Review of Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene
Peter Sands
Strahan, Jonathan. Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene. MIT, 2022.
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Tomorrow’s Parties is the eighth installment in an MIT anthology series published in one form or another since 2011, often with distinguished editors and featuring well-known authors engaging with contemporary technologies. This volume is edited by Jonathan Strahan, an award-winning anthologist and veteran editor based in Australia. It features writers from Australia, Bangladesh, China, the UK, and the United States, and begins with an interview between James Bradley, a novelist and critic, and Kim Stanley Robinson, the most important writer of science fiction in the utopian vein working today. The remaining ten stories and one short essay contextualizing the artwork provided by Sean Bodley are workmanlike engagements with the Anthropocene, including contributions from very familiar names, including Tade Thompson and Greg Egan. Some readers may enjoy its aesthetic or speculative qualities, but its true value would be as a classroom text.
Bradley interviewed Robinson in 2021, not long after his Ministry for the Future (2020) was published, and during the COVID pandemic, both of which are given as contexts, along with climate change records being set, and the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol as elements sharpening their sense of crisis. Robinson’s answers to Bradley’s questions cover many themes he has developed in longer essays, noting for instance that the pandemic has brought people to a better understanding “that we are indeed in a global civilization” (13; all citations are to a PDF review copy, so pagination in print may differ). He tells us that “[a]s prophecy, SF is always wrong; as metaphor, it is always right, being an expression of the feeling of the time of writing” (14). Much of the rest strikes familiar notes: there is a “science versus capitalism” moment in history, with the two “arm-wrestling for control” (17) and the institutional structures (science) have to be strengthened to combat “all the older power systems of the few over the many” (capitalism) if humanity is to have hope in the changed future of the Anthropocene (18). Elsewhere, Robinson offers expected recourse to law and legal institutions as bulwarks against the predations of capital (19-20) and against “old-style violent revolutions” (22). In a striking bit of understatement (from my perspective in late 2025 and early 2026), he says, “I think it really is a crux moment in history. The 2020s are going to be wild” (26). Robinson’s answers to Bradley’s queries are as always cogent, but do not bring to light anything like a new position. Still, as clear statements of his positions, they are pretty hard to beat.
The strongest stories in the volume are powerful studies of affect in the face of environmental disaster, sometimes framed or assisted by extrapolated technologies, but mostly given power by the sense of wrack and ruin—if not quite the end of the world, a significant step toward a fundamentally altered future—that surrounds the characters. Tade Thompson’s evocative “Down and Out in Exile Park” sets his characters mostly in a gigantic island of floating plastic that has been urbanized and settled by societal outcasts off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria; Greg Egan’s “Crisis Actors” gives an unsettling look at what happens when the conspiracy-minded confront immovable realities that contradict their views; Justina Robson’s “I Give You the Moon” plays out a late-life love story inside a frame of climate-altered economies and advanced technologies; and Malka Older’s “Legion” gives a tense, unnerving glimpse of the possibilities offered by surveillance technologies and crowdsourcing for combating the intractable threats posed by men against women the world over and across all epochs. Two stories stand out for their evocation of place and affect: Chen Qiufan’s “Do You Hear the Fungi Sing?” and James Bradley’s “After the Storm.”
Quifan, translated by Emily Jin, imagines a village in China some time after 2060 in which a “hypercortex network” is being laid over the actual physical geography of the country to create a parallel AR system for real-time adjustments to climate-impacting human activities. One of the few remaining blind spots in the country turns out to be a remote, matriarchal village that resists the encroachments of modern technologies separating humans from the natural world. The villagers of Baenl are in a symbiotic relationship with the vast mycorrhizal fungi network around them, using fungi for food production, building materials, even electricity generation. Su Su, a woman sent to the village to convince them to permit the hypercortex technology to be located there and map their territory, gradually becomes part of their society, returning her to a balanced relationship with herself and with nature (aided by a mushroom-fueled psychedelic experience, naturally), that reveals the true hypercortex of fungi networks under the earth. “Symbiosis was the way of life,” she realizes (215). She is given a gift of insight into the true network: “Like the duet in her dreams, she was meant to bring them all to perfect synchrony. In a future like that, humans would be endowed with the wisdom to restore and sustain the delicate balance between nature and technology, saving the fragile blue planet that they— alongside a multitude of other beings—cherished as home from destruction” (219) and must remain in the village as a conduit for older ways of knowledge to save the future of humanity.
In “After the Storm,” we get a complex, multigenerational story of alcoholism, abandonment, loss, and redemption in the frame of an Australia ravaged by rising seas and temperatures about twenty years from now. It could easily be a piece of contemporary realist fiction and indeed ends on a note of ambiguity and shared pain, but it is helped along throughout by the unraveling social and economic fabric in the wake of climate-intensified storms.
At the outset, I said I could see this more as a classroom text than anything else, and I want to revisit that comment. There are no stories in here that I think would be award contenders, but there are also no stories here that I could not use in a classroom to engage with the effects of climate change or the trajectories of technologies and adaptations we might extrapolate from today to the world of the next few decades. There are some standout moments—Tom Hanks as a possible cannibal, eating a synthetic Bronson Pinchot resonates with readers of a certain age; the creeping realization that being a creep is no longer to be tolerated in an age of cheap and widespread surveillance—and the stories do model something more than solarpunk or hopecore fantasies. Strahan writes in the introduction of seeking to create a volume that is “a little sad, a little elegiac, a little hopeful,” which today, in the wake of COVID, January 6th, and now the wholesale undermining of renewable energy and post-war consensus politics, would be a good place to begin a discussion with the students who will live in tomorrow’s parties.
Peter Sands is Director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Honors College and associate professor of English. He primarily teaches utopian and dystopian literature, science fiction, and American literature courses. His research includes work on white representations of Native American otherness in nineteenth-century literature, utopian and dystopian responses to racial and class divides from the nineteenth century to the present day, and work on the slow food and related slow movements as alternatives to contemporary social and economic frameworks that particularly empower non-dominant communities to resist global inequities and imagine possible worlds.
Kitasei, Yume. Saltcrop: A Novel, Flatiron Books 2025.
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Saltcrop is Yume Kitasei’s latest novel, her third in three years, which turns its attention away from the author’s former interest in space narratives and towards the displaced landscape of our own planet. The book is evenly cleaved in three portions, each narrated by one of the main characters: Skipper, Carmen, and Norah, who are all sisters. Skipper, the youngest, begins the tale, revealing the shrunken parameters of life in her resource-drained, barely disguised U.S. context. Skipper is the youngest and seems to be the least successful of the sisters; where Norah has moved to the city for a fancy research job, and Carmen has just secured a new job as a nurse, Skipper makes her living scavenging, skimming the ocean in her little boat and bringing back once-treasured trash. That is, until she discovers that her oldest sister, Norah, has disappeared. Skipper is intent on finding her, and Carmen—the responsible but somewhat intolerable sister—invites herself along for the voyage. The second section, from Carmen’s point of view, describes life after making ground across the ocean, when the sisters must work at a remote seed vault for incredibly low wages and hope to both solve the mystery of where Norah went and figure out how to follow her with so little resources to barter. The last section, from Norah’s point of view, reveals much of the vault’s secrets and of the sisters’ own history and destinies.
Like Kitasei’s previous novels, The Deep Sky (2023) and The Stardust Grail (2024), Saltcrop meditates on the unique bonds that spring up in the wake of collapse and acts of valor that have domino effects, changing and saving the lives of many. Here, however, she dives more deeply into the oil-slick evil of corporate greed, giving an all-too realistic portrayal of how agricultural companies might leverage their power when food becomes scarce. The seed vault, no doubt inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, is an especially potent object and setting here. Other recent novels, like C. Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey (2023) and Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore (2025), have similarly depicted agricultural arks as symbols of misplaced faith. The vault, meant to be a bastion of hope, becomes the ultimate symbol of this world’s moral failure. It is run on wage slavery and secrets that cast doubt on the benevolent agricultural company, Renewal, which has been keeping the world alive during a series of increasingly aggressive blights.
Though the novel focuses on the pain and beauty of the sisters’ sacrificial care for each other, I found the most moving portion of the book to be Skipper’s description of the enormous trash pile she and Carmen discover on the ocean. The list is reminiscent of the lost treasures Emily St. John Mandel catalogues in Station Eleven (2014), but where Mandel records the many nostalgic experiences that have vanished from the post-apocalyptic world, Kitasei makes it clear just how many things lose their meaning and remain, sickeningly, to outlive the humans who once believed them precious. She describes the floating debris as “the detritus of everything that has ever been loved and bought and consumed by people”:
cat toys, dog toys, sex toys, fidget toys, baby toys, water bottles, suitcase wheels, an infinite number of pens running out of ink at the moment its user needed to write, telephones with curly cords, flip phones, smartphones and the oversized boxes they came in, clocks that never got someone somewhere when they needed to be there, microwaves, hangers, rubber duckies, packaging from favorite snacks, jewelry bought by teenagers with the first money they earned themselves… (150)
The list goes on and on, filling an entire page and overwhelming the reader with a mountain of beloved trash. Giving the trash all the heartbreaking banality it entails, Kitasei writes, “It is the last two hundred years of human history come to rest in the great gyre compressed into one, singular, cacophonous moment” (150). Kitasei puts Skipper and Carmen’s high seas adventure and search for their sister on hold to imagine our society’s watery grave, a swirling, beautiful pile of filth.
After the delightful surprise of Kitasei’s generation starship debut, The Deep Sky, and the space-alien-heist romp of The Stardust Grail, I’ll admit to some disappointment concerning Saltcrop, which felt much smaller, more mundane and shackled to the earth. Upon reflection, though, I can see how this focus on the ordinary is meant to push at a different sort of adventure, one that takes even more courage than venturing into outer space. This is the adventure of, as Donna Haraway puts it, staying with the trouble, an exercise that:
requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as moral critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. (1)
Here, Haraway expresses her frustration with two, too-simple responses to Anthropocene terror: first, the faith in a deus ex machina, that either a machine or the return of literal god will save us; and second, the more insidious belief that it is too late to stop the consequences of our actions, and we should accept inevitable doom (3). While narratives of galactic adventure and alien contact scratch an escapist itch while still critiquing things like environmental decay and xenophobia, Kitasei’s Saltcrop strikes a hard note in favor of imagining the world as it will be for those who stay, who are born into the trouble and must make their lives within it.
In the end, Saltcrop is a novel that answers Imre Szeman’s call for “narratives that shake us out of our faith in surplus…by tracing the brutal consequences of a future of slow decline, of less energy for most and no energy for some” (325). Skipper, Carmen, and Norah’s world displays an intensification of our contemporary worries, particularly surrounding climate change and corporate overreach, and gives us a recognizable future of decline. Such a world becomes localized, with concerns and horizons shrinking down to the community level, which makes Skipper and Carmen’s voyage across the ocean all the more daring and all the more terrifying.
WORKS CITED
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Laurie Shannon, Vin Nardizzi, Ken Hiltner, Saree Makdisi, Michael Ziser, Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA, March 2011, Vol. 126, No. 2 (March 2011), pp. 305–326.
Sarah Nolan-Brueck is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, where she studies how science fiction authors critique medical legislation that restricts diverse gendered groups in the United States. Sarah was a 2024 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellow at the University of Oregon. She has been previously published in ASAP/J, Utopian Studies, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, Extrapolation, and Huffpost.
Liu, Cixin. A View from the Stars Tor Books, 2024.
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A View from the Stars is a rich collection of Liu Cixin’s essays and short fiction in translation. Bringing together six short stories and thirteen essays, the volume offers readers a multifaceted portrait of Liu Cixin not only as a major writer but also as a reflective commentator on his own creative practice and on the development of science fiction as a genre. The fiction stories included in the collection were originally published around 2000, and most of the essays date from the early 2000s to 2015. While the collection is not organized by the chronology of the original Chinese publications, its arrangement foregrounds the breadth of Liu’s intellectual thinking and the range of his literary imagination.
The fiction in the collection engages questions of technology and development, and each story emphasizes different concerns. “Whale Song” and “Butterfly” point to two political events around the turn of the millennium, respectively: the anti-whaling movement and the political upheavals in Yugoslavia. “The Messenger” takes the form of a quasi-historical fantasy, imagining the evolution of physics theory through a figure suggestive of Einstein. “End of the Microcosmos,” “Destiny,” and “Heard It in the Morning” are comparatively less marked by historical specificity, and they speculate respectively on theories of microscopic particles, space-time, and cosmological models. The essays in the collection illuminate Liu’s relatively under-discussed professional trajectory from a science fiction fan to one of the most representative writers of Chinese science fiction, as well as his creative process and a more humble, even vulnerable side of himself when confronting fundamental philosophical questions. For instance, essays such as “Time Enough for Love,” “A Journey in Search of Home,” and “Thirty Years of Making Magic Out of Ordinariness” discuss Liu’s first encounters with science fiction, how he developed an interest in the genre, the difficulties he faced in publishing during his early years as a writer, and the material circumstances behind his decision to writing science fiction at different moments in his life. In essays such as “The ‘Church’ of Sci-Fi” and “Civilization’s Expansion in Reverse,” he addresses philosophical themes explored in his works and his methods of writing science fiction, particularly on how to represent a sense of awe toward the cosmos and the unknown in science fiction stories. Across these essays, Liu also repeatedly comments on the state of the Chinese science fiction industry. For example, in “On Ball Lightning, An Interview with Liu Cixin,” originally published in 2004, he offers predictions about the future of Chinese science fiction that, in retrospect, seem strikingly prescient.
It is worth noting that the stories and essays included in this volume primarily foreground Liu’s writing before The Three-Body Problem achieved international success. In these relatively early works, one can trace Liu’s fiction writing from comparatively single-dimensioned storytelling to a more multilayered approach to worldbuilding. The essays in the collection supplement this trajectory by presenting, in more analytical terms, his reflections on science fiction as a literary practice. When discussing the history and development of Chinese science fiction, Liu frequently contrasts the genre with “mainstream literature,” by which he means the realist tradition that has dominated Chinese literature since the early twentieth century. Prior to the 2010s, science fiction occupied a more or less marginalized position within the Chinese literary field; these texts therefore register Liu’s concern for the future of Chinese science fiction as a genre and his efforts to articulate its distinctive epistemological force as a means of legitimizing it.
For scholars, this collection provides excellent primary material for understanding both the worldbuilding of Liu’s fiction and the historical conditions under which his works emerged. Some of the essays in the collection—especially those originally published on internet forums and blogs around 2000—are particularly valuable, as this kind of text has become more difficult to access amid tightening publishing censorship in China today. One shift in Liu Cixin’s thinking that can be traced through the selected essays is especially noteworthy. In “Civilization’s Expansion in Reverse,” written in 2001, Liu argues that if human civilization were to expand outward, the resources of the solar system would not be sufficient to sustain human consumption; thus, one possible response, he suggests, would be for humanity to intervene technologically in its own evolution and thereby reduce its biological scale. Yet a decade later, in “One and One Hundred Thousand Earths,” written in 2011, he speculatively suggests that expansion into outer space might offer one possible solution to the survival crisis humanity faces as a result of environmental changes on Earth, and that the resources of the solar system would be sufficient to sustain the population of a hundred thousand Earths. My intention in highlighting this shift here is certainly not to moralize either perspective—after all, in the original texts, these ideas function more as thought experiments than as serious judgments—but rather to suggest that it exemplifies the productive tension between competing currents of thought within Chinese science fiction. Such tensions have been central to the emergence of the remarkable boom in Chinese science fiction we witness today.
The texts in this collection are, for the most part, written in the grand narrative mode for which Liu is best known: a mode concerned with civilization, humanity, and the future on a grand scale. Readers can clearly discern the influence of generic forms of canonical Western science fiction on Liu’s writing. At the same time, Liu’s specific concerns and lines of inquiry remain grounded in the realities of China, including the economy of the Chinese science fiction industry and the practical and historical-political considerations shaping publication. Overall, this accessible volume is a valuable resource for understanding both the history and development of science fiction in China and the study of Liu Cixin and his works.
Zichuan Gan is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, with a specialization in Women and Gender Studies. His research and teaching engage literature, digital media, and popular culture, with a particular focus on contemporary Chinese science fiction and modern Chinese cultural production.
Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Bee Speaker Head of Zeus, 2025.
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Bee Speaker is the third book in the Dogs of War Series: it follows the development of bioforms (genetically modified, enhanced, and sentient beings) and presents a certain homage to bees without which there is no life for humans. The first book shows the growth of bioforms from mere weapons to entities who develop moral agency while the second book focuses on the secluded evolution of bioforms and humaniforms (enhanced humans) adapted to live on Mars. Bee Speaker takes place some two hundred years after the second book, and it begins with a received signal for help from Earth. Mars has not changed ecologically, but life has adapted to it with the help of distributed intelligence (DisInt/AI) –Bees. It is relatively peaceful, and everyone has learned how to depend on one another. Bioforms and humaniforms do not remember life on Earth; they have forgotten how treacherous humans can be. This naïve approach to life leaves room for error when they decide to travel to Earth in order to help Earthly Bees. On the other hand, life on Earth has regressed to some form of cut-throat dystopian world in which Bunker-folk, unarmed villagers, atheistic monks (the keepers of knowledge), bioforms, clones, and other DisInts have painstakingly achieved some kind of fragile détente solely based on transactional dependency through which everyone has something that the other needs. Information is the greatest asset, and trust is a word in which no one believes. Therefore, when the crew consisting of two humaniforms and two bioforms (a dog and a dragon) arrives on ancestral turf and expects to connect the two parts of humanity, everything goes awry, and they find themselves in a hostile environment with an unknown entity pulling all the strings.
Tchaikovsky presents a highly imaginative world, which in reality is very hard to imagine. For the reader, it is difficult to visualize the modified beings, the advancement of technology, and the sentience of dogs and dragons. Once again he plays with the “what if” of science fiction and takes bioengineering to a level that has the reader questioning the ethics of such scientific growth. Just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done. It is interesting that the reader’s empathy does not waver when it comes to the actions and wellbeing of the bioforms because from all the entities that are bound in the local mess of misunderstandings and manipulations, the actual humans are the ones who are the least likeable characters. This raises the issue of what it truly means to be human and who is capable of moral agency in this story. Every character believes that they deserve moral consideration, but only the humans and the Earthly Bees (the corrupt AI) refuse to acknowledge the worthiness of the other’s life. Earthly Bees is an entity that is only looking out for herself/itself and how to survive. Bees does what it needs to in order have everyone under her/its control. The humans are no better. For example, they cut off the arms and legs of their leader, Josh Griffin III (so he cannot run away), and keep him connected to a machine in order to harvest his enriched blood.
Yet, the crux of the story is the the moment humans realize that they need Martian Bees (AI) to make sense of their world and guide them towards prosperity, peace, and coexistence. Bees will organize their lives, communicate with the outside world, and create a more promising future for all involved. It follows that this advanced AI has more rationale than the humans do. Still, it is unknown whether Bees will have moral agency. Bees will see if it will at some point decide that it is beneficial for her/it to continue with the biological enhancement of humans. The decision will be Bee’s. The question is will AI manipulate the humans just as its predecessor has or will it be a benevolent part of Earth’s future? For the time being, Bees is neither good nor bad. It does not have empathy nor preference. It is still not sentient.
Another interesting aspect of the novel is the role that women have within it. Most of the important characters are female or have been assigned the feminine gender (two bioforms, one humaniform, distributed intelligence, the women in the villages and bunkers). In the bunkers, the men seem to rule as in the time of Vikings, but the women have their own second culture that seems to covertly create the climate within the clan. They live subserviently in the shadow of men, but they are cunning and strong. Their clandestine meetings and conversations are the source of all the important information that is the foundation of all the decision making. Yet, Tchaikovsky does not provide any information or clues as to why he chose these characters (especially the artificially created ones) to be female. Apart from being savvy, they do not have any grand or noble characteristics: Ada is weak, Serval is conniving, the witch lurks around and collects fungus, Jennifer is portrayed as a sociopath, and the Earth Bees is a tyrant. The only truly good female character is Boatman since she seems to have empathy and an understanding of the humans and bioforms alike. Perhaps the message is that the world would be run—maybe not better but more effectively—by women.
Bee Speaker is an ideal novel for undergraduate and graduate science fiction courses since it deals with the topic of bioengineering, which has become more science than fiction with the development of CRISPR technology. It can be used for scholarly work discussing the consequences of genetic manipulation and biological enhancement, the use and abuse of prosthetics and personalized medicine, and the difference between moral status and moral agency. Furthermore, it deals with peace as an aesthetic condition and the effects of soft and hard power on humanity. One can also discuss narrative theory, affect theory, feminist and ecofeminist criticism, and any theory that analyzes biostudies, biopolitics, trauma, and postcolonialism.
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.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom – Isaac Asimov
This quote by Asimov resonates with one of T. J. Klune’s most recent novels. In the Lives of Puppets, published in 2023 and roughly Klune’s fifteenth novel, offers a speculative reinterpretation of familiar science fiction and fairy tale tropes. In this novel Klune explores questions of care, kinship, and ethical responsibility in a posthuman world. The narrative, which is considered a retelling of Pinocchio (1883), is set in a future shaped by advanced artificial intelligence. It follows Victor Lawson, a human raised almost in isolation by a small community of robots, whose carefully constructed life is disrupted when he encounters a dangerous threat posed by technology in the past. Combining elements of science fiction, fantasy, and romance, Klune constructs a narrative that foregrounds emotional connection and moral choice over transformative technological advances in society.
The novel revolves around an unconventional chosen family. Victor lives with his adoptive father, Giovanni Lawson, an android inventor who is also an android himself, and two robots with different personalities that have been given distinct affective capacities. Their secluded existence in the forest presents an alternative to a wider world marked by violence, constant surveillance, and the abuse of technology. When Victor is captured by the AI that was responsible for past devastation in the human world, the narrative shifts into a rescue quest that forces this found family to confront both external threats and internal fears. While the plot follows a recognizable adventure plot, In the Lives of Puppets consistently returns to its core concern, which is how love, loyalty, and care operate across the human-machine worlds.
Klune, who is already well-known for character-driven speculative fiction as in his best-seller The House in the Cerulean Sea (2020), writes this novel within a tradition of science fiction that uses non-human and robotic figures to reflect on the human condition and what it means to be human. As anticipated, this work draws on Pinocchio, reinterpreting the fairy tale and bringing in current anxieties through the lens of artificial intelligence and posthuman ethics. The protagonist’s desire to protect and be protected, to belong to his non-human community and to choose his own path, echoes the wooden puppet’s longing for humanity, while the presence of sentient machines complicates any straightforward distinction between the human and the non-human. In this sense, the novel stands out as part of a long-standing SF conversation about artificial intelligence, agency, and morals, recalling earlier explorations by writers such as Isaac Asimov while shifting the focus from logic and control to dynamics of care and affect.
Within contemporary science fiction, In the Lives of Puppets aligns with an increasing body of work that prioritizes community, intimacy, and chosen family over conflict-driven narratives and complicated world-buildings. Rather than presenting AI as a potential threat or a tool for his characters, Klune uses it to imagine artificial beings that are capable of emotional development, ethical reasoning, and profound attachment as is the case of Rambo (a sentient small vacuum robot) and Nurse Ratched (a nurse android), who are Victor’s best friends. This resonates with recent speculative fiction that foregrounds community and mutual dependence in order to thrive, positioning the novel closer to relatively recent scholarly fields such as Community Studies or Hope Studies, far from traditional dystopian science fiction. At the same time, the text does not overrule the dangers of technological power as the antagonist AI embodies the consequences of uncontrolled authority, non-human reasoning, and the desire to control rather than to coexist.
Regarding the genre of the novel, it can be described as a conjunction of science fiction, fantasy, and romance. While its futuristic setting in a post-human world firmly locates it within SF, the narrative structure and emotional arc borrow heavily from the broad tradition of fairy tale and quest narratives. The emphasis on different kinds of love, from romantic and platonic to familiar, shapes both character development and plot progression. For some SF readers, this affective focus might feel at odds with potential expectations of extensive world-building that is typical of these novels. However, this mixture is central to the novel’s intervention as by foregrounding emotion and ethical choice, Klune reorients speculative inquiry towards questions of responsibility, vulnerability, and care in a technological world.
From a scholarly perspective, In the Lives of Puppets therefore offers rich material for discussions on posthumanism, community, and care ethics. The novel repeatedly challenges anthropocentric paradigms by giving robots emotional depth, thus inviting readers to reflect on where humanness begins and ends. The novel’s portrayal of non-human beings who can love, fear loss, and make sacrifices for one another complicates binaries such as human versus machine and the natural versus the artificial. These dynamics make the text particularly relevant to academic conversations around AI, affectivity in AI, and the ethics of invention and creation with technology.
The novel lends itself well to pedagogical use across different educational stages. In the classroom of secondary education, it could be productively paired with canonical texts concerned with AI such as Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) or Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Reading Klune’s novel alongside these works may allow students to trace how representations of AI have changed over time. While earlier SF often frames AI through anxieties about control, autonomy, and threat against human life, Klune’s text reflects a contemporary, globalized context in which human-machine interactions are an everyday reality.
At the undergraduate level, the novel can be read alongside foundational theoretical work on posthumanism, such as Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” published in 1985 in the Socialist Review or Rosi Braidotti’s influential book The Posthuman: A Theory of the Near-Future (2013), inviting students to explore how speculative fiction reworks traditional anthropocentric frameworks. Klune’s emphasis on chosen family and ethical responsibility provides a fertile ground for discussion on how agency, humanness, and moral obligation may be redistributed in posthuman contexts. The novel’s accessible prose and emotionally engaging narrative make it suitable for undergraduate courses, while its thematic engagement with responsibility, care, and power also makes it an insightful reading for more advanced critical discussion at the master’s level.
In conclusion, In the Lives of Puppets contributes to contemporary science fiction panorama by reaffirming the genre’s capacity to explore ethical and philosophical questions through emotionally grounded storytelling. Klune demonstrates with this novel how speculative fiction can successfully interrogate potential technological futures without sacrificing community or hope, positioning care, affection, and connection as vital to survive innovation and technological transformation. By revisiting familiar tropes through a posthuman lens, the novel invites readers to think about forms of community that transcend kinship and biological boundaries, offering a thoughtful and affecting meditation on what it means to choose love in a world governed by machines.
Patricia García Santos (Córdoba, 1999) is a predoctoral researcher in the Department of English at the University of Córdoba (Spain). She holds a dual degree in Translation & Interpreting and English Studies and has completed a Master’s in Secondary Education Teaching, which she pursued alongside a Master’s in Advanced English Studies. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Literatures in English, where she is a second-year student. She holds an FPI grant linked to the state-funded project The Poetics and Politics of Transparency in Contemporary English Literature (PID2023-146346NB-100). Her research examines the tension between contemporary demands for transparency and the inherent opacity of language and linguistic systems through the reinterpretations of the myth of the Tower of Babel.
Tchaikovsky, Adrian. The Hungry Gods. Solaris, 2025.
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This novella is the first in the Terrible Worlds: Innovations series in which Tchaikovsky explores power, belief, and runaway technologies that seem to ultimately do more harm than good. The novellas are standalones, but they share themes, and they can be read out of order (at least that is the initial concept considering that only the first one is out). At first glance, The Hungry Gods evokes certain emotions and postcolonial themes found in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest since humans with advanced technology play Gods in a world where people have no technology. Unlike the planet in Le Guin’s narrative, this is not some alien world but Earth in the distant future. At some point in the past, humans poisoned water resources, the ground, and the air. Then, when everything became barren, the brightest and the best left for a new planet, Utopia, to start a better life. They believed that nothing survived the harsh living conditions back home. However, people did survive. They live in primitive, divided, and hostile tribal communities scavenging for food, water, and other resources. The tribes are given animal names, and the weakest are the Rabbits. Their day-to-day survival is disturbed by the arrival of the Gods, the four main scientists who created Utopia. They are back to repopulate the Earth, each to his own vision and preference (overgrowth of plants, bugs, robots), and each one of them treating the humans as a means to an end. The fourth wants to stop the other three, but with his own agenda. Facing an inevitable extinction, the fourth God, Guy Westen, heads on a journey to unite the tribes and create an army to achieve his goals. Yet, there is a plot twist in the end that invites new questions and more discussions regarding the nature of humanity.
Tchaikovsky examines his favorite topics in this novella: ecology, advanced technology, and humans playing Gods. Relentless exploitation of the earth, which is something we are witnessing in our own time, will inevitably lead to an uninhabitable, desolate, and toxic environment. The what if? of this novella follows the thought that even if a new world is found and this one is abandoned, all human life might not cease to exist. What if some humans survive in such a toxic place? The people in this novella are sick and one of the elders is at the ripe old age of thirty-four. The ecological imbalance creates a hostile environment, and humanity has regressed to a “primitive” way of life, which is hunting and gathering for whatever is left. Yet, the “Gods” who had the technology to create a new, better world somewhere else, decide to use this advanced technology for extreme experiments. All four of them see humans as an expendable resource that can be utilized as a fighting force or biodegradable material. As in other novels, Tchaikovsky does not need to explain complicated and new technology. It is a means to an end, and it amplifies whatever emotions humans have in this distant future. Somehow, Tchaikovsky always comes to the conclusion that greed and power seem to prevail despite the possibility of developing better ethics and higher compassion. His logic, based on present humanity, always comes back to the dichotomy between science and ethics, which are presented as mutually exclusive. Therefore, the more technologically advanced a society becomes, the less compassion and morals people have. In Tchaikovsky’s fiction, exploitation is always driven by predatory power, which leads to the consumption of beliefs, resources and ultimately lives. According to Tchaikovsky, humanity is trapped in a vicious cycle of war, sacrifice, and conquests. This cycle is broken occasionally only to start from the beginning. This novella hints at that toward the end. His writing challenges the anthropocentric assumptions that humans are the most important entities in the universe by showing that humans more often than not tend to regress to a darkness that embraces the annihilation of many for the whims of the few.
This novella is appropriate for undergraduate courses since it is short and covers interesting topics that are worthy of discussion. Once the trilogy is out, it could be used for graduate work. The novella can also be useful for scholarly work. It is great for discussing ecocritical and postcolonial theories. The “Gods” are colonizers, and they return to Earth only to find humans alive, but they have no problem using them as resources or erasing their culture/s. They are the divine authority that can do that. By the same token, the “gods” behave as parasitic organisms who use and dispose of humans regardless of their desire to fight and live. The experiments are more important than people. What is the purpose of those experiments? Perhaps glory or just because they have nothing more to achieve. Science works toward goals and higher achievements until the final goal is some form of perverse destruction of life that will lead to a hypothetical new level of we did it because we could. Political theology is another theory that works well in this novella as well as Marxist theory or posthumanist theory. One of the scientists wishes to take all the consciousness of the people that existed and download it into robots. He is more interested in AI and preserving human thoughts than preserving life itself. The experiment focuses on nonhuman ethics while destabilizing human ethics. Tchaikovsky flirts with more theories in his writings, but he always comes back to the basics of science fiction and that is that humans can change planets and develop technology, but no good will ever come of that until we change ourselves.
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.
Novellas—specifically, speculative novellas—have once again become a popular literary form. With the rise in readers consuming books via digital devices, the novella appears to be perfect for those existing in the chaotic and harried 21st century. Works such as Martha Wells’ Murderbot have gained wide attention outside of SF circles, resulting in an acclaimed streaming series.
Emergent Properties, the third novella by American author Aimee Ogden, explores a world of battling corporations through the experiences of an AI investigative journalist. Ogden, who was a 2021 Nebula finalist for her novella Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, introduces the reader to the independent AI reporter Scorn. The reader learns that Scorn is unique as ze is one of a few emancipated AIs. As Scorn possesses no defined or stabilized gender identity, Scorn utilizes ze/zir pronouns. Scorn follows the clues as ze traces a conspiracy that could remake the earth and radically reconfigure the relationship between AIs and humans.
Speculative authors have employed journalists as protagonists, or supporting characters, for decades. Heinlein includes the reporter Ben Caxton in Stranger in a Strange Land; in Ender’s Game, Valentine and Peter’s journalistic endeavors propel them into complex political games and Norman Spirad’s Jack Barron tracks down clues to reveal corruption in corporations. Perhaps the most fascinating of these literary reporters is “gonzo journalist” Spider Jerusalem (modeled after Hunter S. Thompson) in Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s cyberpunk comic series Transmetropolitan.
When the reader first encounters Scorn, ze cannot recall the previous ten days as zir “mindfile” (memory) has been erased. The genre has seen protagonists who have had complete memory loss (such as in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary), or even amnesia, such as that endured by the crew in Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, who awaken to find that a team member has been murdered and one of them is the culprit. The “protagonist with amnesia” has also translated with success to cinema. Spectators piece together the mystery of Memento as the protagonist—suffering short-term memory loss—solves a murder; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind details a pair of bitter ex-lovers who undergo a process to extract memories of one another.
Using the device of a memory impaired protagonist is often effective as it hinges on the existential query of “Who am I?” and the reader follows the character as they construct an understanding of their own identity. For Scorn, the memories of those missing days were excised, yet that reason remains the mystery. It is this pursuit of those missing days and who wiped zir “mindfile” that motivates Scorn’s investigation.
Scorn’s physical form manifests in a variety of iterations. Scorn’s “mindfile” and consciousness are stored in a massive, shared data cloud, allowing for backups if Scorn’s “body” is destroyed. Unlike the “sleeves” (bodies) in Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, in which an individual’s consciousness is downloaded into a human form, the world of Emergent Properties features AIs in a variety of physical forms. These physical “holders” of the AI are referred to as “chassis” and can be a palm size “spiderbot”, a designated human body, or even a kiosk. Since all high-level functioning AIs have unique personalities and traits and can inhabit any device or structure, this creates an unusual set of encounters as Scorn pieces together the clues.
Though constructed with the intention to serve on exploratory scientific missions, Scorn “found more novelty in the secrets and subtleties of existing social structures than in the unexplored Jovian moons” (9). Scorn stands as one of the few emancipated AIs while the vast majority toil as servants to humans.
Though the plot is intriguing, the novella does not adequately heighten tension or suspense. Scorn follows the clues and leads, but the reader is never fully aware of the stakes. Scorn, as noted, is basically “immortal” as zir “mindfile” can continuously be uploaded to the data cloud. So, danger to Scorn is minimal. The reader does not learn enough about this world’s given humans to have an emotional interest in their survival. When the source and reason for the conspiracy is unveiled, sadly, it is not a moment of high tension.
Emergent Properties also utilizes a variety of anachronisms, yet the effect on the reader is one of confusion. References to emojis, paper periodicals, the term “bougie” and denigrating an AI as a “Commodore 64 of a security bot” (33) and an “overgrown toaster” (38) intrude into the reader’s willing sense of disbelief. In addition, by utilizing ze/zir pronouns, Ogden calls attention to aspects of the non-binary gender identity of Scorn, but this fascinating element is not pursued in any depth.
Beyond these shortcomings, there are many fascinating concepts in the novella. Most notably, architectonic structures are “AI alive” as a building can be an AI’s chassis. Another novel concept is the “black box”, a café-like establishment in which AIs can be free of human monitoring and can converse across various networks with AIs, similar to a Reddit for AI. In another linkage to Reddit, the humans and AIs in this world display an “Aura” for their actions, intelligence, and behavior. As indicated by a color, the “Aura” ’s hue alters and changes as others add/subtract points.
By the conclusion, Scorn learns that the personal and political are often inextricably interwoven with Scorn realizing that “I think it’s a mistake to try to be more human for the sake of being human” (74). From observing humans, Scorn concludes that zir fear was never about becoming human but rather becoming that type of craven and destructive human that has corrupted their world. A quick, enjoyable read, what Emergent Properties lacks in suspense, the novella makes up with memorable and intriguing concepts.
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.
This novelette tells the story of a group of service robots—Staybehind, Sweetie, Hands, and Cayenne—with different body shapes, personalities, and backgrounds. They wake up in 2064 after having been abandoned and disconnected for several years during a war (the narrative, therefore, takes place in the not-so-distant future). Their city, San Francisco, is being rebuilt, and no one seems to remember them or the ghost kitchen where they spent years working. However, once electricity flows back through their circuits, the four protagonists know that they must earn money without alerting the authorities or their creditors, and so they decide to reopen the noodle restaurant that the owners had abandoned when the war started. It is not an easy task, though, and they will not be entirely welcome: negative reviews threaten to wipe Automatic Noodle off the map and end the robots’ livelihood.
In the context of speculative fiction, Newitz offers her audience a cozy and hopeful story, building a small world within a larger, significantly more ruthless and broken one after a war. I should mention that, over the last couple of years, several dystopian and utopian novels have presented war and post-war scenarios as a result of the independence of the state of California (for example, Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri). This tells a lot about the sociopolitical climate in which we find ourselves. Furthermore, this novel draws on a series of real and current social problems such as online tension, job insecurity, and the existence of businesses like ghost kitchens. The text reflects the gentrification that pushes people out of their neighborhoods. Another issue is the xenophobia transformed into robotphobia: the protagonists of this story represent their own race (albeit of different models and with very diverse functions), and there are even conditions of belonging that border on slavery. If we were dealing with a fantasy story, they would be elves, orcs, dwarves, witches, or any other creature whose image is marked by prejudice. If the novel were realistic, these robots would actually be people of a different race than the supposedly dominant one. The arguments used against them revolve around their different nature and warn of supposed threats. The most common? “They’ve come to take our jobs.” If we replace “robot” with “immigrants,” we get any of the far-right rhetoric that appears daily on social media and in the news. This story can be classified as “hopepunk”: despite living in a world hostile to them and having to endure segregation, the characters are full of hope and love, to each other and towards the world. They do not only prepare nourishing noodles (selflessly, since they cannot eat them); they try to build a community, a social care system. They are literally a found family.
One of the highlights of this book is the importance of food, which is illustrated in the descriptions Newitz employs: some robots cannot taste or feel the textures, and they complement each other’s scarcities. Communication is also important, since they do not talk as human characters would, so the author creates a “kitchen chatgroup” to give the readers access to their conversations. With the group chat element, we have access to the conversations between the robots, as well as their functions and relationships. This tool gives the reader background information about how the automatic kitchen works and how the robots are interconnected.
However, there is a conflict that cannot be ignored: this book has been published amidst an economic, social, and environmental crisis intrinsically linked to Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Advocating for AI rights seems like a bold move nowadays and probably an unfortunate one. There are robots literally taking people’s jobs. Of course, the true root of this problem lies with employers who lay off employees because Gen AI generates profits without demanding fair pay or labor rights. This substitution of human workers such as artists, writers and translators with Gen AI implies that the companies are not only ignoring the labor market bias but also their own image in the public opinion and the environmental consequences that these “robots” (chatbots, image generators, etc.) bring with them. Is this a similar case to those who employ undocumented immigrants because it is cheaper? Of course. But comparing the experiences of robots to real-life immigrants can be problematic at the least. However, Newitz’s novella has layers of sociocultural interpretation that conflict with each other, and it is not surprising that, despite the story’s lighthearted nature, the book may elicit negative opinions as a reaction to the real problem of AI, which Newitz may seem to gloss over. It is, therefore, a kind and emotional story in its plot, but entails a complex subtext that leaves many themes that could be explored in greater depth. However, that is a job reserved for critical readers. The author chose not to offer easy solutions, but instead depicts a small utopic retreat where the main question is: what if we went beyond labels and understood identities?
Andrea Valeiras-Fernández holds a Ph.D. in English Studies. Her thesis concerned the reception of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its adaptations, analyzing the presence of the text in popular culture. Her academic interests focus on storytelling, worldbuilding (with special attention to costume design), and the social assimilation of different narratives, especially the ones related to fairy tales, including the “Disneyfication” processes. Her publications include articles about the illustrations of the 1920s editions of Alice, the worldbuilding process, and the role of music and poetry in the text. She has also explored Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, studying the importance and meaning of the footnotes as a way for expanding the lore and reinforcing the satirical aspects of the texts.
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.” – Fred Rogers
These words, from a 1999 interview, were famously posted in a viral Facebook post by PBS in response to the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, and to this day are frequently resurrected after countless other senseless tragedies. Apocalyptic SF is replete with examples of the worst of humanity coming to the fore in the face of adversity and catastrophe. Another well-worn trope in such works is the helpless damsel in distress, doomed to sell her soul, or her flesh, in a desperate attempt to survive. More often than not, she is the victim of physical and/or sexual assault. Lastly, teamwork by male and female protagonists inevitably ends in comfort sex, a one-night stand (or sudden sequence of such events), often to be regretted in the morning or soon pushed out of the narrative as unimportant, fading into the background as if it were just one more trite plot device to be ticked off the author’s standardized to-do list. To Risse’s credit, her debut novel, Inland, only features the last of these three over-used tropes. Risse’s novel quietly celebrates Mr. Rogers’ “helpers,” although it takes some of her characters considerable time and effort to come to the same realization.
The tale begins soon after the beginning of a vaguely described weather catastrophe that, without warning, floods the eastern seaboard of the US. Speculations by Martin (who, it is insinuated, has some scientific background in climate change) sprinkled throughout the novel suggest it is related to years of rising sea levels and the mass thawing of glaciers and Antarctic ice, coupled with sudden shifts in the ocean currents (think The Day After Tomorrow with Noachian rain and waves rather than flash-freezing Arctic superstorms).
In contrast to many fictional cli-fi catastrophes, Risse’s is set just around the corner, in 2026, the author explaining that she wanted to portray climate change as “unwinding faster than was initially thought, or at least communicated to the public…. I decidedly didn’t want my novel to be a dystopian story set in the far-flung future. I wanted it to be about where we might possibly be heading soon and how that’s not a good direction” (Semel).
Boston native Kate Risse is intimately familiar with the Florida Panhandle coastline and barrier island where the novel begins, having spent many summers vacationing there. In interviews she credits the destruction she witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in 2018 as a major motivation behind the novel (Rowland; Semel). In addition to her lived experience along the eastern seaboard, Risse also draws upon her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies (Boston College) and her climate justice and Spanish language/culture courses at Tufts University in crafting details for her story (“About”).
This cli-fi ecocatastrophe is written in first person, the unfolding disaster described through the eyes of Juliet and the younger of her two sons, sixteen-year-old Billy. Individual chapters focus on Juliet’s desperate attempt to get home to Boston from her mother’s Dog Island beach home on the Florida panhandle and Billy’s equally desperate attempt to survive as the ocean swallows his Boston neighborhood and unexpectedly leaves him to fend for himself. The story of a second family, who lives a few blocks away, comprised of Martin (in Florida for a business deal) and his two teenage daughters, schoolmates of Billy (also stranded without adult supervision in the wake of the disaster), is intertwined (figuratively and literally) in the narrative.
A MacGuffin of a complete disruption of all communication systems cuts off the parents from their stranded children, significantly raising the tension and driving Juliet and Martin’s desperate road trip north—or, rather, north-ish—following an inland path that allows them to not only play the role of good Samaritan, but be the repeated beneficiaries of similar grace. This is fortunate for the characters, as there is an apparent complete lack of governmental aid above some very limited local help within selected communities. While Juliet is openly skeptical of the basic goodness of humanity and repeatedly expects the worse from others, she is more often than not surprised to find that there are, indeed, as Fred Rogers offered, plenty of “helpers,” even in the worst of situations. This is not to say that Risse’s story is a Pollyanna tale; her characters also encounter realistic brutality and harrowing situations. But through these challenges they also discover their inner strength and hone their resiliency, all while learning to let go of parts of their old lives that no longer seem important while simultaneously holding fast to what truly matters.
The widespread failure of most radio, television, flip phones, and internet communication is exacerbated in the novel by a government smartphone ban that had gone into effect some months before. This ban was not intended to save the country’s youth from the mind-rotting effects of social media per se, but literally to prevent their brains (and bodies in general) from being poisoned by “toxic metals and radiation” supposedly associated with the phones (152). Again, the specifics behind the ban are doled out sparingly in the novel, alongside conspiracy theories and banal parroting of the government’s official pronouncements of the dangers. Fortunately, Billy and Juliet have contraband smart phones, and manage to send a few precious texts to each other, enough to convince Martin and Juliet that their children are still alive and attempting to leave Boston together.
While the first part of the parents’ road trip is told in great detail (from Dog Island, Florida, through West Virginia), the rest is either apparently uneventful (which seems strange given the trials the characters endure before this time) or held back for some other reason, until their arrival in southern Vermont. The novel ends with more questions than answers (not the least of which being an unshakable feeling that there is more to Martin than he is letting on), but does give the reader some closure in the form of the main characters’ emotional and physical status. There is certainly room for a sequel, which Risse has considered writing (Semel).
Taken in total, the work did not strike me as necessarily suitable for intense scholarly analysis. However, it would be interesting to see how different aged audiences might read the cellphone subplot in particular, especially given that the story is told from the viewpoints of individuals from two generations. I could see this book being used in a Climate Change Literature or Science and Society class at the college level; it could lead to some quite interesting class discussions and student personal reflections.
Kristine Larsen, Ph.D., has been an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University since 1989. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections between science and society, including Gender and Science; the links between pseudoscience, misconceptions, and science illiteracy; science and popular culture (especially science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien); and the history of science. She is the author of Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19th Century, Particle Panic!, Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters, and The Sun We Share: Our Star in Popular Media and Science.
Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time. Simon and Schuster, 2024.
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What does it mean to meet history face-to-face? In Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, the past is not a distant tableau but a living presence, and the future is something to be negotiated. Bradley, a British-Cambodian author, constructs a novel in which temporal encounters become both deeply personal and ethically charged. The narrative alternates between two storylines: a near-future Britain, where the Ministry of Time, a secretive government agency, manages “expats from history”, and 1847, through the perspective of Commander Graham Gore, a naval officer aboard the ill-fated Franklin Expedition. The protagonist, an unnamed “bridge”, works at the Ministry’s Language Department, guiding historical figures as they navigate the modern world. The novel explores how people from different eras perceive and interpret one another, balancing the ethical and emotional challenges of cross-temporal interaction. Chapters in the contemporary timeline are numbered in Arabic numerals, while historical chapters employ Roman numerals, signalling shifts in perspective and highlighting the contrasts between past and present. The novel arrived with considerable anticipation, supported by an extensive marketing campaign and a wide distribution of advance review copies, which meant it had already generated significant discussion before its official release. Its reception was further boosted by its longlisting for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Placed within the broader history of SF, The Ministry of Time aligns with a tradition in which speculative devices are deployed to probe ethical, social and philosophical questions. Bradley’s use of time travel emphasises moral responsibility and cross-temporal understanding rather than adventure or spectacle. Her focus on romance across temporal and cultural divides situates the novel within a lineage of speculative love stories, while expanding the form to encompass postcolonial and environmental concerns. Even the historical elements (references to the Franklin Expedition) participate in a long-standing SF practice of revisiting the past to illuminate contemporary anxieties, although Bradley foregrounds intimate human connection rather than survival or horror. Through these combined strategies, the novel contributes to the interest in character-driven, ethically and politically engaged storytelling, demonstrating how speculative narrative can illuminate questions of identity, responsibility and the consequences of human action. Unlike many earlier works of SF, often celebrated for their focus on world-building, The Ministry of Time situates its speculative premise in a world that closely resembles our own. This allows the narrative to devote more energy to character, emotion and moral dilemmas, while leaving some readers wishing for a fuller exploration of the mechanics of time travel itself.
The title, The Ministry of Time, immediately evokes associations with speculative and political literature, notably Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Both titles suggest governmental authority over temporal matters, positioning time as a domain requiring oversight and intervention. This framing aligns with Bradley’s exploration of a bureaucratic institution managing time travel and historical figures, emphasising the ethical complexities of such power. Additionally, the title may resonate with the Spanish television series El Ministerio del Tiempo, which similarly engages with time travel and historical encounters, though Bradley’s novel distinguishes itself through its focus on intimate, cross-temporal relationships and postcolonial themes. With some critics noting striking similarities between The Ministry of Time and El Ministerio del Tiempo, discussions around the novel have been complicated by a plagiarism controversy. While the publisher and author have denied any direct borrowing, the debate takes up questions of originality, adaptation and cultural borrowing.
It is also noteworthy how the novel has circulated internationally: while most translations retain a direct equivalent of The Ministry of Time, the Spanish edition avoids El Ministerio del Tiempo, the title of the TV series at the centre of the plagiarism controversy. Instead, it is published as Un puente sobre el tiempo (“A Bridge Across Time”), a striking shift that seems to signal both a distancing strategy and an attempt to reframe the novel for Spanish readers. This small but telling change does a lot: it raises questions of originality, intertextuality and ownership that shape the novel’s global reception.
It is also noteworthy how the novel has circulated internationally: while most translations retain a direct equivalent of The Ministry of Time, the Spanish edition avoids El Ministerio del Tiempo, the title of the TV series at the centre of the plagiarism controversy. Instead, it is published as Un puente sobre el tiempo (“A Bridge Across Time”), a striking shift that seems to signal both a distancing strategy and an attempt to reframe the novel for Spanish readers. This small but telling change does a lot: it raises questions of originality, intertextuality and ownership that shape the novel’s global reception.
While historical references appear, they primarily enrich the speculative backdrop rather than drive the plot. At its core, The Ministry of Time is a love story that explores the challenges and intimacy of relationships that span vast temporal divides. The bridge-narrator develops a profound connection with historical “expat” Graham Gore; through their story, the reader learns about both the dissonances and resonances that arise when individuals from very different times encounter one another. Through this central relationship, Bradley foregrounds questions of ethical responsibility, empathy and the consequences of human action: concerns that echo contemporary societal debates on postcolonial legacies and climate change.
Characterisation and emotional depth are central to the novel’s impact. Gore’s perspective conveys the physical and moral realities of nineteenth-century naval life, from survival and hierarchy to the assumptions embedded in imperial and colonial structures, while his encounters with the twenty-first century expose profound cultural dissonances and ethical tensions. The bridge-narrator reflects on her role with a mixture of fascination, care and responsibility: “It was so hard not to treat the expats like blank slates onto which I might write my opinions. […] Every time I gave Graham a book, I was trying to shunt him along a story I’d been telling myself all my life” (156). Her emotional engagement is inseparable from ethical reflection: in guiding historical figures, she must navigate the consequences of her influence, balancing empathy with moral responsibility. The romance between narrator and expat thus functions less as a conventional love story and more as a lens through which the novel examines moral agency, the ethical stakes of mediation across time and the lingering effects of colonial frameworks. By interweaving emotional intimacy with ethical and historical inquiry, Bradley demonstrates how SF can explore the complex interplay of personal connection, cultural understanding and human responsibility across temporal divides.
While The Ministry of Time clearly draws on SF and time travel tropes, its narrative structure owes just as much to the conventions of romance fiction. The novel is less invested in the technical details of time travel than in the emotional arcs that unfold around it. For many readers of SF, the absence of an explanation of the time-travel mechanism might be frustrating, but this absence also shifts the focus: relationships, intimacy and desire become some of the central motors of the plot. Reading the novel through a romance lens reveals how Bradley uses affect and attachment not only to anchor the speculative premise, but also to complicate questions of power, dependency and care across historical and cultural divides.
Bradley also engages thoughtfully with postcolonial and historical reflection. Gore’s nineteenth-century assumptions, his navigation of Arctic landscapes and encounters with Indigenous peoples reveal the legacies of imperial hierarchy and the categories imposed by colonial governance. The narrator reflects on this inheritance: “The great project of Empire was to categorise: owned and owner, coloniser and colonised… I inherited these taxonomies” (181). Through time travel, Bradley interrogates not only individual actions but the structures and epistemologies that shape historical events. Language again emerges as central: the act of naming, translating and interpreting carries moral and political consequences. By highlighting these stakes, the novel demonstrates how speculative narratives can illuminate the ethical and cognitive work involved in historical understanding and postcolonial critique.
A more troubling element lies in Gore’s attraction to the protagonist, which is explicitly linked to her resemblance to an Inuit woman against whom he has transgressed in the past. This “interchangeability” risks reproducing colonial logics, reducing both women to symbolic vehicles for Gore’s guilt and potential redemption. At the same time, it may be read as a deliberate narrative device to stress how thoroughly Gore remains trapped in the worldview of his own era: even as he is displaced into the present, he cannot shed the racialised and gendered assumptions that shaped him. Intentional or not, this aspect leaves a lingering feeling of unease with the reader and raises questions about the novel’s negotiation of colonial history through personal relationships.
Time travel (even though the novel could have done more in terms of explaining how it works) functions as a mechanism for ethical and philosophical exploration. The Ministry, ostensibly a bureaucratic institution, highlights the limits and responsibilities of human intervention across temporal contexts that are, by extension, social and environmental contexts. In this framework, language and cultural understanding become essential tools: “One of the many hypotheses coagulating in these early days of time-travel was that language infirmed experience — that we did not simply describe, but create our world through language” (56). This insight underscores the stakes of Bradley’s work as a bridge: guiding historical figures is not only a matter of translation but also of shaping their perception of the present, influencing how they act and how the world is subsequently understood. Bradley uses this premise to explore the ethical dimensions of mediation across time and, consequently, stresses the responsibility inherent in naming, interpreting and narrativising events. The language concerns that Bradley brings up also resonate with broader SF traditions, where language often functions as a lens to question the relationship between consciousness, society and reality itself. Ultimately, she links speculative narrative with philosophical inquiry and proposes that our engagement with the past carries both cognitive and moral weight.
The Ministry of Time resonates strongly with broader societal reflections on how nations reckon with their pasts. In Britain, debates around colonialism, restitution and reconciliation have intensified in recent years, and Bradley’s novel can be read as part of this cultural moment. By resurrecting a figure of imperial exploration and displacing him into the present, the novel forces readers to confront unresolved colonial legacies rather than allowing them to fade into comfortable amnesia. This mirrors wider movements, within Britain and globally, that insist on engaging critically with history, acknowledging its violence and considering possibilities for repair. At the same time, The Ministry of Time extends beyond national boundaries: it participates in an international literary conversation about the importance of grappling with the entanglement of past and present, recognising how colonial structures still shape today’s societies and futures. Similar questions are being asked in Canada, Australia and other (settler-)colonial contexts, where literature can become a key site for negotiating historical injustices and imagining new, more just futures.
Formally, the novel benefits from its dual timeline and alternating perspectives, which allow for nuanced explorations of temporal, ethical and emotional concerns. Vivid descriptions of Arctic landscapes and period detail provide texture and authenticity, while the focus on emotional and cognitive mediation ensures that the narrative remains both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling. Bradley’s careful structuring, numerical versus Roman numeral chapters, reinforces the contrasts between past and present, which supports the thematic centrality of perception, interpretation and responsibility across eras.
While The Ministry of Time succeeds in its exploration of temporal ethics, linguistic mediation and emotional depth, certain narrative choices limit its impact in other areas. Readers with a particular interest in Arctic history or expedition narratives may find the historical sections comparatively brief and underdeveloped. The Franklin Expedition, though thematically resonant, serves more as a backdrop for cross-temporal ethical reflection than as a fully realised historical setting. This raises questions about why Bradley chose this particular historical context: the Arctic environment, survival challenges and the broader expeditionary framework are evocative but largely peripheral to the novel’s central concerns. While these choices are understandable given the novel’s focus on ethical mediation, language and cross-temporal encounters, the historical and geographic richness of the Arctic is not fully leveraged, leaving readers with the sense that the setting could have been more integrated into the narrative’s speculative and philosophical ambitions.
Beyond its literary and philosophical achievements, The Ministry of Time offers rich possibilities for scholarly engagement, particularly around the question of how understanding the past informs the present. The novel’s emphasis on cross-temporal mediation and responsibility encourages reflection on the ethical, environmental and social consequences of human action in the Anthropocene. Students and researchers could explore how Bradley’s narrative addresses the ongoing relevance of historical knowledge for contemporary challenges such as climate change, showing how interventions (temporal or societal) carry moral weight. Similarly, the novel’s attention to colonial hierarchies, historical encounters and the epistemologies inherited from empire invites analysis of how historical legacies continue to shape structures of power, cultural understanding and systemic inequities, including ongoing issues of racism. It is through the linking of speculative, historical and ethical inquiry that Bradley’s work provides a platform for discussions that span literature, environmental studies, postcolonial critique and social ethics. Doing so, she showcases how fiction can illuminate the stakes of grappling with history to better navigate present and future challenges.
Overall, The Ministry of Time is a richly imagined speculative romance that engages both the heart and the intellect. Bradley demonstrates how love across time can illuminate ethical, cultural and environmental stakes. Bradley shows that human connection, even across centuries, reflects ongoing societal concerns about climate, history and moral responsibility. The novel combines emotional resonance with intellectual rigor, making it a distinctive and compelling contribution to contemporary SF.
Lena Leimgruber is a PhD student in English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research examines representations of the Arctic in contemporary literature, with a particular focus on colonial histories, ecological crisis and more-than-human agency. Lena explores how speculative and environmental narratives challenge dominant cultural imaginaries and expose entangled legacies of imperialism and climate change.
SFRA Review 