Category: From the SFRA Review

Summer 2026

Ian Campbell

It is likely that most of you who read this journal have also seen Ali Rıza Taşkale’s recent Aeon article, “The Looting of Science Fiction”, but if you have not yet had the opportunity, please take the time. The article gives a number of excellent and well-sourced examples of how our unelected tech overlords consistently take the form and aesthetics of influential works of SF to create or frame their endeavors, but they completely miss the points these works make about power, corruption and collaboration, to the extent that it cannot be anything but deliberate.

Taşkale quotes Peter Thiel, last seen in the pages of SFRA Review giving us his blueprint for the transformation of what remains of American democracy into a violent white supremacist “Christian” corporatocracy, from a 2009 essay where he writes, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” More than half the population needs to be suppressed, which in SF usually only happens in the kinds of evil empires that plucky heroes overthrow, yet Thiel, Musk, Bezos and our other unelected, unaccountable and child-raping overlords clearly fancy themselves the plucky heroes. Most quality SF would subtly point out that libertarians are driving on public roads.

As another of these many examples, Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook and other platforms enable us both to connect and share with friends and also to recoil from AI slop feeding right-wing propaganda directly into our Boomer relatives’ minds, took the inspiration for changing the company’s name to Meta from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash, set in a world where corporate control is so complete that “the Metaverse is a consolation prize for a society that has collapsed”:

Stephenson intended the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads. Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy—where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while providing essential services—echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and Zuckerberg read it as inspiration.

Taşkale has other examples to give, so he does not comment on how Stephenson himself rapidly descended into a libertarian caricature. His overall point, that these oligarchs consistently misread SF, remains solid and well-sourced throughout: “The aesthetics got materialised. The warnings did not.” He says much the same of William Gibson’s Neuromancer:

Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.

One can only hope that none of these evil clowns has read Gibson’s 2014 The Peripheral, which gives us “Party Time”, an aerosol drug that transforms its victims into ax-crazy combat sadomasochists, though undoubtedly there is a Thiel- or Musk-adjacent laboratory working hard on this right now for use on protestors. It’s highly unlikely that those among the oligarchs who have read or watched The Peripheral regard “The Jackpot” in the same ironic light Gibson and the rest of us do.

There are two points to be made here, above and beyond what Taşkale has to say—and what he says is very much worth reading, so please take the opportunity. One is that for those of us who have spent our adult lives with literature and literary criticism, it’s far too easy to look at the oligarchs and call them bad readers: they understand only the surface of SF, not the estrangement, allegory, irony or actual political message. They’re clueless; they don’t get it. This is something I certainly used to think.

But it’s not true. They’re excellent readers: they’re just reading SF for completely different reasons than those for which it’s written and we critics and fans read it. We look to the message; they’re just looting it. They understand the message, and disdain it. We can look at Musk naming his seagoing ships and exploding rockets after ships in the Culture novels and facepalm, because Musk is Culture villain Joiler Veppers from Surface Detail, and then groan further when he baldly states that Iain M. Banks was not a socialist. Yet we do this at our peril: he and his cronies own the media, and he can loot the Culture while deliberately ignoring its message. He can make his own truth, and we have perilously little with which to oppose it.

The second point is more of a question: what are we, insofar as “we” represent SF, going to do about it? This looting is an existential threat to human society: the oligarchs think of Skynet as a stretch goal, not a warning about AI. But in the nearer term, it’s also a threat to SF. The general public is already agitating against data centers, AI in everything, Flock cameras, and all the other SF-adjacent means by which we’re surveilled and controlled. It’s not inconceivable that soon, the public will sour on anything SF or SF-adjacent, because it too clearly reminds them of the extent to which our oligarchy uses technology to surveil, manipulate and control us. It’s no wonder fantasy is becoming the dominant mode in speculative fiction.

Perhaps it’s a reading comprehension problem: too many people don’t see the estrangement or irony or allegory, and miss the message of SF. If you’re currently teaching in a university environment, you’ve likely witnessed the sharp and catastrophic decline in reading skills, reading comprehension and attention span since the pandemic. This process is also driven by deliberate action by our oligarchy: a massive, coordinated assault on education so as to produce voters easily fooled by propaganda. Perhaps we all need to shift to today’s dominant mode, which is 40-second videos of questionably-informed and overconfident people speaking forcefully from the driver’s seat of their car. Perhaps we need to be less subtle.

I don’t have the answer, or even really an answer. I’m not an SF writer, just a guy with a quarterly column in an obscure journal. Yet I think it’s a question worth pondering. In an age where there’s so much pressure to accept the dominant (and comprehensibly false, and racist, etc.) narrative, maybe it’s the duty of SF to oppose it more forcefully. Or at least more directly. Share your thoughts on the matter or any other at icampbell@gsu.edu. Enjoy this issue of the Review, where in addition to our usual compendium of reviews, we have statements from the SFRA award winners and a thoughtful article on work in the age of AI.00

Winter 2026

Ian Campbell

A point of inflection is when the double-derivative of an equation changes from positive to negative or vice versa: when the pace of change begins to slow or accelerate. The pace of technological advance has of course only continued to accelerate over the last year, but as more and more people begin to realize how bad for us all artificial “intelligence” is, even that might begin to slow.

SF writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “reverse centaur” when describing the effects of AI, or any technology: if the technology enhances human life or productivity, it’s one thing, but if it essentially enslaves humans or otherwise makes our lives worse, it’s still another. The tech world has run out of new ideas that enhance our lives, but since it’s dominated by half a dozen firms all run by the same vampire squid of international capital, it must find new worlds to colonize, no matter the human cost. As SF scholars, we can all readily point to the likely consequences of colonizing “new” worlds. The only remaining question is whether the market can stay irrational long enough to keep Oracle and all the AI companies from bursting like a bubble and making the 2009 financial crisis look like a pleasant day in the park.

So, it’s possible that an inflection point will be reached in tech, not because tech cannot do anything different, but because there’s little further profit in it. They’ve bet literal trillions on AI, and it doesn’t really work at scale, and there’s not much else people really need or even want. I’m not claiming we’re going to enter some utopia where six corporations don’t control our entire lives—heaven forfend!—but merely making the observation that there are fewer worlds left to conquer than one might think.

The place where I feel we have reached an inflection point is politics. What people without decency never understand is that it’s possible to be decent: the ICE thugs and assorted mutants, psychopaths, lickspittles, torturers and profiteers that surround the Mule cannot wrap their heads around the fact that they’re wildly outnumbered by people with basic human decency. The murders in Minneapolis were the second half of the inflection point, but the first half was Greenland. When Golden Toilet started ranting about Greenland back in December, his remaining supporters who aren’t cultists even sat up and took notice. Why Greenland, exactly? Nobody could answer the question coherently, and that’s when the rate of shittification began, if only barely, to change.

Enjoy this issue of the SFRA Review, where among our usual suite of reviews, Quentin Skrabec gives us not just one but two long-form pieces on Jules Verne and 19^th-century industry. His take on Verne’s understanding of the problematic of coal will be especially useful to scholars whose work in SF touches upon climate change and the Anthropocene.

Fall 2025

Ian Campbell

I came across this ICE recruitment ad and felt that it was worth everyone’s notice, because as scholars of science fiction, it’s part of our duty to the public to translate and critique SF in such a way as to help the public understand the critique of our own world that SF so often embodies.

If you’re not familiar with the wildly popular Halo series of video games, which are tremendous fun, this ad might seem like just garden-variety white nationalism. ICE is the guys with the vehicle and the flood is immigrants: the sort of horror that delights at least fifty million Americans. Calling immigrants a “flood” dehumanizes them, while having the approach to immigration be represented by a vehicle-mounted machine gun rather than Justice with a blindfold makes it clear that this isn’t some kind of compassionate white nationalism. It would be ghastly even were it not published by the official Homeland Security and White House accounts.

But if you are the sort of SF fan or scholar who has played much Halo, there’s an extra dimension of vileness to this ad. Because the words Destroy the Flood are in all caps, it’s not clear, other than to someone who knows Halo, that “flood” isn’t primarily intended to evoke water, here. It’s Flood, with a capital F. Per Wikipedia:

Millions of years ago, a powerful interstellar species known as the Precursors seeded the galaxy with life. One of their created races, known as the Forerunners, attacked their former masters and drove the Precursors into near extinction. A few Precursors turned into a dust, intending to regenerate themselves in the future. This dust became defective, infecting and contorting organisms into a new parasitic species, connected by a hivemind: the Flood… The Forerunners conceived the Halo Array—ring-shaped megastructures and weapons of last resort that would destroy all sentient life in the galaxy to stop the Flood’s spread. The array could be activated from the Ark, a repository of sentient life outside the range of the Halos. Exhausting all other options, the Array was activated, ending the Flood outbreak. The surviving Forerunners reseeded life and left the Milky Way galaxy.

So the capital-F Flood is a parasitic hivemind created by the defective dust of a defeated people, not just a natural disaster. They’re not even themselves people: they’ve lost their status as people because they’ve been conquered and assimilated into a race so toxic that the only way to defeat them is to destroy all life. In the series, the Flood is driven by a desire to infect any sentient life of sufficient size. Someone who’s not familiar with Halo or SF, and who has a touch of empathy, just sees this poster as yet another example of the sheer crassness of the current regime. The demographics ICE intends to recruit from—ex-husbands with restraining orders and people who failed the police psych exam, it appears—have likely played an awful lot of Halo, and understand perfectly what the ad’s rhetoric is really intended to evoke.

The ad’s visuals work in a similar way. The arch ascending behind the soldiers might just seem like something artsy or maybe generically sci-fi if you’ve not played Halo, but if you have, you understand that it’s the arch of a Halo, a weapon of genocide. And hardly anything is more white nationalist than genocide.

Like so much about the regime’s rhetoric, this ad is designed to draw young people, primarily white and primarily male but with more diversity than one might hope, into white nationalism. And if it takes framing people who came here to work as fruit pickers or home health care aides or neurologists as a parasitic hivemind, the regime clearly has no problem going there. But if we, as scholars familiar with explaining SF to laypeople, can take the time and energy to show these young people’s families and friends what’s really being marketed, we might take another step closer toward making Nazis bad again.

I’ve not even touched on the role that AI plays in the Halo series, as this piece is already overlong. Enjoy the rest of this issue, where in addition to our usual palette of reviews, we have a group of papers on utopia and dystopia in the Turkish SF tradition. Write me at icampbell@gsu.edu.

Summer 2025

Ian Campbell

The best SF holds a distorting mirror up to our own world and induces us to reflect upon the artificiality of what we think natural. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, for example, puts a woman from the late twentieth century into the worst of antebellum chattel slavery, in order both to tell a compelling story and also to expose us to what our history books typically gloss over or deliberately misframe. Of course, now we live in an era where our history books are being rewritten in order to make it seem as if the Confederacy was the natural state of humanity. Much of my own work centers around SF in Arabic, where estrangement and distorting mirrors are quite useful, because of the lack of formal protections for freedom of speech; I rather expect that Americans will become increasingly familiar with having to read between the lines in order to understand critique.

A vast supermajority of Americans loathe the new normal, but there are just enough cultists (and billionaires) to hold it together with duct tape and bullshit for now. The central issue of the moment is that there is no consensus alternative to fascism. Almost literally nobody wants what the sclerotic leadership of the Democratic Party is proposing, but not all that many people want the Full Bernie, either. What does a durable consensus on what an antifascist society looks like entail? And how can that consensus be reached without oligarch-controlled algorithmic social media putting its thumb on the scale, or how can that thumb be counteracted? We’re right on the cusp of an age where all photographs and video can be perfectly faked: is the answer a retreat to small, in-person communities where trust is earned, or (e.g.) the Fair Witnesses of Stranger in a Strange Land, or (heaven forfend) strict regulation of verified content and news organizations independent of corporate control?

In this issue of the Review, we as the Editorial Collective take on the Hugo and Nebula novel nominees and ask two questions: why has SF appeared to retreat into fantasy, and why in particular was this suite of mostly mediocre novels chosen as representative of the best the genre has to offer? Spoiler alert: we only have partial answers to each question. We would very much like to hear your thoughts on the matter: send them to icampbell@gsu.edu.

Spring 2025

Ian Campbell

I write this on the one hundredth day of the new regime. We’ve all read about or seen the numerous authoritarian/fascist regimes in science fiction, but what they all tend to have in common is basic competence. Say what you will about the Empire in Star Wars, but they’re predictable and appear to keep the trains running. After three months of this, we’re lost in a farce, with Photoshopped tattoos, tariffs on a whim, poll numbers dropping like rocks into gravity wells and a rotating cast of sycophants and plastic surgery disasters.

Yet farce is like SF, in a way: both hold up mirrors to our own world in order to estrange via distortion what’s happening to us and why we permit it to happen. Farce and SF are instructive, above and beyond their entertainment value. Having a ketamine-addicted oligarch waving a chainsaw about as a means of signaling the end of public health programs in a farce (or SF) would be indicative of our own complacency or failure in allowing manifestly terrible people into positions of power, our own shortsightedness in coming up with excuses to make the perfect the enemy of the good, the sheer lunacy of allowing billionaires to exist in the first place.

Perhaps we’ll learn from the estrangement. Consider Asimov’s Foundation novels, where the repugnant Mule strolls in and uses powers of manipulation to twist the system in his direction. “A master of deception, only interested in pillage and plunder”, he takes a system that was indeed in need of serious reform and wrecks it for his own delight and profit. In the novels, the Mule (who poses as a clown) is defeated because his maniacal persistence in searching for and defeating those who might represent an alternative center of power prevents him from maintaining control over his conquered populations. He has no allies, only yes-men and opportunists, and this proves his undoing. Perhaps SF does provide us models for reversing authoritarianism, in addition to its function of deconstructing our received assumptions. Most fictional galactic emperors, I feel compelled to note, don’t reverse themselves when their trade partners refuse to comply.

Yet the defining feature of farce is that it’s intended to be funny. And while there are, to be sure, many things about our new overlords that stimulate our sense of humor, there’s nothing funny at all about what’s happening to our most vulnerable populations. Trans people being erased, exhibits being removed from the African-American museum at the Smithsonian, the wanton destruction of our economy, the destruction of a century of alliances in order to cozy up to ghouls and psychopaths, the open love for cruelty of all sorts, the summary deportation of international students for free speech or minor traffic tickets, the illegal detention of all manner of innocent people, the sending of many of those people to what is obviously a death camp in a foreign country contrary to every principle of our constitutional republic… all of these together, under the dominion of a diaper-wearing clown gangster, are the sort of thing that would have a literary agent or editor saying it’s too over the top to be published.

It only looks like farce, and it’s only SF in that what is called “artificial intelligence” is making the decision to destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people who have made national service the defining feature of their lives. In SF, these intelligences are often actually intelligent instead of just pattern mimics, and when they run societies, it’s generally benevolent and oriented toward equality. In Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, the AIs take care of every human need except the desire to be useful; in Surface Detail, the AIs go to great lengths (and take great pleasure in) comprehensively destroying a world-dominating oligarch.

The real genre we’re in now is not SF nor farce, but horror, where the characters’ hubris inspires them to ignore obvious warning signs in order to see what might happen, and then suffer existential threats.

In this issue of the SFRA Review, we offer perspectives on modes of governance SF provides us. Because SF generally works via estrangement, we might well view these alternative modes of governance as takes on our own mode of governance. We hope that you will find these takes illustrative. We also have a call for papers, where we ask you for your short takes on the Nebula and Hugo nominees; this is on an abbreviated schedule so that we might publish them in three months rather than six. These do not have to be strictly academic opinions: we welcome a wide variety of perspectives on these works.

With respect to our real world in real need of estrangement, do not obey in advance. If forced under threat to modify your speech and actions, you have to make the decision that’s best for you. But do not modify your speech or actions just because you think the oligarchy won’t like it: at least make them work to try to silence you.

Winter 2025

Ian Campbell

I have a longstanding love/hate relationship with SF author Neal Stephenson—or rather, with his works, as I’ve never met the gentleman. Really cool ideas and digressions into all sorts of knowledge, and then gaping misogyny and the inability or principled refusal to wrap up his narratives. Something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of months is the neurolinguistic hacking in Snow Crash (1992), where people could be “neurolinguistically hacked” by exposure to ancient Sumerian language and a bitmap image, reducing them to babbling nonsense syllables. At the time, and even for many years after, this seemed like just a fun conceit to scaffold an adventure narrative onto. But now, our franchised landscape is under the near-total dominance of people who have been neuroliguistically hacked, only instead of babbling nonsense syllables, they babble nonsense about QAnon and “religious freedom” and things about masculinity, that are all breathtakingly counterfactual yet spoken of with absolute belief that they are true.

In The Diamond Age (1995), Stephenson has a girl in a private school chafe at lessons she feels have little to do with her education. Her teacher tells her that “It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together,” a statement that I might have glossed over the first time I read the novel, but which seems eerily prescient today. I’ve unfollowed and been unfollowed by many people over the last few months, all because I was unable or refused in principle to stay quiet about their own inability or principled refusal to pull together. Perhaps you’ve been on one or both ends of the same phenomenon.

SF looks at trends and predicts the future as well as estranging the present: though its predictions of the future are usually off in significant ways, they often get the general tone quite well. Snow Crash has Christians looting the ancient Near East for their own benefit; The Diamond Age has what’s left of Western culture ruled by people called Equity Lords. Stephenson’s Fall, or Dodge in Hell (2019) has the rural swathes of America outside the metro areas and interstates, “Ameristan”, ruled by a violent Christian culture that rejects empathy and compassion in favor of a hypermasculine model of Christ that has little to do with the Gospels. I’m compelled to wonder whether we get a distorted version of that future, or something closer to The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake. Just our luck, it will probably be all of those.

Enjoy this issue of the SFRA Review, where we have in addition to our usual suite of fiction, non-fiction and media reviews an essay on Ghost in the Shell and not one but two pieces of SF-related fiction. Try to limit your doomscrolling: touch grass, talk to people, make art.

Fall 2024

Ian Campbell

Living in the USA right now feels like the backstory to an SF novel, where in less than a week, some mad scientist is going to pull the quantum lever that sends different versions of each of us off into two different universes, one with a decent and hard-working government that at least attempts to do something to bring us closer to a equitable and inclusive future—though in fact it won’t likely be all that equitable—marked by technological innovation and at least an attempt to mitigate the great Jackpot of climate change, and another future that has concentration camps.

What I never would have thought in all my years reading SF as a child and young adult is that something close to half of Americans want to live in the future with concentration camps.

Many people fear modernity, whether because they’re used to privilege so equality feels like oppression, or whether they’re constitutionally anxious and have a hard time dealing with change. Many people look at the increasingly clear signs of climate change and become reactionaries not out of hatred but out of wishful thinking: maybe they could pull their own quantum lever and go back in time to where it wasn’t quite so hot and loud and fast. In America at least, power has been maintained by the gentry since colonial times by telling downscale white people that no matter how much of their money gets funneled to the gentry, they’ll still have people who don’t count as human to kick down on.

Just imagine the SF novel written about this: some ambiguously hot Special Circumstances agent and her wisecracking drone companion standing there agog, when a white man who misses the days of segregated lunch counters explains that they don’t mind poverty and abjection so long as they get to be gleeful about others’ having it worse.

We don’t have that in this issue of the Review, but we do have a really interesting look at feminized robots and our usual spread of nonfiction, fiction and media reviews. Enjoy them all, while I and half of my compatriots sit around wringing our hands waiting to find out which way that quantum lever sends us. I’m really hoping it’s the future where I don’t get more fake special privilege for being a white guy. Write me at icampbell@gsu.edu.