Category: Fiction Reviews

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A Psalm for the Wild-Built, published by Tor, arrived in the hands of readers in 2021. Becky Chambers’ first foray into softer sci-fi, Psalm speaks to both readers’ need for comfort in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and our alienation from the structures of “normal” daily life. Psalm for the Wild-Built offers a vision of what a different kind of life might look like. Sitting at the junction of science fiction and fantasy, the novella asks important questions about what a future built on sustainability and care might look like.

Psalm for the Wild-Built takes its audience on a journey into the far future, after an event called the “Awakening.” The “Factory Age” has long collapsed and the world that emerges from the rubble is one in which humans strive, as much as they can, to allow the natural world to heal from the damaging effects of the past. In the catalyst to this worldview shift, the Awakening, robots gained sentience. Offered the choice to stay or to create their own society, the robots decided to go off into the forest “so that we may observe that which has no design—the untouched wilderness” (2).

We follow two characters. Dex is a nonbinary monk whose job it is to travel from village to village to offer tea service; feeling that something is missing from their life, they decide to travel off the well-worn paths of Panga—their world—to an old hermitage ruin. On the road, the robot Mosscap walks out of the forest to introduce itself.

When they meet, Mosscap reveals it has been sent on a mission by the robot community to answer the question “What do humans need?” It offers Dex an exchange: Mosscap will help Dex get to the hermitage ruins and in return, Dex will teach it all about human customs and culture. The book follows this meeting of first contact between robot and human and examines the unlikely yet tender friendship that forms between the two. Both must answer questions that get to the heart of being in the world: what do humans need? And, for Dex at least, what makes a life fulfilling and driven by purpose? As the series continues, these questions become inextricably tangled together.

Psalm for the Wild-Built explores speculative fiction’s role in addressing our political and climate crises: how might the future look if we manage to survive? What can we build from the ruins? And how might speculative fiction build worlds to strive for?

Psalm for the Wild-Built draws on a recent trend in speculative fiction that focuses not on the future of technology or space travel but rather on the ecological consequences of decades of striving toward these things. The culture created by Chambers in the novella does not rely on technology; it avoids the trap of declaring technology itself as the root of all past evil and exploitation. For instance, Psalm takes seriously the question of artificial intelligence, though perhaps it would be better to call it “mechanical consciousness.” My preference here lies in the distinction between “intelligence” and “consciousness.” Will Douglas Heaven writes for the MIT Technology Review that “intelligence is about doing, while consciousness is about being” (Heaven). The decision made to go out and observe the untouched wilderness exemplifies what it means to be concerned with being rather than doing. And I opt for “mechanical” in place of “artificial” because artificial implies an opposing “natural.” “Mechanical” represents the vessel of Mosscap’s consciousness, its mechanical body, without having to imply that its consciousness is unnatural next to Dex’s. Chambers imagines a world where humans exist only as one part of a vast network of both human and non-human species that work collaboratively toward all their survival.

What seems maybe the most significant about this book is the tenor of its emotion. The world-building is idealistic. Everyone in this world has food and shelter. Money does not exist anymore. The preservation of animal life and the environment is the top priority on Panga. And people are nice. For some readers this is a weakness of the text. Talking to a friend of mine recently, I was surprised by his critique of the idealism in the novella.

I am reminded of conversations that I have had over the past few years concerning the idea that any sort of belief in the inherent goodness of things is naive and therefore escapist or unrealistic. This is not just a conversation in Science Fiction Studies, but I am reminded here of Suvin’s distinction between science fiction, which often has important conversation about ethics and society, and fantasy, which offered only escapism from society. But I am wary of the idea, too, that sincerity and escapism do not have a place as useful rhetorical modes in literature or that they are inherently uncritical. The low stakes of the novella may not draw some readers in, but for me they provide almost a meditative refuge in the act of reading–a moment of leisure that provides an escape from the seemingly never-ending drive to work and produce work.

And the novella does offer some concrete ideas about building a sustainable future that we might test against our current everyday experiences. The novel asks important questions about how science fiction can respond to the crisis of climate change and late capitalism without resorting to the same types of liberal humanist ideals about progress that got us here in the first place. The novel also imagines a world that is delightfully queer and accepting. Even if it may seem too good to be true, Psalm for the Wild-Built offers a mode of speculation that allows us, while reading, to exist in a world that we might one day wish to create for ourselves.

I am planning on teaching this text in the fall 2023 semester in a class designed to look at how recent speculative fiction imagines possible futures. I am pairing this text and Catherynne M. Valente’s novella The Past is Red because they offer two distinct ideas of what the future may hold. The Past is Red offers what might be considered the “more realistic” version of the future we are headed towards—a planet full of garbage and ruin and greed. Psalm for the Wild-Built, on the other hand, offers a world in which the impulse to care for each other and live sustainably becomes the dominant way of life. Is this naive? Or do such imaginings of worlds enable us to realize that they might also be possible for us?

WORKS CITED

Heaven, Will Douglas. “What an Octopus’s Mind can Teach Us about AI’s Ultimate Mystery.” MIT Technology Review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032111/conscious-ai-can-machines-think/. Accessed 24 April 2023.

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Bulgarian fantasist Lyuben Dilov died in 2008, but his humanist tech-magic satires live on and provide a glimpse into a segment of Soviet-era intelligentsia who were dutifully ridiculing the excesses of the West while also lampooning their own self-appointed leaders behind a veneer of distant stars and time machines.

Translating any older book well demands familiarity with the context of its writing and the audience it was written for. But SF, in theory, should be more forgiving. Being inherently futurist and instructive or at least cautioning, it should escape its substrate and offer its audience a future less burdened by the contemporary shackles that bind reader and author alike. It’s not cynicism! Proper science-fiction just isn’t written about how great your society is now. Imagine: Let’s keep doing this! Forever! In every corner of the universe!

Following that logic, translating an old time-travel book should be even easier, in theory; especially one conveniently structured with well-known elements of Slavic folklore. Lyuben Dilov’s Unfinished Novel of a Student spans four millennia. It was submitted to the Bulgarian state publisher in 1985. And as its translator, contrary to logic, I find that it isn’t even clear if my obligation is to the readers of the ’80s, the ones of today, or the ones in the twenty-fourth century. I’m worried that it might be all three.

Over thirty years after its publication, it took about three years to translate Unfinished Novel to English. Our language changed in the thirty; and about the same amount in the three. For example, in the past, you may have been frightened to discover someone “following” you. The Oxford English Dictionary(OED) changed it in 2020 to be a good thing. In 2021, they revised the entry for “mass extinction”, so these things aren’t completely devoid of semantic consequence. Dilov didn’t write about mass extinction in this book, an unforgivable sin for any SF writer in our own era. In the 1980s, Dilov and his colleagues were tasked with writing “socialist realism” about the future as a place of universal abundance and equality. In 2022, OED added an entry for “energy poverty”.

Socialist realism, the prevailing philosophy dispersed by the Ministries of Culture of the various Soviet-ized states, saw art as a tool to build the ideal citizen, and their science-fiction was no different. There was no mandate to explore the furthest bounds of technology, only a mandate to create the ideal citizens to be responsible for that technology. So when Isaac Asimov has two robots having a conversation with each other, that would essentially be outside the genre of “speculative fiction”, the SF/fantasy of the Soviet world that utilized familiar, localized human structures like folk tales and myths.

In Unfinished Novel, the borrowed Slavic folk structure in turn borrows heavily from sci-fi tropes and scenarios. Lyuben Dilov wrote this about originality in his 1981 novel, The Missed Chance, 

…originality is not contained in the unrepeatableness of a given plot or situation – the question is what you express through it.

We’re fortunate for Dilov’s forgiveness. Isaac Asimov’s short story “Cal”(1991) is remarkably similar to The Missed Chance. I wonder if Asimov read the Russian translation?

I made all Dilov’s talking computers genderless, and I made other “contemporary” linguistic choices, mostly related to gender. The decidedly non-English source challenges the translator to imitate the texture of the original’s lexical choices. Translator Brian Nelson uses the term “creative imitation”. But the heaviest lifting of bringing the future of the past to this present now is matching the cadence, and that’s all in the context.

Dilov excuses himself from any technical continuity errors right from the introduction,

Let the reader not worry if some things seem unmotivated and unclear, they also seem so to the author…

and the translator asks only this same consideration because no human knows the secrets of time, right?

Well, in Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga knows them. And in Unfinished Novel, the Professor of Temporal Flight knows. Everyone who comes into contact with foreign times must have their memories wiped; everyone but him. By Dilov’s time, Soviet state atheism had degraded the Christianity that had corroded Baba Yaga’s paganism before it. So Dilov’s professor hearkens back to the dual-natured Baba Yaga of pre-Christian folklore: both creator and destroyer, bridge between the living and the dead, lacking free will. Completing the allegory, Baba Yaga is often depicted as the goddess of masculine-femine duality and of time.

But history books and propaganda movies, not only religions, are also used to nudge society towards desired change. We find that not only our hero Cyana but also her twentieth-century beloved, at various times, find employment as historians. This allows Dilov to hint that maybe historians are flawed humans too, despite whatever era they write from or about.

Another facet of Slavic folklore is the appearance of three brothers, and this is rather clearly reflected in the three men Cyana encounters off course in her malfunctioning chronolet. When faced with the unimaginable future girl and her chronolet, the first two are tried and found wanting. Just like in the tales, the third is the fool who turns out wise in the end. This one was the historian, now changed professions to, guess what… a SF writer. But rather than him saving the damsel from the dragon, it’s Cyana who comes back to retrieve him from the wastelands of the twentieth century, easily defeating the dragon (his wife) with her future judo.

Dilov did foresee Cyana’s multifunctional smart watch but not the “selfie” which entered English way back in 2014 alongside “wardrobe malfunction”. Cyana does experience “wardrobe malfunction”, however, on a few occasions along her journey: not understanding why her skirt is too short for rush hour in “contemporary” communist Sofia, or why Praxiteles shouldn’t sculpt her fully nude in tyrannical ancient Athens. This is Dilov’s take on the conflicting mores and virtues of disparate societies and how their hypocrisies, if there are any, always look sillier from a distance. And fittingly, even some of Dilov’s own ideas about decency may have already fallen out of favor by now.

Coincidentally, Dilov was the first to formulate a Fourth Law to supplement Asimov’s Three, preceding Asimov’s own Zeroth Law by nine years (The Path of Icarus (1976), Robots and Empires (1985))

Dilov excuses himself from any technical continuity errors, but he then constantly reminds the reader that you won’t get any disclaimer like that from a historian, no matter the number of their Laws.

An Excerpt from the Introduction to Unfinished Novel

In this novel, we’ll be describing the adventures of a history student from the twenty-fourth century. We’ll go on to discuss the machines of time and also time’s messes which cannot but occur when people and machines meddle in its course. Let the reader not worry if some things seem unmotivated and unclear, they also seem so to the author. For, time is the foundation of clarity in our lives – if it gets mixed up, the natural order of everything gets mixed up.

But this natural order of things is not actually natural at all. Humans have invented their own time; they’ve forged it into shelves, racks, cupboards, and chests of drawers to arrange in them, one after another, the works of their own hand – and works not made by hands too – while real, universal time is probably just one shelf with no beginning and no end, so that no matter where you set something on it, you will still never know exactly where it’s located. That’s why, with the invention of the time machine, humans would confuse only their own time, not universal time. In universal time, it wouldn’t be illegal at all for a novel like this one to not look like a novel and to begin, for example, with its third chapter instead of its first. And it is not illogical for it to remain incomplete because, even according to the laws of our thinking, for the reader of today, it isn’t possible for a given action or event which will occur in several centuries to be completed.

Therefore: do not blame the author for the mess he dared present to you! It is ours, it is human

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Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2021 novella, Elder Race, is a beautifully constructed cocktail of fantasy and speculative fiction. Much like Tchaikovsky’s previous works, including the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning Children of Time (2016) and the BSFA-winning Shards of Earth (2021), Elder Race considers the future of humanity away from planet Earth. The story begins on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humanity around 1,500 years ago. Over time, the modified humans who call Sophos 4 home have forgotten their ancestors’ science and all tales of Earth, or “the otherworld,” have slowly ceased to exist (111). In the space left void of science and Earth knowledge, a new culture and language emerges in the surviving communities. It is a seemingly primitive culture, with a strong belief in magic and “ancient creators who had, the stories said, placed people on the world and taught them how to live” (35). Those who live on Sophos 4 believe that there is one of the ancient sorcerers left on the planet, the last of the Elder Race, who has lived in a local tower for centuries and can only be called upon when there is a threat from old magic, which only he can understand.

The novella’s narrative is split in two, starting with Lynesse, the fourth daughter of the Queen of Lannesite, one of the domains on Sophos 4. Lynesse leads a life she believes is purposeless. As the fourth daughter, she is far from being next in line for the throne, and her unshakable belief that she is a disappointment to her mother seems to influence her every move. She vehemently believes the old stories of her ancestor, Astresse Regent, who awoke the last of the ancients, Nyrgoth Elder. The stories say that Astresse summoned Nyrgoth Elder from his tower and together they fought the evil Magic that was awoken by the warlord Ulmoth. The ancient sorcerer banished the mechanical monster that Ulmoth controlled, and together Astresse and Nyrgoth Elder were victorious. Now that a “new power has arisen in the Ordwood that men say is a demon who steals minds,” Lynesse climbs to the Elder Tower to seek the sorcerer’s help as her ancestor did a century earlier (37).

The other half of the narrative is from the perspective of Nyr Illiam Tevitch. An “anthropologist second class of Earth’s Explorer Corps,” he is centuries old and light years from home (25). Nyr came to Sophos 4 over three centuries ago as part of a team of anthropologists; expected to observe and study the descendants of the original colonists, they were “sent to watch and not act” (147). Nyr has been alone in what remains of his team’s outpost for centuries; with “no word for two hundred and ninety-one years,” Nyr has spent most of the time sleeping, depending on the outpost’s suspension facilities to keep him alive (26). After a couple of centuries sleeping in the suspension pods in the outpost, Astresse Regent comes to him, asking for help, and against his better judgement he agrees. He falls in love with Astresse and considers staying with her. Instead, he ultimately chooses to return to his suspension pod, promising Astresse that should her family be in peril again, they can come to him. It is hard to know if he regrets his decision to leave Astresse; he thinks of her as “a woman of primitive culture who could never have understood what I am, and yet magnificent, radiant. And I had been alone for so long by then” (31). Perhaps trying to denounce the affection he once felt, he diagnoses it instead as a symptom of his loneliness.

As soon as Nyr (Nyrgoth Elder) and Lyn (Lynesse Fourth Daughter) meet, there is a jarring and undeniable language barrier and cultural differences. These lead to miscommunication and trouble understanding one another emotionally, with the differences in linguistic nuance and common vernacular (on both sides) being constantly misunderstood or overlooked. The split narrative provides insights for the reader to comprehend the intention of each character, as does much of the dialogue, but the language barrier remains intact throughout. The “linguistic chasm,” as John Folk-Williams calls it, between Lyn and Nyr is a side effect of the passing of time, but it also highlights the stark differences in belief constructs and local social norms. Many examples litter Nyr’s and Lyn’s interactions, but there are a few of note.

Nyr tries and fails to explain to Lyn and her companion, Esha Free Mark, that he is in fact not a sorcerer. There are simply no appropriate terms in Lyn’s language for what Nyr understands as “scientist,” or “scholar,” so when he states these signifiers, “in their language, these are both cognates for wizard” (85). Nyr’s hypothesis is that, should he attempt to dispel Lyn and Esha of their belief that he is an ancient wizard, he might end up saying “I’m not a wizard; I’m a wizard, or at best a wizard,” an imagined interaction that he finds less than amusing (85). Whilst this is a valid obstruction in their communication, which prevents Nyr from explaining that he is an anthropologist and not a wizard, Tchaikovsky appears to forget that the term and “scholar” and its appropriate definition do not exist for Lyn, which was a slight surprise. Throughout Tchaikovsky’s work, he shows a skill for consistency within the lore of his novels, never forgetting or making errors. However, in this novella he states that the term “scholar” referring to a specialist in a particular branch of research, does not exist for Lyn or the other inhabitants of Sophos 4, but Lyn does use the term slightly later in the text within the same context that Nyr would use it to define himself. This small, perhaps overlooked, slip was something I never thought I would notice in any of Tchaikovsky’s work and hope never to notice again (109). Regardless of this, the difficultly Nyr encounters in his attempt to explain his position continues, and he struggles on to try to explain who he is to Lyn and Esha. He decides to break the rules of anthropology, to tell the ‘true story,’ hoping that they will be able to understand (110). Unfortunately, the language barrier holds fast, and whilst he tries to explain that humans travelled to Sophos 4 from Earth, they hear something else entirely.

Nyr tells stories of humans arriving from Earth, then adapting to their new planet, engineering body modifications for humans and the native livestock, as well as the machinery used in the colonisation process, but all Esha and Lyn hear is that the Elders used “magic” to travel from the “otherworld” (111) and began “teaching the beasts and plants their place, naming them and giving them their roles,” and about the “monsters” that did the will of men (112). Nyr tries his best to remove magic from the conversation, but once he is finished, Lyn simply states, “yes, that is how we tell it,” unable to grasp the concepts he has tried so delicately and desperately to explain (115).

The juxtaposition of Nyr and Lyn is remarkably insightful. In emphasising the generational differences and language barriers, Tchaikovsky successfully dramatizes the ideas surrounding witchcraft being an early version of medical science, or the well-known Arthur C. Clarke phrase that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In this novella, Tchaikovsky uses this concept to highlight the difficulties confronted when attempting to cross technological, cultural and language barriers, as well as dramatically different belief systems. In doing so, Tchaikovsky also illuminates the distinctions between Fantasy and SF narratives, and by blending the two genres into one novella he makes it extremely difficult to speculate on the story’s outcome. When approaching a text of either genre, one holds certain expectations or assumptions, which are immediately useless when reading a novella that combines the two.

Unlike some of Tchaikovsky’s other texts, there are fewer allusions than one might expect. Whilst there are some of the usual tropes such as suspension pods, the use of technology to regrow or augment body parts, and someone being very far from home, one might not notice the key text that influences Elder Race unless they take a look at the dedication in the front of the book. In the dedication, Tchaikovsky nods to the late Gene Wolfe and his story “Trip, Trap,” which was the novella’s major inspiration. Constructed as two intercutting narratives, much like Elder Race, the story follows Garth the son of Garth in a fantasy-medieval setting (which is not dissimilar to Lynesse Fourth Daughter) and Dr. Morton Finch, a field xenoarchaeologist investigating possible ancient spacefaring technology. Whilst the narratives are quite different, their structures, focuses on magic, generic combinations, and constructed barriers are similar. The significance of this intertextual connection reveals much about Tchaikovsky and his skills as a writer, as well as the impact of manipulating genre. In his other works, he often utilises puns or alludes to other works in a clever and whimsical way for apparently humorous reasons. However, in using “Trip, Trap” in such an opaque manner, he reveals that his skills move beyond amusing allusions, whilst also illuminating the impact one can have when they blend genres, particularly disrupting expectations and dramatizing the apparent and somewhat noticeable correlation between what can be understood as science and what is viewed as magic.

Elder Race is an emotional novella, and through the narrative Tchaikovsky does what he does best, exploring the future humans might have away from Earth. With this text, Tchaikovsky reminds us that although he has crafted inspiring and award-winning SF novels, he is also an imaginative fantasy writer. Using the inspiration of Wolf’s intercutting narratives as a starting point for his own work, Tchaikovsky creates a story with feeling, magic, and science. Whilst one might find this text frustrating due to its characters’ failure to communicate, the novel confirms what we already know: Tchaikovsky is a commanding, imaginative writer, who can master and manipulate genre is any way he sees fit.

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WORKS CITED

Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. Indigo, 2000.

Folk-Williams, John. “Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review.” Scifi Mind, www.scifimind.com/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/. Accessed 28 December 2022.

Wolf, Gene. Storeys from the Old Hotel. Ord Books, 1995.

Lucy Nield is a PhD student and GTA in the Department of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include dog-culture, posthumanism and the Anthropocene within contemporary speculative fiction. She has been an organizer for the Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference at the University of Liverpool since 2019 (@CRSFteam) and is a regular contributor to The Fantasy Hive (@TheFantasyHive). Lucy is an active member of the Olaf Staple Centre (UoL), has been published in Foundation (2021 & 2022) and SFRA (2019 & 2022), with a pending chapter for Bloomsbury’s ‘Future Werewolf,’ (2023), a pending article for Comparative American Studies: An International Journal (2023), as well as a special collection with Extrapolation (2023).

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The science fiction detective story is a subgenre with a most respectable line of ancestry and descent: its conventions of the world-weary sleuth or law enforcement agent, the femme fatale (or homme fatale), the uncovering of deadly secrets, the exposure of the seamy and corrupt underbelly of society—all woven into tapestries of fantastical and futuristic settings—have been explored in a myriad of works. We see it in stories ranging from Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (whose noir elements became turbocharged in the 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner)to Rusch’s Retrieval Artist series, Morgan’s Altered Carbon, Mieville’s The City and the City, Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Scalzi’s Lock-In. Why the SF and detective genres have mixed in such fruitful combinations might be connected to their mutual concern with the truth of things: detective stories, from the most simplistically pulpy to the most cleverly devised, are tales of uncovering truths, the truths of personal lives, of relationships, of the motives driving people to extremes, and of how societies and their structures (governments, law enforcement, corporations, capitalism) operate in the “real world” in opposition to ideals of law and justice. The best traditions of SF also look towards the exploration of truths—how things such as scientific advancements, encounters with the alien Other, or even simple contact with the unforgiving, hard vacuum of deep space cause human beings to reexamine themselves and their place in the universe and to make revelations about the truth of our existence.

Malka Older is no stranger to stories in which the hidden is uncovered or in which truth becomes a crucial resource. Her Hugo-nominated Centenal Cycle (Infomocracy, Null States, and Plate Tectonics, 2016-2018) explores a near-future Earth whose planetwide political system consists of constantly shifting microdemocracies that depend on information flows for their very existence – the truth of which has nation-changing potential. And she has co-created/co-written several streaming serials—Orphan Black: The Next Chapter and Ninth Step Station, the latter of which is a series of literal detective stories—whose primary themes include the harm done to innocents through deliberate informational occlusion by the powerful. Drawing upon these traditions, Older brings readers a new and honorable addition to the SF detective tale: The Mimicking of Known Successes. An impactful opening sets the tone and the expansive exoticism of the novella’s setting:

The man had disappeared from an isolated platform; the furthest platform eastward, in fact, on the 4°63’ line, never a very popular ring. It took Mossa five hours on the railcar to get there, alone because none of her Investigator colleagues were available, or eager, to take such a long trip for what would almost certainly be confirmation of a suicide.

The platform appeared out of the swirling red fog, and moments later the railcar settled to a halt at what could barely be called a station. Mossa, who had not been looking forward to the long trip herself, had nonetheless passed it in a benevolent daze, looking out at the gaseous horizon that seemed abstractly static and as it moved in constant strange patterns. Once disembarked, she found the rhythm of talking to people on the platform only with difficulty. (Prologue)

At once the necessary economy of information is provided: we have a possible crime, certainly a mystery. We have a detective, one dogged and curious enough to take on a case in which others see no promise, a detective who does not relate well to other people. And we have a setting that is at once familiar to mystery readers: the investigator disembarking from a train into a crime scene. But Older immediately puts an SF spin on this by dropping the reader without warning into a world we instantly know not to be our own. Mimicking is set in a far future, where humanity has fled an environmentally ravaged Earth and set up a ring-structured colony called “Giant” that orbits Jupiter. But within this extraordinarily evocative setting, Older weaves a tale consisting of multiple strands: a “cozy” mystery (one where bloody or extreme violence is generally eschewed); a story of academic life, with all the intrigue and internal rivalries those stories tend to feature (most of the novella is set in the area of Valdegeld University, a center of scholarly tension between rival Moderns, Speculatives, and Classics); and a Holmesian pastiche, in which brilliantly cerebral and peerlessly logical Investigator Mossa teams up with Classic Scholar Pleiti, the novella’s narrator and source of emotional comfort, occasional inspiration, and eventually, romantic connection for Mossa.  

Several kinds of truths are laid bare over the course of Mimicking. The most obvious and relevant to the detective genre of which the novella is unquestionably a part, is that of the mystery itself: the whereabouts and fate of arrogant Scholar Bolien Trewl, last seen at the very platform Mossa arrives at as the story opens. But moving farther along the novella’s ring, Moss and Plieti also uncover truths about their own needs for romantic human connection—it is heart-wrenching to watch Pleiti hesitantly expressing, if only to herself, her desire for Mossa while Mossa responds for much of the novella with tempting, teasing closeness that belies her own deep yearning. In the end, the most profound truths may be less the ones that come at the end of a chain of evidence or a series of clues, and more the ones that reveal things about ourselves as living, connected human beings. In a scene close to the novella’s end, Mossa and Plieti confront their mutual attraction, something both characters take pains to avoid before this pivotal moment.

“Mossa. Mossa. You are doing important work. And – and –  and I don’t know anything about Investigator culture, but I could tell your colleagues respect you, admire you even. And you have your own home in this beautiful city. You have changed since university, even if not exactly in the way I – and mostly – and mostly I don’t care.”

“You don’t?”

I should have, I knew that, but I couldn’t. “I don’t.”

“Does that mean – do you mean – Plieti, might I kiss you?”

“Yes,” I said in a rush, and threw my arms around her.

But the most crucial truths within the novella’s own universe involve rival interpretations of humanity’s future in space. The eventual return to a reconstructed Earth is a common dream on Giant—much of the story, for one, circles around the Koffre Institute for Earth Species Preservation, a sanctuary for genetically-reconstructed Earth plants and animals maintained as a resource for the eventual reseeding of a renewed Earth. It is a topic of crucial importance, but on Giant beliefs in its immediacy and practicality become the source of extreme and dramatic tension. As a Classical Geography Scholar, Pleiti studies ancient Earth history as part of a long-range collective plan to re-create the old Earth, but other factions see the truth elsewhere. Pleiti exclaims to a rival Scholar at one point, “You are going to overturn years, decades of planning for Earth reanimation, delay the time when we can finally go back” to which her enraged colleague replies, “It’s never going to be Earth!… Not the Earth that you Classicists deify! It’s never going to be exactly like it was before, and that means you’re never going to be willing to let us get back there.”

Which truth about humanity’s return home is closer to objective reality? Does a colony-wide reconstructive endeavor planned and carried out over decades, if not centuries, better resemble the truth of the situation, or should impulsive, individual decisions rule the day? The truth, as with most things, lies somewhere in the middle, Older tells us. Or, as Mossi puts it, “[A]ttempting to approximate an idealized past is most certainly both futile and foolish, but individually disrupting what absolutely must be a collective endeavor is no better, and selfish as well.” The same sort of collectivist vs. individualist tension marks Older’s Centenal Cycle, and we also see echoes of it in detective fiction, where individual decisions based on impulse and passion and idiosyncratic interpretations of the truth give birth to crime, and where lone investigators must solve crimes for the common good. It is in these concerns with the tensions of warring truths, as well as the expertly drawn Holmes-Watson relationship of Mossa and Pleiti, that we see how beautifully and skillfully The Mimicking of Known Successes follows in the footsteps of the best of both SF and detective fiction.

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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.

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Memory’s Legion is a compilation of the novellas and short fiction of the Expanse universe of James S.A. Corey. The Expanse consists of a series of books and short stories, a role-playing game, and a television program. Small parts of Memory’s Legion make up a collection of shorter fiction that was produced for other media. Each is available through other means, but together they are placed in a chronological order related to the main series of books. For someone who only knows the TV series and RPG game, Memory’s Legion expands upon the worlds, characters, and periods of the series. This collection isan amazing introduction to the many elements of the Expanse universe and series. I accessed this text through Audible, which additionally provides authors’ notes (spoken by the authors) and allows the listener to hear the correct pronunciation of names and places. This review will try not to reveal any spoilers but only hint at their existence.     

“Drive” is the first short story. It covers the technological advancement that makes space travel more profitable and accessible in this universe. The Expanse is set 200 years into the future. This story, set 150 years before the main plotline of the series, follows Solomon Epstein as he invents the Epstein Drive to allow faster space travel. The drive enables humankind to venture throughout the solar system, including the Outer Belt and the moons of outer planets. It is a wonderful blend of hard soft science as the authors “show” rather than tell in this story of the first flight. Although theory, it gives a wonderfully detailed explanation of the related theoretical physics. Solomon Epstein reflects upon his past as we learn what this new technology does to him, the pilot. It is a very skillful tribute to this fictional inventor that sets off the entire “expanse” or colonization of the solar system.  

The next three stories are all interconnected as they cover the main zones and characters of the series. “The Butcher of Anderson Station” introduces Colonel Fred Johnson and the Belters with the theme of political strife between governments, corporations, and the Belters. We see how Johnson evolves and observe the living conditions of the people of the Belt and Outer Planets. “The Churn” introduces the background of a major character from Earth with a surprise twist. The hidden twist helps the reader to focus on a wonderful story of the lives of the common people of Earth, demonstrating how the lives of people on Earth are shaped by their high population numbers. We see things like “Basic” Universal Income, free mass transit, and underground economies of the average citizen without looking at only the elites. Once the twist is revealed, it makes a lot more sense. From the TV series, the actor is subdued and only hints at what the character is experiencing, which can be felt from his performance. After reading this, you will have a greater appreciation for elements of his performance and backstory. Finally, “Gods of Risk” continues the story of Bobbie Draper and introduces us to common life on Mars. Mars is colonized and seems to be very much like a modern-day Earth in lifestyle and opportunity. Each of these stories establishes the political environment of their cultures through a personal story that draws in the reader. Each gives its flavor to a crime story of sorts but that just is the medium for these great character stories. Much of the jargon and flavor of each world is conveyed so this makes a great introduction to the cultures for both reading the series and playing the RPG version. 

“The Vital Abyss” covers a discovery and technological development that was not explored well in the series. The story presents a very interesting argument in ethics and philosophy wrapped into a weird story of an unusual situation. I now see that there was really no place for this in the main series, but it is a very deep story that is a pleasure to experience. Strangely, this story also introduces the reader to a theme or element of the Expanse universe that might be missed. A major character has a diverse education that bridges ideas and concepts from many sciences within the story. This mirrors the biological education of one of the authors that adds layers to many of the stories. We also see the higher education skill of secondary fields like philosophy from the author notes or interview at the end of the Audible reading. This does support that any beginning writer should read or listen to this collection with interviews as a lesson on the importance of diverse personal skills and techniques in world building.

“Strange Dogs” reads simply as a horror story but has many layers. We have advanced forward into time to the colonizing of the planet, Laconia, within the Expanse universe. We meet a young girl named Cara who is growing up on the world as part of what was supposed to be just a five-year mission. She is being raised with rules from Earth on a world where most of those rules do not apply. She is a young, responsible girl trying to do the right thing, but all the rules have changed. The authors say that this is a story of immigrants. The first generation tries to live by their rules from home, but Cara develops through her learning of the rules of the planet. Within this horror story, we see that the planet has different technologies and abilities. I do not see it as horror even though it ends very horror like. It has more of a colonization / immigrant edge to it as two cultures experience conflict. As a Canadian who works in a First Nation community, I recognize a familiar misunderstanding between the Laconians and humans as they try to help. It reminds me of the Westerns where a young child becomes part of tribe or the Star Trek NG episode “Suddenly Human” where the child is reintroduced to humans after being raised by an alien culture. This is a much more interesting way of dealing with the bridging of two different cultures by a person. The total distrust of the events due to human-centered beliefs causes the horror but what would have happened if the characters connected as Cara does, accepting the gifts and knowledge of the “Strange Dogs”? What are we learning from the Indigenous peoples now that we are actually listening and trying to understand? “Strange Dogs” therefore prompts the reader to carefully consider these pivotal topics.

“Auberon” is a story filled with political intrigue. This is due largely to its plot, which focuses upon the aftermath of the Laconian Empire’s takeover of the universe and its subsequent placing of governors on its planets. Strangely, it opens with a wonderful speech about how change is constant and that there is therefore a dire need to learn new rules quickly. There are definite connections to “The Churn” and the recurrence of the social political emphasis in the Expanse universe. We see how a governor deals with a very corrupt planet with limited trusted forces and how the criminal underworld adapts and survives. We learn about the problems of winning a war. What really gets me is how this story is so perfect as a teaser for the series without giving anything away. There is even a reference to “Strange Dogs” linking them. The author’s notes additionally enrich this section. For these reasons, it is a short story that prompts the reader to explore the rest of the series.

“Sins of the Father” tells the tale of one of the characters and how this character ends up wrapped in a very strange fate. A major event happens in the universe, so we see the effects on a group of colonists. Once you read this story, you will also see a strange karma in the fate of the main character, but what struck me was how Earth is being destroyed and we look at the stars and science for solution. Between “Strange Dogs” and this story, we are told it is not a guarantee. There is a secondary lesson in the stories of the Expanse about life on this planet and possible outcomes. This might not be an intentional theme, but I picked up on the possibilities. Not everything turns out, especially for 400 with no way home and no chance of rescue.

The short stories and novellas in this collection are a wonderful gateway into the Expanse universe, whether it is for a reader of the books, a watcher of the TV series, or a gamer interested in the RPG. This also carries great weight for the aspiring writer to see the craftsmanship and diversity of knowledge necessary for creating a realistic universe. We see biology, politics, and philosophy as major viewpoints for the writing. The Expanse universe was also used for a campaign for a roleplaying game by the author. One thing many tabletop or Role Playing Games do is incorporate elements of different fictional worlds. Many read the works of the authors to get the flavor of the universe in which they are playing. The authors of the Expanse do well in explaining the science and technology involved in these stories and exploring the culture of both the leaders and the common folks, especially those of the underworlds. There is even new terminology like “goldilocks planets” and “living on basic” to explain concepts in this view of the universe. 

This collection allows the players to jump off many places for their own games and campaigns through this long story arc. This is a wonderful piece of writing as both an introduction and teaser to the Expanse books or TV series. The Audible package also includes the author’s notes in an interview format after each story, which, by providing the authors’ comments directly, greatly enriches the text. It is a nice package to give clarity plus it provides great insight into the writers and the process. Those author’s notes are very informative to both readers and future writers. For those watching the TV series, these stories are linked in as titles and more. Reading or listening to the stories provides a depth and scope unavailable to consumers solely of the television series. The quality of the reader in the Audible recording is great as there are those voice changes that help the listener understand who is speaking. Additionally, it is read at a great pace and is clearly spoken. Overall, this book and its format are top quality and worth your time whether you be an avid fan or someone looking for a mind-opening piece of science fiction. It provides escapism, provokes important ideas, and introduces strong characters, culminating in a great reading or listening experience. 

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Robert Creedon is an intermediate and high school teacher in the Canadian First Nation community.  With backgrounds in emergency services, sociology, and teaching, he has cultivated an interest in science fiction through tabletop role playing games, film, media, and books for over 40 years.  This is his first review of fiction, but he has reviewed books on popular culture and philosophy before.  Robert has also participated in over 50 productions of theater and media.   

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Clark’s debut novel won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2021, and in 2022 won the Compton Crook Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. It was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2022. The work depicts an alternate steampunk-esque Cairo of the 1910s, where the technical innovations are the work of the djinn or the result of their influence. There are many social innovations, as well, more on which below. The timelines split in the 1870s, when in our world Egypt was nominally independent but in practice dominated by the British and French: the proximate cause of this was Egypt’s vast indebtedness to those countries, partially due to the cost of the Suez Canal. In Clark’s world, a mystic going by the name al-Jahiz was able to open the door between our world and what Clark refers to as the Kaf, the world of the djinn. The irruption of mystical force into the world enabled Egypt to leapfrog the Western powers both technolgically and socially; this irruption spread to other colonized lands, enabling those societies to throw off their Western oppressors via their cultures’ particular sorts of sorcery and magical beings.

This alternate history provides the background for a police procedural that becomes an epic struggle for power through control of the djinn. Fatma el-Sha’rawi is a senior agent with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, which is itself part of a highly modernized and efficient Egyptian government. When a British man with ties to the colonial past, who is also the leader of an esoteric brotherhood devoted to al-Jahiz, is murdered along with his whole brotherhood in a clearly sorcerous manner, Fatma is called in to solve the mystery: her main companions in this quest is her new partner, Agent Hadia, and Fatma’s lover Siti, whose heritage proves crucial. The McGuffin here is the Seal of Solomon, which has the power to bind the djinn in service: a villain cosplaying as al-Jahiz returned needs to re-open the gateway between worlds in the service of their own will to power. A Master of Djinn builds upon a previously-published novella and novelette, whose events are summarized in the text of this work. I should note that I have not read these earlier works, on the premise that the novel should be understood as a thing unto itself.

The novel has much to admire. Its world is vivid and particular: Clark has a good picture of Cairo and uses it to his advantage in structuring its steampunk alter. The world is also internally consistent. The novel is quickly-paced and an easy read. The central plot is well-structured, even if its sudden reveal is telegraphed much too clearly. Its version of the 1910s is startlingly modern in terms of social mores, above and beyond the overturning of colonialism: most contemporary readers will appreciate its feminism, queer relationships and other details.

What A Master of Djinn best represents, however, is the hollowing-out of the publishing industry and the vast disservice this does to both writers and readers. Clark is a first-time novelist, and it shows: there are clunky bits of exposition, even including a couple of instances that verge on “As you know, Bob,” and minor infelicities of language here and there. A caring editor would have had him cut down the number of descriptions of clothing, spaced out the introductions of some of the characters, etc. For example, djinn is the group plural and the name of the race of beings. The singular is djinni, yet “djinn” is used in the singular throughout the text; also, there are repeated mentions of masjid, which does mean “mosque”, but it’s singular and the word is consistently used in the plural, where it should be masájid. These infelicities should have been addressed in the editing process, but clearly were not. It’s a testament to Clark’s skill at keeping the story moving and portraying a vivid alternate universe that the novel won the awards it has—but this recognition comes despite, not with the help of, Tor and its editors.

The infelicities are sometimes grating but ultimately trivial—and again, I want to emphasize that my critique here is not of Clark, who’s done a great job as a first-time novelist. More problematic is the glaring lacuna that anyone familiar with the literary tradition in Arabic will find at the heart of A Master of Djinn: his portrayal of djinn very much goes against their nature.

Structurally, the djinn occupy a space in Muslim culture very similar to that of the fey in Celtic-influenced northwestern Europe. The djinn predate humanity—and often predate upon humanity. They are very diverse in form, and fall into groups based on similarity of form. They have great sorcerous power and live far beyond the mortal lifespan. They are arrogant, lack empathy and are often cruel, but are honorable in their generally Lawful Evil way. They can be bargained with, but will obey the bargain only to its literal word and will do what they can to make those words misleading. Some are more curious than actively malevolent; a very, very few are intrigued by humanity and might even verge on the benevolent. The primary structural difference between fey and djinn is that while Christianity is inimical to the former, the djinn are fully imbricated in the Muslim tradition—though the djinn existed in the cultures of the region prior to the advent of Islam. The djinn were created first, and from fire; when god created humans from earth, he demanded the djinn bow down to the first humans. Some refused, while others obeyed. Some djinn became Muslims, while others did not.

The djinn of A Master of Djinn have all the superficial characteristics of the traditional djinn, and many of the powers. They certainly look like djinn: Clark, like many new writers, spends a great deal of space giving us physical descriptions of characters, and the descriptions of the very different physical forms (and outfits) of the djinn go a great deal toward the vividness of his world. The djinn have the same broad variety and particularity in the novel as they do in the literary tradition. Some of them act like djinn, whether their words and actions be arrogant, oblique, opaque or esoteric.

Yet Clark has humanized the djinn, and it takes away from the power and innovation of his world, in a way that might not be evident to those unfamiliar with the djinn. Partway through the text, Fatma sees an English woman reading from a luridly-illustrated book of 1001 Nights-esque tales. She responds to this by directly lampshading, anachronistically, the concept of Orientalism, first articulated by Edward Said in 1978, six decades after the novel’s setting. Fatma is right to sneer at the book she sees, but A Master of Djinn performs the opposite trope upon most of its djinn. The djinn are not human, and their djinn-ity is being done something of a disservice by the text. The novel is full of djinn who, despite their baroque appearance and habits, have opinions and take actions that make them seem like 21^st-century progressives. Since the advent of the djinn, every hierarchy has been overturned: colonized and colonizers, democrats and authoritarians, men and women. The novel makes it clear that the djinn are the causal factor here: for example, the USA has banned the supernatural, and due to this it remains a backward land drenched in Jim Crow. While I personally am very much on the side of upending hierarchies, there’s a real issue of willing suspension of disbelief, here.

When presented with an alternate world, most readers of SF demand to know by what plausible set of circumstances that world arrived at its current state, but how the djinn caused a progressive revolution is the lacuna at the center of this novel. The technological revolution is clearly backstopped: it arises due to the djinn’s knowledge and sorcerous power, and this conforms to the nature and role of djinn in the literary tradition. With respect to social issues, however, the nature and role of djinn in the literary tradition is to preserve traditional hierarchies. They are for the very most part contemptuous of humans, and deeply resent having had to bow down to us. There are next to no female djinn in the tradition, and the male djinn have no more interest in feminism than do most of the human characters: the 1001 Nights is full of people of both sexes in drag, and notable female characters like Princess Budur who take on a man’s role, but none of it is feminist in the sense of saying that women should have the equal political, economic and social rights as men that they have mostly achieved via the djinn in Clark’s Egypt. The text states several times that while things aren’t yet perfect in Egypt of the 1910s, women have it rather better than their Western sisters. Yet the Egypt of 1870, before the timelines split, was socially conservative to a degree modern readers could hardly understand.

There was in fact a real-world Egyptian feminist movement in the 1910s, though not in the 1870s: it was instrumental in removing the British from direct rule. One of its chief leaders was Huda Sha’rawi (1879-1947), who is best-known for publicly throwing away her headscarf and thereby starting the period between 1922 and the 1990s when Egyptian women of the middle and upper classes did not veil. Fatma el-Sha’rawi is repeatedly said in Clark’s text to be from a downscale background and also a Sa’idi: someone from Upper (southern) Egypt, whose people are darker-skinned, regarded as hayseeds and come under a great deal of racist oppression in the real Egypt of then and even now. It’s a strange re-use of a last name, with the implication of making Egyptian feminism not only somehow djinn-driven but also populist as opposed to being entirely driven by a narrow upper class. The sort of reforms the real Sha’rawi advocated for were incremental, nothing like the openly queer relationship Fatma practices. I’m not advocating against feminism or queer relationships in SF novels: I’m arguing that A Master of Djinn doesn’t explain how any of this happened, and it’s a real distraction from an otherwise engaging story. I’m absolutely willing to suspend disbelief about the presence of the djinn in the novel, because it’s SF and the novum, and it’s cool. But they have to be djinn, and this novel for the most part transforms them into progressive humans. While this isn’t Orientalism, it is a little problematic to take this very well-documented aspect of another literary tradition and adapt the form but not the function.

Again, I’m not critiquing Clark, who deserves next to none of the blame for any of these lacunae: I’m blaming Tor. It would have taken the bare minimum of professionalism on their part to work with him to edit through the small infelicities, and only a little more to have someone familiar with the literary tradition in Arabic read the manuscript and explain where and how the djinn come across as counter to their nature as expressed in that tradition. Clark is clearly blessed with creative talent: I rather doubt it would have taken him long to articulate how the djinn became progressive and to integrate it smoothly into the novel’s additional chapters, and then to perform some minor redjinnification of some of the characters. His story and world are compelling, and I do hope that Clark continues to refine his voice and expand upon what he’s created.

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Ian Campbell is the editor of SFRA Review.

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The 2084 Report is the only work of fiction written by James Lawrence Powell, an American geochemist who has written books on climate science, the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and the extinction of dinosaurs. The novel is an authoritative chronicle of the effects of climate breakdown as experienced across the globe in an imagined near future. Composed of interviews collected and published in the year 2084 by an unnamed oral historian, it is organised thematically around specific, albeit overlapping, phenomena: droughts and fire, flooding, the rising of sea levels, melting glaciers and permafrost, resource struggles, fascism and xenophobia, death, and nonhuman extinctions. 

Powell’s book plays into a major trope within the cli-fi genre, one which features a future historian interpreting and documenting the errors, failures, and sometimes demise of contemporary life in the Capitalocene. The 2084 Report begins with a preface by a historian, dated Dec 31 2084 in Kentucky. He describes his methods to produce the book, “knowing that it will be read mostly by friends and family” (preface). Like works such as The Age of Stupid, World War Z, and The Collapse of Western Civilization, it conjures what Pieter Vermeulen describes as the “posthumous readability” (880) of climate breakdown and human extinction, evoking “a ravaged future in order to serve as a warning for its present readers” (869).

As is expected of works within this subgenre, Powell’s book is elegiac in tone, as ecological beauty vanishes, and communities lose their lands and livelihoods in the near future. Displaying the vivid speculative prowess of fictional prose, it details the eventual demise of cities and communities in both the Global North and South, as their water resources disappear, from Bangladesh and the Netherlands to Peru and Phoenix. The book features the “ghostly skeleton of some monstrous, dissected sea creature” that the Great Barrier Reef has become (part 8), and the demise of tropical glaciers—a miraculously beautiful “contradicción frágil” (part 4). As ecosystems are torn asunder, so too are monuments of civilisation: China’s Three Gorges Dam is destroyed when a “giant wall of water washed down the Yangtze, sweeping away everything before it” (part 2), and the Statue of Liberty meets a similar demise as “one giant wave toppled her” (part 2).

The novel thus offers a glimpse into what Greg Garrard calls disanthropy, “the world as it is when we are not looking… at once alluring and frighteningly indifferent” (942). Such an aesthetic centres around the downplaying of human agency and exceptionalism in the face of seemingly cosmological and uncontrollable anthropogenic climate phenomena. Vermeulen likewise suggests that works within this subgenre are “sustained exercises in abandoning human life to a geological gaze that is rigorously uninterested in understanding human exceptionality” (880), allowing contemporary readers to “begin facing up to the increasingly inescapable fact of human species finitude” (872). To critics like Garrard and Vermeulen, then, trope performs an important cultural function, one which leans towards a stoic acceptance of climate breakdown rather than action and activism in averting such a future.

Yet, Powell’s book suggests an alternate function that narratives and fiction have to play in the climate crisis. While such texts commonly employ a narrative temporality in which “the present is always also the object of a future memory” (Vermeulen 872), producing “an imagining of the future as if it were already past” (Vermeulen 872), The 2084 Report is slightly different in its temporal inflection. Rather than a book that mourns the future as foregone, it is very much present-oriented, focussed on human agency and the ability to avert a future-without-humanity.

The depth of knowledge that Powell possesses of climate science accurately brings to life the socio-political impacts that the impending ecological fallouts will create. It provides first-hand accounts of the creation and displacement of “25 million Bangladeshi climate refugees” (part 2), the “seemingly endless human chain (that) filled the roads” (part 4) when glacier meltwater dries up, the slow violence of water rations in Phoenix (part 1), and wars within the Arab nations over water (part 5). It is concerned with making real both the slow and dramatic consequences of climate breakdown, drawing strong causal links between climate phenomena and the subjective lives of different human beings. Despite its strong scientific focus (its range of interviewees invariably cite climate statistics), it grapples with both the slow, Nixonian violences of climate breakdown, and its large-scale catastrophes. The 2084 Report thus enables us to approach the material—and affective—reality of our near future.

Unlike the disanthropic works described by Vermuelen and Garrard, however, Powell’s book takes this as the first step towards tackling the climate crisis. As Energy Humanists like Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer suggest, the climate crisis is not just a technological or scientific problem, but an imaginative and cultural one (Szeman and Boyer 3). Books such as Powell’s novel allow readers to begin properly understanding the affective and cultural consequences of climate breakdown and thus to act to avert it.

Its final two chapters are, perhaps, the most obvious example of this urgent aspiration towards the possibility of steering the planet away from climate catastrophe. While the book largely maintains that climate breakdown within the story has become irreversible, past the “point of no return” (part 9), it also insists on the ability to imagine a different future. The narrator, speaking to two professors in energy production and politics, reiterates:

you are saying that several countries, including Canada, France, and Sweden, had shown that an expansion of nuclear power production could have cut fossil-fuel emissions enough between 2020 and 2050 to keep the global temperature rise under 3.6 ° F [2 ° C] and to eliminate fossil-fuel use. More than two dozen countries, including the U.S., China, Russia, and India, had the necessary experience and controls. And yet it was not done. (Look to Sweden I)

The overarching question of the book, then, is not just “why, back in the first few decades of this century, before time had run out, people did not act to at least slow down global warming” (part 0)—but what are our last possible options in averting large-scale climate catastrophe?

In looking urgently towards the options we have at present, Powell’s book is closer in tenor to Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Instead of a nihilistic reckoning with a world without us, it is occupied with the political and ecological cascade of actions and consequences that branch from our contemporary moment.

The book remains, ultimately, largely driven by facts, even as it colours in the subjective and affectual experiences of the immediate future. The interviewees presented are voices of authority (politicians/journalists) and scholars who are experts in energy politics, geology, engineering, anthropology and more—with the exception of an indigenous native of Brazil (part 1) and a native of the island of Tuvalu, off the coast of New Zealand (part 3). While the glaringly elitist selection of voices does make space for emotions, with characters feeling “terribly sad” (part 2) or remembering how their favourite beaches grew narrower (part 2), the book’s seemingly limited affective scope is not simply a result of its privileging of science over culture as in the age-old disciplinary distinction.

Rather, it recounts the chaotic, messy fallout of climate breakdown through an incongruously neat aesthetic. Beyond the cataloguing of its interviews by theme and didactic questioning, the prose of the book is largely rational, easy and authoritative. It is at odds with the structure of feeling that has come to characterise the Capitalocene in the 21st-century, one which Fredric Jameson describes as a fundamental break, a “situation where discontinuity has become more fundamental [MP1] than continuity” (318). The overwhelming, discombobulating nature of this simultaneously planetary and unevenly specific fate is unsatisfactorily conveyed by the oral historian’s curated and complete recounting of the near future. The neat sorting of climate phenomena into themes and the narration of the violence wrought by climate breakdown captures the content, but not form, of the experiences to come.

Rather, it recounts the chaotic, messy fallout of climate breakdown through an incongruously neat aesthetic. Beyond the cataloguing of its interviews by theme and didactic questioning, the prose of the book is largely rational, easy and authoritative. It is at odds with the structure of feeling that has come to characterise the Capitalocene in the 21st-century, one which Fredric Jameson describes as a fundamental break, a “situation where discontinuity has become more fundamental than continuity” (318). The overwhelming, discombobulating nature of this simultaneously planetary and unevenly specific fate is unsatisfactorily conveyed by the oral historian’s curated and complete recounting of the near future. The neat sorting of climate phenomena into themes and the narration of the violence wrought by climate breakdown captures the content, but not form, of the experiences to come.

Ultimately, The 2084 Report manages to turn “science faction” into a compliment, suggesting key ways in which narratives and fiction intervene in shaping conceptualisations of the climate crisis. While unable to convincingly pull it off through the quality of its prose, Powell’s book points authoritatively towards the shape of the troubles facing us.

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WORKS CITED

Garrard, Greg. “World without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.” Substance, vol. 41, 2007, pp. 40–60.

Jameson, Fredric. Allegory and Ideology. Verso, 2019.

Szeman, Imre and Dominic Boyer, editors. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. JHU Press, 2017.

Vermeulen, Pieter. “Future Readers: Narrating the Human in the Anthropocene.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 5, 2017, pp. 867-885.

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Ada Cheong (she/her) is a PhD candidate based at the University of Exeter. She is fascinated by the alimentary anxieties surrounding the world-food-system, and the ways in which issues such as industrial meat, ultra-processed foods, GM technology etc. register culturally in sf works from the 1970s onwards. Her research more generally concerns the politics and culture of the Capitalocene, and critically engages with the fields of the Energy Humanities and world-ecological literary studies. She is also a communicator and writer for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission.

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There is so very much to examine about our present right now, but ironically, a crucial issue that concerns us all has been generally overlooked in recent science fiction. The issue is economic inequality, a subject of serious concern and equally serious implications for both the future of humanity and the planet. It brings suffering and misery and hardship to countless people, and all the forces of greed and corruption seem arrayed to support it.

There’s great dramatic potential offered by an issue with such grave planetary and societal import, yet I see few stories that try to grapple with it, except as background dressing (or as an aspect and outcome of post-apocalyptic disaster). This to me represents a missed opportunity, because some of the greatest literature in any genre is that which, first, has something to say about ourselves and the human condition when subjected to immense stress and second, describes what happens when people attempt to solve vital problems. I believe the genre would greatly benefit from more stories in which people apply similar degrees of resources, thought, or effort to economic inequality. Acting with narrative boldness to counter the seeming inevitability of capitalism’s continued dominance may seem as science fictional (fantastical, even) as it gets, but the limitless reach of SF’s imagination should not preclude us from envisioning possible solutions or alternate economic pathways for ourselves, even if, as Rachel Swirsky demonstrates in her intelligent novella January Fifteenth, the consequences aren’t predictable or even, sometimes, just.

Set in a near-future United States, the novella takes place over the course of a single day, the day every American receives their yearly Universal Basic Income payment (“UBI” is defined by the Basic Income Lab at Stanford University as “a periodic cash allowance given to all citizens, without means test to provide them with a standard of living above the poverty line.” From that basic definition there are all manner of differing opinions on what qualifies as UBI or who should receive it.). Swirsky’s novella benefits from timeliness, certainly, since UBI as a method of reducing economic inequality has become a part of the national economic conversation in the USA over the last few years, with debates involving people as disparate as Andrew Yang, Hillary Clinton, economist Thomas Piketty, Bernie Sanders, and Mark Zuckerberg weighing in. It is an idea that appeals to many, and it is no wonder that Swirsky has turned her narrative gifts towards a fictional exploration of its potential impact on the complicated lives of human beings.

The novella centers four women, each from a vastly different stratum of American society and each impacted by UBI in a vastly different manner. Although the four never interact, Swirsky’s story amounts to a kind of mosaic, where the different lives and fates of the central characters come together as diverse bits making up a greater whole—the overall societal picture of UBI and the ways, great and small, that it impacts people and society. In upstate New York lives Hannah Klopfer and her two small boys—for Hannah, January 15^th is a day less about economic security and opportunity and more about trauma. It is the anniversary of the day she took her boys and fled her abusive, mentally unbalanced, former wife—now stalker—Abigail. Hannah is on the run and living as quietly as she can; picking up her UBI check is a time to be watchful and scared of discovery by Abigail.

In Chicago, Janelle, a freelance reporter in a post-journalism world, scrounges at the request of news aggregator services every January 15^th for man-on-the-street interviews of people and their opinions on UBI. For Janelle, an orphan who raises her 14-year-old sister Neveah alone, the day is one of predictable banalities and arguments with her firebrand liberal sister over the injustices of UBI. The story moves west into Colorado, where Olivia is a freshman in college and the child of great wealth; for her and her friends in Aspen, January 15^th is “Waste Day,” where the fabulously rich compete to see who can burn through their UBI in the most dramatic and flamboyant manner. And last, there is pregnant teenager Sarah, a “sister-wife” in Utah whose “family” travels the long route on foot through Utah to pick up their UBI payments in person.

What makes Swirsky’s novella so intriguing is not that it lays out the details of a UBI-based society, nor that it explores the traditional arguments about UBI (freedom vs. dependency), but that it instead concentrates on how traumas, abuses, and everyday circumstances “affect our lives. They affect our happiness. They certainly affect how and why Universal Basic Income could change our circumstances” (Author’s Note). In the United States of the novella, UBI fails to actually solve any of the characters’ individual problems on its own, but it provides avenues and opportunities for people to evolve and change. It also, like anything else, can be a negative force: Sarah notes that “the prophet’s wives and children trekked on foot every year to protest the state’s requirement that they go in person to receive their benefits. The state claimed that it was to mitigate ‘abuses of the system,’ but everyone knew it was just another way to harass them for having different beliefs” (35). Meanwhile, the yearly UBI gives license to Olivia’s friends to be crushed under the weight of their own decadence and insecurities. And darker elements are hinted at—at one point, Janelle hears rumors of Native women being sterilized or else having their UBI withheld, and people being forced to sign loyalty oaths to receive their money. As Swirsky notes, money does not solve everything, and it can not necessarily correct injustices in an already problematic system.

The imperfections and limits of UBI are important themes of the novella, in fact. At one point, Janelle and Neveah argue over the history of the program, Neveah appealing to Janelle’s youthful liberalism. In this scene, the compromises and betrayals and hidden motives that accompany any reform are laid bare:

[Nevaeh] added, “I don’t believe you’ve really changed everything you think.”

“What I think – and what I thought – is that UBI is better than having nothing.”

Neveah started to respond. Janelle held up her hand.

Janelle continued, “What I think – and what I thought – is that we had an extraordinary moment of political will after Winter Night. The whole country was breathing a sigh of relief. We weren’t just trying to get ourselves back on track; we were trying to figure out what kind of track to get on. It was like we had this dream together of improving the world.”

“Right? So- “

“What I said was that it would be a one-shot deal. We had one sure arrow to fire from that bow. And whatever we didn’t make sure to fix then, it probably wasn’t going to get fixed for a long time.”

“You were right!”

“Yeah, I was….UBI is definitely better than having nothing.”

“But you were right about everything,” Neveah said. “You called it patchwork legislation…you said once the opposition realized UBI was definitely happening, they were going to try to make it hard to collect. Like drumming up paranoia about bank breaches to make us use checks and the mail. You said they’d start saying states needed the right to make their own rules, but they’d really mean states should be able to make people jump through hoops. You said it was ‘enshrining unequal access.’”

Janelle shrugged. “And now the law’s been written.” (55-56)

Through a single day in the lives of four wildly disparate women, each bearing their own particular emotional burdens and life experiences, January Fifteenth provides a smart and thoroughly realized series of proofs that the human element is vital to the outcome of any attempts at economic or societal restructuring. It shows how narratives of economic inequality, no matter the genre, cannot be simplistic if they are to be either remotely realistic or conducive to imaginative considerations of real-life reform. Society is complicated, people and their relationships are complicated, and realistic stories about this kind of inequality—stories we need to tell—will be complicated, too. Economic inequality is a corrosive phenomenon that threatens us all with an ever-more uncertain future, and Rachel Swirsky has done us all a great service in writing a story that thoughtfully explores the human impact of attempts to reduce it.

WORKS CITED

“What is Basic Income?” Stanford University, 5 Jan. 2023, https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-ubi/.

Jeremy Brett is an Associate Professor 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.

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Stepping back into the world of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series is a comfort. Beginning with the first novel, A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and culminating in the fourth and final novel, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Chambers creates a vibrant, messy universe where humans are just a footnote in galactic history. In fact, in the Wayfarers universe, it is the humans who need to be saved by the other alien species with superior technology; it is the humans whose status as an independent and legal species needs to be acknowledged by the Galactic Commons, the parliamentary system that governs most of the known, traveled universe.

But Chambers is not concerned with the big picture of the galaxy—she is interested in the stories of the individuals who simply live their lives, and how they navigate a world in which people (and when I say “people” I mean all the sapient beings in this universe, not just humans) travel halfway across the galaxy through what is essentially traffic-controlled wormholes but still struggle with ordinary, everyday problems. In fact, one could say that Chambers is preoccupied with the personal, and it is through the personal that she is able to connect to the universal.

It is this particular preoccupation that makes The Galaxy, and the Ground Within approachable, despite the fact that it is the only book in the series in which none of the protagonists are humans. Instead, the novel focuses on four different beings stranded on Gora, an unassuming planet in the middle of what is essentially an intersection of five busy highways in space. Because of the interstellar traffic that passes through Gora and the wait time it takes to traverse the interspatial tunnels from one part of the galaxy to the other, many businesses spring up in the area to cater to travelers waiting to cross to other parts of the galaxy, including restaurants, bath houses, and travelers’ inns. One of them is the Five-Hop One-Stop, a kitschy intergalactic bed and breakfast that welcomes all visitors, no matter the species.

The novel’s plot is fairly simple: during a routine visit to the Five-Hop One-Stop while waiting for their turn in the queue to make their space jump, three guests are stranded when a major communication satellite malfunctions in Gora airspace, rendering the transportation hub inert. While the Galactic Commons Transit Authority and Goran officials scramble to repair the satellites and get the transportation tunnels back in order again, everyone is ordered to stay at their respective habitats, effectively stranding the three guests at the Five-Hop.

One of them is an Akarak named Speaker, who is described as small and stunted, with her arms ending in hooks that allow her to swing from one pole to another. The Akaraks are considered a fringe species, existing in the margins of the civilized universe without a home planet of their own and unable to live in more civilized spaces because of their unique biological needs; namely, they breathe methane instead of oxygen and are therefore unable to live outside of mechanical suits. Another guest is the exiled Quelin, Roveg, a designer of artificial simulations for entertainment and education. The Quelin, a monolithic society that despises change and insists on the enduring permanence of their own culture, branded Roveg a traitor after he was identified as the creator of narrative simulators that challenged Quelin ideology. Though he has since recuperated his career and finances, he is still permanently cut off from his family and home. The final guest is the Aeluon military cargo captain Pei, a character we briefly meet in the first book, as she heads to a secret rendezvous with her human lover. The Aeluons are considered one of the “Big Three” species that established the Galactic Commons and are generally considered one of the most advanced species in the universe. However, because of biological and social expectations, such as a declining birth rate, Aeluons are generally discouraged from romantic relationships with other species. Rounding out the cast of characters are Ouloo and her offspring, Tupo, a Laru mother-and-child who run the transit stop. Ouloo struggles with raising her child with a wealth of options while at the same time trying to figure out her place in the wider galaxy; similarly, the adolescent Tupo struggles to figure out their place in the world while they grow into their body and gender identity. The Laru are described as long-necked and fur-covered, are in part identified by their strange gaits—commonly alternating their walking style between two and four limbs—and are widespread across the galaxy, so much so that they no longer have any meaningful or traditional ties to their own home world.

The enforced proximity of the five characters reveals lines of tension. For instance, Pei’s work in a military-adjacent career is constantly challenged by Speaker, whose entire species was almost wiped out during a planet-side war generations ago, but the effects are still being felt in the present. Roveg’s exile also becomes a sore subject for him, especially when he confronts his own prejudices against Speaker and Pei, as well as his own personal philosophy of maintaining neutrality at the expense of everything else. However, the manufactured closeness also unveils intersections of commonality between everyone. Speaker’s reluctance at revealing her worry for her missing sister, Tracker, changes as Roveg and Ouloo attempt to help her find alternative means of communication outside the habitat. Pei’s frustration at the way by which her species are discouraged from entering relationships outside of their people boils over when she is faced with the choice of whether to be a mother, and though Aeluon motherhood is nothing like human motherhood, the choice still remains. Even Ouloo is challenged by the extended presence of visitors in her habitat and how their needs clash with the needs of her son.

Unlike many SF novels, Chambers smoothly gets around the thorny problem of exposition and explaining how the world works by utilizing short intermission pages that occur between chapters. They take the shape of planetwide bureaucratic announcements from the Galactic Commons Transit Authority that update the shelter-in-place policies around Gora. This allows readers to follow both the passage of time as well as provide ongoing updates of the events happening outside the Five-Hop. Similarly, Chambers uses the character of Tupo as a reader intermediary: as the youngest character, Tupo can easily shift between the four adults and ask questions, thereby expanding on our understanding of how each character sees each other and themselves. Although she consistently reminds the readers of the significant differences between the five protagonists—especially during the denouement of the novel, in which Pei, Roveg, Speaker, and Ouloo all have very different approaches and actions towards Tupo’s accidental poisoning—the novel seamlessly integrates their characters through constant interactions within each chapter.

In fact, it is very easy to forget that one is reading a story in which there are minimal mentions of humans or humanity. Chambers’ writing shines as she writes through the complexities of imagined species and cultures and touches on our own complex cultures as well. Though some may consider The Galaxy, and the Ground Within a slow novel in which nothing of note happens (which is a valid critique, especially if one expects a science fiction novel to be full of action) I would argue instead that the novel refracts and defamiliarizes genre tropes in SF and provides an alternate way of thinking about belonging and alienation in an unfamiliar space. It is to Chambers’ credit that The Galaxy, and the Ground Within welcomes the wayfaring reader with open arms.

Gabriela Lee teaches creative writing and children’s literature at the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines. Her second collection of SF short stories, A Playlist for the End of the World (University of the Philippines Press, 2022), was just released. She recently received a National Children’s Book Award in the Philippines for her children’s book, Cely’s Crocodile: The Story and Art of Araceli Limcaco Dans (Tahanan Books, 2020). She is currently a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work at http://www.sundialgirl.com.

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Rebecca Roanhorse’s epic fantasy novel Black Sun (2020) was received fondly by readers and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2021. The book is the first part of the Between Earth and Sky series with its sequel Fevered Star (2022) already out. Drawing upon Polynesian and pre-Columbian American cultures, the novel explores the theme of embracing one’s destiny and ideas of celestial balance, sacrifice, vengeance, and justice. In a thrilling story that invokes a fresh, magical world, Xiala, a sea captain belonging to a mermaid-race, oversees the transportation of Serapio, the Crow God, across time for a celestial event called the Convergence in the city of Tova. Serapio was ritually blinded by his mother and trained by three capable tutors to prepare him for what awaits him in Tova. Xiala’s crew must be convinced of their mission with half-truths and she does not know Serapio’s true power until the very end.

Guided by the watchers and the sun priest, the people of Tova are not expecting the reborn Crow God to land on their shores. The four Sky Made clans of Tova—the Golden Eagle, the Water Strider, the Winged Serpent, and the Carrion Crow—exist mostly in peace except for the mournful Carrion Crow clan who have not forgotten the Night of Knives, a massacre of its members by the priesthood that led to the rise of Serapio as the Crow God. Naranpa, the sun priest who has raised herself from poverty to the highest echelons of the priesthood, and Okoa, the warrior prince of the Carrion Crow clan, are the other two major characters in the narrative.

The political intrigue in the fantasy world that Roanhorse builds makes the story interesting. The conflicting interests of the Sky Made Clans, Naranpa’s feeling of alienation inside the priesthood, and Serapio’s ambiguity towards his own power drive the narrative. The character of Serapio is a fantasy archetype, but he is an unlikely villain consumed as much by a thirst for vengeance as he is by a similar desire for justice: “…vengeance can be for spite. It can eat you up inside, take from you everything that makes you happy, makes you human” (350). Serapio considers himself to be the Crow God, commanding his flock of crows to attack, serve, and intimidate anyone who crosses him. Serapio’s loss of eyesight grants him a greater vision with the help of ‘star pollen,’ which he relies upon just as Xiala relies on her song to calm the seas and influence men. As a seafaring Teek, Xiala is good at leading her crew but is treated as an outsider because of her race. The character of Xiala makes readers confront their prejudices, overturning gendered expectations. There are other women in the story such as Naranpa and the Matrons of the Sky Made Clans who serve as leaders, while men serve as warriors or ‘knives.’ Such characters help readers understand the otherness felt by marginalised groups to some extent.

The landscapes in the novel extend from the Obregi Mountains to the Crescent Sea, and to the Cities of Cuecola and Tova. The descriptions of the places are sparse but are fleshed out in conversations and some illuminating phrases. At the beginning of each chapter, the location of action and days in relation to the Convergence is mentioned, situating the narrative for the reader. The Convergence is an eclipse event that takes place when three suns align in a single line and are obscured by the moon completely. Members of the priesthood undertake ritualised practices, including the Day of Shuttering when they strictly stay indoors. The title of the novel itself invokes this solstice event in which the sun disappears during a period of cosmic alignment. The indigenous way of narrating is to place it alongside temporal and regional markers populating the story world. Roanhorse does this with ease and an elegance that makes the novel immersive.

Compared to N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Roanhorse’s first novel allows for magical thinking that does not centre the apocalyptic tone too prominently. Jemisin’s novels carry the weight of a post-apocalypse, but Roanhorse crafts vivid characters and an exciting narrative with the Convergence revealing Serapio’s true power. The vengeful destruction that Serapio unleashes can be seen in two ways. The massacre of the Night of the Knives can be seen to justify Serapio’s anger, but Serapio does not feel like he belongs to the Carrion Crow clan at all, having been brought up as a weapon. With an anti-hero at the centre of the narrative, Roanhorse weaves a memorable story that can be taken forward in interesting ways. The ambiguity of Serapio’s character compares to Jemisin’s female protagonist in her trilogy, although the latter is a much more complex character due to her maternal role, and her duty in saving/re-making the ‘broken’ earth.

The characters of Serapio and Xiala are set up as binary opposites in terms of the powers they wield. While Serapio summons the shadow into him, Xiala casts her song out into the world. These oppositional forces allow for a balance in the narrative and an interesting juxtaposition that is also gendered. Xiala’s queer sexuality and Serapio’s chosen celibacy allow for their companionship to develop in a striking way. Towards the end of the novel, Serapio’s destiny is realized in some sense, with consequences, and Xiala is left to wonder at his power. Roanhorse sets up the two characters to respond to each other and their conversations reveal the differences in how they think about their respective journeys. While Serapio feels like he has been brought up for a purpose, Xiala lives from day to day with a mission to get her crew across the Crescent Sea to Tova and reap the rewards of such a journey. Roanhorse’s novel also invokes the idea of befriending pain in relation to training the mind and the body, with Serapio’s tutors teaching him that sacrifice is essential to fulfill one’s destiny.

The novel is a good example of speculative fiction that values diversity of characters in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. In a world that increasingly recognizes the importance of inclusive thinking and representation, Roanhoarse’s novel makes for a satisfying read that shows us how indigenous life can be portrayed in a fascinating manner. The fantastical world that Roanhorse developed is sure to inspire more speculative fiction writers to come up with similar works that will show how various indigenous people have lived in conjunction with the natural world, with knowledge of celestial events and clans that protected and fought for their kin.

Athira Unni is a PhD candidate at Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her PhD thesis is on dystopian and utopian fiction from South Asia and the Caribbean. Her research interests include women’s writing, utopian studies, postcolonial studies, studies of the Anthropocene, memory studies and 20^th-century American poetics.