Liu, Cixin. A View from the Stars Tor Books, 2024.
Version 1.0.0
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.
Version 1.0.0
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.
Version 1.0.0
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.
Version 1.0.0
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.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is possibly one of the best writers of science fiction today. In his novels, he imagines and creates futuristic worlds as soft dystopias. The problems that arise in his novels are a result of human greed and bad politics rooted in the everlasting campaigns of acquiring more commodities. With this novel, Tchaikovsky puts forth a premise: the possibility of intelligent life evolving in complete darkness. In some distant future, humans have exhausted Earth’s resources and have colonized other planets. Children live in impoverished and confined shared spaces (hubs) with little food and even less opportunities unless they prove themselves to be potentially useful workers on spaceships. They travel throughout star systems in search of ore and other materials with the same colonial zest that humanity has cultivated over the centuries. Their bodies hibernate while doing so, and if there is no need for their particular skills, they can stay “shelved” indefinitely. By the same token, life spans can be prolonged since people can be re-shelved many times. The Garveneer Composite Mission Vessel approaches a moon in the Prospector413 system, which is always on the dark side of a planet and is, therefore, forever hidden from light. Due to its pitch-black nature that is hidden under layers of gasses, it is named Shroud. What appears to be an easy mission of doing pre-excavational research turns into a first-contact mission. The entity inhabiting the moon is named Darkness, and the reader soon finds out that Darkness is rather loud and has quite a story to tell. Yet, Tchaikovsky expands his premise and stretches the readers’ imagination further; it turns out that Darkness is a fast learner.
As in his previous novels, Tchaikovsky plays with the limits of science and describes the unknown with scientific knowledge known to readers. In this case, he shows how creatures living with no light develop a complex system of deciphering and tracking sound as it is done with natural sonars. However, sound is also a learning and communicating tool, which turns out to be too evolved for humans to understand. Tchaikovsky goes back to the greatest downfall of humanity—dismissing what cannot be understood as primitive and unworthy. Per instructions, the crew cannot afford to admit that intelligent life exists simply because not acknowledging life legitimizes the destruction of the same. Turning a blind eye for the sake of plundering and the never-ending prosperity of mankind seems to be the go-to modus operandi even in the distant future. Nevertheless, like any good hard science fiction work, this one opens the discussion on what it means to be human. For every colonizer throughout history, the category of humanity is stripped down to the notion that white man’s superiority implies morality. Darkness proves more than once that it has higher moral standards of understanding the other and alien life than humans do. It wants to learn and communicate in order to share knowledge and acquire new ones. It recognizes that learning about a different life form can benefit its own existence. Yet, ruthless human behavior forces the alien entity to become shrewd and recognize people for the threat that they truly are. Once more, Tchaikovsky shows how alien life does not have basic human emotions; yet, it has appreciation and a fascination with the workings of other life forms, which puts them in a morally higher category than people are. The lack of morality and respect of all life on the Garveneer shows that humanity, even though it has the technology, has still not evolved enough to make first contact with unknown life. This seems to be the strongest criticism of present-day people that Tchaikovsky provides. He also creates Darkness as an entity that has a learning curve similar to AI, which brings the reader back to the present moment and the debate on whether we should create more sophisticated AI machines when we are morally so corrupt that we do not recognize the responsibility that goes with such an endeavor. In other words, man’s hubris blinds him from recognizing his inability to compete with and monitor the rapid pace of AI innovation.
Furthermore, Tchaikovsky returns again to the representation of genderfluid people as well as the use of the ever so popular pronouns they/them for some of his characters. This could be his giving into or supporting certain social trends, which according to his novels will undoubtedly survive and make it into the future, or it could simply mean that humanity in some distant future will forego strict male/female interactions in favor of more conformable relationships, bodies, or identities. Perhaps, in the distant future, affinities will be based on proximity, because one cannot choose with whom one will be joined while mindlessly going through space in a pod ad infinitum. Still, the use of these pronouns and strange names can be misleading at times, as it was toward the end of this novel. Empathy also seems to be an ability that Tchaikovsky likes to use and explore. In the novel, it is quite clear that the humans have barely any empathy (except for a few crew members), while Darkness has a level of curiosity that prevents it from destroying life. On the other hand, the readers are left with difficult choices regarding who the villain in this story will be. In the beginning, one empathizes with the lithe crew members who are dispensable to the owner (Opportunities). However, as one finds out about Darkness, empathy is slowly transferred to the entity, while leaving only vague sympathy for the humans. In his previous novel, Alien Clay, alien symbiotic life did not have intelligence, although it acted and reacted based on innate hyper altruism. Darkness shows that it prefers not to destroy, but once its existence is threatened it chooses to learn and outwit the aliens (humans). The outcome of the story is suggested and, considering the exponential learning curve of Darkness, the readers will figure it out on their own.
Shroud is a well-written novel intended to pique one’s interest into the possibilities of alien life and how it might interact with humans. As a novel, anyone interested in science fiction will have a good time reading it. For science fiction courses, it is a good example of hard science fiction writing with an emphasis on space exploration (and excavation), space travel technologies, alien encounters, hive minds, and a fascinating concept of an alien species that processes learning as AI does. This novel can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses. I also find it as a valid work for scholarly explorations of narrative empathy, the aesthetics of peace, corporate exploration, and the evolution of consciousness and how humans can/cannot keep pace with it.
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.
This competently written pseudo-historical fantasy novel is a textbook example of essentially everything that’s wrong with book publishing under late capitalism. I’m going to thoroughly spoil the novel here and also likely make it appear that Bacigalupi is my primary target, but he’s not: it’s the industry, the structure, not the individual. The story is set in an alternate-world version of the Italian Renaissance. Davico di Regulai is the only son and heir to a great and powerful banking house. The first three-quarters of the text centers around Davico’s being simply too nice and decent a person for the role that has been chosen for him by his patrimony. He’s kind, sensitive, naïve and open in a culture that values viciousness, indifference, cynicism and duplicity. He rather wishes he could become a physician and help people: he’s quite aware that he’s a bad fit for what he’s supposed to be. This is in no way a terrible setup for a good story. Either Davico is going to find a way for someone else to replace him so he can go pick mushrooms and heal people, or he’s going to grow into the role, lose just as much of his naïveté as he needs to in order to thrive, and take the banking house one step closer to domination. Or he’s going to grow into the role of patriarch/CEO but do it in a kinder, gentler fashion. But none of this happens; in fact, by the end of this 200k-word novel, we only get to the first couple of scenes of Act Two of how this sort of story typically works. I found myself nearly finished, thinking “well, this is all going to need to get wrapped up in a hurry, here”, and then it… doesn’t, really.
The initial chapters foreground a magical artifact in this otherwise non-magical world. Davico’s father has acquired at tremendous expense the eye of a long-dead dragon and has placed it on his desk as a symbol of his power and wealth. Davico comes to view the eye differently: he can sense the dragon’s dormant power and consciousness and is constantly fascinated by the glowing orb. The text does not explain why Davico in particular senses power through the eye, when neither his father nor any of the minions, allies, and rivals who sit across the desk from his father look at it as anything more than a trophy. We’re to infer, I suppose, that his sensitivity is the reason for why the eye reacts differently to him, but like many things in this story, we don’t get a clear explanation. Were I feeling charitable, I’d argue that Davico’s general head-in-the-clouds demeanor prevents him from looking too closely into the matter, and this is reflected in the text. The eye does enter into the final act of the story, or rather, what would be the final act were it a complete story.
Yet, aside from the eye, this world is mundane. Herein lies the true problem with Navola: it is much too close to our own world and yet too different to be literature worth the name. When I first picked up the book, I flipped to the first pages of actual text and so missed that there was a map before the first chapter. As I worked my way through the first third of the text, I kept thinking “this is a pastiche of our own world”. I was willing to accept pseudo-Italian city-states separated by rough terrain, on the premise that this was going to be an estrangement of the Italian Renaissance, and the developments in the book were going to defamiliarize me just enough with our own world to give insight into… any number of aspects of the time and place, such as how and why art flourished so much or how modern banking arose, etc. Compare Navola to, e.g., Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which hews closely to our own world save for a few characters and does real work in not only telling a banger of a story but also providing a great deal of food for thought about how attitudes toward science and economics shifted during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Bacigalupi’s story takes so very long to get going, and is so filled with endless, loving detail about how this society functions, that an experienced reader of SF or fantasy is going to expect a similar payoff, only maybe with a dragon. But “the Italian Renaissance was real cutthroat” doesn’t justify a buildup this long. Why was it cutthroat? What was it about the city-states’ relative freedom from domination by larger imperia or kingdoms that produced such an environment? How did the flourishing of arts and culture dovetail with politics and economics? None of these questions is answered or meaningfully addressed by the text.
It was at this point that the kingdom of “Cheroux” to the northwest is introduced, and some part of my eyeroll made tangible led me to finding the map in the front material. Oh, look: it’s the Mediterranean, only some catastrophic event, distant enough in the past to be mostly legendary, has erased Greece, Turkey and the Balkans and left empty sea in their place. The city-states look more or less like Italy; Cheroux is in the place of France. Navola is simultaneously too close to and too uninvolved with our own world to function as a work of literature. The first three-quarters of the text is constantly filled with pseudo-Italian words for things. I’m proficient enough in Italian to be able to read a book or hold a conversation in the language, and nearly everything was just the regular Italian word but with one or two letters different: this was both very distracting and, like most of the rest of Navola, fundamentally very lazy writing, though in fact the sentences are lovingly constructed and very smoothly edited.
There are two effective ways to write a fantasy novel that estranges the Italian Renaissance and makes us rethink what we understand about the time and place. One of them is to do what Stephenson did with northwestern Europe during the Baroque period: carefully research everything, get the times, dates and personalities right, then insert fictional characters through whose points of view the action takes place, all as a means of showing us what it was like for the dominant paradigm to shift from ancien regime to something approaching the Enlightenment. There are ample sources on the events and personalities of the Italian Renaissance and the long history of French meddling in the affairs of northern Italy for Bacigalupi to have done this. The other way to write such a novel would be to give us some completely different world, mundane or magical, that reproduces the conditions of existence of the Italian Renaissance: geography gives rise to city-states whose main source of income and power is trade and banking rather than production, and while their internal rivalries usually dominate, they can unite to fend off larger powers. They might even have dragons. Consider, for example, the Song of Ice and Fire series, which Martin has stated has its roots in the real-world Wars of the Roses, but is its own, internally-consistent world (with dragons) that can be read as its own world without reference to its estrangement of English politics of the era, but which becomes that much better if you’ve read too many of Shakespeare’s history plays.
Yet, Navola does neither of these; rather, it’s a (very) thinly disguised version of our world without the depth, and it’s one that doesn’t give us any meaningful insight as to what the Italian Renaissance was really like. The real Renaissance gives us all kinds of vivid, three-dimensional people about whom quite a bit is known, but in Bacigalupi’s text the only person we get to know is Davico, who in fairness is a carefully drawn and internally consistent character. His father is a caricature; he has friends who each have one trait; the family’s household is generic but perhaps for the spymaster. The actual de’ Medicis were much more interesting. The text makes constant reference to the Navolese being “twisty” people, always concealing their true plans, but the novel doesn’t go anywhere with this: there’s no reflection on what it means to be twisty other than that Davico can’t pull it off, and the text isn’t twisty in form nor content, either.
For example, one way in which this world does differ significantly from ours is that it’s a fundamentally pagan society. There’s a monotheistic church, but it’s more first-among-equals than truly dominant: there’s also a whole pantheon of gods that have magisteria and mythology that is both detailed within the text and referenced by the characters. And to Bacigalupi’s credit, this is all done quite well. It just doesn’t go anywhere. The real Italian Renaissance was dominated from top to bottom by Catholicism: look at the intrigues of the Borgias to make one of their own the pope. Look at the art. If a fantasy novel that is a work of literature is going to change this and make its analogue of Italy polytheistic, that needs to tell us something about the role of monotheism in the events and paradigm of the time and place. But it doesn’t: it’s just lore and worldbuilding. It’s actually interesting and plausible, but irrelevant to any estrangement value the novel might have. The same goes for the giant gaping hole where Greece, Turkey and the Balkans used to be, which is not detailed with the same care as the polytheism. Remove those lands from the world, and then the novel can estrange how much of the Italian Renaissance had to do with refugees from recently conquered Constantinople fleeing to Italy. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Children of Earth and Sky series actually does this, though it too suffers from being both too close and not close enough to our world. But in Navola, the Italian traders and bankers just do business with the lands on the periphery of the sea.
There’s also a long subplot in the novel where Davico grows up with a “sister”, Celia, who is in fact the daughter of a family his father has removed from the power structure. It’s never clear quite why his father brings her into the family: is she a hostage, or the natural child of the father? Throughout the first three-quarters of the book, we consistently see that Celia is far better at twisty intrigue than Davico is. It’s easy to think “oh, they’re going to get married, and Davico can be the genial patriarch while Celia is the power behind the throne with a knife up her sleeve”, or else have the two of them think this and then we find that they’re actually half-siblings.
But none of this happens at all: the novel plays with our expectations, but very poorly. At the three-quarter point, Davico’s father’s adversaries pull off a surprise plot, and nearly every character we’ve met gets killed, including the father. Celia pulls a Villainous Heel Turn out of nowhere and blinds Davico, then completely disappears from the book. The adversaries put Davico in the oubliette, from which he gradually plots a way to get close enough to the dragon eye and use it to see through to effect his escape. The novel then ends rather abruptly with his riding off into the woods to plot his revenge. And it becomes clear that Navola is not a story at all, but rather the first installment in a cash-cow million-word series.
This is what I mean when I say that this novel represents everything that’s wrong with modern publishing. Somewhere out there, an unpublished writer has meticulously researched the Italian Renaissance and written a wonderful stand-alone historical fantasy about it: Lorenzo de’ Medici, Action Hero. Somewhere else, a different unpublished writer has written a wonderful fantasy novel with city-states and bankers and so forth, set in its own world that doesn’t look like Italy. I want to read both these books. Yet they won’t be published, because their authors have no track record and those two novels are both outside the bounds of easily-categorizable marketing copy. Rather, the publishing industry, concerned only with shareholder value, has let Bacigalupi publish a long prologue, and then marketed it with “by the Hugo and Nebula award winner.” I’ve read The Windup Girl, and while it evidently gets some details about Thai culture wrong, it’s a remarkable text that deserved the awards. I’ve taught it to undergrads three times now, and it’s a real, complex estrangement of colonialism, climate change and a host of other things. So, when I needed a beach book a couple of weeks ago, I thought “this will be good”, and it’s… not. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s basically the notes for an undergrad’s D&D campaign. I want to be clear here that I don’t blame Bacigalupi. It’s difficult to write award-winning literature, and were I such a writer, I’d absolutely jump at the chance to write something much easier and know I’d make a lot of money from it because of my past writings. I blame the industry that only answers to the profit motive and puts sales over quality.
SFRA Review 