Category: Fiction Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORKS CITED

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

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

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Scientists trying their hand at writing science fiction is certainly not a new phenomenon. However, since the landscape of the physical sciences has been (and to a lesser extent, continues to be) largely populated by white cis-het men, their tales will often be told through the lens of mirroring protagonists. CUNY Graduate Center astrophysics master’s degree student Ness Brown openly explains that one of their priorities in writing their 2023 sci-fi horror novella The Scourge Between Stars was “contributing to black female representation in these genres and specifically queer black female representation” (“Ness Brown”). Accordingly, Brown’s inaugural work features a diverse cast of characters, including a Black LGBTQ female lead and a dark-skinned, female-presenting and identifying android.

In a YouTube interview, Brown offers how they wanted to start the story from “a place of failure,” the crew of the interstellar spacecraft Calypso and the rest of its ragtag fleet fleeing a failed colony on the planet Proxima b, “limping back [to Earth], tail between our legs” (“Ness Brown). Indeed, conditions are painted as extremely grim for the humans aboard this multi-generational retreat to a climate change ravaged Earth. With dwindling supplies and limited means to communicate between ships, their desperation is palpable. Jacklyn “Jack” Albright, second-in-command and acting captain of the Calypso, strikes a precarious balance between pushing the barely functioning technology to its limits and stretching the resources to feed an increasingly agitated crew who are apparently destined to know no other home than this hamstrung ship. It is a powder keg waiting to explode, until they are faced with a uniting enemy, a pack of stereotypical deadly xenomorphs who hitched a ride from Proxima b, hunting down and horrifically disemboweling their human victims.

Brown successfully paints a dark, haunted house atmosphere, one of intense claustrophobia and visceral terror. While the author admits to openly drawing upon works such as Dead Space, Doom, Pitch Black, Alien, and Event Horizon, I also noted subtle echoes of the Cloverfield franchise (Semel). Taking a page from the Alien playbook, Brown wisely shows us mainly glimpses of the creatures, enough to demonstrate their utter alienness and mode of killing but leave sufficient mystery for the imagination to work on. What descriptions we do get are indeed evocative of generic insectoid ETs and the xenomorphs of Alien. However, while this work is obviously derivative of the Alien franchise in some ways (including the strong female lead and the uncannily human android), it sufficiently avoids being a direct copycat.

A scientist’s first fictional work may succumb to several additional traps, for example, a plot slavishly bogged down in the science, stilted and antiseptic writing, or a formulaic and linear plot. To their credit, Brown avoids all of these pitfalls, even while admittedly drawing heavily upon their six years as an instructor of introductory astronomy and astrobiology (Semel). Astronomical accuracy is added in clever rather than heavy handed ways, perhaps so understated that the casual reader may not appreciate them. Discovered in 2016, Proxima b is an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of the nearest star system, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, but as Brown correctly explains, it is subject to intense and possibly fatal superflares (Howard et al. 1). As a planet likely to be tidally locked, the most habitable (in a human sense) area is probably the terminator, the twilight area between the permanently star-facing and sunlit side (in the bulls-eye of said superflares) and the colder dark side. The terminator is precisely where Brown has their failed colony set up shop on this rocky world. While the planet’s atmosphere apparently shields the human residents from the star’s flare-generated ionizing radiation, the orbiting spaceships suffer significant degradation, similar to effects on the electronics of Earth-orbiting satellites from our Sun’s much smaller outbursts. The author expertly (yet, again, subtly) draws upon reasonable science in crafting the evolutionary adaptations found in their monsters, explaining the creatures’ strengths and (as one might expect) exploitable weaknesses.

There are, however, numerous missed opportunities for even more detailed storytelling due to the relatively short length of the novella format. For example, there is minimal information on the colonists’ time on Proxima b and why their colony failed (other than a vague inability to establish self-sustaining food production). There is also limited motivation for the whispered legends of the deadly indigenous life, now relegated to merely scary bedtime stories told aboard the retreating ships. Brown shares in an interview that the novella format was decided upon in concert with their publisher, and “a lot was necessarily cut from the story” as a result. Brown now admits that they would “love to … wax on at incredible length about Proxima b and the conditions of the failed colony” if the opportunity arose (“Ness Brown”).

Despite these limitations, Jack’s past (and present) family drama is treated with sufficient detail to motivate her conflicted emotions and desperate plans of action. She and the handful of characters she interacts with most often (including her lover, Jolie) are described in necessary detail for the reader to have a reasonable sense of their distinct personalities. But in such minimalist storytelling, little flesh is built over the bones of most of the other characters before it is literally ripped off by the monsters. This work could have easily been more fully rounded out as a full-fledged novel, especially as there are at least three distinct mysteries to be solved—the immediate one of the deadly xenomorphs threatening the ship; the disturbing relationship between the android Watson and its creator, Otto Watson; and the intermittent events that, like rogue waves in the ocean, jolt the ship without warning. In terms of the xenomorphs themselves, this astrophysicist was left with multiple questions concerning their biology. Discussions of destroying versus experimenting with the xenomorphs’ eggs are given short shrift, yet such investigations apparently take place off stage (resulting in one of several examples of deus ex machina in the story). The final twist of contact with advanced extraterrestrials (related to the intermittent jostling events) is vaguely sketched out in the finale, leaving the ultimate fate of the Calypso (and humanity more broadly) wide open.

While the novella does a decent job in painting the creepiness of the hubristic robotics specialist Otto Watson, there is no clear motivation to it. In many ways he is a two-dimensional character, when he could have been much more deeply nuanced. In contrast, his creation, the lifelike android Watson, is a fully integrated character that is given sufficient, endearing personality to evoke concern for her safety in the reader’s mind. The disturbing relationship between the android and its creator cleverly draws upon the history of the American master/slave relationship in nuanced ways, including the android’s forced taking of its master’s name, episodes of punitive physical restraint, and nonconsensual sexual attention. The Watson secondary story is creative and meaningful, and could have been easily expanded upon with a longer page count. Turning this limitation into a strength, the story’s relatively short length makes it more easy to include in the classroom, focusing on the Watson subplot in particular, and the experiences of the female/queer/BIPOC characters more broadly.

Brown has divulged that they have a work of “fungal horror” in the works, taking place on an alien world (“Ness Brown”). Hopefully the publisher of that work will allow them to produce a complete novel so that we might have a fuller sense of Brown’s talent as a science fiction writer and world-builder.

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WORKS CITED

Howard, Ward S., et al. “The First Naked-eye Superflare Detected from Proxima Centauri.” Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 860, 2018, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/aacaf3.

“Ness Brown author of The Scourge Between Stars.” YouTube, uploaded by UpperPen Podcast, 25 Apr. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBEJwfuRVPo.

Semel, Paul. “Exclusive Interview: ‘The Scourge Between Stars’ Author Ness Brown.” PaulSemel, 1 May 2023, paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-scourge-between-stars-author-ness-brown.

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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Corroding the Now is a chapbook, based upon the conference of the same name held at Birkbeck College, London in 2019, and consisting of essays on a wide range of SF-related topics and linguistically innovative poetry. These are not the kind of poems that might feature on the Rhysling Award or which we might associate with the genre of SF poetry (as, for example, in the work of Steve Sneyd and Jane Yolen). Instead, they are in direct descent from such avant-garde groupings as the Black Mountain School and the Cambridge School, in particular such complex poets as Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne, whose verse intersect multiple discourses – political, sociological, economic, technological, historical, and ecological. On occasion, the worlds of SF and linguistically innovative poetry have rubbed shoulders: Philip K. Dick was friends with both Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer (the latter a big SF reader); Samuel R. Delany was inspired by John Ashbery to write Dhalgren (1975); and J.G. Ballard’s friends in later years numbered the poets Jeremy Reed and Iain Sinclair.

However, as co-editor Francis Gene-Rowe argues in their introduction to the book, the affinity between SF and linguistically innovative poetry should go much deeper than that: both actively desystematise habitual ways of thinking which, in their routinisation, replicate the hegemony of a “Now” that Gene-Rowe characterises as “a tawdry work of dystopian science fiction”. This desystematisation is posited by the editors as a “corrosion” and ultimately a re-worlding; a dissolving of current political and intellectual regimes in order to unearth a latent utopianism. Although the approach here is thoroughly aesthetic, it complements wider attempts to decolonise the curriculum and to use science fiction as a survival tool as in the recent essay collection Uneven Futures (2022). By necessity, though, such an approach is selective: it’s hard to see what the military SF of Neal Asher would have in common with the kinds of SF represented here, while much of the poetry tends to side with the neo-Marxist rhetoric of Prynne’s successors: from Andrew Duncan and Ben Watson to John Wilkinson and Keston Sutherland. As with any anthology, there were pieces I preferred more than others, a tendency exacerbated by my sense that responses to poetry are more emotionally subjective than responses to prose. I will admit, therefore, that my preference in linguistically innovative poetry tends towards the less doctrinaire—poets such as John James and Douglas Oliver—and to the great wealth of women’s experimental poetry, beginning with such writers as Denise Levertov, Elaine Feinstein and Veronica Forrest-Thomson, all of whom encountered antagonism from their male-dominated coteries.

To that end, the editors are mindful of the historic biases within the experimental poetic tradition, and their contributors present a range of genders and sexual orientations, as well as abilities and ethnicities. Although there is no strict order to the contents, the arrangement displays a number of intersectional interests, ranging from neurodiversity to climate change to gender politics to Afrofuturism. Indeed, one of the stand-out sequences is “We Spiders” by the writer, artist and composer Amy Cutler, whose rhizomatic piece, consisting not only of the main poem but also a series of footnotes followed by a further poem that acts as a commentary, embodies both the interdisciplinarity of her work and the book’s intersectional aims. As Gene-Rowe suggests in their introduction, Corroding the Now constitutes an act of deterritorialization: a reclaiming of SF from its precorporation into technomodernity and a repositioning in terms of a poetic artifice that foregrounds process, fragmentation, dialectic, permeability and situatedness. This is a mighty claim, but it is pleasing to see a poetry anthology in step with contemporary protest movements, inspired by such poet/activists as Sean Bonney, rather than the backs-against-the-wall negative dialectics of the 1990s.

A suite of poems by, amongst others, Charlotte Geater, Jonathan Catherall and Chris Gutkind introduces the dystopian Now that the book seeks to corrode, often via metaphors drawn from the worlds of finance and computerisation. Iris Colomb’s visual poem and Suzie Geeforce’s AR text offer other ways of embedding and appropriating technological systems as poetic resource. These are followed by the first of the essays, Naomi Foyle’s wide-ranging proposal of an ecotopian SF poetics and Peter Middleton’s analysis of autism in poetry by Ron Silliman and science fiction by Ann Leckie. Foyle, inspired by such critics as Vicki Bertram and poet/activists as Sandeep Parmar, delineates a binary opposition (at least in the public imagination) between poetry as “soft” and “feminine” and SF as “hard” and “masculine”. She argues that an ecotopian, as opposed to utopian, SF practice could exist somewhere between these binaries, deconstructing their opposition in the process. Middleton’s account, superbly detailed and sensitively written, is one of the book’s highlights and, I would suggest, essential reading for all further attempts in thinking through disability both in poetry and SF. Drawing in particular upon the work of Erin Manning and Laurent Mottron, Middleton suggests that autism might be best understood as “an entirely different processing system” that produces a “complex network” of sensory perceptions. Using this model of autism as a critical lens, Middleton applies it brilliantly to Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) and the characterisation of Breq, a ship-sized AI downloaded into a single human form. Middleton then finds a similar conceptual framework at play in Silliman’s sequence Ketjak (1978) before concluding that the conceptual schema, which we call poetics, could be regarded as being already a science-fictional discourse.

The next set of poems takes a more political turn. Verity Spott offers an Acker-esque sexual fantasy; Jo Crot (presumably another pseudonym for Jo Lindsay Walton) really, really hates Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye and establishment satirist. Co-editor Richard Parker also offers a surreal fantasy but one in which anarchic notions of community are juxtaposed with genocidal images of state oppression. The following essays focus on the politics of the Anthropocene. Josie Taylor compares Fritz Leiber’s “The Black Gondolier” (2000) with Philip Metres’s poetry sequence, Ode to Oil (2011), in which both texts figure oil as a living, sentient substance. Meanwhile, Fred Carter explores the landscape poetry of Wendy Mulford, a key figure in the development of linguistically innovative poetry during the 1970s and 1980s, and a writer, like Olson, drawn to the history, politics and geography of place, not least the abandoned tin-mines and fragile coastline of Cornwall or the glacial impact upon the shaping of Somerset. Although at first glance Carter’s essay might have little to concern the SF reader, his superb examination of how Mulford handles differing timescales and the relationship between the human and non-human, as in Taylor’s essay, has much to say to SF’s treatment of alterity. Moreover, whereas so-called “new nature writing” has been dominated by the solipsism of male explorers such as Robert Macfarlane or by Mark Fisher’s neo-Marxist rendering of “the weird and the eerie”, Carter points to a woman writer in Mulford who preceded them both and who approached the subject of landscape from an explicitly materialist and feminist perspective.

The essays of Carter and Taylor announce an ecocritical turn in the following poetry by Cutler, Kat Dixon-Ward and Liz Bahs. Kate Pickering’s “Plot Holes”, meanwhile, subjects the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden to the quantum mechanics of Max Planck, playing upon the serpent’s intervention as a singularity—a wormhole—in space and time, which also suggests the possibility for a heretical reading of this key foundational narrative. Pippa Goldschmidt, too, commits a kind of heresy in recounting how she dropped out of astrophysics but discovered another way of making sense of phenomena in the form of poetry. Goldschmidt and Pickering’s contributions inaugurate another shift in the collection towards questions of space, where the radically indeterminate yet entangled relations of quanta (as indicated in Allen Fisher’s somewhat opaque series of prose and poetry observations) are contrasted with the instrumental usages of space travel for personal gain as embodied in the figure of Elon Musk. Unfortunately, although there is much to be criticised about the proposed new era of space exploration, I find that the poems in this section, as well as Robert Kiely’s polemic on SF and poetry, tended towards the doctrinaire and to playing to the gallery. To be really effective they required more of the elegance that Jo Crot displayed (à la Wyndham Lewis) in his take-down of Hislop as a “pseudo-Enemy”.

Instead, a more thorough riposte to the new space economy is advanced in the book’s final essays on Afrofuturism. Sasha Myerson and Katie Stone alternate in leading the reader through the poetry of Sun Ra in order to reveal the unity of thought that emerges through his written fragments, and in their oblique relationship to his wider body of work. Matthew Carbery, too, takes Sun Ra as his starting-point to reflect on the roles of time, history and futurity in the work of the Black Quantum Futurism collective, and in Camae Ayewa’s solo work as Moor Mother. This excellent pairing of essays not only expertly contests the instrumental ownership of space travel but also ends the collection on an optimistic note, by arguing that there has always been, and will always be, Black people in the future no matter the entrepreneurial visions of a Musk or a Bezos.

Overall, then, Corroding the Now is, as in the nature of a chapbook, a somewhat idiosyncratic affair which nevertheless captures a moment where we might see SF and poetry as sharing a common “taproot” (in John Clute’s terminology) or conceptual schema in Middleton’s vocabulary. Despite the attempts of the editors to supply an overriding thesis, readers may tap into either the poetry or the essays, or roam freely between them. Either way, there is much here to enjoy and be stimulated by; it is much more than the curate’s egg that it could have been. In particular, academic readers of SF criticism should note how little the contributors refer to what we think of as our common critical tradition—no mention at all of journals such as Foundation, Extrapolation or Science Fiction Studies—but, instead, they take their inspiration from sources far wider than what we assume to be the critical domain. Indeed, as SF expands into the cultural field, its tropes becoming indivisible from the lived contradictions already experienced by writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from genres not traditionally regarded as “SF”, so we should also pause and reflect on the continued relevance of some of our most cherished critical shibboleths. Although Delany is approvingly cited on several occasions, not once does Darko Suvin appear. Who needs cognitive estrangement when life, as lived, is already sufficiently estranged and in dire need of an art various enough to represent it?

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Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-founder of the feminist imprint Gold SF. In another life, he was Curator of the Eliot Modern Poetry Collection at the University of Kent. He is currently writing a study of J.G. Ballard’s Crash.

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In essence, the process of terraforming is quite simple: find an inhospitable planet and change its ecosystem to transform it into a garden. The existing planet, be it Venus, or one of the seven theoretically terraformable planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, or the planet called Sask-E in Newitz’s text, maintains its motion about its sun, but everything else about it becomes new, different, better. Yet this process is in fact complex, difficult, tedious, and requires a tremendous amount of work and even more time. Moreover, it renders extinct the existing ecosystem, which may well not have been hospitable to humans, but was unlikely to have been entirely devoid of life. To actually terraform a planet requires vast resources of time, capital, and labor, in addition to the continuity of focus and organization necessary to maintain the process over a timescale likely longer than that of recorded human history.

Anyone reading this review is likely to understand that SF outside of pure adventure stories generally works on more than one level: it provides us with an engaging story about a world different from our own and permits us to read that world as an estrangement of our own as a means of critiquing or reframing some aspect of our societies. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has its inhospitable planet right in its title: it uses the Moon as a penal colony in order to describe the conditions under which an anarcho-libertarian society might evolve. The engaging story of how a computer repairman is led by an artificial intelligence to help direct a revolution against Earth also enables us to explore anarcho-libertarianism from the perspective of its adherents; the novel shows us that nearly anyone who has the opportunity to escape anarcho-libertarianism does so at once, but compels us to infer this while at the same time having its narrator extol its virtues. It’s quite possible to read Harsh Mistress as promoting rather than critiquing the political system it examines, because of the layers of subtlety in the text. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed performs through its own engaging story a structurally similar and even more nuanced presentation and critique of anarcho-communism with its inhospitable planet and the intense and less than totally successful attempt to terraform it over the decades since its colonization. The Terraformers, at its heart, is a fascinating piece of science-fictional metafiction: it compels us as readers to perform the complex, difficult, and time-consuming work of transforming over a hundred thousand words into an interlocked ecosystem of text hospitable to meaning.

The text presents us, in the year 59,006 of a calendar that we’re told began somewhere around now, with the planet Sask-E, whose terraforming is in its final stages. The Verdance Corporation, over the course of forty thousand years, had first seeded the oceans with blue-green algae to transform its atmosphere, then worked on seeding and maintaining a new ecosystem so as to create a version of Earth from the Pleistocene—i.e., the period of glacial cycles between c. 2.6 million and 11,600 years ago, during which hominins developed into anatomically modern humans. Verdance plans to profit from this by selling plots of land to the idle rich, who can then decant themselves or remote-operate human bodies in order to enjoy the unspoilt/created wilderness or life in the cities prebuilt by a different, subcontracted corporation. The ecosystem is maintained/expanded by a cadre of rangers, from which our initial protagonist Destry is drawn. She spots an anomaly, which turns out to be a squatter: someone off-planet operating the body of a human enjoying the Pleistocene by building a shelter and eating and skinning animals, the last of which horrifies Destry. She eliminates and recycles the remote body, then returns to base only to find that the Verdance VP in charge of the project is furious with her: the squatter was in fact a potential customer.

The desire to get away from direct supervision leads Destry to a distant location where Verdance is having a river rerouted to make an area more attractive to potential clients. She finds a community of Archaeans, the original rangers, who seeded the oceans and were then discarded by Verdance and supposedly left to die in the new atmosphere inhospitable to them, but who instead created an underground and hitherto fully concealed city near a volcano. The rerouting of the river will cause them huge problems, so they ally with Destry: because the Archaeans have (an also hitherto fully concealed) system of machines with which they can manipulate Sask-E’s plate tectonics, they are able to threaten Verdance’s profits to the point where Verdance is compelled to negotiate with them. The first and longest of the three sections of Newitz’s text ends with a treaty whereby the inhabitants of the underground city are recognized as self-governing. The second two sections address conditions after the planet has come to be inhabited by those to whom Verdance has sold the experience. At no point does the text raise the question of what the original ecosystem of the planet might have been like.

A primary novum of The Terraformers is that technology enables the creation of sentient nonhuman animals: in the text, larger herbivores such as cows and moose (though in fact neither animal is a pure herbivore here on Earth), then smaller ones such as cats and naked mole rats, all the way down to earthworms in the later sections. Verdance limits the sentience of animals and even some humans, in order that they have only enough to do their jobs properly. When a group of rangers including a sentient cow encounter a corporate dairy farm in the second section, great hay is made of the horror this evokes in the characters, both in that one might choose to drink milk from cows rather than almonds or oats and also in that animals’ potential sentience would be as limited as that of these cows clearly is. Later, a means is found to cancel the limitations on sentience and further the treatment of nonhuman animals as people. This is the closest The Terraformers comes to a traditional presentation of SF: we can read this particular story, engaging or not, and also understand the hypocrisy of how we in the West in the 21^st century treat nonhuman animals. There is cow’s milk in the coffee I’m sipping as I write this, and when I’m done, I’m going to use the beef I bought at the farmer’s market to make tacos, but I would never even consider exploiting or mistreating the cat currently on my lap and whom I absolutely treat as capable of understanding what I say to her. I’m well aware of my own hypocrisy, but another reader might well be moved by Nemitz’s portrayal of how Verdance bottlenecks the intelligence of nonhuman animals and thereby re-examine their own practices or beliefs.

This serves as an example through which we as readers can understand what must be done to most of the rest of the text. With respect to characters, Harsh Mistress and The Dispossessed give us detailed background material on how Man and Shevek came to be: their childhood and young adult experiences determine their perspectives, their politics, their very language. Heinlein and Le Guin give us characters who have evolved inside their hothouse environments, in such a manner that they are not only vivid and engaging characters, but also represent their political perspectives from the point of view of natives of those societies. The Terraformers is metafictional: it compels us to extrapolate from the characters’ words and actions what made them come to take these positions. Destry is the only one of a couple of dozen speaking parts who gets any background at all, and it’s quite minimal. It’s up to us as readers to infer, or to create out of whole cloth, the societies or particular circumstances that might have created the other characters such that they all—humans, Archaeans and sentient animals alike—have essentially the same attitudes as very self-consciously progressive young Western people from our own century, even though the book is set on another planet, fifty-six millennia in the future. It occurred to me as I wrote the characters’ names and species on an index card in order to keep track of who they were, that Nemitz’s near-total lack of differentiation among them was part and parcel of the metafiction: it is as if the text were the blank planet upon whose new ecosystem was the complicated and time-consuming work I was doing to formulate species, societies or families that might have generated such convergent characters.

This same metafictional trope of terraformation exists on many other levels of the text, as well. We are told by Destry that the sort of ranger she is generally has the protection of the ERT, an interstellar umbrella organization of rangers, but that Verdance has cloned, or built from scratch (it’s not clear) rangers not subject to this protection. Destry knows this despite the repeated statement that Verdance prevents its on-planet employees from accessing interstellar networks. It’s left to us as readers to build the network of whispers or samizdat that might have clued Destry and her fellows into the knowledge of this protection coupled with the inability to (e.g.) signal the organization that might come to their aid. We are entirely left to infer, or to build for ourselves, what society might exist so far in the future that still has corporations controlling planets yet permitting something akin to free will among human employees, instead of using drones or AI to maintain their new ecosystem. We’re told the controller of the squatter body destroyed by Destry is thinking about taking Verdance to court, but entirely left to build what a society that still had courts this far in the future might be like. We’re told that Verdance has been at this for at least forty thousand years, but left to build from the ground up an economic system where corporations, which are governed by the constant desire of their investors for short-term profit increases, not only exist over that long of a timespan but also are able to justify to those investors the tremendous work and cost involved in terraforming a planet in terms of its distant future profit. Perhaps this is a deflationary universe, where the value of a given sum of money increases rather than decreases over time. We don’t know! We get to impose our own ecosystem upon the text, and thereby replicate the process of terraforming.

We’re constantly told things, rather than shown them: it’s up to us to terraform this text. Whereas Heinlein or Le Guin might have a character tell us one thing and show us another, The Terraformers leaves it up to us to show what might have happened. Very early in the text, the narration tells us that:

The ancient order of environmental engineers and first responders traced their lineage all the way back to the Farm Revolutions that ended the Anthropocene on Earth, and started the calendar system people still used today. According to old Handbook lore, the Trickster Squad—Sky, Beaver, Muskrat and Wasakeejack—founded the Environmental Rescue Team 59,006 years ago. That’s when the legendary heroes saved the world from apocalyptic floods by inventing a new form of agriculture. The Great Bargain, they called it. A way to open communication with other life forms in order to manage the land more democratically. (13)

We’ve already explored the question of how Destry knows this yet remains essentially a slave to Verdance, unable both to access networks and receive help from the ERT. But there’s more metafiction to this. Imagine this story in the hands of Heinlein, where some grizzled old Loonie would be telling the narrative with some detail to an audience, likely with sardonic commentary by some equally cantankerous author insert. Imagine it in the hands of Le Guin, who would show it to us through a tapestry or interpretive dance, complete with storytelling that made the legend meaningful (and plausible) and also included the distortions imposed by the vast timescale of the novel. But instead, we’re simply handed this story, and then the text essentially never touches upon it again other than to use the phrase Great Bargain every so often. What did the Trickster Squad actually do? What is the new form of agriculture? The text shows us multiple examples of farm fields: wheat, sugar, lavender, and somehow the fifty-Xth millennium still has people growing and using tobacco. How did this save the world? How did the Trickster Squad overcome the modern corporate state yet still preserve for aeons a corporate state? Or is this a new corporate state, and if so, how does it differ from our own? The text of The Terraformers does not show nor tell us any of this, and while at first this might be frustrating, it may eventually dawn upon other readers that it’s metafictional. We get to terraform the text: it’s almost literally a whole blank new world. It’s tremendously exciting.

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Ian Campbell is the editor of SFRA Review.

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The trope of the city as a literal living, breathing entity is not new: it appears in the weird sci-fi of H. P. Lovecraft (whom Jemisin mentions in The City We Became) and Jeff VanderMeer to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino’s postmodernist narratives. However, what makes Jemisin’s cities stand out are their manifest avatars—human beings. Her Great Cities duology, The City We Became and The World We Make, is set in contemporary New York. It revolves around New York/Neek and his boroughs/avatars as they try to take back control of the city from an extraterrestrial entity that threatens to consume New York.

N. K. Jemisin is a multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winning sci-fi and fantasy author, best known for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her protagonists are trapped within a constant struggle against alien power structures that are usually thwarted via the use of fantastical elements. Great Cities is then comparable to a dystopic world ruled by utter chaos, anarchy, and totalitarianism that the Other entities try to impose upon New York and the rest of the world. The human manifestations of the boroughs must now wage a war for a normal world order free of surveillance and xenophobia. The juxtaposition of the alien world onto New York can be read as the literal descend of a totalitarian regime.

The first part of the duology ends in a promising note as the boroughs struggle and almost succeed at keeping “the Woman in White” at bay. The second part, however, is where things spiral as four of the boroughs—Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens—and New Jersey are forced to encounter the Woman who strives to get rid of them one by one. The novel follows the first-person narratives of each of them, and of Staten Island, which is exiled in The City We Became and subsequently aligns with the antagonists in their personal and multi-versal fights. The World We Make is Jemisin’s attempt at creating a world that lives and breathes on its own, full of cities that are constantly born and reborn with the help of their human manifestations. Employing the usual trope of good vs. evil, Jemisin stages a fight against xenophobia and gender inequality as the cities must fight with an alien entity that threatens to literally consume the earth.

Being a Butler scholar, Jemisin has always expressed a deep interest in Octavia E. Butler’s fiction. The premise of The World We Make, for instance, is comparable to Butler’s 1977 novel Mind of My Mind where Butler imagines an interconnected world in which telepaths are connected to each other via threads and patterns, constantly drawing energies from each other. It is this kaleidoscopic world that determines the future of humanity, a telepathic network that exists because of intricate mental connections and is ultimately controlled by a “patternmaster” who can mentally control/kill each of the participants. Jemisin’s avatars, then, behave in a similar fashion. They draw energy from abstract concepts such as mathematical equations or rap music or from concrete phenomena such as credit cards and souvenirs in order to amass enough power to fight their common enemy.

By creating a world that functions on proximity and the need to connect and cohere, Jemisin proposes the need for communication and community in our real world. This is not to say that Jemisin’s cities are free of racism, sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy. She advocates a world where multiversal corporate companies that enforce deep rooted misogyny and xenophobia can be fought with the help of goodwill and community. For instance, the extraterrestrial entity appears in the form of an impeccably dressed white woman who inadvertently captures human beings by attaching a small, white, fleshy tentacle into their bodies. Once you have this tentacle sprouting out of your body, you are under the absolute control of the “Woman in White” (Jemisin does not shy away from using conspicuous tropes of race and surveillance here).

Though she employs fantasy and speculation, Jemisin’s novel is steeped in realistic representations of the world. Neek notes at one point,

Periodically R’lyeh [Woman in White] sends forth a hollow, tooth-aching, atonal song that echoes across the whole city. The song’s a problem; listen to it for more than a few minutes and you start thinking Mexicans and birth control are what’s really wrong with the world, and maybe a nice mass shooting would solve both problems. (10)

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WORKS CITED

Butler, Octavia E. Seed to Harvest. Grand Central Publishing, 2007.

Sreelakshmy M is Visiting Faculty (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India. She recently submitted her doctoral thesis titled “Reproduction, (M)Othering and Multispecies Community: A Study of Octavia E. Butler’s Select Fiction” at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. Her areas of interest are speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, and fantasy studies. She has published in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS).

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The winner of the 2021 Otherwise Award (previously known as the Tiptree Award) that “celebrates science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of speculative narrative that expand and explore our understanding of gender,” and a nominee for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Light from Uncommon Stars was published at the end of September 2021. The breathtaking cover design, with an elegant koi fish swimming in space, sets the reader up for an unexpected science fictional journey.  

In the beginning, we meet Katrina Nguyen, a young trans woman running away from trauma and abuse. Then quickly, in a parallel story, we meet Shizuka Satomi. We know little about her other than the fact that in comparison with Katrina, she is privileged and lives in a comfortable neighbourhood in Monterey Park, Los Angeles with Astrid who looks after her. This little introduction of both characters frames chapter one, and already, we are treated to perspectives of Asian-American communities—the big white Asian bus system, convergence of Asian languages, pentatonic folk songs, and more—that are very rarely seen in science fiction. But is Light from Uncommon Stars science fiction?

Soon after we meet the two main characters, we learn that Shizuka needs to find a seventh prodigy to be trained and have their soul delivered to the devil—she has already delivered six!—to escape damnation. On a drive, she gets lost in her own thoughts and finds herself needing the restroom, having missed several exits on the highway in San Gabriel Valley. She pulls off the next ramp, but comes to a residential area with only a big donut peeking over the trees. It is at Starrgate Donut that Shizuka meets Lan Tran, a retired alien starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. And it is afterwards, by a pond that is within walking distance from the donut shop that Shizuka meets Katrina, shares half a donut with her, and hears her play the violin for the first time.

In a Barnes & Noble interview with Miwa Messer, Ryka Aoki explains that these three women characters, she feels, would not normally have met, but when she throws them together on the page, they find companionship, unexpected family, and love, even though they might not feel they deserve it. The chance encounters are what propels the story forward, and each character questions not only their goals, but also their limitations: how they have limited their dreams in what they wanted to do. As they learn this of themselves and each other, it drives them to be more.

Light from Uncommon Stars is a story of relationships and of relationalism, as introduced by zoetology—the philosophy derived from ancient East Asian teaching that is grounded in the knowledge that association is a fact (Ames 87). These women—all heroes—are not portrayed as binary heroes. They are full characters who are aware that there is no end to the end, where the story doesn’t stop once they have reached their goals. Aoki describes this as a trait of the women she admires who have a realism with them. Ambition becomes much more nuanced because they realise that it is always balanced by repercussions, or damage one might do to the world, or even just remembering that even if they climb Everest, after they come down, they will still need to wash dishes (Messer).  

This associativeness explored through the characters’ journeys that are full of love, kindness, hardship, and difficulties, flows deeper yet into the core of the story itself as it balances genre-defying juxtapositions with the devil and a curse, aliens, interstellar travel, classical music, and American fast food as prominent features. Readers used to mainstream science fiction that provides clear binary storytelling, might question whether the book best belongs to fantastika, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres. Or it might even be perceived to be kitsch. However, the onslaught of concepts is there to show us that there is a world (and indeed, our world is one of them) that can be a loving home to such diversity. It is crucial for creating the space to make the story work. Borrowing Seo-Young Chu’s informal definition of science fiction as “a representational technology powered by a combination of lyric and narrative forces that enable SF to generate mimetic accounts of cognitively estranging referents,” Light from Uncommon Stars’s cognitively estranging referents create such a distracting scene that it forces us to accept the Asian characters, transgender narrative, even the classical music theme, as the realism needed to ground the mimetic accounts (73). This goes beyond its representation of minority communities: it normalises the reality of these communities’ lives.

In A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, David Mura points out that “for most Asian Americans, American culture provides two unsatisfactory identities”: 1) one that is “perpetually foreign”; 2) a second described as the “model minority”, and a third that allows Asian Americans to understand that their “experiences are far more complicated than white Americans understand, and, indeed, than even [they themselves] may understand” (11).

Aoki sees writing as a public act; as an introvert—she is usually a very private person—it is a way for her to take part in society (Messer). With this skill, she deftly spins these complicated experiences into the story that is Light from Uncommon Stars because of, and for, her own experiences as an Asian American trans woman growing up in San Gabriel Valley.I am a British East and Southeast Asian woman, a classically-trained musician, a migrant, a teacher, a writer, a geek, and more. When I finished reading the book, I cried. I felt acknowledged, loved, and seen, not realising that these were things that I have been craving. Light from Uncommon Stars is a wonderfully entertaining, heartfelt, and wholesome novel, and if you give it more time and space, you will find yourself learning from it. Learning, as Aoki tells us, involves facing parts of the world that we are not able to change, and we might not be able to experience things the way we wish them to be (Messer):

‘When you’re trans, you’re always looking and listening,’ Katrina explained later. ‘It’s following, but it’s more than that. You need to see what might be coming, hear the next danger ahead.’

Shizuka nodded. So it wasn’t merely follow – it was follow and predict. Perhaps even follow and perceive.

This was an entirely different level of skill. (Aoki 130)

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WORKS CITED

Bartter, Martha A. “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1986, pp. 148-58.

Anders, Charlie Jane. “Ryka Aoki with Charlie Jane Anders / Light from Uncommon Stars.” YouTube, uploaded by The Booksmith, 28 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsCI7jjIX6k.

Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Messer, Miwa. “#PouredOver: Ryka Aoki on Light from Uncommon Stars.” YouTube, uploaded by Barnes & Noble, 4 August 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze_thqxXNdY.

Mura, David, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing. University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Yen Ooi is a 2023 Hugo Awards finalist writer-researcher whose works explore East and Southeast Asian culture, identity, and values. Her projects aim to cultivate cultural engagement in our modern, technology-driven lives. She is currently completing her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London looking at the development of Sinophone science fiction by East Asian diaspora writers and writers from Chinese-speaking nations. Yen is narrative director and writer on Road to Guangdong, a narrative-puzzle driving game. She is author of Rén: The Ancient Chinese Art of Finding Peace and Fulfilment (non-fiction), Sun: Queens of Earth (novel), and A Suspicious Collection of Short Stories and Poetry (collection). She is also co-editor of Ab Terra, Brain Mill Press’s science fiction imprint. When she’s not got her head in a book, she lectures, mentors and plays the viola. www.yenooi.com

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Julie E. Czerneda is a prolific author of SF and fantasy, having written over twenty (usually long) novels and multiple shorter works over the last quarter-century. Most of her novels are parts of series, but To Each This World is one of her rare stand-alones. Nevertheless, it revisits territory Czerneda has explored before. The novel is a space opera in which New Earth has an alliance (called a Duality) with the alien Kmet, which becomes complicated—and deadly—due to biological imperatives and communication problems.

Czerneda has a lot of balls in the air in this novel. New Earth is now, as far as our main characters know, the only place inhabited by humans, with Earth Original (one of many instances of Czerneda’s clunky writing in this book) lost or destroyed—what happened is never made clear—, the six sleeper ships sent out hundreds of years earlier to colonize other worlds lost, and New Earth now eschewing space travel except via the Kmet portals, which allow for instantaneous travel from one destination to another but are used solely for commercial ends. Kmet technology has allowed for the creation of polymorphic AIs, one function of which is to serve as aides; the AI Flip is a major character. Communication with the Kmet is handled primarily by the Arbiter, Henry, who is one of our three main characters. Human pilots work with the Kmet to control the Portals, giving us Killian, a second main character. However, humans never go to space in their own bodies any more, instead uploading their consciousnesses into epitomes, or clones (I assume; how the epitomes are grown is not clear); should the epitome be threatened with destruction, the consciousness can be returned to the hibernating “real” body. (And if you think that this is going to hit a snag at a critical point, well, you know your SF.) Furthermore, tech allowing the projection of “oneirics,” or humans who serve as advisors to our main characters, into the receiver’s mind while in a sort of trance state, means that Henry and Killian have access to assistance from New Earth-bound folk no matter where they are—the tech evidently allowing for instantaneous linkage across space. The plot catalyst is the receipt of a message from one of the evidently lost sleeper ships and the Kmet’s concomitant concern about humans being anywhere other than New Earth, as another alien race, the Dividers, represent an existential threat. The action of the bulk of the novel, then, takes Henry and Killian with a Kmet on a quest ultimately to seven other worlds to try to find human settlers/survivors and return them to New Earth. So: multiple alien species; substitute human bodies; complex AI; projected consciousnesses; sleeper ships; a space quest—this is a lot to manage, which might explain the fact that the book is almost 500 pages long.

Sadly, that makes the book too long, though paradoxically, not long enough. Though some of the planets visited on the quest are uninhabited (or no longer existing), our heroes encounter three different human colonies they must convince to evacuate within days. None of these are adequately developed, and Czerneds mainly waves her hands at the logical and psychological complexities that would be involved in such an endeavour, even for relatively small populations. On the other hand, Czerneda’s character-focused approach with her protagonists fails to be compelling because there is little sense of character growth or development. Killian, for instance, spends the novel with a chip on her shoulder, without ever really developing (or, to be frank, becoming tolerable). While one of the points of the novel is the difficulty of communication even among humans, never mind with aliens, the character conflicts here seem largely constructed for dramatic effect rather than being organic. Furthermore, while Czerneda is usually quite good at depicting plausibly alien aliens, there is little sense of depth or complexity to the Kmet, and when we do finally encounter them, the Dividers are an enigma at best. Indeed, at times what is even going on, let alone what motivates the characters, is a challenge to parse.

Czerneda does touch on interesting subjects, such as the morality of using “alternative facts,” one might say, to convince people to do what is in their best interest—at least insofar as those presenting the “facts” think. The intricacies of the insides of the Portals are fascinating, as well, owing something to the Gothic tradition, with plenty of hidden passages and concealed corpses, keys to find, and even a sort of ghost in the machine. Czerneda also requires the reader to consider the important question of whether the Kmet are evil because their actions are inimical to human survival. There is also a profound and fruitful irony in the human distrust of the Kmet, given that the novel makes clear that the humans have deceived the Kmet in various ways (e.g., by not letting them know about the substitute bodies or the oneirics, as these would violate the Kmet’s rules). Indeed, while the novel eschews any sort of overt political commentary, its depiction of politics governed by paranoia, betrayal, and Machiavellianism obviously resonates with our contemporary reality. Czerneda even nods to pronoun use, creating specific pronouns for the Kmet (kmeth) and the AIs (alt), though oddly, and despite depicting queer characters, she never (that I noticed) uses any pronouns for humans other than he and she.

In short, this is an entertaining albeit overlong space opera. It does not really expand or transcend the genre, and its length makes it an unlikely choice for classroom use.

Dominick Grace is the Non-Fiction Reviews editor for the SFRA Review. His primary area of scholarly interest is the Canadian fantastic across media.

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Overview of the Collection

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the world’s most renowned science fiction authors, but her poetry is rarely discussed. Yet, poetry was a constant in Le Guin’s life. She began writing it at age five (Collected Poems 569); her first published work was a poem, “Songs of Montayna Province” (Collected Poems 647). She finalized her last book, a collection of poetry titled So Far, So Good, a mere week before she passed away. It was published posthumously in October 2018. Le Guin the prose writer remains famous for her lyrical, evocative style, which can be described as “a poet’s prose” (Collected Poems, xl). Le Guin’s poems are windows into her emotional life, her relationships with family and friends, and her deep and abiding love of the natural world.

Despite the importance of poetry in Le Guin’s life and writing, her poetic legacy remains largely unknown. Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems is thus an important addition to many bookshelves. This book will help Le Guin readers gain a deeper understanding of her fiction through these poignant and intimate works; it will appeal in general to lovers of poetry and to readers of regional literature who are attracted to intricate and powerful writing about the Pacific Northwest. Le Guin’s writing is arboreal, and readers who delight in nature-inspired poetry will find many wonderful works in this book. Le Guin is, of course, a powerful feminist figure, and this collection will appeal to readers of feminist literature, broadly construed. Finally, this text is also an invaluable source for researchers.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems reprints all nine of Le Guin’s major poetry collections, beginning with her wonderful Capra Press chapbook Wild Angels (1974), and ending with So Far, So Good (2018). In addition to the nine poetry collections, Collected Poems includes her translation of the Tao Te Ching and poems from chapbooks and collaborations such as No Boats (chapbook), The Uses of Music in the Uttermost Parts (poems set to music by Elinor Armer), and Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country (a collaboration with photographer Roger Dorband). The book also includes an important selection of Le Guin’s published but uncollected poems, including her very first publications from 1959 and 1960. I would have loved to know more about how the “Selected Uncollected Poems” were selected, and if anything was left out.

The supplementary material consists of an introduction by series editor Harold Bloom, a chronology of Ursula’s life and accomplishments, a bibliography, and an index of titles and first lines. The book also offers a handy section of notes explaining references in individual poems, such as various mythical figures (Ariadne, Anansi, Tlaloc), specific geographic locales (Oasis of Mara, Kishamish), and translations of words that appear in languages such as Welsh, Latin, Spanish, and Le Guin’s own constructed language, Kesh. In addition to Le Guin’s poetry, the book includes seven pieces of her nonfiction: two essays, two prefaces to books of poetry, a foreword, an afterword, and finally an interview focused on poetry.

A few words about what the book does not contain: while the Selected Uncollected Poems section reprints some of the poems that originally appeared in other books, such as Buffalo Gals: And Other Animal Presences (1987), it does not include all of the poems published in Le Guin’s non-poetry books. For example, her novel Always Coming Home (1985) contains many striking poems, which were not included here. Collected Poems does not include the collaborative translation with Diana Bellessi, The Twins, The Dream / Las Gemelas, El Sueño, perhaps because many of Le Guin’s poems published in that volume were also reprinted elsewhere and thus ultimately included as a part of other books (more on this collaboration below). The supplementary material supplies bibliographic information for the uncollected poems, but does not provide information about the first publication of individual poems from the nine collections – this would be good information to have, especially for the poems that were reprinted, rather than originally published, in the nine collections.

Collected Poems also does not include, or mention, Le Guin’s unpublished poems, such as those I have discovered in her archives (I plan to discuss them in my manuscript on Le Guin’s poetry).

Despite these minor qualms with some of the supplementary materials and editorial choices, I am extremely happy that this book exists and is available to readers. While Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems is not an exhaustive volume, it contains most of her poetry—certainly the vast majority of her published poetry—and a good taste of her poetry-adjacent work.

The Introduction

As a scholar of Le Guin’s poetry and a poet myself, I confess that I was not satisfied with Harold Bloom’s introduction. Bloom looms large in the world of American literary criticism, but in this case, I would have appreciated a lot less looming, which is to say, less of a focus upon Bloom himself. For example, he highlights a poem on Le Guin’s long marriage to Charles Le Guin because he, Harold Bloom, has also enjoyed a long marriage. At times, the introduction reads as condescending in tone—he talks about Le Guin’s “intuitive poetics” (Collected Poems xlvi) and calls her “primordial” (Collected Poems xlvi) despite Ursula’s meticulous attention to matters of craft and her extensive knowledge of it, some documented in this book’s nonfiction sections. When discussing a single poem Le Guin wrote about Lorca, Bloom remarks that he feels that there is “a daemon speaking in and through Ursula K. Le Guin” (Collected Poems xliii). Her feminism is mentioned, but not discussed at all; at one point Bloom writes about “her Taoism, anarchism, ‘feminism,’ literary aesthetic” (Collected Poems li)—but Le Guin’s feminism does not need the assistance of scare quotes.

And while it was heartwarming for me to imagine two such prominent octogenarians corresponding, I would have much preferred to read an introduction by a different person—perhaps an SFF author who is both a prose writer and a poet (Amal El-Mohtar immediately comes to mind, or Sofia Samatar), or alternatively a writer-scholar and/or a biographer who could help connect the poetry to Le Guin’s life and larger body of work (like Lisa Tuttle or Sandra J. Lindow). Judith Barrington, a feminist author, friend, and collaborator, would be another fantastic choice. I wished for the introduction to highlight Le Guin the poet’s significant contributions to feminist letters, to nature writing, and to regional / Pacific Northwest writing, and I did not find much of it in this text.

In addition to ultimately finding the introduction unsatisfying, I also dispute the inclusion of Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching translation in this volume and the simultaneous exclusion of her translations of Gabriela Mistral and Diana Bellessi. Perhaps just Le Guin’s introduction to her translation of Mistral could have been included (Mistral xix-xiii).

Le Guin’s translation/version of the Tao Te Ching relies on Paul Carus’s translation and transliteration (“The Feminine and the Tao”). Le Guin herself explains that her version is “a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese” (Collected Poems, 290). Regarding the inclusion of the Tao Te Ching, Bloom highlights and immediately dismisses any concerns: “Scholars tell me that her work is disputable, but I see nothing to dispute” (Collected Poems li). Translating without understanding the original is a practice specifically perpetuated by white translators, often involving the East Asian literary tradition. Ezra Pound engaged in exactly such a practice with regards to Classical Chinese poetry, and this remains a topic of criticism and debate in translation studies (Williams; Yeh). This important issue continues to be discussed in the field (specifically concerning the practice of “bridge translation,” see Calleja and Collins; Wang).

Since the Tao Te Ching translation was included, I was surprised not to see any of Le Guin’s other poetry translations. I am especially concerned with the exclusion of The Twins, The Dream / Las Gemelas, El Sueño, a brilliant volume of co-translations with the Argentinean poet Diana Bellessi. Le Guin held translation close to her heart and engaged in it throughout her lifetime, but the practice of translating from a language one does not know at all is problematic. On the other hand, The Twins, The Dream / Las Gemelas, El Sueño is a beautiful collaboration between two feminist poets (Bellessi and Le Guin), who corresponded, exchanged translations, discussed and corrected each other’s work—certainly a much more intimate and thoughtful process, which honors the principles of feminist translation (Eshelman). Since the Tao Te Ching translation was included, these excluded translations warrant a discussion.

Walking with Ursula

With 700-odd pages of poems alone, it would not be possible for me to present a broad overview of Le Guin’s poetic work in a book review—although I refer the readers to my earlier essay in Climbing Lightly through Forests (Lemberg), which surveys all nine of Le Guin’s major collections. For this review, I will discuss a single aspect of her poetry—a theme of walking, and an echoing and recurring approach.

 Ursula K. Le Guin was an avid walker. She went on walks everywhere she went, in some cases repeatedly, sometimes, over the span of years. These intimate walks reflect the poet’s personal journeys. Most of these walking poems are not speculative, but perhaps one can think of them as speculative-adjacent: these earthly landscapes are transformed and reappear or reverberate through her fantastical worlds.

Ursula’s early and privately printed chapbook Walking in Cornwall (1976), reprinted in her second collection, Hard Words, is an example of such a walk, in which the poet reflects on the enduring power of togetherness, and of women’s labor:

It was home, once, Chysasuster village was.
Nine families, their cattle, their heartfires.

O small cold hearths, so old, so old,
Yet you could light a fire in them tonight.
It would be the same fire.
We don’t need very much:
water and warmth and walls, the flickering ring of faces. (73)

There are three long poems in Walking in Cornwall. The second and third poem both end with an almost identical line: “and the wind is sweet as honey in the mouth” / “and the wind as sweet as honey in the mouth,” which reflect one of Ursula’s favorite poetic devices, repetition, an echoing return to places and thoughts that evoke the senses.

After the cataclysmic eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, Le Guin returns repeatedly to the desolate landscape, writing four poems originally published in the chapbook In the Red Zone (1983), later reprinted in her third poetry collection, Wild Oats and Fireweed (1988) and included in Collected Poems:

The earth fell on the earth. It looked like cloud
but it was dirt: the planet turning on itself.

Rock, slag, dust, earthgas, earthfire, earthwork.

A column of boiling stone. Ponderous.

From a distance thunderblue, but in itself earthdark,
grey, brown, black: a mountain inside out.

And the lightning struck, and struck, and struck.
Dancing like a hopjack strung up on the groundcloud,
the stoneplume, jagging between earth and earth,
the lightning struck, and struck, and struck.

The forest was dead in the first five minutes. (98-101)

Three decades after the explosion of Mount St. Helens, Le Guin returns to the same spot in “Summer Morning on the Volcano,” originally published in Finding my Elegy (2012):

The mist lifts off the little lake down there,
way down, across a gulf of shining air.

The upward spiral song of Swainson’s thrush,
a white-crown’s teedle-eedle in the hush:

there is this music in the morning, where
was only silence, and grey dust, and ash.

“We are her children, we are in her care,
our destroyer-mother,” sings the mountain thrush. (497)

In her collaboration with the photographer Roger Dorband, Blue Moon over Thurman Street (1993), Le Guin writes about walking the street for decades: “To walk a street is to be told a story. Through the years that I have lived in Portland, as I walked up and down my street, Thurman Street, it kept telling me its story. … When we started working on this book, I had lived on Thurman Street for over twenty-five years” (6-9).  A poem from that book, “The Aching Air,” was later collected in Finding my Elegy (2012) and in Collected Poems (863). In this resonant and heartbreaking piece, Le Guin narrates how a gorgeous chestnut tree, a neighborhood fixture for all the years she lived there, was cut down by neighbors who thought trees—and their companions, birds—were dirty:@font-face {font-family:”Cambria Math”; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073697537 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:””; margin:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; mso-hyphenate:none; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-font-kerning:1.0pt; mso-ligatures:standardcontextual;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:”Calibri”,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-font-kerning:1.0pt; mso-ligatures:standardcontextual;}.MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-hyphenate:none;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}

Where the most beautiful
horsechestnut held up deep branches
in a cathedral
full of wings and voices
and a golden light,
and the tall, rose-white flowers
smelled like the bread of heaven,
and eyes praised upraised,
being blest by seeing:where the tree was
the air’s empty. (683)

In this book and elsewhere, Le Guin’s abiding love for nature is tinged with a deep concern for the scope of environmental destruction perpetuated by humans—corporations and individuals.

Nature poems are abundant in the collection, but they are far from the only kind of poems one finds in Collected Works. Some of Le Guin’s poems focus on family; others remark on current events and engage with feminist themes, especially women’s rights. Some poems deal with Le Guin’s personal experiences (she discusses her abortion in a number of poems throughout her life). Many poems feature animals—Le Guin was especially fond of cats; some of the poems are humorous, such as the delightful “A Palindrome I Do not Want to Write” (Collected Poems 698). With a few notable exceptions such as the 1982 Rhysling-winning “The Well of Baln” (Collected Poems 80-81), Le Guin’s poems do not offer us much speculative / science fictional material. Instead, these pieces are glimpses into Le Guin’s life and her interests, and her incessant and enduring attention to the natural world, to the trees perhaps most of all, but also to animals, rocks, mountains—in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

To read these poems is to become immersed in Le Guin’s world: a world of quiet wonder and great intricacy, of mythic grandeur, with wonderful flashes of humor and play. Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems invites us to take many long walks with her. This book will become a staple for many readers, as well as scholars of Le Guin’s work—including myself.

WORKS CITED

Calleja, Jen, and Sophie Collins. “She Knows Too Much: ‘Bridge Translations,’ ‘Literal Translations,’ and Long-Term Harm.” Asymptote Journal. Accessed 8 August 2023.

Eshelman, David J. “Feminist Translation as Interpretation.” Translation Review, vol. 74, no. 1, 2007, pp. 16-27.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home. Harper & Row, 1985.

—. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. Capra Press, 1987.

—. Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

—. Hard Words, and Other Poems. HarperCollins Publishers, 1981.

—. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way. A New English Version by Ursula K. Le Guin. Shambhala, 1998.

—. So Far, So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018. Copper Canyon, 2018

—. and Diana Bellessi. The Twins, The Dream / Las Gemelas, El Sueño. Arte Publico Press, 1997.

—. Wild Angels. Capra Press, 1975.

—. Wild Oats and Fireweed: New Poems. Harper Perennial, 1988.

—. (text), and Elinor Armer (music). The Uses of Music in the Uttermost Parts. Koch International Classics, 1995.

—., and Roger Dorband. Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country. Raven Studios, 2010.

Lemberg, R.B. “The Poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin: A Retrospective.” Climbing Lightly Through Forests, edited by R.B. Lemberg and Lisa M. Bradley, Aqueduct, 2021, pp. 101-150.

Mistral, Gabriela. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

Peterson, Brenda. “The Feminine and The Tao: An Interview with Ursula K. LeGuin [sic].” Embrace the Moon, https://embracethemoon.com/ursula-k-leguin/. Accessed 7 August 2023.

Wang, Yilin. “Barriers, Privileges, and Invisible Labor: A Sino Diaspora Translator’s Perspective.” Words Without Borders, https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2021-06/june-2021-queer-barriers-privileges-and-invisible-labor-yilin-wang/. Accessed 8 August 2023.

R. John Williams. “Modernist Scandals: Ezra Pound’s Translations of ‘the’Chinese Poem.” Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics, edited by Sabine Sielke and Christian Kloeckner, Peter Lang GmbH, 2009, pp. 145-165.

Yeh, Michelle Mi-Hsi. “The Chinese Poem: The Visible and the Invisible in Chinese Poetry.” Manoa, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, pp. 139-146.

R.B. Lemberg is a 2020 Le Guin Feminist Fellow and a scholar of SFF, LGBTQIA+ studies, and translation studies. As R.B. Perelmutter, they are a Professor of Jewish Studies and Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. R.B.’s literary work has been shortlisted for the 2023 Le Guin Prize for fiction, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, World Fantasy, and other awards. Their novel The Unbalancing (Tachyon) and short story collection Geometries of Belonging (Fairwood) were published in 2022.

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Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer and editor. They are a graduate of the Clarion Writing Workshop and the University of Kansas’s MFA program. They are the author of the award-winning debut fiction collection Homesick (2019) and the novella Finna (2020). Cipri´s Defekt is a winner of the British Fantasy Award. The narration takes places in an unknown time in a fictional corporate group, LitenVärld, an interesting Swedish name that means “little world” in English. As the narration reveals, the protagonist, Derek, is a humanoid working machine (Cipri’s narration does not specify Derek’s species) and the most loyal employee for LitenVärld. However, Derek’s diligent working schedule is interrupted one day when he suffers from concerning physical conditions: a nose bleed and bloody cough.

This marks an ironic narrative turn, for one would assume a working machine will not suffer from physical weakness, which in return, foreshadows the company’s overwhelming exploitation of its employees. But more ironic is that only by then is Derek informed that LitenVärld employees are entitled to sick leave. Thus, he asks for one day off; yet, unbeknownst to him, this single off day invites troubles with the company, in that his manager refuses to believe his reason for being absent and calls his loyalty into question.

Therefore, after returning to work, Derek is tasked with one special obligation: to eliminate the defects or ¨defekta¨ from other pocket universes. It is through the demystification of defekta and of pocket universes that we can catch a shivering insight into the company’s exploitative supply chains. Through blackholes, LitenVärld opens portals to other, smaller universes with cheaper labor – hence, pocket universes – and delivers requested products back to LitenVärld for assembly. However, when requested products go through blackholes, there is a chance of mutation owing to gravitational pulls, so that these lifeless products may be transformed “into animate, murderous, mutant furniture. Corporate calls them defectives, or defekta in Swedish” (74).

Here, behind the seemingly science-fictional motifs in his narration—black holes and animated objects—what the author presents to us is rather a realistic concern about modern-day globalization, rooted in Marxist political-economic insight concerning the estrangement of labor:

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.” (40)

To Marx, private ownership of production material produces the alienization of labor, in that under the capitalist mode of production, a worker is separated from his/her/their own products. In the era of globalization, this estrangement is furthered by geo-economic distances between developing countries where products are manufactured, and developed countries that claim most profits from production. Similarly, in the narration, Cipri manages to re-represent such an alienating process through a shift of locus from the pocket universes to the major universe containing LitenVärld.

Moreover, the estrangement of labor results in the deprivation of a worker’s significance, in that Marx argues that “man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.” (42). In the novel, this alienized human nature manifests itself first and foremost in the protagonist’s inhuman identity as a human-made working machine and further in his loss of self-identification outside of his position at LitenVärld: “He always felt naked without his uniform, and the feeling was more acute with mirror was coming in handy” (21-22).

To Marx, the solution to this lies in the class struggle between the bourgeois and proletarians, led by a collective entity of the working class, the Communist Party in his The Communist Manifesto (1848). Cipri conducts an inward, but perhaps not less violent, search for such a solution. In particular, in the nightly inventory shift, Derek encounters the other four team members – his doppelgängers. Dirk is an earlier, masochist version of him whose dominating ego suppresses empathy, whereas Darkness represents the queer side of Derek, as demonstrated by the use of the non-binary pronoun “they.” The remaining two persona of Derek, Delilah and Dux, on the other hand, result from an industrial misfunction, in that Derek’s kinds are set to be adult men, while Delilah is a woman and Dux a teen. Led by the self-elected team leader Dirk, the five Ds set out to exterminate defekta in the inventory.

It is interesting to note how the five Ds form a small-scale patriarchy inside the small world of LitenVärld. It is more interesting to note an implicit connection between (conventionally-defined) masculinity and royalty to the company. Among them, Dirk is the most faithful one, whereas the rest of the four’s fidelity declines along with their waning manhood. This evokes how patriarchy, represented by Dirk in the novel, and capitalism, signified by LitenVärld, can be intertwined with each other, as Engels explores in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1902).

While others are searching for defekta, Derek realizes he can communicate with the outlaws. Sympathizing with them, Derek decides to show mercy, making himself a de-facto defekta in the eyes of Dirk. The two soon brawl with each other, carrying strong symbolism in the novel. As demonstrated earlier, the four Ds represent a unique persona of Derek himself, which makes the fight not only over fidelity to the company, but over the controlling of Derek’s self-identification – either with the capitalist corporate company or with himself. With the help of the other three, Derek murders Dirk and launches a revolution inside the little world by negotiating with the company at the end of the novel. The finale serves more than as closure for Cipri’s narrative arc but rather an indicator that capitalism and patriarchy can be overthrown by not only the unified working class, but the unified queering group. Here, I do not limit my understanding of queer to simply sexuality, but rather return to its archaic meaning, as in weird and marginalized. The two lexicons remind us of identity politics that draw attention to “the unjust squandering of resources on the less deserving – on migrants, people of color and queer people…. In this sense, identity politics is positioned in a variety of Marxist frameworks as ineffectual; as a politics founded on difference, it is inherently incapable of building the broad-based movement needed to destabilize capitalism” (Kumar et.al, 5-8). However, at the novel’s conclusion, we see a possibility or at least an attempt, albeit at the fictional level, of reconciliating identity politics with the Marxist paradigm of redistribution. The novel finishes with an email where the other four Ds demand that the company increase employee social welfare benefits. Moreover, the last chapter, titled “Changing the World, One Room at a Time,” foreshadows a potentially more radical and broader-based movement against capitalism. In this sense, identity politics proffers another possibility, as an analytical tool, of unifying the marginalized groups to co-sabotage capitalism.

WORKS CITED

Kumar, Ashok, et al. “An Introduction to the Special Issue on Identity Politics Introduction.” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, vol. 26, no. 2, 2018, pp. 3–20, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-00001776.

Marx, Karl. Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Neeland Media, 2014.

Yimin Xu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney. Her research interest is gender in Chinese science fiction, Chinese fantastical literature and Chinese popular culture in general. Her current PhD project focuses on the modernity rhetoric behind gender representations in contemporary Chinese science fiction and the resurfacing of the late 19^th-century national memory of Western semi-colonization in current Chinese science fiction writing. With her project, she hopes to contribute her own part to the great effort of de-colonization studies in China. In addition to this research, she is the country representative of Australia for the Science Fiction Research Association.

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The increasing exposure to the Western world of narrative traditions, subjects, and cultures outside its traditional worldview is one of the brightest trends in science fiction and fantasy today. These traditions have always existed and been a part of the human penchant for storytelling, of course, but for so long they remained, at best, occasional adjuncts by most readers and critics to the “standard” literary products of the Western sf/f traditions. However, African and Afro-Diasporan creators are moving more and more to the forefront, thanks in large part to recent collections such as Sheree Renee Thomas’ pioneering Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and its follow-up Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2005), Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall’s Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond (2013), Nisi Shawl’s World Fantasy Award and BFA-winning New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (2019, 2023), Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s BFA-winning Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora (2020), and so many others; to newer online venues like FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction; and Black-led publishing ventures such as MVmedia. Writers from Africa and the African Diaspora such as Ekpeki, Nnedi Okorofor, Tade Thompson, Tochi Onyebuchi, Sofia Samatar, Wole Talabi, Tloto Tsamaase, Eugen Bacon, and Namwali Serpell exponentially enrich the experience of encountering sf/f. 

So, then, the arrival of Africa Risen is less unprecedented and more another reminder – expressed as a wildly varied package of beautifully created content – that African and Afro-Diasporan voices demand and deserve wider exposure as well as a greater portion of sf readers’ and publishers’ attention, that there have always been multiple, not to say infinite, creative possibilities for examining our shared human future, and that African speculative fiction is, in fact, here and has always been with us. As the editors note in the collection’s introduction, “[r]emember that this is a movement rather than a moment, a promising creative burgeoning. Because Africa isn’t rising – it’s already here” (4). The book presents its readers with thirty-two highly individual visions of where African sf is going, not limited by age, or gender, or national borders, or life experience. In doing so, the editors have produced a work that provides an impressive and multifaceted introduction for new readers looking to explore those aforementioned creative possibilities, and if, in the process, African and Afro-Diasporan speculative fiction can achieve wider ranges of reader attention and enthusiasm, that is truly all to the good and bodes well for future instances of creative richness in the genre.

Certainly, no readable review of any collection can provide detailed descriptions of every story in it, so I restrict myself here to highlighting several of the ones I think are the most interesting (well-written is not the defining factor here, since all the stories contained therein are worthy of praise for their style and writing quality—a tribute not only to the writers themselves but to the collection’s editors for their judicious powers of content selection). Several of the stories involve intimate connections with the electronic world: Steven Barnes’ “IRL” has particular value in these days of increased online presences, in its story of young Shango, who spends much of his time in the Void (a virtual Earth of fantasy kingdoms where ordinary people can exercise outsized, dramatic influence on their fellows) but who ultimately manipulates that fantasy world to affect his real emotional and financial existences. With “A Dream of Electric Mothers,” Wole Talabi gives us a future Oyo State where governance is directed by the collective memory of generations of ancestors preserved in a national data server and accessed through induced REM sleep. The story is a beautiful meditation on the power of memory and the advantageous necessity of political consensus.  In Ada Nnadi’s lively and humorous “Hanfo Driver,” the beleaguered Fidelis, grubbing for freelance employment in Lagos, finds himself roped into his friend Oga Dayo’s latest scheme and driving a hoverbus of dubious condition through Lagos traffic. In a story of much grander scale, “Biscuit & Milk” by Dare Segun Falowo relates the chronicle of a pan-African ship fleeing into space to escape a dying Earth, finding instead a long journey of deep struggle and new definitions of home. And the collection’s opening tale, “The Blue House” by Dilman Dila, skillfully charts an artificial person working through the central human question of identity.

A number of the stories here concern the struggles of the ordinary or the small, in worlds both fantastical and futuristic. Many of these stories see people grappling with particular issues of social, economic, or political injustice. In Tananarive Due’s heartwrenching story “Ghost Ship,” the sadly relevant issue of the exploitation of migrants is spotlit in the tale of Florida, an American expatriate obliged by her crushing debts to smuggle a mysterious cargo by sea from South Africa to the United States (a dystopian US in which millions of nonwhites have fled to avoid racism and police violence). The dark evil of American racism is noted in another story, “Ruler of the Rear Guard” by Maurice Broaddus, concerning American student Sylvonne, who flees the horrors of her home country for a Ghana that has led the way towards welcoming home the people of the African Diaspora. Resistance to hatred and unjust power is seen in tales as disparate as WC Dunlap’s “March Magic,” which sees a group of righteous witches coming together with soul magic to bring dreams of racial progress into reality; Joshua Uchenna Omenga’s fabulistic folktale “The Deification of Igodo,” where a brutal ruler seeking to become a god faces deserved and dire consequences from divine entities; Tobias S. Buckell’s “The Sugar Mill,” where centuries of white injustices have soaked the land with ghosts and angry memories; “Mami Wataworks” by Russell Nichols, a tale of a terrible future in which increasingly scarce water becomes a weapon that the powerful use to hold down the ordinary and the innocent, but which is poised for radical change via the intelligence and creativity of clever Amaya; and Tlotlo Tsamasse’s visceral, searing “Peeling Time (Deluxe Edition),” which strikes a blow against the objectification and easy disposal of women in our human society, where trauma and toxic masculinity take on monstrous forms.

Beauty and the intensity of life and human existence abound throughout the collection, in stories of spaceships, spirits, and bodily transformations. The sheer variety and scope, combined with the geographical and cultural diversities on display, give a real richness to Africa Risen that makes it an excellent introduction for both scholars and casual readers of African and Afro-Diasporan traditions and demonstrates (though of course no proof is actually required) the robustness of the A + A-D speculative presence.

Jeremy Brett is an Associate Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is both Processing Archivist and 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.