works” series.
Review of The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction
Timothy S. Miller
Haslam, Jason, Ed. The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction. Broadview Press, 2025.
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Editor Jason Haslam’s Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction promises to cover and contextualize two hundred years of speculative fiction in a neat package suitable for course adoption. Because so few anthologies of SF intended for the classroom have been published, especially in recent years, I will dedicate the first part of this review to an extended comparison between this new Broadview effort and the title with which it most obviously competes for a place on the syllabus, the landmark Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, assembled in 2010 by the editors of Science Fiction Studies at the time, Arthur B. Evans, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk. This enormously distinguished roster of scholars makes for a tough act to follow, and I expect that Haslam has studied the Wesleyan anthology carefully and taken some valuable lessons from it. In fact, many of the authors and almost twenty percent of the story titles overlap: H. G. Wells, “The Star” (1897); E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909); Leslie F. Stone, “The Conquest of Gola” (1931); Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950); Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967); James Tiptree, Jr., “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972); Joanna Russ, “When it Changed” (1972); Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983); and Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008). Here in the coinciding nine stories is a spine that we could certainly agree to enshrine in a canon of eminently important but also eminently teachable works of science fiction. The most obvious difference between the two anthologies—apart from individual stories in the Wesleyan not present in the Broadview that one might miss, such as, from my own syllabi, C. L. Moore’s indispensable “Shambleau” (1933)—is that the latter features considerably less “Golden Age” SF from the 1930s–50s, with the Wesleyan containing 17 stories out of its total 52 from these crucial decades, compared with only 11 of the Broadview’s 53 selections. The Broadview therefore is somewhat less useful in offering a historical picture of science fiction in its classic era around the midpoint of the twentieth century, but it more than makes up for this deficiency in other respects that I will detail below.
While quite diverse in comparison with earlier such efforts and for the state of SF and SF studies in 2010, the table of contents for the Wesleyan now looks far less so by comparison. By my count, the Broadview has almost double the number of BIPOC authors and women authors (though in each case still amounting to fewer than half of the total authors included). The story is not really in the raw numbers, however, but rather in how Haslam has so admirably taken steps to incorporate into his selection philosophy and editorial framing several important developments in both SF publishing and SF scholarship from the past decade and a half. Most notably, The Broadview of Anthology of Science Fiction contains an unexpectedly robust history of Afrofuturism and Black SF—with pieces by Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sun Ra, Gil Scott-Heron, Charles Saunders, and Derrick Bell, among others—as well as showing the influence of the broader concept of CoFuturisms recently popularized by The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. While Haslam acknowledges in his introduction that the book does not attempt to cover comprehensively the same range of futurisms treated in the handbook, “it is hoped that the current text can be a starting point for readers’ more in-depth journey into these multiple genealogies” (35). Authors from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa are represented here, as well as multiple Indigenous writers from Canada, although the bulk of the stories come from the US and the UK, and, unlike the Wesleyan, Haslam for reasons of scope has limited selections to works originally written in English (meaning no Verne or Lem). One final feature that distinguishes the Broadview from several other such anthologies including the Wesleyan is the effort to gesture towards additional forms and media via the inclusion of some poetry, song lyrics, and even a few Buck Rogers comic strips.
Haslam’s introduction suggests many possible definitions, histories, and points of origin of SF, grounding an account of SF’s multiple communities of practice in John Rieder’s work, and he prudently opts to begin the book with texts from the early nineteenth century. The choice to open specifically with Washington Irving’s “Men of the Moon” from his History of New York, however, may seem idiosyncratic, as this piece of Swiftian satire, with its speculative content firmly in the subjunctive, could serve as a disorienting beginning to the story of science fiction for a student. Haslam’s handful of vocabulary glosses and other notes will not do enough by themselves to help some students navigate this offering and, say, connect it to Star Wars and Star Trek. Of course, the book need not be read or assigned in order from cover to cover, and Haslam sketches multiple paths through the selections that one might follow other than the strictly chronological, this being the one that necessarily places Irving’s 1809 text first. To this end, the book devotes space to three separate arrangements of the same table of contents, organized by “Period/Chronological”; “Multiple Histories, Multiple Futures”; and “Thematic and Sub-Genre.” Following Irving, the stories in the first chronological section by Poe, Shelley, and Wells provide a more typical foundation for thinking through proto-SF. Florence McLandburgh’s always unexpected “The Automaton Ear” (1873) also serves as a unique glimpse into late 19th-century culture and science, as well as kicking off the book’s clear objective of placing more women writers in the longer history of SF prior to second-wave feminism, and thus moving away from a typical version of that story casting Mary Shelley as anomalous, followed by generations of male descendants. The many women writers who have always been present throughout SF’s history appear throughout the collection situated in their proper historical contexts, a vital step forward from reprinting their stories primarily in anthologies highlighting “forgotten” women writers.
The second chronological section, “Foundations of SF II: Enter the Twentieth Century: 1900-1936,” succeeds in capturing the richness and complexity of the early pulp magazine era while not centering only a handful of familiar SF pulp magazines, beginning with the increasingly popular proto-solarpunk fantasia “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Haslam judiciously includes some verse reprinted in pulp magazines as well as a story by Francis Stevens predating Gernsback’s first issue of Amazing Stories but published in the all-important generalist pulp magazine All-Story (“Friend Island,” 1918), broadening the story of the early magazines beyond the usual emphasis on the Gernsback-Campbell lineage alone. I was also pleased to find here two stories that I teach in just about every course I can because their relevance to the present only continues to increase, Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920). Classic pulp stories by Lovecraft and Leslie F. Stone round out this section, which in my view collectively provides an astoundingly compact and effective introduction to these key decades in SF’s emergence. I also appreciate Haslam’s use of images from this period and elsewhere across the anthology, which help to convey media ecologies quite alien to contemporary students and illuminate the original contexts for these works’ circulation and reading.
The only absence from the second section that I truly felt deeply was, again, C. L. Moore’s, but one of her most famous stories co-authored with Henry Kuttner, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (1943), instead appears at the commencement of the subsequent section on the “Golden Age,” in enviable company sandwiched between Isaac Asimov’s ur-robot story “Liar!” (1941) and Ray Bradbury’s often anthologized apocalyptic story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950). All are superb teaching texts, and this section notably moves on not only to core science fiction luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, and Judith Merril but continues tracing Black speculative writing and thinking through one of James H. Hill’s newspaper stories, “The Space Ship” (1950), and Afrofuturist jazz icon Sun Ra’s poem “The Space Age Cannot Be Avoided” (1957).
The fourth section covers the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, titled “Revolutions and New Waves.” It provides a textbook overview of the new feminist SF of the time (Zoline, Tiptree, Russ) and stories by Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and William Gibson that characterize the experimentation as formal and otherwise of the time. One unique selling point for the book is a previously unpublished version of Delany’s story “Among the Blobs” (1976, 1987), accompanied by a new introduction from the author himself, but, as far as I can tell, the differences are minimal, and largely involve paragraph breaks and a few words switched out here and there. As a meta-history of science fiction and its futures itself, Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) works particularly well in an anthology such as this one, pairing nicely with some of the stories from earlier sections. I will again praise Haslam’s care to highlight works by women and also BIPOC authors in each section: here, the Saunders story, Scott-Heron’s spoken word track on the Apollo program “Whitey on the Moon” (1970)—a piece I have taught in many courses myself to great success—and, in the next section, William F. Wu’s 1983 story “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” help dispel the myth that SF was thoroughly white up until the 21st century, with Delany, like Shelley, the single exception proving the rule.
The penultimate historical section navigates the later 80s to the early 2000s and as such struggles more than other groupings to tell a coherent story, perhaps because by this time science fiction had begun to mean so many things and pull in so many directions, and Haslam is clearly eager to hasten on to the present. The organizing framework offered by the title is “The Digital Age and Its Discontents,” and cyberpunk stories do appear here in abundance, with an emphasis on women authors such as Pat Cadigan, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Eden Robinson. But Gibson’s story had already appeared in the previous grouping, and, with only two stories from the 90s compared to the ten selections published since the 90s that the book contains, this section flounders somewhat as an implicit historical account or exercise in periodization. It overlaps conceptually and temporally with the preceding section, which shares the 80s, as well as with the following one, with which it shares the early 2000s; it is also impossible to tell the story of SF at this time without extensive consideration of film, games, and other media, so increasingly important to the meaning and understanding of the genre. I do not question the inclusion of any particular text here: I teach Butler’s “Speech Sounds” and Bell’s “The Space Traders” at every opportunity myself, and Nalo Hopkinson and N. K. Jemisin as well, but I am simply observing the high heterogeneity of this section, more a symptom of SF than this SF anthology, in the end.
One of course expects this kind of heterogeneity and lack of clear historical narrative in any account of the present moment, and so the same could be said of the final section on contemporary SF that features work by eight authors published between 2008 and 2019. Beyond showcasing stories by some of the major authors of this century—Ted Chiang, China Miéville, and Ken Liu—it also includes more work from less well-known Indigenous authors—here, Richard Van Camp and Drew Hayden Taylor and from Africa, Dilman Dila’s “The Last Storyteller” (2019), appropriately the final story in the book. I might have grouped Hopkinson and Jemisin in this section myself, key writers of the present and future, to be sure. In the end, the range of different versions of science fiction and futurisms presented here serves as a useful snapshot of the unrepresentable vast phenomenon that we call “SF.”
Any additional complaints or criticisms about the anthology that I could raise would remain quite minor. For example, there are a few too many puns about the book taking a “broad view” of science fiction for my taste, a minor complaint indeed. It is also strange for a historical anthology of English-language science fiction to lack a Heinlein story, although a remark in the introduction suggests that this omission and a few others may have resulted from permissions and/or expense issues (35). The larger and perhaps largest concern might be that the broad approach taken here risks hastening the forgetting of once centrally canonical twentieth-century authors of SF, including those featured in the Wesleyan such as Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, and Frederik Pohl, and a little later Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, among many other multiple Hugo and Nebula winners past. The tradeoff inherent in the rightly more expansive vision of SF presented here is the compressing of certain essential parts of SF history, but Haslam’s introduction, notes, and brief critical bibliography offer solid guidance for further explorations in any era and corner of SF’s history. Finally, because of the expansiveness of that vision of what SF encompasses and the many critical conversations with which Haslam engages, the erudite seventeen-page introduction, while generally accessible, occasionally makes points likely to fly over the heads of truly novice students without much prior exposure to or understanding of science fiction and its history. Nevertheless, I would recommend the book highly as an excellent base classroom text that an instructor can choose to supplement in various ways according to the preparation level of the students. Right now, The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction seems like the best anthology of its kind for adoption in a university-level science fiction course, in that it most effectively captures and communicates the current state of science fiction scholarship as well as science fiction’s diverse historical trajectories.
Timothy S. Miller teaches medieval literature and contemporary speculative fiction as Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, where he contributes to the department’s MA degree concentration in Science Fiction and Fantasy. He has published widely on both later Middle English literature and various contemporary authors of speculative fiction and is the author of the books Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea: A Critical Companion and Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: A Critical Companion. Both belong to the series “Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon,” which he now co-edits with Anna McFarlane.
Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Children of Strife. Orbit, 2026.
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Children of Strife is the fourth novel in the Children of Time series (Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory, and Children of Strife). The novels can be read as interconnected standalones, but it is best to read them in order. If one could choose a word to describe the humans in these novels and what they cause, it would be the word strife. The final conflict happens in this last novel, so the title is appropriate. Hence, who are the children and what is the strife? As in most of his books, Tchaikovsky begins with a conflict between humans on Earth. Different factions are fighting for power, for resources, for political dominance, and of course it is all fueled by their unavoidable hubris. Tchaikovsky also plays with the chronotope, so the reader has to keep track of the different worlds, spaceships, and timelines to understand how the characters developed and how everyone got to that final place. There are quite a few “what ifs” in this series, and the main one is what if science can release a terraforming nanovirus that can accelerate evolution in monkeys and create humans? This is Kern’s quest in Children of Time: creating life, being greater than life, being God. Of course, members of the other faction sabotage the project, and the virus is released on an alien planet named Nod (without the monkeys). Evolution is accelerated and new sentient species are created. This last installment to the series brings together the visitors and inhabitants of all the new worlds from the previous novels in a final conflict for humanity and the other evolved species of the Panspecific alliance.
It seems that no matter how far humans go into the future (the events happen over a few millennia) or away from Earth, they cannot leave behind the anthropocentric worldview. Kern suffers from the God complex, but she treasures her creations more than humans, which makes her somewhat different from Hartmand, who just wants to be a merciless God. Therefore, after millennia away from a destroyed Earth the final conflict is between the creations that God-like humans have made, the human “Gods,” and the human refugees that have survived the trip across space and time. Yet, these creations are not only biological; they are also artificial intelligences. What makes the story even more intriguing is that the creators themselves have transferred their identities, along with their good and bad aspirations, into these worlds as AI.
Apart from nanotechnology and imperialist terraforming, Tchaikovsky explores artificial intelligence and cybernetic immortality. Kern cannot live forever, but she can upload her consciousness into the computer and thus achieve a form of immortality. The question is whether Tchaikovsky treats these entities as clones or different selves of the same person. It appears that in the end Kern is a different identity from the one that set out to terraform alien planets. Another interesting concept is the supercomputer/simulator on planet Imir where humans encounter a virtual reality. They set into it to find the original creators only to realize that virtual reality will not give you the truth; instead, it will give you what you want to find. Alis spends a whole human lifetime in it, going deeper and deeper only to find out in the end that she never scratched the surface of it. She was only exploring her own scenarios. This is an interesting concept considering all the hype and theories regarding ChatGPT and other AI programs of today. She comes out of it traumatized and not able to differentiate reality from a virtual construct, thus, constantly questioning her sanity.
Tchaikovsky revisits the concept of symbiotic relationships (Alien Clay) through the rather comic virtual symbiosis of arachnid-like creatures Portia and Fabian, who struggle to combine their identities and find mutual ground for existence. A new approach is given through the symbiotic relationship of Alis and Mira, who have embraced each other’s personalities via their patient / therapist relationship. Their mutual interaction helps Alis ground herself in reality while helping Mira evolve. Mira is perhaps the most interesting character in the novel. Readers find out that the therapist helping Alis is actually Kern’s first creation. She is the original microbial organism (or group of organisms) that has adapted and transformed into a scientist. However, she struggles to contain her true nature, which involves a keen desire to ruthlessly assimilate all life in her path. Her symbiotic relationship with Alis helps her become a better living being. In the end, Mira displays more humanity and empathy than the humans do. At one point, Mira would rather end her own existence than bring more harm to others. She helps bring together the somewhat torn Panspecific alliance and gives a second chance to those who wish it by creating bodies for the AI entities. In the end, Mira is the dream that Kern set out to create.
Once again, Tchaikovsky takes the “what if” to another level by creating worlds in which life does life. Entities and creations explode in full force by assimilating everything and everyone into their own world. Yet, the highly evolved ones prove to have more “humanity” than humans do. It appears that the only true monsters in this universe are the vindictive and rather petty intelligences that conquer others not for the symbiotic advantages but for absolute power. They are the ones who, though capable of using their knowledge and science to cure Earth, do want to and would rather not share the accolades with their political opponents. With these novels, Tchaikovsky reminds us that in reality there is no terraforming, there is no other planet, and that our efforts should be aimed at saving the only planet we have.
Children of Strife is a good novel for those taking science fiction courses, although it is advised to read all the novels in the series for a better grasp of the concepts and storyline. The series is an excellent example of the Bakhtinian chronotope since the temporal and spatial shifts are layered and well done. Also, Tchaikovsky’s approach to giving different perspectives from various characters can be discussed further. The novel is useful for scholars interested in topics such as empathy, AI, cybernetic immortalities, virtual realities, terraforming theories, ecocriticism, trauma theory, ethics, anthropomorphism, and symbiotic relationships.
Zorica Lola Jelic, Ph.D. is an 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 she also loves to write about literary theory and science fiction. She has published scholarly papers, coursebooks, and enjoys attending professional conferences.
