Category: Fiction Reviews

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Rabbits by Terry Miles builds off Miles’ podcast by the same name, picking up where the podcast ends: at the beginning of a new iteration of a recurring alternate reality name, or ARG. This ARG, unofficially known as Rabbits, involves finding patterns in the world that supposedly allow the player to see the true texture of the universe. While the book is technically a standalone addition to the world of Rabbits, it’s probably better to come to it after listening to the two seasons of the podcast. The novel features a cast of characters who already know a bit about the game and there is somewhat of a presumption that the reader will, too. In the first scene, our main character K is hosting a Q&A about Rabbits in an arcade; the first sentence of the book is a question K poses to the audience: “What do you know about the game?” (5). This is also a direct address to the reader: are you new, or do you already know what’s going on here? While there is some exposition, it’s hard for me to say whether someone completely unfamiliar with the podcast would find the introduction to the world sufficient.

As the novel begins, the game has been dormant for years, since the tenth iteration ended. At least that’s what K thinks. At the end of this Q&A, they are approached by Alan Scarpio, a billionaire rumored to have won the sixth iteration of Rabbits. He asks for their help because he believes something is wrong with the game. After this meeting, and after conveniently promising K more information “tomorrow,” Scarpio is declared missing. K only has Scarpio’s phone to figure out what has happened to him.

So how do you play the game? You find patterns and follow them until it starts to seem like the very threads of reality are unraveling. After K gets hold of Scarpio’s phone, they start to follow the trail: the wallpaper on Scarpio’s phone is a dog, but Scarpio is allergic to dogs, so they suspect this picture is a clue. While examining the photo, K notices that the tag on the dog’s collar says “Rabarber,” rhubarb in Danish. This reminds K that during their first meeting, Scarpio ate rhubarb pie and referenced an audio file on the phone of rhubarb growing. The file on the phone seems to be a complete dead end at first. There are no hidden messages in the audio itself. However, when they transfer the file to K’s laptop, they realize that it is larger than it should be for what it is. They find a hidden, extracted video that beings with the text “Jeff Goldblum does not belong in this world,” and then goes on to depict a gruesome event that, according to everyone they subsequently interview, did not and could not have happened in this world (67). Now, they are playing Rabbits. Oscillating between present-day events and flashback narration, Rabbits takes its characters on a search for the ultimate truth. Rabbits is for those who want to take off the blindfold and see the truth of reality, the universe, everything.

While the novel and the world of Rabbits is addictive, it suffers from the same narrative problem as Miles’ podcasts. Like the others, The Black Tapes and Tanis particularly, Rabbits asks what deep, ancient, unknowable mysteries really exist under the veneer of everyday reality. These texts set up intriguing mysteries that promise world-shattering answers. But all three also fail to deliver a satisfying answer. In this case, the end of the book is a confounding mess of events that may or may not have happened. Because the answer to the questions pitched in the very first episode of the podcast has to do with the meaning and structure of the universe, each text either has to defer the answer or revisit the same answers repeatedly. The novel, while offering a couple of small resolutions to the larger mystery, does the same. The sequel to Rabbits, The Quiet Room, does finally offer some satisfying concrete resolutions. You will eventually get answers there. Maybe not all of them, but maybe enough.

So, what keeps fans coming back? The alluring thing about Rabbits is the game and the conspiracies that it spawns. K says in the very first few pages, “This was the thing that itched your skull, that gnawed at the part of your brain that desperately wanted to believe in something more. This was the thing that made you venture out in the middle of the night in the pouring rain to visit a pizza joint-slash-video arcade….You came because this mysterious ‘something’ felt different” (5). There is something about a mystery, particularly one that promises to reveal the truth behind the curtains, that draws people in. These texts speak to the deep disconnect that many people feel with modern, everyday life and come from a desire to find something more meaningful underneath it all. In the case of Rabbits, we see a text that is preoccupied with the idea that there must be some underlying pattern underneath the seeming randomness of existence.

On the surface, Rabbits may not seem traditionally science fictional. It takes place in the present day and mostly venerates older, not newer, technology, but it asks the same questions that other science fiction texts ask: is there some ultimate truth about the universe and what else is out there just beyond our perception? What technology might be needed to get to that other place? What is the relationship between past, present, and future? Despite its flaws, it is an intriguing world precisely because it promises the discovery of something bigger than us, some mechanism underneath it all that works tirelessly to keep the world turning.  You must make it to the end of The Quiet Room to get the closure you want, but it’s a fun ride all the way there. R U playing?

Brianna Best is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington. They are an associate editor with Mapping the Impossible: Journal of Fantasy Research and an editor of the science writing blog ScIU: Conversations in Science at Indiana University. They are also a reader for fiction and poetry at Indiana Review. They are currently writing a dissertation on myth/storytelling in contemporary speculative fiction.

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To describe Sofia Samatar’s carefully crafted new book as a “campus novel in space” would risk misleading potential readers into expecting a lighthearted romp through sci-fi versions of the satirical scenarios typical of the genre. Yet it is not not a campus novel in space, even though it reads quite differently from those earthbound satires of academe. David Lodge’s exemplars of that genre are taking place just out of sight, on a different starship, at a different social echelon. There is a satirical dimension to The Practice, as in the book’s bitter and not so comical critique of higher education’s self-satisfaction with superficial DEI initiatives. As the story unfolds, well-meaning allies prove not so well-meaning after all, and institutionally-sponsored celebrations of “Multiplicity” ring hollow because they change nothing fundamental about broken systems continuing to do real violence. In Samatar’s narrative world, as in ours, it is difficult to accomplish genuine justice work when our institutions rest on a foundation of exploited labor and inequalities of obscene proportions.

The Practice uses its science fictional novum to literalize those labor relations and social inequalities into a three-tiered caste system that governs life aboard a fleet of mining ships trawling the universe for minerals to sustain human life indefinitely. The book therefore also belongs to the generation ship subgenre of SF. While interstellar ark novels can be sprawling in terms of their worldbuilding and their page count, this one is spare; Kim Stanley Robinson’s hefty Aurora (2015) is more typical. What is strikingly different about Samatar’s premise is the absence of the lofty collective goal that propels most generation ship narratives: colonizing an untamed planet, or seeking a new home for humanity after some tragic fate has befallen Earth. We do learn from an aside in The Practice that Earth has suffered from rising sea levels, perhaps to the point of uninhabitability, but the book nevertheless holds out no hope for a new Eden: the ships are all we have, recalling the 2019 film Aniara with its accidental interstellar ark. The goal of Samatar’s fleet of generation ships is more suggestively tied to profit, and certainly not collective profit, as wealth still funnels to families associated with the mining company that runs the vessels. The Practice relies on a reader’s understanding of the basic parameters of a generation starship narrative without belaboring any details, ultimately in order to turn the premise sideways in pursuit of now defamiliarized but all too familiar subjects. In this sense, the narrative operates much like Ursula K. Le Guin’s ecofeminist antiwar parable The Word for World Is Forest (1972), which drew on the planetary colonization plot of so much “Golden Age” SF to critique the Vietnam War and other engines of destruction. The two books are also comparably short, and yet there are depths to both, as well as an urgency.

Below the new interstellar aristocracy imagined in The Practice are two oppressed castes, the lowest compelled to labor in deplorable conditions in the darkness of the Hold, literally chained to one another, effectively enslaved, and treated as nonpersons. In the middle is the protagonist’s caste, made up of people who live in fresher air and wider open spaces with the mining class, but have limited career and education options, and must wear an ankle bracelet that functions as an only slightly less obtrusive chain. The ankleted know that they are only a single misdemeanor away from the Hold themselves: they know to be grateful and have internalized rationalizations for their place. Our unnamed protagonist is one of the few ankleted professors at the ship’s university and also the daughter of one of the only Chained ever to have been raised up to ankleted status via a scholarship. Both the ankleted and the Chained are defined by their past participles, what has been done to them: only members of the upper caste are treated as individuals with names worth recording. Samatar traces some intricacies of this new social order, giving us glimpses into interactions among the classes that resonate with but are rarely fully mappable onto the complexities of our own social systems. For example, the ankleted do not have access to smartphones, and we hear that one of the professor’s colleagues “never liked to use it in front of the woman, a sensitivity she appreciated” (16). Another less-liked colleague shows no such restraint, but we might wonder whether the former colleague’s “sensitivity” is really a demonstration of tact, or instead a result of embarrassment about his privilege, or some other combination of emotions and social dynamics. The phones, as a symbol of class and power differential, also carry additional layers of significance, we later learn.

The plot centers on the (nominally) successful outcome of what is effectively a DEI program in space, the relocation of a Hold laborer with a talent for drawing to become an ankleted university student. The woman has expended an extraordinary degree of effort to revive this lapsed “University Scholarship for the Chained,” and such details attest to Samatar’s deep familiarity—and frustration—with the workings of academic bureaucracy and the realities of academic precarity, along with difficult colleagues, unequal access to university resources, time-consuming committee work that never seems to amount to anything, and the threat of burnout as the inevitable reward for caring about one’s work and one’s students. The story of The Practice, then, is the story of a woman trying to do something meaningful within the systems of power that seem to exist precisely in order to prevent her from doing anything of the sort and in the end attempting to learn new strategies for collective survival and flourishing. It is also the story of the boy who is acted upon by this scholarship program; the first sentence of the novel deploys the passive voice in a way that speaks to the treatment of persons in the Hold as objects: “The boy was taken upstairs without warning” (9). In the “outside” world above, he must endure the indignities and mockeries that come with being the scholarship kid, and from peers and professors alike, including “the insult of being taught about himself […] in anthropology class” (24), and learn how to perform to expectations: “Dr. Angela’s particular demand was for an easy camaraderie and warmth” (67). He is supposed to be grateful, of course, for this rare opportunity. He is supposed to make it okay that the rest of the Chained are still chained down below.

Increasingly aware of all of this and increasingly sensitive to the institutional forces curtailing her efforts to effect change, multiple times the woman asks herself the direct question that has been on many of our own academic minds here in 2024, “Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?” (63). The narrative voice directly answers that question in the negative, but eventually finds hope in a mantra that centers individuals rather than institutions: “Start with one” (94). That imperative, however, does not simply endorse the scholarship plan to uplift the boy, that single Chained student. Samatar rejects vertical metaphors entirely, especially the verticality inherent in the idea of “upward mobility,” that promise of so-many DEI initiatives, the education system more broadly, and the American Dream itself: “It seemed to him that up was their favorite word” (29). It emerges over the course of the story that the concept known as “the Practice” is tied to image of “the Horizon” from unremembered Earth, the horizon framed as a challenge to such vertical thinking: “to gaze on it was to look neither up nor down” (57). Instead, the book encourages horizontal thinking, a reclamation of that image of “the Chain” linking you to your fellows. The book’s underclasses are united in their marginalization, united even by the chains that link them together, and especially by those chains. The anklets — and even the literal iron chains — link, connect, and unite those bound by them. That is not what the chains or anklets are intended for, but it is something that they do. Because, we learn, the anklets are networked with one another, the ankleted can feel the presence of others through that network, and it turns out that technologies used to dominate and discipline can also be used in other ways.

At various times The Practice seems to be about social inequality in general: prisons and for-profit prisons in particular (“Look, the Hold is a business, get it?” [102]), the Middle Passage and its reverberations (the chain links the living to each other but also to the past and to the dead), higher education and its promises both kept and unkept, and institutions and state violence of all kinds. In the end, though, it is likely about solidarity above all else, forging links on a different kind of chain. It is about solidarity and also education, but education rethought beyond something that occurs only within institutional settings. Samatar dedicates the book to her teachers and her students, and the story affirms the duality inherent in the word education itself. We see the professor’s education of others, but also her own education, as she learns from the boy and from his own first teacher, a character known as the prophet who never leaves the Hold. From them the woman learns to grasp after “an outside knowledge” beyond the different ways that academic disciplines have sought to carve up human understanding (104). After the woman secures permission to visit the prophet as part of a “community engagement project,” the uplifted academic and the immiserated subaltern, along with their student from the next generation, work together to build a common language that transcends what any one of them could have achieved alone.

Professionally, the woman is a professor of “design” who specializes in the study of play, and we are treated to snippets of her research on children’s folk games featuring inventive uses of “castoff” or garbage, always framed with the appropriate academic jargon that she has mastered despite her yearning for a different kind of language: “it was necessary to set up her argument with theories familiar to the discipline, to couch her work in terms her audience knew” (41). The book takes a keen interest in castoff, garbage, “the potential of abandoned things” (103), and abandoned people. When meeting in the Hold with the prophet, the professor drops the jargon and defines design’s capacity to rearrange “the things that were” to create “a new way of being.” The prophet identifies this ambition with the concept he calls “the Practice” (66). If the Practice is “the longing for understanding” (29), as the boy thinks of it, it has some kind of affinity with the academic enterprise—the non-institutional part—and also with art, which he experiences when drawing as “the desire to breathe and know and live” (36). Together the three of them talk and think, and sometimes play those children’s games, “building imagined castles in the gloom” (66), a fair summation of the book’s own ambitions to hope for change against a rather grim backdrop (in the future, in the present).

The most extended explication of what exactly Samatar’s title means appears in a page-long aside positioned near the book’s center. This passage likely occupies a central position only because, in this view of the world, everything is a potential center, a node in the reconceptualized chain that has even rewritten the verticality of the Great Chain of Being: “the Chain of Being is not up and down” (64). Literally and metaphorically, too, “The Hold was in the center” (70). Throughout the book, Samatar evinces the complexities of space, temporality, and the metaphors and ways of thinking they engender. The Acknowledgments reference Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, as well as the work of Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand, and their collective influence definitely shows. The syllabus practically writes itself, and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is vital new reading for scholars and students of all kinds.

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Timothy S. Miller teaches both medieval literature and contemporary speculative fiction as Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, where he contributes to the department’s MA degree concentration in Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is the author of the books Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea: A Critical Companion and Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: A Critical Companion. Both belong to the series “Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon,” which he now co-edits with Dr. Anna McFarlane.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hugo Award winner John Scalzi struggled to complete a rather serious novel project before the contracted deadline, but eventually admitted defeat. He, like many of us, embraced the need for self-care, and instead produced what he calls in his lengthy Author’s Note a “pop song” of a novel, “meant to be light and catchy,” in less than six weeks (262). As he further explains, writing The Kaiju Preservation Society “was restorative…. I had fun writing this, and I needed to have fun writing this. We all need a pop song from time to time, particularly after a stretch of darkness” (262). However, just as a light-hearted earworm can garner Grammys, Scalzi’s replacement assignment was honored with the 2023 Alex Award of the Young Adult Library Services Association and the 2023 Locus Science Fiction Foundation Award for science fiction novel.

In the early months of COVID, first-person narrator and English Ph.D. program drop-out Jamie Gray finds that their six-month term at the management side of a start-up food delivery service does not go as planned. Reduced to delivering food for said company to make ends meet, Jamie meets a past acquaintance who offers employment at a mysterious company known only by the abbreviation KPS. The job is described as working with “large animals” in an isolated location for months at a time. After signing various ominous non-disclosure agreements, Jamie and several likewise underemployed Ph.D.s step through a nuclear-powered dimensional doorway in Greenland into a parallel Earth. But instead of a commercial ‘Kaiju Park’ featuring genetically engineered monsters, this is a natural ecosystem—albeit one featuring a completely alien biology—that scientists study while simultaneously preventing the kaiju from entering our world.

As Jamie and the reader discover, nuclear reactions “thin the barrier between universes” (41), allowing travel between these two Earths. The start of humanity’s nuclear age allowed several kaiju—who are themselves largely powered by their own internal nuclear reactors—to enter into our world in the 1950s. Although instinctively attracted to a new source of food—the fallout from nuclear bomb tests—the kaiju were ill-adapted to our world and quickly succumbed, although rumors of eyewitness accounts became the impetus for the original Godzilla film. An international project, KPS, was created to keep the kaiju on their side of the barrier while studying them in secret. Once funded by governments, billionaires now provide much of the support, leading to the inevitable: celebrity tourism. While the official gateways are tightly controlled by international agreement, the threat from unrestricted black-market doorways looms large; therefore, KPS also protects the kaiju from humanity, for as in the case of much of science fiction, the real monsters often wear a human face.

After surviving a number of threats posed by the wild kaiju and their parasites (bringing to mind a slightly kinder and gentler Cloverfield), Jamie and the scientists are drawn into a predictable conspiracy involving evil capitalists and the disappearance of a kaiju named Bella and her eggs during a conveniently scheduled shutdown of the official gateways. The rescue mission to return the kaiju and its young to their native climate (before Bella’s bioreactor becomes unstable and causes a nuclear disaster in our world) includes numerous mad scientist tropes, befitting the general timbre of the novel. 

While the physical gateway between worlds is rather underwhelming (compared to passing through garage doors on opposite sides of a room), Scalzi does due diligence in world-building and scientific speculation for a novel of this relatively short length, especially on the biological side. As explained in an interview, Scalzi felt the need to provide a reasonable scientific basis for his giant creatures, explaining “God knows I love a Godzilla movie, but the physics of Godzilla are all wrong” (Sorg). The resulting fictional lifecycle of the kaiju is interesting; as a kaiju’s internal bioreactor can go critical, nuclear explosions are a natural part of the alien ecosystem. The resulting energy attracts other animals to feed upon the ‘carcass,’ providing a consistent explanation as to why the first hydrogen bomb tests attracted kaiju through the weakened dimensional wall into our world. The use of artificially developed kaiju pheromones to control kaiju behavior (including encouraging Bella and her reluctant mate Edward, members of an apparently endangered species, to breed) reminds one of a throwaway line involving T-Rex urine in Jurassic Park 3 (during a scene in which a young boy uses the liquid to scare away most of the island’s dinosaurs). Although some critics have poked holes in his science (e.g., Howe), the kaiju origin story is plausible enough for light science fiction. Indeed, this “pop song” of a novel certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously, delighting in numerous pop culture references to such disparate works as Stranger Things, Pacific Rim, Doom, Twilight, The Incredibles, and even Pitch Perfect for good measure.There are the expected direct nods to Japanese kaiju films, such as the names of the KPS bases playing homage to the original Godzilla’s director and producer. Subtle celebrity tourist name dropping includes the COVID-era president’s adult sons and possibly Bad Astronomer blogger Phil Plait.

Yet, for all these details there is scant description of the physical details of the individual kaiju (except for size), Jamie offering that human terms such as eyes and tentacles are insufficient to capture the unearthly physiology. Additionally, similar to protagonist Chris Shane of Scalzi’s Lock In (2014) and Head On (2018), Jamie Gray’s gender is never revealed. Scalzi openly embraces this (as well as the inclusion of trans or non-binary characters in the novel), offering that it is “reflecting the world I know” as well as the context of the communities described in the novel (Scalzi, “A Month”). Scalzi is also quick to warn in the same blog post that although Wil Wheaton reads the audiobook, this is not a clue to Jamie’s gender. Given that The Kaiju Preservation Society will probably be coming to a screen (small or large) near you before long, Jamie’s casting may provide an opportunity for a non-binary actor.  

Reflecting on each reader’s individual gendering of his protagonist, Scalzi offers that “what they decide brings an interesting and personal spin to the book, and I like that. It’s also fun for people to interrogate their own defaults and what they mean for them as a reader and human” (Scalzi, “A Month”). Such interdisciplinary opportunities for open discussion, as well as the novel’s short length, eminent readability, and embrace of pop culture references, make it a natural for inclusion in the classroom, especially in a first-year experience course. The overall depiction of a pointedly diverse group of young Ph.D.s specializing in biology, astronomy/physics, and organic chemistry/geology—self-described as “the foreign legion for nerds” (32)—as heroes brings to mind not so much Jurassic Park but the John Carpenter film Prince of Darkness (without the cringy, red flag sexual relationships) and could spark useful discussions on depictions of science and scientists in popular culture. While Jamie is not a scientist, their master’s thesis on sci fi depictions of bioengineering is deemed appropriate preparation for the team. The group’s acceptance of Jamie as an equal—despite the lack of a Ph.D. and a background in the humanities rather than the sciences—is refreshing, reflecting current efforts to incorporate the arts into STEM education (the so-called STEAM movement). The ensemble nature of this ‘fellowship’ of the kaiju also reflects the process of science in an excitingly realistic way. The world is saved not by a lone genius, but a group of amusingly ordinary scientists, who tell bad jokes and delight in scatological humor. Although they utterly fail at being cool superheroes, through friendship and a convenient character twist good triumphs over evil. The setting of the novel during the COVID pandemic also encourages discussion of individual experiences during that time, reflecting how we, like the characters in the novel, were largely isolated from society, with the exception of our nearest family or friends.

While The Kaiju Preservation Society takes its reader on a relatively satisfying joy ride befitting a summer pop song, it will be interesting to see how it, like the musical ditty, holds up in five years, as we move farther away from the pandemic and our memories of the experience fade.

WORKS CITED

Howe, Alex R. “Book review: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi.” Science Meets Fiction, 10 Sept. 2022, sciencemeetsfiction.com/2022/09/10/book-review-the-kaiju-preservation-society-by-john-scalzi/.

Scalzi, John. “A Month of The Kaiju Preservation Society.” Whatever, 19 Apr. 2022, whatever.scalzi.com/2022/04/19/a-month-of-the-kaiju-preservation-society/.

Sorg, Arley. “Friendship In the Time of Kaiju: A Conversation with John Scalzi.” Clarkesworld Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine, Mar. 2022, clarkesworldmagazine.com/scalzi_interview_2022/.http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/scalzi_interview_2022/

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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 sexism and science; science and popular culture (especially science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien); and the history of science. She is the author of the books Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19th Century, Particle Panic!, and Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters.

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With The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older introduced an intriguing queer detective duo awash in Holmes-and-Watson similarities (though perhaps all crime-solving duos are Holmes and Watson to one degree or another): the relentlessly logical, dogged investigator Mossa and her lover and partner-in-solving-crime, the academic researcher Pleiti. Following the crimes, scholarly scuffles, and dramatic revelations of Mimicking, Older has brought these two back together to solve another mystery set among the existential dangers inherent to life in deep space. In the grand tradition of mysteries, during the novella, important, and sometimes deadly, truths are exposed that lay bare the nature of the world around us as well as the deepest motivations and longings of the characters. All mysteries are, ultimately, searches for the truth of things, whether that truth is to be found in a cozy English drawing room, on the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles, or even within a ring-structured colony that orbits Jupiter (or, as the book calls it,“Giant”) in the far future following the climatic destruction of Earth.

One central truth Older explores in this new chapter of the series involves the uncertainties that come with interplanetary existence. Mossa, at the story’s onset, has returned to Valdegeld University (where Pleiti works) because of a recent rash of seventeen disappearances among its population. We open with her musings on the disquieting ability of people to vanish from Ring society. She thinks to herself:

A startling percentage of cases brought to the Investigators dealt with missing persons. It might even be considered the raison d’etre of the service…After the controlled, condensed environments of the spaceships and stations, where everyone was within contact all the time, life on a planet with a dense, communications-unfriendly atmosphere seemed full of gaps and mystery. Particularly in the rapid expansion period, people would disappear into the growing network of platforms and rings, and there would be no way to know whether they were prospering or vaporized unless someone went to find out. (2)

Pleiti, enmeshed in her own more academic and theoretical mysteries, finds herself completely unaware of the vanishings all around her and is shocked to learn from Mossa how this went without notice, because the scattered can slip through the cracks without notice or perception of a pattern. But, then, patterns are what Mossa and her other fictional detective forbears seek to find. Detectives look to find meaning and purpose in seeming randomness. These are revelations for Pleiti, as is the uneasy feeling that perhaps she has been guilty of objectification and blindness towards her fellow residents. When Mossa notes that porters and other support staff are among the missing, Pleiti wonders, “‘Porters?’ That seemed even more surprising, somehow, and I wondered with a chill whether I did not see porters as people enough to be kidnapped” (32). That mindset, too, is a truth to be unraveled – how do we interact with each other in this kind of far-flung, disconnected society? How do we see one another and find value in each other, especially in an environment as unremittingly hostile as space, where coming together in viable communities may be the only way to survive?

Disconnection is key to the novella, as Older describes long-standing cleavages and prejudices among different Giant classes, particularly between people from Giant and the descendants of the rich, exclusionist settlers from its moon, Io. These kinds of familial and class prejudices form one variation of the kinds of “unnecessary obstacles” that we humans are always imposing among and between us, obstacles that constrain our ability to form communities and relationships and institutions and that can throw off a settlement’s unsteady balance. When Pleiti speaks to one of her scholarly colleagues, Zei, about the university faculty, Zei notes that “It has always been…precariously balanced, shall we say: dependent, like so many supposed systems, on the personalities involved. And their principles…Something is off” (97). Whereas Mimicking of Known Success involves a clash between differing, often violent opinions on when and how humans might return to an environmentally repaired and reconstructed Earth, Unnecessary Obstacles concerns itself with how we look at ourselves and those around us in the context of the societies in which we reside.

On a personal level, we see it with Pleiti, who is filled with doubts and insecurities about her relationship with Mossa:

…had I made it clear to her that it (Mossa’s home on Io) only mattered to me because it mattered to her? The thought that she might class me as an ignorant tourist, seeing only the surface, was like a pang of acid in my throat. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted me to see how much it mattered to her?..Round and round on their immutable rings went my thoughts, as I stared at the endless fog. (85)

Self-doubt and deliberate self-occlusion are also unnecessary obstacles Pleiti places in her path, as she confesses to Mossa her true feelings about her own dream of a renewed Earth: “I never really thought it was possible. I mean, reading about Earth, it was like…reading about Oz, or Pern, or Quistable. You want it to be your reality so much, but you also know it isn’t real. I believed in what I was doing, rationally I thought – think – it can happen, but it always felt…insubstantial somehow” (160). And on a more macro level, we see in the novella’s denouement how ideology and a heedless rush towards independence can themselves throw up obstacles such as self-deception or a romantic communal identity rooted in difficulty. As Mossa notes near the novella’s conclusion, “I dislike self-delusion. I particularly dislike when one or a few people’s chosen delusion is powerful enough to draw in others. And the idolization of the settlers for what they could not avoid as opposed to for their choices, the donkulous invention of obstacles to try and achieve the same status…” (192). When the final mystery is revealed, Pleiti sadly observes that “I looked again at the bare platform, sparse of society, precarious in every way, and wondered again at our human tendency to romanticize the imposition of unnecessary obstacles into our lives” (176).  It’s the narrative moment where Pleiti expresses for the reader a fundamental human fallacy—in space or Earthside—that so many of our problems are of our own making, and that we risk a great deal of harm in making those problems seem inevitable and unavoidable.

We are, or should be anyway, long past the romantic literary trend of the individualist conquerors and pioneers of space; we now reside in an age in which we must, if we are to survive as a species and a planet, come together in a greater cooperative spirit and sense of common humanity and truly recognize the worth of one another. We must realize a world where the disappeared are considered worthy of finding. This is an increasingly popular trend in the genre, from authors such as Becky Chambers, Annalee Newitz, Carrie Vaughn, Travis Baldree (in a fantasy setting) and Martha Wells (Murderbot may be constantly exasperated by humans, but its journey is one towards greater understanding and feelings of care both by and towards itself); Older’s tales of Mossa and Pleiti as they negotiate both their own feelings towards each other and the obstacles we deliberately throw in each other’s paths as we work our way through interplanetary existence are valuable additions to this growing canon of authors who face uncertain human futures with optimism, who believe in the never-ending capacities of humans to learn and thus to remove the unnecessary obstacles that come our way. The best detective fiction relies not only on solving puzzles but on the detective learning new truths about their own abilities and perceptions. As Mossa uncovers the truth of both the crimes she investigates and the unexplored aspects of her own nature, so Pleiti gradually learns to expand her own limits. As she says to Mossa in the novella’s final pages, “Our experiences have influenced how I work, for the better. I am grateful to have gone back to Io and seen more of it, even if I did hate the process of getting there…Oh yes, the danger. Well. A little danger is salutary, I think. A tonic” (206). Risk becomes a crucial learning experience, a lesson which might define the entire enterprise of human space travel and colonization, in fact.

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

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Twenty-four years ago, the goal of the prolific African-American writer and editor Sheree Renée Thomas in her highly-regarded anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000), was to “correct the misperception that black writers are recent to the field” (6). There is perhaps no better testament to the achievement of her goal than the ever-growing list of science-fiction and fantasy anthologies centring authors from Africa and its diaspora since Dark Matter’s publication: from Nalo Hopkinson’s So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004) to Nisi Shawl’s New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (2019) and Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora (2020), edited by Thomas’ collaborators Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight. The editors of Africa Risen no longer have to convince their readers that black writers are prolific in this genre because, to anyone with more than a passing familiarity with science-fiction and fantasy, the point has already been made. With the burden of proof removed from their shoulders, the stories in Africa Risen are free to “continue the mission of imagining, combining genres and infusing them with tradition, futurism, and a healthy serving of hope” (4). Undoubtedly, it is in the moments when this anthology takes advantage of this unimpeded creative and cultural freedom that the stories shine best.

From the contents page alone, Africa Risen begins to impress readers with the names of included speculative literary giants such as Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. Barnes’ story “IRL” is the first real stand-out of the collection, a cyberpunk-esque exploration of black masculinity and fatherhood with characters motivated by the drive to provide for one’s family and community against the obstacles of corruption in the economic, justice, and healthcare system. It is a story that legitimises the use of escapism and worldbuilding as tools of survival. “IRL” quickly proves itself to be among good company with the other stories of Africa Risen. Wole Talabi’s “A Dream of Electric Mothers” turns bureaucratic indecision into an opportunity to commune with a digital ancestral hivemind, with a main character who finds resolution and strength through her maternal lineage. “The Sugar Mill” by Tobias S. Buckell is also about ancestral communion, except this time in the form of a ghost story with the intimate feel of a family drama rather than a campfire horror tale. Haunting manifests through bloodlines of trauma—the ghosts haunt the land where their blood was spilt and they haunt their descendant who carries their blood and the haunting doesn’t end until they are properly memorialised and safeguarded against neo-colonisers who would disregard their pain and their history. “The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library” by Tobi Ogundiran (a story which has gained popularity after being featured on an episode of the podcast Levar Burton Reads) reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone, exploring the inescapable and cyclical burden of responsibility using an African Literature classic, Things Fall Apart, as the plot’s MacGuffin— the object that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance, like The One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. “Hanfo Driver” by Ada Nnadi is a slice-of-life tale with casually diverse characters and a realistic view of how technological disparity will continue in the future, leading to a relatively low-stakes conflict and heartwarming humour.

With just a quick summary of these five standout stories, it is clear the impressive range of settings, themes, and characters that appear in Africa Risen. However, as to be expected with an anthology of thirty-two stories, not all of them work as well as the others. There are many stories in Africa Risen that lead the reader to think, “Didn’t I just read a better version of this a second ago?” But these choices come across as intentional rather than redundant. These stories are in conversation with each other, with the writer, and with the SFF generic tradition. Just because “Cloud Mine” by Timi Odueso is the eco-dystopia from a child main character’s point-of-view that resonated most with me due to its lens of systemic abuse and labour exploitation, it doesn’t mean another reader wouldn’t prefer Dilman Dila’s “The Blue House,” Russell Nichols’ “Mami Wataworks,” or Moustapha Mbacké Diop’s “When the Mami Wata Met a Demon.” Likewise, while Alexis Brooks de Vita’s “A Girl Crawls in a Dark Corner” is a standout for me, others might prefer the alternate history retelling of WC Dunlap’s “March Magic” or the feminist horror of Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo’s “A Soul of Small Places.” “Liquid Twilight” by Ytasha Womack is a mermaid story with a cinematic feel and captivating characters who treat speculative work as a form of activism and vice versa, but another reader might prefer the representation of activism in Akua Lezli Hope’s “The Papermakers.” Stories within an anthology are collaborative, not competitive. The fact that many of these authors chose to write about similar topics only reinforces the importance of these themes in literature in general. These stories are just as concerned with the role of history, tradition, and ancestry as they are with futurism. These worlds are fully realised: there are no dystopias without hope and activism towards change and there are no utopias without realism and a critique of the status quo. And for every story that felt like it was treading familiar ground, there was also a story which had something new to say, whether it was about misogyny and trauma exploitation in the music industry (“Peeling Time (Deluxe Edition)” by Tlotlo Tsamaase), PTSD and the exploitation of child soldiers (“A Knight in Tunisia” by Alex Jennings) or the African-American fantasy of Pan-African return (“Ruler of the Rear Guard” by Maurice Broaddus). By the time you reach the end of the collection, you truly feel like you have experienced a cohesive yet diverse presentation of thirty-two Afro-speculative worlds.

As with any anthology, there isn’t space to review every story, but there is one story that it would be remiss not to mention as, in my opinion, “Air to Shape Lungs” by Shingai Njeri Kaguda, is emblematic of what Africa Risen is all about. Although it is not the diaspora story the editors chose to end the collection with (Dare Segun Falowo’s “Biscuit & Milk” gets that honour), to me it is the diaspora story of the anthology, the one that best narrates the feeling of home-seeking and anti-rootedness of the diaspora experience through a disembodied, airborne, communal “we” voice. It is narrated in two alternating sections, “Memory” and “Living Now,” which summarise perfectly the concerns of the authors throughout the collection. Speculative fiction is most often associated with futurism, but in the hands of these African and Afro-diasporic authors, speculative fiction is equally about the legacies of the past and the concerns of the present as it is about the imagination of the future. Africa Risen may not be revolutionary in the way Dark Matter was, but it is not the job of black writers to revolutionise with every story they tell: black speculative fiction writers, like all speculative fiction writers, only need to be allowed space to have fun, to debate, to explore and to innovate. Undoubtedly, with Africa Risen, Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight have once again provided that space for African and Afro-diasporic authors to thrive.

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Reo Lewis is a graduate of the MA in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London. She is currently a Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, with research at the intersection of speculative fiction, linguistics and diaspora studies. Her project is a short story collection that explores how the use of diasporic speech in fantasy and science-fiction worlds can contribute to decolonising the tropes of these genres.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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