Category: Nonfiction Reviews

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In The Boom & The Boom, Lyu Guangzhao’s intention is both to close the intellectual distance between two national zones of global sci-fi, and to widen a breach in its established discourse and structure. Two previously disconnected movements within the genre are beginning to speak to each other without US-mediation. Chinese works have already gone global, and modern British works are finding readership in China (5). Academic discourse can, perhaps, facilitate further and deeper mutual recognition.

His subtitle is a straightforward promise: political and historical analysis of sci-fi from two nations. As for the title, Lyu’s ‘booms’ are two ‘new waves’ from broadly parallel historical moments: China’s transition from Maoist communism to growth-oriented ‘post-socialism,’ and Britain from postwar social democracy to post-industrial neoliberalism. The title’s syntax is an intentional invocation of China Mieville’s The City and the City (3), in which two worlds exist side by side, each never recognising the other. (China isn’t chosen for his name: he’s the closest thing to a figurehead of the ‘New Weird’ strain in the British ‘boom.’)

Lyu’s thesis is that key works in each boom built a space to respond to a national and global swing from state socialism to market capitalism. He lays out how British and Chinese writers publishing at the supposed end of history (and later, ‘capitalist realism’) rallied to form critiques and imagine alternative societies. Steering clear of denial and wishful thinking, Lyu underscores how different works lament, subvert, or even imagine accelerations of a turn away from the security and grandeur of a society with socialist ambitions. He dwells much upon questions of coming together, or shattering apart.

In Lyu’s approach, ‘Chinese sci-fi’ and ‘British sci-fi’ are two national literatures unfolding against a historical and political backdrop. Other identities and languages within each state fall outside the fame. The first two of Lyu’s five chosen British authors are Scots, but this fact proves incidental. Appended to Lyu’s broadly left political approach is the use of theorists from the critical canon—Marx, Jameson, Foucault, etc—but also of figures and schools such as Mark Fisher, Gilles Deleuze, and Object Oriented Ontology. Deleuze in particular bridges orthodoxy and the weirder theorists.

Lyu also draws on literary specialists. Examples concerning China: David Der-wei Wang for Sinophone literature, and Li Hua, Song Mingwei, and Nathaniel Isaacson for Chinese science fiction. Concerning Britain, Stuart Hall for politics and culture in the neoliberal era, and Roger Luckhurst and Andrew M Butler for commentary on UK sci-fi and its boom—not to mention choice quotes from the politicians Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Nigel Lawson, and (naturally) Margaret Thatcher.

Each chapter pairs one novel or series from the British boom with a correspondent from the Chinese boom. Lyu’s selected texts also mix intuitive and niche choices. Of the five British authors selected, Iain M Banks and China Mieville are the celebrities, Ken MacLeod a rung or two lower, James Lovegrove a could-have-been who receded into IP tie-ins, and M John Harrison a dark star. Of the five Chinese novels selected, two of the five are not published in English translation. One author, Long Yi, has had none of his works released in English.

The introductory chapter, Mapping the Field, sets the model for the book’s pleasingly symmetrical approach. After defining ‘boom’ and introducing each of them, Lyu sets the historical context for one nation, and then the other. Britain goes first. The section A Journey to the Right: The Rise of Thatcherism is a detailed political timeline starting with the end of Britain’s postwar consensus and progressing to the present. Those familiar with the terrain could skip it, but whether as a refresher or introduction, the marriage of detail and flow is commendable. Next comes Challenging the Narrative: British SF Boom as Left-Wing Responses, discussing Thatcher’s legacy in British culture, and how it relates to sci-fi. In Lyu’s telling, the left’s material defeat shifts resistance to culture, which is in turn neutered by institutions (31), yet sci-fi maintains an edge due to its low status (32). In the book’s concluding chapter, Chinese sci-fi faces a similar conundrum. When you are nobody, there is no need to become respectable. But when you are somebody, the reverse [277].

Next, China. In the section Before the SF Boom: Spiritual Pollution and “Top-down” Elitism, Lyu details the first attempt at a post-Mao emergence of sci-fi, and how it fell victim to an intellectual pile-on in which a new cultural elite resorted to a moralistic backlash that favoured science writing over science fiction. Lyu’s summary brings this history into English—extremely helpful for readers previously unfamiliar with the names of key players and publications. Chinese sci-fi’s complicated relationship with liberalisation continues in the next section, The Cat’s Colour Does Not Matter: Deng’s Reform and the Dawning of the Chinese Boom. Lyu first details how, despite pushback, China’s opening up continued, albeit with a heavy skew toward marketisation. The decoupling of publishing houses from state protection forced them to consider the tastes of readers, thus freeing sci-fi from the judgements of once-dominant intellectual elites (49). Lyu pins the start of the Chinese boom to 1991, when the magazine Science, Art and Literature changed its name to Science Fiction World, an indicator of collective insistence on the value of applying fiction, and not just educational writing, to scientific topics (52).

Lyu finishes the introduction with a claim sitting on the verge where academia falls away into esoterica: that the parallel emergence of the UK and PRC booms is not coincidental, but rather two local expressions of the same hyperobject. Or in plainer English, products of a force/system so massive that it resides on the edges of human comprehension (53).

More concretely, Lyu tees up his next task: to initiate dialogue between the booms (54). In his words, they are family: “Fraternal twins already separated for too long.” (53) In Chapter 1, The Ones Who Walk Away, Lyu’s first attempt to connect the twins brings in Han Song’s Red Star Over America (火星照耀美国) (2000) and Iain M Banks’ Culture series. The topic is ‘disrupted utopias.’ At the opening of Red Star (also translatable as ‘Mars’), China is governed by a benevolent AI named Amanduo, whose collapse triggers massive chaos. The main character, a Chinese go champion, sets out across America to seek a replacement utopia. Lyu argues that Amanduo represents various aspects of China’s authoritarian model, from grand-narrative Marxism to post-Mao humanism: secure, static, suffocating. Though it was never perfect nor sustainable, once dead it can be mourned as a lost utopia. But in its collapse, the innocent optimism necessary to conceive another utopia dies (76). Thus, nothing subsequent can suffice.

Lyu ends his discussion of post-utopian China by noting that a search for a ‘new form of sovereignty’ could look to Iain Banks’ Culture: “the other utopia that exists in the shadow of its own disruption” (79). Lyu then introduces the Culture (series) as something less grand: as Banks’ vengeance against Thatcherism (84), taken by modelling a new form of space opera centred on a society running on what we might call “fully automated luxury communism” (Bastani). Then, citing Sherryl Vint’s use of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Lyu details how a close reading of the series indicates that the Culture in fact reflects the real-world shift from classical forms of imperialism (power secured through force, territory, conquest, hierarchy, purity) to the American (90) postmodern form (power secured through values, lifestyle, assimilation, decentralisation, hybridity). He guides the reader to note a fundamental contradiction in both the Culture and the US: a society that vaunts freedom, plurality, and noble ethics, but practices confrontation and homogenisation, driven by a fundamental belief in the value of itself over all alternatives (96). Lyu closes with comparisons of Han Song’s dying utopia and Banks’ contradictory utopia, focusing particularly on a comparison of their respective AI governors: the centralised Amanduo and the distributed, autonomous Minds. Scarcity is also discussed, which leads into the next chapter.

Chapter 2, What’s Past is Prologue, concerns ideological options for building an ideal society, operating under the constraints and dilemmas of political reality. Lyu’s chosen texts are Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds (流浪苍穹) (2016) and Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series. Lyu starts with Vagabonds, which follows youths torn between a high-minded collectivist society built on Mars, and a hyperindividualist consumer society on Earth. The former offers a managed life of intellectual and technical pursuits; secure but solemn. The latter promises personal freedom and self-expression, but a constant fight to sink or succeed. Lyu’s focus is to evaluate this Martian variant of utopia. In comparing one of its key mechanisms with China’s once-foundational work unit (danwei) system, he brings in insight those less familiar with China would surely miss (106). He also dwells on the characters’ feelings of disenchantment, and notes that the Martian society’s noticeably academic system of funding and citation bears a similarity with Earth’s capitalism: both systems motivate their subjects through competition and personal ambition rather than solidarity and collective enrichment (116). So, as Hao Jingfang intends, Lyu reads her Mars as an ambiguous utopia.

Lyu then brings in Robert Nozick’s concept of meta-utopia to deal with MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series: that is, a zone in which contrasting utopian models can be attempted and administered, leaving individual humans free to migrate and participate in their preferred version of society. MacLeod’s series features and explores both socialist and libertarian ideas, yet for Lyu the series’ fascination with the market—imagined to its extremes, and safe from consignment to the scrapheap of history—suggests the “historical exhaustion” (135) of the neoliberal era in Britain. Capitalist realism in space, legislated by a weary socialist. Earlier, Lyu notes that MacLeod’s characters are luckier than Hao’s (122). The former don’t need to forge or overthrow societies to find their ideological home. The latter are orphans forever. But at the chapter’s end he evens the score, noting that both authors’ characters live in universes where no conclusive utopia can exist (136).

Chapter 3, Long Live the Vampire, returns from space to consider how China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (2013) use elements of speculative genre, chaos, and the weird to approach social issues and dynamics as they exist on Earth today: foremost the exploitation of the weak and the marginal, hybrid identity, and collective resistance. In Chen’s words, spoken in 2007 at a conference in Chengdu (Dongmei): “reality has surpassed science fiction.” The vampire in question is capitalism, not any lone predator. Neither author leads: Lyu’s analyses the books in tandem. The theory he deploys here is Foucault’s heterotopia, concerning marginal places of otherness and difference – worlds in words, opposite but adjacent, again mirroring Mieville’s The City and the City (2009). Cities and symbols are Lyu’s starting point. He explains that the Silicon Isle (硅屿, guī yǔ) of Waste Tide stands in for the real town of Guiyu (贵屿, guì yǔ), a massive e-waste recycling hub on the edge of Chen’s native Shantou (141). Perdido Street Station’s New Crobuzon stands for London: colossal, mongrel, fluid, and vastly unequal (149). The exploited of the former are, just as in real Chinese cities, domestic migrants from poorer provinces. The exploited of the latter are a diverse array of humanoid species, standing in for London’s globalised, multiethnic populace.

Lyu’s analysis begins following the natural fault lines for each group, considering class foremost for the migrant workers and identity for the ‘xenoid’ species. But as the chapter progresses, he weaves this back around. Concerning the waste people, he analyses how social demarcations and anxieties form a social caste for them, blocking them from integration or synthesis with the ‘natives’ of Silicon Isle (152), and thus allowing class exploitation for profit to continue. Concerning New Crobuzon, he explores how the technocratic aristocracy work in conjunction with organised crime to engineer the vampiric conversion of citizens’ dreams into a commodity: a drug. The distinction here is that in Waste Tide, exploitation has arisen without conspiracy, whereas in Perdido Street Station the elite use weird forces to force it on the populace (164). The reader may decide for themself which world is more frightening and chaotic.

Chapter 4, From Consumption to Prosumption, deals with worlds where market logic and consumer psychology have achieved total dominance, and to do so brings the reader into less-mapped literary space. James Lovegrove’s Days is an early entry (1999) from an author who departed from the British boom to write less ambitious works: mostly teen fiction, pastiche and IP tie-ins. Long Yi’s Earth Province is far more recent (2018), but is not available in English translation. Lyu uses each to move from class society to consumer society: another mirror, this time reflecting Britain and China’s journey across the new millennium. The former from postwar democratic socialism of unions and nationalised industries to a financialised and individualist service economy, and the latter from revolution, rigid Maoism, and the ‘iron rice bowl’ to market reforms, an expanded personal freedom, and burgeoning inequality.

Days is a satire focusing on a middle Britain fixated upon an all-encompassing department store. Earth Province is something darker: a depiction of our planet under the thumb of an alien race who harvest us for food. In Days, the store is the locus of prestige and desire. In Earth Province, every aspect of society is up for sale, purchase, and taxation. Life ends at 45 for men and 40 for women, but that too can be prolonged by a purchase. This pair clicks perfectly with Lyu’s titular concept, presumption: a mode of consumerism in which the consumer pays to contribute to production (203). Aided by Days, Earth Province, and his chosen theorists, Lyu demonstrates how, in both British and Chinese novels, the desirous and defanged consumer-citizen will now volunteer their own energies to feed the machine,  whether tapping at the McDonald’s self-service screen, or handing over cookies and content to Meta and Meituan.

In Chapter Five, Past the Point of No Return, Lyu uses two trilogies, Liu Cixin’s Three Body and M John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract, to characterise opposing visions of despair and possibility. The former is the logic underpinning the war for survival in Three Body: the universal ‘dark forest’ in which (A) trust is not possible and therefore that which is not self is enemy (214), and (B) everything which is not strictly economic and strategic is a liability that must be jettisoned (224). Lyu interprets the titular zone of Harrison’s series as the opposite (238), not in the sense that it is safe and cheerful, but that it is pluralistic rather than reductive (241), and impossible to capture in any conceivable law or system (240). Lyu frames the dark forest’s conversion of social subjects into objects of capital and enterprise as emblematic of post-socialism and neoliberalism, and documents how in China capitalism’s beneficiaries (corporate elites) (219) and proponents (the online right) (228) have embraced the aspects of Three Body that favour a bleak and narrow will to power. Inability to see beyond the market, recast as virtue.

Lyu finds a line of dialogue in Harrison’s series to summarise his proposed opposition: “Uncertainty is all we have. It’s our advantage. It’s the virtue of the day” (Harrison, 21). Sticking to this line of thinking, Lyu uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to characterise the series: a drama of and journey toward radical multiplicity, decentralisation, and perpetual flux. Lyu is not afraid to use Deleuze and Guatarri’s internal language, either, to frame the series as one in which the principal characters become ‘haecceities’ rocket along ‘rhizomatic’ ‘lines of flight’ to be ‘reterritorialised’ in a blinding light. He returns to the topic of capitalism at the close, suggesting that Harrison’s stories orbiting the Kefahuchi Tract model a way to move beyond capitalism, rather than defeat it through binary war and resistance (255). Readers are free to ponder the length of such a road relative to their own lifespan.

In the conclusion, A Confession of Breach, Lyu considers the breach in literary culture where these two national booms have begun to speak to each other. Lyu devotes the most words to the Chinese boom. As he makes clear, the British boom has conclusively ended, while its Chinese counterpart persists. Lyu’s personal confessions here—really, they’re anecdotes—are illuminating. He recounts conversations with British readers which revealed that their understandings and valuations of the Three Body trilogy were remarkably different from his own, leading him to surmise that the contrast hinged on foreign readers’ desire to experience “Chinese-ness” (261). This prompts a digression on questions of Orientalism, ‘world literature’, and an opportunity for Lyu to synthesise the thoughts of key academics such as David Der-wei Wang and Song Mingwei, and his own: suppose world science fiction is a hyperobject (267), or a planetary literature (279)? The polyphonic planet is a pleasing note to end on, and suitable. Consider the Earth as a hard limit (for the time being), but one host to teeming, cross-pollinating multiplicities.

The Boom and The Boom joins a small but growing cohort of English language academic works on Chinese sci-fi, and is the first to bring in another country on equal terms. The Boom and The Boom is verbose but easily penetrable, and flush with enthusiasm, and thus could serve as a great step up for Anglophone readers who devoured the essays in the Invisible Planets and Broken Stars anthologies edited and translated by Chinese-American writer Ken Liu (or perhaps more appropriately Sinopticon, whose assembler Xueting C Ni is British-Chinese). Lyu’s words can take the reader to places these titles’ paratexts can only tease. Sino-specialism aside, the book will also be of genuine interest for those keen to explore readings of British science fiction, and more broadly how the worldwide turn to market economics ushered in by the likes of Thatcher, Deng, and Reagan has rippled through world cultures.

If I were to reach for a critique of the book I might point to its asymmetries. For example, Lyu is far stronger on context and details for Chinese works: take his run-through of Chinese internet culture wars over Three Body (228), which is of the top rank of all available in English, or his footnote on Chengdu’s botched Worldcon (276). His engagements with British sci-fi skew more broadly, more likely to engage with Britain’s literary figureheads and already-archived discourse than beating-pulse intricacies around, say, household registration laws (143) or uproar over crowdsourced marketing for the Tangdaren instant noodle brand (210). In dealing with Days, for example, we find no mention of Britain’s greatest lost middle class utopia: Debenhams. But whether or not the mirror is askew, and though it is hard to say if one academic can link two worlds, Lyu certainly succeeds in widening the breach, and creating a strange and pleasurable portal for the critical and curious to dive into.

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WORKS CITED

Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism! Novara Media, 2014.

Ren, Dongmei (translated by Xu, Chenmei). Interpreting Folding Beijing through the Prism of Science Fiction Realism. Chinese Literature Today. 7:1, 54-57. 2018.

Harrison, M John. Nova Swing. Gollancz, 2006.

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Angus Stewart is a Dundonian living in Greater Manchester who writes occasional strange stories and essays. His fiction has appeared in various small publications including Ab Terra, Necksnap, and Dark Horses. His writing on Chinese literature and culture has featured in Asian Cha, the Asian Review of Books, and Crumble. He holds a BA Hons in English Literature and Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, and an MSc in Publishing from Edinburgh Napier University. He spent several years teaching in China, and currently works as an editor within the bowels of the University of Manchester. His show, the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, is on hiatus.

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Jesús “Jess” Franco (1930–2013) occupies a unique position within European genre cinema, navigating the boundaries between exploitation, auteur filmmaking, and underground aesthetics. The years 1953 to 1966 mark Franco’s formative period, laying the foundation for his later cult status. Despite directing over two hundred films, Franco has remained a marginal figure in mainstream film scholarship, though his work has garnered considerable attention within cult cinema circles. Academic engagement with his body of work remains uneven and often polarized, oscillating between celebratory fan discourses and outright critical dismissal. Notable contributions include Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco (1993) by Lucas Balbo, Peter Blumenstock, Christian Kessler, and Tim Lucas, which combines biographical insights with an accessible, albeit non-academic, exploration of Franco’s recurring motifs and aesthetic tendencies. Similarly, Alain Petit’s The Strange Case of Jesús Franco (1998) provides filmographic detail and personal recollections, though its critical perspective is limited. More recently, Stephen Thrower’s two-volume work, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco (2015), has become a key reference for both scholars and fans, offering production histories and in-depth analysis. However, its coverage of Franco’s early films remains cursory, focusing predominantly on his later, more sensational output. Within the broader context of European exploitation cinema, Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956–1984 (1995) situates Franco alongside contemporaries such as Jean Rollin and José Ramón Larraz, emphasizing his transgressive role within genre traditions. Nevertheless, focused academic attention on Franco’s early career (1953–1966) remains notably scarce—a gap that The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 directly addresses.

Primary sources authored by Franco himself offer valuable insights into his creative process and self-perception as a filmmaker. His statements, dispersed across interviews and liner notes for home video releases, reveal his resistance to genre classifications and his commitment to artistic subversion. Notably, La noche pasa demasiado lenta (1991), Franco’s semi-autobiographical and poetic work, provides a glimpse into his personal mythology and creative psyche, blending fiction with reflections on his cinematic preoccupations. Further interviews compiled in Balbo et al.’s Obsession and Thrower’s Murderous Passions illuminate Franco’s views on censorship, genre hybridity, and his complex relationship with commercial and avant-garde cinema. Although often anecdotal, these sources are essential for understanding the idiosyncratic trajectory of Franco’s early artistic development.

The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 offers a timely, well-researched examination of Franco’s often overlooked early films, situating them within two intersecting frameworks: the political and cultural conditions of Francoist Spain, and the industrial dynamics of European co-productions. By focusing on his formative years—characterized by genre experimentation, musical influences, and subversive elements—the book fills a significant gap in Franco critical studies. It challenges the prevailing assumption that his career began solely within exploitation cinema, instead of foregrounding his engagement with diverse genres and artistic aspirations. As discussed in Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco (1993), these early films provided fertile ground for experimentation, wherein Franco explored musical motifs and genre hybridity, foreshadowing the more defined horror and erotic aesthetics of his later work. The book offers critical reassessment through archival research, primary sources, and detailed film analysis.

Authors Francesco Cesari and Roberto Curti engaged in rigorous archival work, drawing on censorship records, contemporary reviews, and production documents to construct a comprehensive portrait of Franco’s artistic development. Their approach significantly deepens the understanding of Franco’s early output, demonstrating that his subversive tendencies and experimentation were present from the outset.

While The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 provides an academically grounded, contextual analysis of his early work, Cesari and Curti’s earlier publication, The Jess Franco Files – Vol. 1: Cuatro guiones y una sinopsis de Jesús Franco (2017), offers a complementary perspective through its use of primary sources. This volume presents four of Franco’s screenplays and one synopsis, granting unprecedented access to his creative process through previously unpublished materials. As an archival resource, The Jess Franco Files is invaluable for researchers focused on textual analysis and script development.

In contrast, The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 prioritizes critical interpretation, situating Franco’s early films within the socio-political and industrial contexts of post-war Spain and Europe. It combines scholarly argumentation with insights from secondary sources, production histories, and interviews, rather than relying exclusively on Franco’s unmediated creative documents. Its strength lies in connecting these early films to broader discourses on genre cinema, censorship, and transnational production, while The Jess Franco Files provides raw textual material without substantial analytical framing.

One of the book’s most compelling contributions is its examination of Franco’s relationship with national identity and international co-productions. The authors demonstrate how his collaborations with French, German, and Portuguese producers enabled him to transcend the constraints of Spanish cultural policy, resulting in films that defy straightforward categorization. In doing so, the book aligns with contemporary scholarship that reframes European exploitation cinema as inherently transnational. Rather than portraying Franco as merely a purveyor of low-budget cinema, Cesari and Curti present him as a director who actively negotiated the boundaries of artistic freedom within restrictive political and commercial environments. Their research underscores Franco’s ongoing experimentation with narrative form and genre conventions as central to understanding his evolution as an artist, preceding the more sensational elements that would later define his reputation.

However, the book offers limited exploration of how Franco’s early films were marketed, censored, or critically received beyond Spain. While it provides a thorough analysis of the transnational production context, the international reception of these works receives comparatively less attention. This omission mitigates? inhibits? makes it difficult for readers to gain? a comprehensive understanding of the global circulation and legacy of Franco’s pre-1967 output—an area complicated by the post-war political climate and the challenges of incomplete, poorly preserved, or lost film records from the period.

Despite this limitation, the book makes a substantial contribution to cult cinema studies by elevating Franco’s early work from historical obscurity to essential groundwork for his later, more widely discussed productions. By centering on this neglected period, Cesari and Curti invite a reassessment of Franco as a filmmaker whose artistic ambitions extended well beyond his most controversial films.

The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 offers a much-needed scholarly examination of a crucial yet underexplored phase in Franco’s career. Through meticulous archival research and critical film analysis, the book challenges reductive readings of his early work and situates it within broader cultural and industrial frameworks. While certain aspects, particularly international reception, could be more fully developed, the book ultimately succeeds in addressing a significant gap in research about Jess Franco. It serves as a vital resource for scholars of Spanish cinema, European genre film, and cult cinema more broadly, representing a key step in the ongoing academic reassessment of Jess Franco’s diverse and often misunderstood filmography.

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WORKS CITED

Balbo, Lucas, et al. Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco. Editions 7e Dimension, 1993.

Franco, Jesús. La noche pasa demasiado lenta. Ediciones La Máscara, 1991.

Franco, Jesús. The Jess Franco Files: Cuatro Guiones y Una Sinopsis de Jesús Franco (Laberinto; La Noche Tiene Ojos; El Castillo de Frankenstein; Un Tiro en la Sien; Orloff 2001). Edited by Roberto Curti and Francesco Cesari, 2017.

Petit, Alain. The Strange Case of Jesús Franco. L’Étrange Festival, 1998.

Thrower, Stephen. Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco. Vol. 1, Strange Attractor Press, 2015.

Tohill, Cathal, and Pete Tombs. Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956–1984. Titan Books, 1995.

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Elena Natalia Romea Parente holds a PhD in Spanish Cinema and Literature, with a doctoral dissertation focused on the Spanish mystic filmmaker José Val del Omar. She also holds dual degrees in English and Spanish Studies, as well as a Master’s in European Literary Studies. Her academic career includes teaching appointments at several Spanish universities, including the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). In addition to her scholarly work, she is the founder of Spanish Fear (spanishfear.com), a platform and podcast dedicated to the study and dissemination of Spanish horror cinema. Her research engages with multidisciplinary contemporary narratives, with particular emphasis on horror, the uncanny, and the aesthetics of strangeness.

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Miguel Sebastián-Martín is a postdoctoral researcher and teacher in the English Department at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, where in 2023 he completed the PhD dissertation behind the volume here reviewed, Thinking through High-Tech Hell: A Theory of the New Media Dystopia. Sebastián-Martín, an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge, focuses his research on Anglophone speculative fiction in audio-visual media. In this volume, he studies in particular diverse British and American 2010s series, which he presents as part of the SF sub-genre of new media dystopia.

With this label, Sebastián-Martín refers to the series that criticize digital capitalism while being at the same time successful products of the digital-capitalist streaming platforms. Sebastián-Martín’s volume is informed by the underlying supposition that new media dystopia is part of an epoch-making structure of feeling, as a narratively reflexive sub-genre, as an aesthetically ambivalent form, and as the expression of (post-)postmodern quixotism. The author explores which ways the series selected contribute to, rather than truly criticize, the hopelessness with which we face seemingly indestructible contemporary capitalism, and encourages readers to boldly face the high-tech SF hell that current life is in the age of digital capitalism.

The success of the series that Sebastián-Martín analyzes is paradoxically based on inviting viewers to acknowledge the many points of contact between SF and current reality, and to critically rethink both, but without abandoning the 21^st century dystopian structure of feeling. Sebastián-Martín wonders, therefore, whether the series do offer a truly meaningful discourse beyond the attractive post-cyberpunk aesthetics and the enjoyable reflexivity about their own medium: platform TV. The author argues that, actually, the often-ironic approach to their position as SF audiovisual texts made to entertain a media-savvy audience results in a rather limited critical-dystopian message. Often, the characters express a utopian impulse, but, since this follows the myth of Don Quixote, spectators are left with no feasible referents for actual change. Unless, that is, they approach the fictions of new media dystopia as Quixotes ready to fight digital-capitalist giants even knowing they’re windmills.

Thinking through High-Tech Hell is divided into four substantial chapters, each constituting an area of theoretical exploration dense enough to originate a separate volume (the author himself hints this might be particularly desirable in the case of the last chapter, devoted to examining quixotism, and I agree). Chapter 1, “Our Hopeless SF Times: Contemporary Capitalism as a New Media Dystopia,” addresses the contradictions articulating the bleakness that current dystopia expresses, paying attention to left melancholy, capitalist realism, and, above all, to Raymond William’s notion of the structure of feeling. Inspired by Tom Moylan’s concept of the critical dystopia and its links to hope, Sebastián-Martín investigates how in dystopia “contrasting ideological impulses, the utopian and the anti-utopian, are put into dialog, resulting in a complex interplay of hopefulness and cynicism” (43). He worries, though, that our postmodern stance and the neoliberal hegemony are preventing us from finding an alternative to the bleak vision of the dystopian future. This dark panorama has been thoroughly absorbed by SF, so that “new media are now re-imagined as a science-fictional novum when they are understood as a totality and a totalizing force that seems to be taking history in a dystopian direction” (83, original italics). The series, in short, might seem just the cherry on top of the fictional dystopian cake, but they are actually a basic ingredient in our march towards something that might be even worse than the current capitalism.

Chapter 2, “New Media Reflexivity: Self- Referentiality and Self-Consciousness in the Audio-Visual SF of Digital Platforms,” claims that this speculative sub-genre mirrors the nature of the digital media themselves. Using Pedro Javier Pardo’s transmedia model of reflexivity, Sebastián-Martín reads Amazon’s serialized adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Black Mirror’s interactive film Bandersnatch, made for American Netflix after the series abandoned UK’s Channel Four. For the author, new media reflexivity is both “a symptom of digital capitalism’s dominant dynamics, which predispose a degree of commodified self-referentiality” but also “a potential mode of estrangement that can be allied with SF’s own estrangement—and directed against the system from within” (120), though neither production ultimately challenges the thriving streaming platforms system of production and consumption.

Chapter 3, “Between Critique and Mystification: The Aesthetic and Ideological Ambivalences of New Media Dystopias,” explores the essential ambivalence of this sub-genre, which offers its products as a potential critique of the excesses of technology while flaunting that same technology as the source of mere SF audio-visual spectacle, just as SF cinema has always done. The analysis of HBO’s Westworld in comparison to Devs (a DNA/FX production distributed by Hulu) also raises the issue of whether unnecessary plot complexity is the main enemy of new media dystopia and the main hindrance to build clear-cut utopian hope.

Chapter 4, “New Media Quixotism: Satiric and Utopian: Characterizations of Digital Subjectivity,” offers a ground-breaking theorization of current SF’s indebtedness to the myth of Don Quixote. Sebastián-Martín considers Black Mirror’s popular episode “USS Callister” (Netflix), Mr. Robot (US Network) and Maniac (a Netflix remake of a Norwegian series), to explore characters who, following Cervantes’s unique protagonist, mix (science) fiction and reality with different degrees of awareness, and madness. Sebastián-Martín, however, prefers not to deal with the issue of whether this new SF quixotism affects in particular male characters, concluding instead that all spectators are “somewhat quixotic as users of digital technologies” (337) which provide us with dystopian views of the present and the future, as we ponder, each of us alone before the screen, “what we can do about the apparently inevitable” (337).

Thinking through High-Tech Hell: A Theory of the New Media Dystopia does not conceal from readers that its aim is to present a theory of a particular SF sub-genre. This is why the analysis of the series selected leaves readers asking for more (such as information about the platforms distributing the series and the material conditions of production), while the deluge of footnotes leaves us asking for less. Sebastián-Martín assumes a no doubt idealizing quixotic position in trying to impose order onto a very complex phenomenon, as he maps simultaneously the theorization of capitalism (above all of commodified culture), audio-visual SF, the new media, their rather hypocritical dystopian inclinations and their techno-ambivalent gaze (a re-purposing of Laura Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’). He calls, besides, for “theorizing digital platforms as self-referential, all-encompassing paratexts” (341) since “there is still need for a theory of the possibilities—and the limits—that digital cultural consumption poses for reflexive narration” (341). The author’s beautiful quixotism is also manifest in his decision to celebrate his mentor, Pedro Javier Pardo, cited in many points of his book as an indispensable referent, when most of us, Spanish scholars in SF studies and/or English Studies, too often unfairly ignore our own local talent to rely instead on Anglophone big (and small) names.

 “Maybe descending into high-tech hell,” Sebastián-Martín writes as a final conclusion, “was a necessary exercise that gave us a degree of critical-utopian clarity” in the 2010s to “keep on walking away, to see what awaits” (345) beyond the paralyzing hopelessness of the 2020s, to which the popular series of new media dystopia have so significantly contributed. The future calls, indeed, for a new utopian SF but, as Sebastián-Martín warns, this cannot be built unless we abandon our postmodern cynicism and turn technology into a source of welfare rather than despair.

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Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a SFRA member. Dr Martín specializes in Gender Studies, particularly Masculinities Studies, and in Science Fiction Studies. Her most recent books are American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film (2023), Masculinity in Contemporary SF by Men: No Plans for the Future (2025) and Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television (2025, co-edited with Michael Pitts).

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Above all, reading Late Star Trek gives the reader a solid appreciation for the result of scholarly and thoughtful analysis when melded with the enthusiasm, excitement, and feelings of betrayal for a franchise that only a fan can provide. Kotsko’s volume is suffused with his own fannish opinions (for example, his love for the first season of Discovery[1] [DIS] [2017-2024] followed immediately by his crushing disappointment in its remaining seasons, or his scathing summary of the narrative failures of Picard [PIC] (2020-2023), or his clear affection for Lower Decks [LD] [2020-2024]). Trek fans and scholars alike, I believe, will commend Kotsko’s avoidance of stereotypical scholarly bloodlessness; rather, they will, as I do, take delight in the ways in which he is deeply committed to the Trek storyworld in its various permutations and how that longtime love informs his analysis of its successes, failures, and creative potential. I think, in fact, that Kotsko’s work is a model of readable, practical popular cultural analysis, because the best scholars tell us not only factually or analytically what we need to consider about a particular topic but emotionally why that topic is meaningful. There’s uncommon emotional resonance in a media franchise like Star Trek, which has nearly six decades of history behind it, including eleven television series, fourteen films (13 theatrical, 1 streaming) from two different in-universe timelines, more than 850 tie-in novels and story collections, numerous comic book series, and boundless amounts of social and cultural recognition. Such a widespread body of content that has generated so much love and fannish dedication over the years deserves attention, particularly in our late-stage capitalist age when nothing seems free of commodification, even a beloved media franchise that traditionally roots itself in a post-scarcity utopia where inequality is nonexistent.

One of the more valuable portions of Kotsko’s study is his examination of the ways in which “late Star Trek” (the term Kotsko applies to the period of the franchise following the end of Voyager in 2001, the time when “Star Trek stops being a business out of necessity, simply because that’s what it takes to keep new stories, and becomes more purely commodified (2)”) evolves in the face of corporate necessity. Late Star Trek represents a media moment where, as Kotsko puts it, “story decisions are dictated by business strategy, when the quest for new audiences risks undercutting everything the established fans love, and when endless reams of materials are churned out in the expectation that those same fans will shell out for anything with the name Star Trek on it” (Ibid.) (No doubt Star Wars fans are nodding along with this sentiment.) However, Kotsko never simply surrenders to a simplistic model in which late Trek = late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism (and a concomitant assumption that late Trek is automatically and forever worse than the original series or Next Generation [1987-1994]). Instead, throughout the book he brings to bear his inner Trekkie and posits that Trek avoids full commodification in this late period—despite multiple dramatic missteps—because the people who generate and consume it still tend to love it (well, perhaps not Section 31 [2025]) and take to heart the ethics, values, and ethos that mark the Trek universe. And by proceeding step by step through each iteration of post-Voyager (1995-2001) Trek, Kotsko produces what he calls “a case study for late capitalist franchise storytelling…(and) our understanding of a franchise that has always been noted for its relative intellectual sophistication and has therefore held a privileged place in the academic study of popular culture” (16). Furthermore, he looks deeply into the double-edged, fraught influence of franchise “canonicity,” which throughout Trek is a push-and-pull struggle between fan service (where canonicity is enshrined as the highest value), artistic freedom as expressed through discontinuity from the main established storyworld narrative (which can be a perilous endeavor the more it pulls away from that narrative), and maximizing worldbuilding (which synthesizes both these other strategies, but which risks losing character and plot development). His method is an elegant one for exploring canon in all its ramifications for a franchise, ranging from igniting fannish enthusiasm to a cheap replacement for narrative exploration.

These three different narrative strategies and their varying levels of deployment mark the directions of every Trek iteration in late Trek.  Kotsko begins with an exploration of the prequel show Enterprise (2001-2005), Star Trek’s redheaded stepchild, generally disliked by fans and eschewed by scholars. The series, under franchise bêtes noires Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, had the unenviable task of being the first Trek iteration to try and solidify the universe’s timeline into some sort of cohesive whole. But despite bright spots, Kotsko argues that the show was dragged down by the creative decision to make a prequel (that should, by definition, prioritize fan service and reward fannish understanding of franchise lore) that instead tried to center Berman and Braga’s desire for creative freedom which ended by downplaying or ignoring the Trek tradition of progress, diversity, and inclusion. Later attempts in the show to try and exercise fan service (i.e. the Klingon head ridges storyline) were maladroit and unnecessary at best, producing in the end a series that was “a fragment, riven by contradictions and continually making promises its creators could not—and perhaps did not even want to—fulfill” (64). However, Kotsko argues that Enterprise set the tone for future late Trek in trying to maintain a successful tension between fan service and creative freedom while making frequent use of in-text meta gestures to continually cement itself into the franchise’s history and evolution.

The next section of the book examines the area of the Trek universe that has received the least scholarly analysis: the “novelverse,” that is, the body of so-called ‘beta canon’ that supplements what we see on screen. Kotsko quotes Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan, who define the novels as “an imaginative space for fans to collectively work out the implications of concepts from televisual Star Trek, as well as to identify and attempt to resolve apparent contradictions in the character portraits, fictional history, and philosophical themes of the series” (70). That massive and complex body of work is no less meaningful because the corporate owners of Trek deem it noncanonical and not legitimate. He uses the works of three different authors to ground his analysis here: Christopher L. Bennett (who personifies effective deployment of fan service), Kirsten Beyer (artistic freedom), and David Mack (Federation- or worldbuilding strategies). The novelverse in many ways, Kotsko argues, enjoyed the freedom to drastically expand our reading of thefranchise from Enterprise through Voyager, but that creative flowering was dramatically curtailed once Picard began production and the novels’ canon was deemed irreconcilable with what the Powers That Be declared “official,” requiring an overwriting and destruction of the entire novelverse, in part, it seems, to meet studio executives’ need for control over a profitable product.

Another chapter explores the “Kelvin Timeline,” the three films from J.J. Abrams set in an alternate timeline and rooted in a creative freedom that would free them from the constraints of an established canon. The first film, Star Trek (2009), however, proved empty in being concerned with nothing more than placing new versions of beloved Original Series characters into familiar positions on board the U.S.S. Enterprise. The next film, Into Darkness (2013) was a poorly disguised 9/11 allegory, and the third, Beyond (2016), is convoluted and, like its predecessor—and much else in late Trek—is darkly overlaid with themes and images of terrorism. The Kelvin reboot/prequel/sequel hybrid series proved ultimately unsuccessful in impacting the greater Trek universe by its emotional and actual separation (mandated by corporate pettiness between co-owners CBS and Paramount) from the beloved Original Series. Kotsko then moves to Trek’s return to television after a 12-year absence: Discovery (2017-2024), whose first season resulted in what Kotsko calls one of the finest story arcs in Trek history, through both a re-embrace of traditional Trek diversity and taking seriously franchise worldbuilding via intricate plots and dramatic retcons (i.e. a devastating Federation-Klingon war that had never been mentioned in the franchise before). But later seasons betrayed this original expansion of artistic freedom by writing the series into an irrelevant dead end and much more clumsy, haphazard worldbuilding.

Kotsko reserves his greatest fannish scorn and disappointment for Picard (2020-2023), the first Trek since the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis to move the timeline forward past Next Generation. As with Discovery, the first season of Picard combined creative freedom with expansive worldbuilding to create a complex and emotionally rich story, one that “breaks” the utopia of Next Generation by placing TNG’s Picard in a Federation that is callous towards Romulan refugees and allows economic inequalities, and where old friends (William Riker and Deanna Troi) live lives marked by grief and trauma. But Picard suffers from developing plot incoherence and an increasing tendency to reset in the name of fan service—season 3 virtually erases season 2—and culminates in a painfully pandering conclusion that reunites the TNG crew on the bridge of the old Enterprise-D battling the last of the Borg. Kotsko notes that this moment marks perhaps the lowest point of late Trek, “the moment when the franchise threatened to transform into a purely cynical commodity, nothing more than ‘content’ churned out to extract subscription fees for Paramount+” (197).

A final chapter plays cleanup by discussing together the latest three Trek shows: the animated and ultra-meta comedy Lower Decks (2020-2024), the animated children’s adventure series Prodigy (2021-2023), and the prequel Strange New Worlds (2022-present), all of which taken together demonstrate late Trek’s potential for narrative variety. All three series share a general unconcern with the knottiness of worldbuilding, that instead obliges them to concentrate on interesting and likeable characters and a return to the episodic nature of old Trek instead of a focus on universe-shattering story arcs that mark Discovery and Picard. Their approach to canon varies. Prodigy, set just before Picard, sidesteps canonical disconnect by setting itself mostly (especially in season 1) in the distant Delta Quadrant, far from the Federation; Lower Decks embraces canon as an opportunity by constantly referencing it as part of the characters’ lived experiences as self-aware fans of the franchise’s past; and Strange New Worlds manages to wear lightly its identity as an ultimate expression of fan service while still flexibly playing with canon without destroying it (i.e. by readjusting the romantic tension between Spock and Christine Chapel, or by giving the lizardlike Gorn a terrifying and horrific Xenomorph-like maturity cycle).

Kotsko concludes his remarkable study on a cautionary note, referencing failures in studio management, corporate tendencies to interfere with creative production, the periodic invalidation of tie-in productions, problems with the streaming television model and, most of all, an overreliance on the significance of franchise canon. He calls this concept of a binding canon “a marketing technique to compel fans to consume every new installment because it may become relevant for still later installments” (239), and worries that, for all the fun that fan theories and connections to canon may generate (I’m certainly guilty myself of such activities!), an iron-clad commitment to a corporate-mandated continuity may ultimately suffocate drama, and cause consumers, driven by a production environment devoted to maximizing profits, to replace appreciation of plots and characters on their own terms in favor of labored, endless searches for canonical connections that may not exist. But, in the finest tradition of the Star Trek he loves, Kotsko holds out optimism, if future Trek creators can be freed from the current neoliberal moment and given freer rein to explore the post-capitalist utopia in which Star Trek resides.

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[1] For the purposes of this review, I am ignoring the naming convention that the titles for all the series discussed here formally begin with the prefix ‘Star Trek:’.

Jeremy Brett is a Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. 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, superheroines, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

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John L. Steadman offers a blunt exploration of H.P. Lovecraft’s racism. While severely limited in his engagement with race scholarship, Steadman nevertheless presents an intriguing exegetic text on key stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Steadman’s main thesis is twofold: Lovecraft’s racism manifests one way in his early works and another way in his later writings. Specifically, the early works have a focus on miscegenation as brought on by immigration, and the later works have a focus on slavery as seen in a master/slave race dichotomy. The book is divided into three parts and nineteen chapters. Part I (Chapters 1-4) is titled ‘Beginnings,’ and it offers an introduction to Lovecraft’s early life with a focus on biographical details, especially his intellectual preoccupations and formative experiences. Part II (Chapters 5-11) is titled ‘Humankind against Hybrid, Degenerative Monsters’ and it is concerned with racism as miscegenation in the early works of Lovecraft. Part III (Chapters 12-19) focuses on the later works, and Steadman’s second thesis respectively; it is titled ‘Humankind against the Cosmic Slave Masters.’ Overall, Steadman’s argument is persuasive in its distinction between Lovecraft’s twofold racist fixation and its development throughout his work. More than that, the book does well to root its thesis in an analysis of Lovecraft’s formative years. The common Lovecraftian protagonist’s ultimate stupor upon uncovering the hidden eldritch knowledge is argued to mirror Lovecraft’s own passivity in dealing with trauma and hardship.

While Steadman presents a focused monograph with a cumulative logic, certain matters tend to get obscured and displaced. For instance, the book, especially in Parts II and III, takes on the format of a single chapter per specific text by Lovecraft. Most chapters of this kind might prove rather descriptive to the reader familiar with Lovecraft’s work, and there is only occasionally a reference to a scholar or writer other than Lovecraft. At the end of both Part II and III, Steadman offers a ‘Critical Commentaries’ chapter (11 and 18, respectively), in which he moves away from the story-specific chapters and situates his own twofold thesis in relation to other scholars. While the bulk of the book tends to have a reverential, albeit critical, approach to the original text, Steadman seems to be rather quick to dismiss certain perspectives from other scholars. For instance, in a discussion of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” (1923), Steadman cites Williams’ work on the hysterical female gothic in relation to Lovecraft’s use of underground locations such as caves and grottoes.  Instead of providing an argument against Williams’ claim (or Callaghan’s claim cited shortly before), Steadman rejects it out of hand and provides a dismissive generalisation about ”so-called psychological analyses of Lovecraft” (90). Interestingly, Steadman does not see his own argument in this vein, even though significant attention is devoted to Lovecraft’s own “pattern of loss and failure […as] evident in the lives of Lovecraft’s main characters” (5). This results in a certain tension that cannot be ignored by the careful reader of the book, let alone the reader familiar with Lovecraft. Specifically, this means that the potential significance of a range of patterns in Lovecraft’s fiction remains ignored; so is the case with the multiple cases of chthonic female goddesses, the symbology of the witch (which Steadman acknowledges on pg.197), and the spatial symbolism of caves and grottoes, especially considering Steadman’s own remarks on Lovecraft’s own formative experiences of restrictive spaces (such as the house he moved into with his mother after his grandfather’s passing, or his inability to enter hospitals and only visiting his ailing mother in the hospital grounds—in fact described as “the grotto” in a quotation provided on p. 27).

This is not an uncommon pattern in the book. Steadman will acknowledge a perspective, only to dismiss it without engaging with the claim in question in much depth. Another example is Simmons’ argument that Lovecraft’s characters are both repulsed and attracted by the Other. Steadman is a little more thorough here with his dismissal of the claim, but similarly as noted above, the tension between the dismissal and Lovecraft’s texts remains unresolved. Steadman claims that there is nothing attractive about the Other in Lovecraft’s work. Such a dismissal has to ignore the very fact that Lovecraft’s characters seek out magic from Western Asia, knowledge from Africa, or refer frequently to places beyond Western Europe and North America as abounding with mystery and danger. In the simplest of terms, Lovecraft’s characters are in need of people over which to rule. The common interweaving of revulsion with attraction in orientalism appears to be a proposition unworthy of consideration for Steadman.

This is indicative of Steadman’s understanding of race, which at times appears superficial, at others severely misguided. The bulk of the conceptualisation of racism seems to rely on Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018). However, despite informing the subtitle of Steadman’s book, DiAngelo seems to be cited only once on the first page of the introduction. Nevertheless, the evocative phrase of ‘white fragility’ is made to carry a lot of weight in support of Steadman’s general lack of engagement with scholars of race. This is made worse in two telling instances. First, in the chapter discussing Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936), there is a misguided, to be quite generous, attempt at riffing on Lovecraft’s racist language that amounts to Steadman himself using the n-word (165). Second, the appendix seeks to go beyond Lovecraft and engage with work that deals head on with Lovecraft’s racism. To do this, Steadman discusses Afrofuturism in general and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) in particular. Steadman’s ignorance of race scholarship is quite telling. It is such ignorance that leads him to draw parallels between Afrofuturist music duo Drexciya and Lovecraft’s work. Steadman (223) cites Kodwo Eshun’s description of Drexciya’s “science-fictional retelling of the Middle Passage,”: in which they imagine “water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of ‘pregnant America-bound African slaves thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo”’ (Drexciya as cited in Eshun, 2003: 300). Steadman, perhaps facetiously, and definitely in bad taste, pontificates so: “The idea of adding the water babies born from drowned female slaves into the mix is intriguing and one, I think, that Lovecraft might not have objected to” (223). To claim that Afrofuturism is “overtly Lovecraftian” (223) is a terrible misreading of the unbridgeable difference in what separates the aesthetics being compared.

Overall, Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft promises an intriguing perspective by trying to pick apart Lovecraft’s racism and its central role throughout his work. Nevertheless, Steadman, while clearly critical of Lovecraft’s racism, fails to provide much insight into the subject. At this point in time, the description and acknowledgement of Lovecraft’s racism is easy and should be the bare minimum in critical scholarship. It is much more important to understand it.

Vladimir Rizov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sussex. His current book project is titled A Criminology of Videogames: Playing at Crime and its Control. He is the author of Urban Crime Control in Cinema: Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression. He has published articles and essays on film, videogames, the history of documentary photography, and urban history.

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Julie Wosk’s Artificial Women explores society’s enduring fascination with the constructed female–who is created in a variety of guises both in reality and fiction, from embodied machines, automatons and robots, to disembodied AIs and virtual voices. In these techno-re-imaginings of the female as servo-bot, Wosk outlines how cultural understandings of women as passive, giving and obedient are held in tension with the reality of lived female personhood, in which women desire agency and self-determination. The primary questions asked are: In the complex world of technology and gender, how do women combat the cultural proliferation of the female as an exploited identity? How do women intervene in a male-dominated industry of technology and engineering that genders servitude as feminine, reifying women as subordinate to the needs of patriarchy and capital? In Wosk’s readings of the artificial woman, she is not opposed to the creation of the female simulacrum to explore human-machine encounters. However, she does insist that we must create her so that the interface between human and machine will, a) productively and positively rehearse the rightful treatment of women, and b) genuinely foster respect for the human female. However, as Wosk’s book highlights, in the service of male desire and in the pursuit of profit, tech companies and corporate businesses are, for the most part, perpetuating archaic stereotypes of women that continue to distort visions and gender relations and future technology. In this respect, Wosk is a crucial voice for scrutinising and contesting male dominated visions of gender and technology.

 Artificial Women begins with a fascinating and compelling introduction that outlines Wosk’s enduring interest in female simulacra in both avant-garde and popular culture. Here, Wosk demonstrates an impressive range and depth of knowledge of the subject in visual, material and literary culture across differing timelines. Following the introduction, Wosk discusses the myriad synthetic females that have been and still are being created and exploited by industry and culture today. In Chapter 1, ‘A New Breed of Sex Robots and Sex Dolls,’ Wosk looks at the female robot and AI as a self-sacrificing sex worker/slave who frequently doubles as an emotional companion. She plays with the stereotype of the ‘tart with the heart’ normalising the male treatment and expectations of such stereotypes in which the human male is put first and women, whether organic or synthetic, second. In Chapter 2, ‘Under the Skin: The Fabricated Femme Fatale,’ the performative masque of the artificial woman as lure and threat is explored through the seductive image of the femme fatale. In this section is the suggestion that the synthetic skin as a progressive development in robot technology is a deception akin to women who are accused of putting on femininity as artifice to distract and subvert for personal gain. In Chapter 3,  ‘Female Robot Caregivers, Doubles, and Companions,’ Wosk’s focus shifts towards social and emotional robots envisioned as caregivers and companions to ailing elderly adults and vulnerable children. Extending to narratives of human loneliness brought about by failing health, cataclysmic events and hostile environments, the female robot – in fiction and reality – is a replacement or double designed to mitigate loneliness or protect their human (or humanoid) charge by emulating human empathy and compassion.

In Chapter 4, ‘Paradoxes of Perfection: A Servant No More,’ Wosk takes the reader through cultural anxieties about technology in the home by exploring the female robot as a familial, domestic helper who ultimately becomes either a perceived threat to traditional family relations or threatens to rebel and break free from her servitude. In Chapter 5, ‘Virtual Voices: Talking Barbie Dolls, Alexa, Bitchin’ Betty and More,’ Wosk discusses the cultural history of the talking doll and automaton and its evolution into disembodied voices and computerised companions that serve as assistants in the work and home and fascinatingly as a warning system in domestic and military aviation. The disembodied female is open to abusive treatment, which Wosk discusses in detail, but when contextualised in a more life-threatening setting and safety is of the utmost importance to protect human life, such as in the field of aviation, the virtual female is afforded respect and the authority of her voice being adhered to without question or derision. Finally, in ‘Coda,’ Wosk summarises her book’s premise of humanity’s hope, fascination and anxiety surrounding the figure of the artificial woman. Can the artificial woman produce new and transformative possibilities for humanity? Or will she reify gender roles that reduce women to a commodity in accordance with patriarchal expectations? It is in these closing pages that Wosk calls to women to intervene in the vast array of new robot and AI technologies. Here she provides examples of women who are already doing so as they work to empower and create a space for living in a complex, contemporary world. It is in these final moments that Wosk draws examples from the active work and engagement of LGBTQ+ and disability communities, a springboard perhaps for further work and research for those who negotiate the everyday from a diverse and alternate position of the human.

Julie Wosk’s book is a relevant new addition to the field of robot technology and gender studies.  Her work on the artificial is long-standing, and her interests are fuelled by life experiences working in media and magazine culture, art, literature and museums. Artificial Women demonstrates Wosk’s extensive knowledge of the cultural and social history of the artificial woman. It is written for academics and students of visual and material culture and literature and accessible for non-academic individuals who are interested in the subject. It provides a comprehensive source of ideas for those who want to take the discussion further.

Sue Smith is an English Teacher at a Post-16 SEN College in Leicestershire, UK. Her interest is in the representation of gender and disability in American Cyborg Fiction. Her current research article is on the robot psychiatrist in American military medicine and American military science fiction.          

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What if the real question cultural artifacts ask after a global catastrophe is not what happened but why do we keep imagining it that way? Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities operates less as a blueprint for the ‘end of times’ and more as a forensic investigation into our collective anxieties, hopes, and failures. It is a kind of whydunit in which the apocalypse is never just an end, but a narrative charged with ideology, desire, and critique. Comprising four major parts, each divided into approximately four chapters, this edited collection catalogues representations of crisis across literature, activism, and performance, interrogating the deeper patterns beneath them. It highlights how cultural production reflects ecological and epidemiological realities, helping us to reimagine what comes next.

Framing the collection within the current world context is a timely and urgent provocation since, even as we appear to teeter on the edge of the so-called posthuman era marked by the collapse of stable binaries, technological saturation, and ecological precarity­, we remain deeply entangled in the complex web of humanity. This foundational tension animates the collection’s interdisciplinary inquiry, which employs theoretical frameworks from scholars such as Jason Moore, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway to explore the ruptures and continuities between the human and the non-human. Concepts such as Moore’s “intimacy, porosity, and permeability,” Barad’s “intra-action,” and Haraway’s “more-than-human” (1) become key tools to unpack how pandemics both reveal and intensify these entanglements. The book’s relevance has only deepened after the COVID-19 pandemic, which has prompted our interconnectedness with microbial and ecological systems in ways we can no longer ignore. The editors are quick to acknowledge that while the volume’s conception was there before the pandemic, its development during this global health crisis makes it a crucial intervention in the present moment. Each section of the book unfolds as an iteration of an ongoing crisis; the sections build upon each other to shed light on how global health, environmental breakdown, and social injustice are not separate but mutually reinforcing.

The editors’ introductory section establishes a theoretical framework that is as ambitious as it is urgent. Rejecting the more familiar language of climate change in favor of the term “ecological breakdown” (5), the editors seek to capture an intricate network of mutually influencing crises: the erosion of biosphere integrity, mass extinction events, and the systemic unraveling of ecological interdependencies. This reframing is not merely semantic since it underscores the collection’s broader commitment to an intersectional analysis attentive to colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, queerphobia, and human supremacy. While this theoretical section gestures toward concepts from critical posthumanism, such as entanglement, and acknowledges ecological affects like fear and anxiety, its brevity occasionally leaves key theoretical anchors underexplored. Nevertheless, the editors articulate a compelling vision of pandemics as events that rupture rather than reinforce human exceptionalism. Their nuanced treatment of utopia and dystopia similarly resists static definitions, proposing instead a dynamic continuum where dystopic collapse may give rise to fragile yet vital forms of hope.

            The first part of the collection, “Monsters and Monstrosity,” draws together a set of chapters that redress the figure of the monster as a key to explore the collapse of boundaries between human and non-human life. Across the three chapters by Tânia Cerqueira, Ujjwal Khobra and Rashmi Gaur, and Timothy S. Murphy, a shared concern emerges with the political and affective work monsters perform within pandemic imaginaries. Rather than framing monstrosity as an object of fear, the narratives explored in these chapters present how figures of contamination, whether viral, ecological, or social, break down with anthropocentric models of agency and citizenship. Cerqueira’s chapter proves foundational, as it introduces the theoretical framework of EcoGothic, a new interpretive lens whereby ecocriticism draws from typical traits from the gothic novel to explain environmentally-related collapse. While Cerqueira leans on gothic and ecological motifs, Kothra and Gaur foreground Braidotti’s politics of otherness. Murphy’s chapter, for its part, pivots toward a more explicit political critique, using Richard Matheson’s novel I am Legend  (1954) to illustrate how ecological and social collapse expose the fragility of dominant power structures, particularly when the majority finds itself displaced. When read together, these chapters not only stage an encounter between historical materialism and new materialism but also signal the collection’s broader project: envisioning forms of posthuman belonging in the ruins of familiar worlds.

If part one foregrounds monstrosity as a rupture in the human/nonhuman divide, part two recalibrates this tension through the lens of intersectionality. What emerges from the chapters in “Intersectional Critique” is a sustained interrogation of how posthuman ecologies are never experienced abstractly but mediated through histories of dispossession, gendered embodiment, and racialized vulnerability. Crucially, these essays do not deploy intersectionality as a stable lens. Rather, this framework works as a moving analytic that constantly shifts according to context. Legatt’s discussion of “fungal capital” (71) in HBO’s TV show The Last of Us (2023–) and Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) underscores how capitalist flow masquerades as disorganized rhizomes that subtly reproduce hierarchies of value and access. However, these rhizomes also embody the potential for radical horizontal solidarities that surface in crisis. Benjamin Burtt’s reading of Joca Reiners Terron’s novel Death and the Meteor contrasts this view by foregrounding the Indigenous experience of ongoing apocalypse as colonial continuity, not rupture, and evokes ritual, not resilience, as a form of collective refusal. Meanwhile, González-Bernardez and Rossi’s respective chapters resist the treatment of nature as passive terrain: in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015) and Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), the nonhuman world functions as a volatile ethical subject where vulnerability emerges not as a weakness but as a condition for political transformation.

The third part of this collection critically interrogates the concept of mutual aid, particularly in its intersection with ecological justice. COVID-19 put mutual aid into the spotlight but stripped it of its radical roots to serve the political elites as a mask to state failures. Yet, the contributions of this section return to the concept’s original transformative potential, expanding the boundaries of mutual aid beyond human-centric frameworks. Curtis’ chapter explores post-pandemic science fiction to reveal how the genre’s preoccupation with environmental justice urges a shift from survivalist thinking toward proactive frameworks that seek justice for both human and non-human life. Similarly, Horn, Martin, and Seville’s analysis of Charles Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole (1995) shows how the viral transmission of a sexual disease turns into an agent of transformation that fosters posthuman sensibility. Both analyses critique anthropocentric, capitalist frameworks that isolate humans and their environments, urging instead a radical reimagining of interdependent solidarity.  Grześkiewicz and Boschen’s chapter also adds to this critique by underscoring the destructive effects of state-imposed borders and the potential of more-than-human solidarity in resisting it. Collectively, these chapters foreground that more-than-human mutual aid does not simply offer an antidote to neoliberalism’s failures but a push for radical ecological and social justice that embraces a multispecies, interconnected world.

Part four, “Creative Resistance and Utopian Glimmers,” turns away from critique as diagnosis toward critique as creation. This section assembles a set of chapters that treat culture as a mode of political and ecological practice. Throughout these chapters, utopia is not presented as a distant concept, but as a set of situated, messy practices: DIY music enclaves, pandemic theater, and youth-led climate action. Moreover, these contributions offer a sustained interrogation of how aesthetics and performance can resist the logic of legal, spatial, ecological enclosure and foreground relational forms of agency. Käkelä, Breemen, Yağcıoğlu, and McKnight all push back against narratives of apocalyptic finality, opting instead for a speculative mode rooted in entanglement between humans and more-than-human actors, between past devastation and future invention. Importantly, these chapters do not romanticize resilience or prefiguration. Their focus is instead on how minor gestures, or “micro-utopias” (215) as McKnight calls them, can reorient perception and shape collective imaginaries. Nonetheless, a critical tension persists: can cultural resistance unsettle the infrastructures of surveillance, control, and commodification it navigates? Or does it risk being reabsorbed as aesthetic capital in the very systems it critiques? This section insists that utopian thinking must remain alert to this paradox, which is at once generative and complicit, speculative and material.

In sum, Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown is a timely and thought-provoking collection that does more than analyze crisis. It dwells in it, navigates through it, and asks what forms of thought and practice might still be possible from within wreckage. There is something about this collection that sets it apart from others. It refuses to offer simple solutions or neatly packaged theories. Instead, it models a form of scholarly engagement that is porous, speculative, and deeply rooted in the urgency of our current moment. Whether discussing plague literature, performance during lockdown, or youth climate movements, these contributions do not deliver definite conclusions. Rather, they equip readers, especially scholars, students, and artists, with conceptual tools to rethink what critique, resistance, and creativity can mean in a world shaped by ecological collapse and viral entanglement. In that sense, it is not just a collection of essays but an invitation to reimagine how we live, relate, and create in times of crisis.

Corpus Navalón-Guzmán holds a PhD in English Literature and Culture from the University of Murcia, where she completed her dissertation on queer trauma in contemporary Anglophone literature and cinema. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Northampton and Ghent University. Her research interests include queer theory, trauma studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies, with a focus on the representation of queer trauma in literary and cinematic texts.

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Although use of the term ‘folk horror’ has been traced back to 1936, it was not until the twenty-first century that it entered the critical lexicon, used by director Piers Haggard to describe his 1971 film Blood on Satan’s Claw in 2003, and then by actor, writer and director Mark Gatiss, with reference to Haggard’s film as well as to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973), in the 2010 documentary A History of Horror. Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed, edited by Louis Bayman and K. J. Donnelly and recently released in paperback following its 2023 hardback publication, delves deeper into this now canonised triad, but also reaches back to Night of the Demon (1957) and forward to Apostle (2018), and examines films more typically associated with other genres, such as the science fiction thriller Doomwatch (1972). Comprising fourteen chapters, the book begins with debates on The Wicker Man—today the best-known of the “unholy trinity” (Scovell, 8)—followed by analysis of the titular ‘Return of the British repressed,’ and, finally, of ‘Folk horror’s cultural landscapes.’

Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) sparked new interest in folk horror, which Scovell theorised not as a subgenre or (as is often the case in Gothic studies) a mode, but rather as a “chain” that links “disparate forms of media through their summoning of … themes and ideas,” including isolation, unsettling landscapes, “a skewed belief system or morality,” and a “happening” or “summoning” (Scovell, 17–18). As Bayman and Donnelly observe, “folk horror is of the folk themselves, and of the wider conditions that sustain their existence” (5). As the unity of the United Kingdom disintegrates, with 54% of Scottish adults favouring independence as of March 2025 polling and thousands of farmers protesting proposed changes to inheritance tax in the English capital in 2024, British folk horror’s interrogation of national identity and evocation of metropolitan anxieties concerning rural communities are increasingly relevant. This collection thus offers politically as well as academically significant theorisations of such cultural products.

The opening three chapters probe The Wicker Man’s religious ideologies. While Ronald Hutton identifies a representation of “paganism as dangerous in a way that either Christianity or modern scientific scepticism are not” (34), Laurel Zwissler reads the film as offering “a carnivalesque experience for viewers, both Pagan and otherwise” (51). As Miken J. Koven notes, however, the word “Pagan,” derived from “[t]he Latin pagamus,” which “simply meant rural,” was later “further applied to designate between dichotomies of … Christian/non-Christian,” and as a consequence, “to identify as Pagan is nonsensical because to do so would be to recognise the hegemonic power of the Church” (58-9). Such varied perspectives exemplify the collection’s excavation of the complexity of Britain’s cultural and mythological history.

Derek Johnston begins the following section with an interpretation of “folk horror communities as microcosms of the wider nation,” particularly in their “reproduction of a form of class system” (79). Dawn Keetley likewise attends to capitalism’s influence, reading Doomwatch as centrally concerned with “the life-destroying sickness of global modernity that dooms land and people alike” (89). In his analysis of Requiem for a Village (1975), Paul Newland similarly identifies the locus of horror not in the film’s undead, but in its “faceless, gigantic mechanical leviathans” (109). But the past is as threatening as the present. Donnelly reads folk horror “as a form of historicism,” revealing “a forgotten – and happily forgotten – heritage” (117) and producing “an ‘outsider’ version of Britain’s history” (129). As Beth Carroll argues, however, folk horror’s relegation of regions beyond “England, and arguably even more specifically the south of England and London” to outsider status (131), rather than contesting this traditional hegemony, instead “assume[s] an English framework and mode of viewing” (144), reinforcing existing power structures. Amy Harris’ examination of folk horror as “defined by androcentrism” (152), meanwhile, brings vital attention to the Othering of women in the folk horror tradition – a form of exclusion endemic not just to British history, folklore and folk horror itself, but also to related academic discourse. The ‘British repressed’ of the collection’s title thus emerges as referring less to marginalised communities than to the actual processes of marginalisation – geographic, socioeconomic and gendered – that have shaped British history at the level of both content and methodology.

In the final section, David Evans-Powell and Mark Goodall explore the ascription of “agency, sentience or autonomy” to landscapes (Evans-Powell, 178) and “to the built-up environment, liminal areas and technology” (Goodall, 211) in traditional folk horror and what Goodall terms the “urban wyrd” (211). This transgression of the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate is mirrored by a coalescence of the diegetic and non-diegetic. Goodall notes that the rape scene in Blood on Satan’s Claw is “filmed voyeuristically[,] forcing the viewer to be almost party to the crime” (214), while Lyndsay Townshend explores the role of drums in “conjuring … community, bodily affect and fear” (164), acting “as a sonic identifier for a human heartbeat” (175) that encourages corporeal identification in viewers. Diane A. Rodgers also considers audience response in her analysis of the “wyrd,” which she suggests generates “a general sense of brooding fear” (225). As well as cultural, theological and historical frameworks, then, the collection also attends to audience studies—a growing area of academic interest that is essential to analysis of texts so concerned with emotion, corporeality and communality.

WORKS CITED

Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur Publishing, 2017.

Brontë Schiltz is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, England. Her work has been published in The Sibyl, Fantastika Journal, Aeternum Journal, SIC Journal, Revenant Journal and Horrified Magazine, as well as several edited collections. She features on documentaries and commentaries on Hammer’s 2025 rereleases of The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2, and has appeared on podcasts including Victorian Legacies, The Ghost Story Book Club, The Death Studies Podcast, BERGCAST, There’s Not Always a Twist, The Folklore Studies Podcast and Scarred for Life. She is the members coordinator of the International Gothic Association and principal editor of Hive Journal.

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Kassia Krone’s Hollywood’s Monstrous Moms exposes the long-term stigma against mothers with mental illness in Hollywood horror films. Her study demonstrates a troubling pattern in the film industry of villainizing mothers with mental illness. Her book also identifies a research gap that hasn’t been fully explored at the intersection of disability studies, women, and mental illness. Disability studies in film has increasingly focused on representations of physically disabled bodies, arguing that their representation challenges the dominant able-bodied cinematic narrative. While there is some attention to cinematic characters with mental disorders, the one-dimensional characters make the discussion lack complexity. Even within feminist disability studies which critically examine the stereotypes about women with disabilities, women with physical disabilities or chronic illnesses are often central in discussions about the female body, beauty standards, and medical treatment as opposed to the experiences of women who are mentally ill. However, Krone’s research follows a feminist approach while adding the focus on mental disabilities. 

The scope of Krone’s research includes classic horror films such as Carrie (1976), Mommie Dearest (1981), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968); slasher films such as Friday the 13^th (1980) and Scream 2 (1997), as well as other more recent films such as The Sixth Sense (1999), Us (2019), Things Heard & Seen (2021), and so on. Her research also examines prestige horror films such as Hereditary (2018) and The Babadook (2014) to address the new trend. Krone’s scope is large, but all these films portray women with mental illness, which also illustrates how their images are rendered as a horror trope by the film industry. As Krone argues, these tropes vilify disability and gender together, especially motherhood. These depictions are also harmful to those in the disability community who fight for justice and equal rights.

Krone mainly examines female characters with mental illness from the following perspectives: women’s liberation movements and the film industry backlash; the representation of disability tropes; medical and social models of disability; and mother-child relationships. This approach draws her research into conversation with the gender inequality in Hollywood, disability tropes in films, and the narrative of female madness. Dating back to the Victorian period, women with mental illnesses were viewed as moral failures or as inherently emotionally fragile, which successfully constructed female madness as something stigmatizing and distorted. Krone’s analysis persuasively argues that these discriminations are also ubiquitous in contemporary cultural products.

Chapter One discusses classic horror films such as Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby and Mommie Dearest, in which mentally ill mother characters serve as a horror response to the emerging independent women. Their mental illness is used as a metaphor for punishment, suggesting that their progress is “detrimental to their mental health or stability” (22). Chapter Two analyses the films The Others (2001), Mama (2013), and Things Heard and Seen to illustrate how mental health facilities or haunted houses impact women’s mental condition and dehumanize them. This discussion is also addressed to the history of women who are diagnosed with hysteria, showing the long history of the medical narrative inclined to stigmatize them as ‘mad women’ without questioning the reason and truthfulness and then imprison them into isolated spaces (45). In these films, these female characters become ghosts after their suicide and haunt their children in the house. These depictions also complicate Jay Timothy Dolmage’s “kill or cure” trope for disability representation in film, as these mentally ill women “are already dead” and need to be banished again (57). Chapter Three focuses on the female killers in the slasher films Scream 2 and Friday the 13^th. They are labelled as psychotic, driven to seek revenge for their sons’ death, a characterization reinforced by the slasher film narrative to emphasize their ‘craziness’ while ignoring their grief and emotional trauma over losing their children.

Moreover, these harmful portrayals are also linked to other forms of discrimination, such as racism and medical bias. Krone’s discussion situates these elements within the concept of intersectional feminism, which recognizes overlapping oppression rather than focusing solely on sexism. Chapter Four shifts the focus to mentally ill Black women in the horror films Ma (2019), Barbarian (2022), and Us. Even when Black women are present, the film industry often commodifies them through fixed tropes or stereotypes, such as the “Black villain” (96) and the “Black female vixen” (97). Their mental health is often overlooked by medical professionals and the film narrative, especially when they encounter racism and ableism at the same time: “blackness” is sometimes regarded as a form of disability within horror film narratives (108). Chapter five discusses the representation of mothers with Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP) in films The Sixth Sense, Fragile (2005), Love You to Death (2019), and Run (2020). It is implied that mothers who have mental illnesses are unfit to raise children.

However, this does not mean that all contemporary horror films are trapped in this representational dilemma. As readers might be aware, horror films are also constantly evolving, responding to the growing concern regarding approaches to disability and gender. Krone examines Things Heard and Seen in Chapter Two to argue that it provides an unconventional ending that resonates with contemporary feminist movements by foregrounding female solidarity. The film emphasizes the collaborative efforts among spectral moms to break the cycle of domestic abuse. Chapter Six shows that Hereditary and The Babadook portray the female protagonists who navigate their mental struggles with resilience which challenges stereotypes linking their mental illness with villainy. These depictions also embody the potential to understand the mentally ill in another way: to sympathize with them. This change mirrors the rising of “prestige horror” in the film industry (149); these films juxtapose mental illness with societal issues and call for greater attention to people’s spiritual world. In the films Hereditary and The Babadook, the mothers are portrayed as “three-dimensional” characters, with their mental illness symbolically linked to themes such as religion, family grief, and personal trauma (149). Krone posits that these films also “present mental illness as more of an allegory or symbol through the use of the supernatural” (176). In this way, they complicate the trope of mental illness in horror cinema, rather than solely using it to characterize villains. However, the thematic direction expressed by the creators and the audience’s perception can be vastly different. Krone argues that Hereditary expresses compassion toward mentally ill characters, especially the mother character Annie. However, I see the film as reinforcing a fear of mental illness, particularly through its title, which indicates that mental disorders are inevitably passed down through generations. This implication could further deepen societal fear and misunderstanding of mental illness. Thus, Krone’s interpretation also needs to be supported by further evidence.

Krone is, however, correct when she argues that an often-overlooked issue in horror films that we rarely reflect on is the negative impact of depicting mentally ill characters as villains. Audiences tend to accept these terrifying portrayals as natural. Furthermore, Krone points out that Hollywood rarely casts actors with disabilities in disabled roles. This reiterates the need for more diverse representations in horror films. I believe this book could explore its connection with the Victorian tradition of depicting female madness in literary works, a topic not fully explored in this study. At the same time, this book can also be integrated with queer theory, as this theory similarly challenges the narrative of “normality,” creating intersections with both disability studies and feminist scholarship. Scholars interested in horror cinema, feminist disability studies, and mad studies will likely find this book valuable.

Shiqing Zhang is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University, where she studies children’s literature. In particular, she does research on Ursula K. Le Guin and how her work challenges the conventions of YA literature. She acknowledges the support of the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for funding her research in the UK.

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When I completed my Master’s degree in English Language and Literature in July 2024, I found myself increasingly drawn to the question of how science fiction (SF) can help us think critically about the digital and technological futures we now inhabit. Many of the speculative worlds I explored during my degree – once purely imaginative, especially in the late 20th century – no longer feel like distant possibilities. They feel less like fiction and more like our lived reality. Surveillance systems, pervasive data collection, algorithmic control and governance, and artificial intelligence are no longer abstract concepts. They are already here, shaping everyday life in profound ways.

Science fiction has evolved beyond simple prediction or foresight; it has become a practical method, a way to decode the complex digital cultures around us. This shift is at the heart of Alan N. Shapiro’s Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction, a book that blends cultural theory, media studies, and futures thinking to explore how science fiction (SF) helps us understand and even shape emerging technologies. I wish I had discovered the book earlier, particularly during my thesis research. Still, it has since become a key influence in my current role as a Fellow in the Young Future Maker Fellowship Program, run by Future Days (Portugal), the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (Denmark), and Media Lab Bayern (Germany).

During my fellowship, I have been applying many of the ideas that Shapiro discusses: using literary and science-fictional thinking to analyze digital futures, especially around themes of surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic governance. My work focuses on utilizing cultural texts (literary studies) to address real-world challenges, collaborating with futures and media experts to explore how stories and technologies intersect. For instance, in preparing for my Future Days 2025 fellowship presentation, I used his concept of science fiction as a critical lens and methodological tool—an applied iteration of the Literary Futures method by Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers—to analyze not only the stories we tell about technology but also the algorithms and systems that structure our digital lives. This book hasn’t just been a background reference; it has directly influenced my practice-based research, showing how theory can guide creative, future-oriented work. Shapiro’s framework has profoundly shaped my approach to projects that bridge narrative, technology, and futures thinking. The book has helped me frame projects that bring literature into dialogue with foresight practices, culminating in recent presentations at the Future Days Conference (2025) Garden Gallery in Estufa Fria, Lisbon, Portugal.

Shapiro’s book explores the deep entanglement of science fiction, digital technologies, and cultural theory, arguing that SF is no longer just a storytelling genre. Instead, it has become a shaping force, influencing both the design of new technologies and the ways in which society understands them. The text is divided into three interconnected sections: Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism, progressing from analysis to critique and ultimately to proposals for transformation.

In Part 1, Shapiro introduces Hyper-Modernism, an intensification of postmodernism driven by algorithmic systems that now organize culture and everyday life. Drawing on theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Gilles Lipovetsky, he shows how science fiction has evolved from mere storytelling to a force that actively influences technological development. Through examples like Black Mirror and Star Trek, Shapiro demonstrates SF’s dual function: it both inspires technological innovation and provides critical commentary on its consequences. This section particularly resonated with me, as it highlights why SF deserves serious study within the humanities and beyond.

Part 2 engages with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, where simulations and images replace reality itself. Shapiro argues that in today’s digital, algorithm-driven world, Baudrillard’s ideas are more relevant than ever, but they need to be updated. Platforms such as social media, VR, and AI have pushed hyperreality to new extremes, eroding the distinction between the real and the virtual. This section also addresses post-truth politics and the algorithmic shaping of perception, connecting Baudrillard’s theories to contemporary debates. What I appreciated most here was Shapiro’s insistence that we are not powerless: by “re-coding” digital systems, we can resist and reconfigure the structures of hyperreality. His use of The Matrix as a metaphor for this kind of critical engagement was especially compelling.

Part 3 moves toward transformation, focusing on Creative Coding and Posthumanism. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, Shapiro critiques the traditional, abstract conception of code as purely functional. Instead, he envisions coding as a creative, embodied, and collaborative practice. This has profound implications for computer science, which he argues should become more transdisciplinary, connecting technology, art, and the humanities. Creative Coding, as Shapiro presents it, can resist algorithmic capitalism, generate art, and decenter human authorship through collaboration with AI. While this section was inspiring, I found myself wishing for more detailed, practical, and concrete examples of Creative Coding, as this concept feels especially promising for education and futures studies. It would have been valuable to see specific examples of how these ideas could be applied in classrooms, labs, and workshops.

Shapiro situates his work within a rich theoretical tradition. His arguments draw on thinkers such as Michel Foucault (panopticism and power), Donna Haraway (Informatics of Domination), Cornelius Castoriadis (The Imaginary Institution of Society), Jean Baudrillard (hyperreality and simulation), and Gilles Deleuze (rhizomatic thought and networks). By engaging these foundational ideas, Shapiro provides a strong intellectual grounding for his claim that science fiction is not only a cultural artifact but also a methodological tool for decoding digital life.

In this sense, Shapiro’s work sits alongside other major texts in digital culture and futures studies. For example, while Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism examines the economic and political dimensions of the surveillance economy, Shapiro goes further by showing how narrative and imagination can decode and critique these systems. Similarly, where Hayles explores the evolution of posthuman subjectivity, Shapiro provides a practical, future-facing perspective, demonstrating how SF can actively shape our responses to technological change.

One of the most compelling chapters in the book is “Science Fiction Heterotopia: The Economy of the Future.” In the section “Similar Technologies in the Real World Today,” Shapiro draws striking parallels between fictional worlds and actual technologies. He weaves together Foucault’s panopticon, Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, and science-fiction narratives to explore the politics of surveillance and power in the digital age. These intersections between theory, technology, and narrative are where the book truly shines, showing how science fiction can act as both a mirror and a map for our future.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its interdisciplinary reach. It speaks to literary scholars interested in speculative fiction, digital humanists exploring the links and intersections of narrative and technology, and futures practitioners seeking frameworks to guide foresight projects. Its ideas could enrich courses in literary studies, cultural theory, media studies, and futures education, helping students and researchers think critically about how stories and technologies co-evolve.

From a personal perspective, this book has been transformative for my fellowship work. It provided not just theoretical insight but also a practical philosophy for using science fiction as a tool in real-world futures work. Shapiro’s approach reaffirmed my belief that fiction is not just meant to be read or interpreted, but to be applied—as a way of anticipating, critiquing, and reshaping the future. This understanding has guided my collaborations with media experts and informed public presentations, where science fiction acts as a bridge between storytelling and systems thinking.

If there is one area where the book could be expanded, it would be its treatment of Creative Coding. Shapiro’s vision of coding as an artistic and philosophical practice is compelling, but I found myself wanting more concrete examples and teaching strategies. Given the rapid growth of computational creativity and generative AI, this topic deserves more attention. While I would have liked to see a deeper dive into Creative Coding, this does not diminish the book’s impact. For me, it has been more than just an academic text: it has become a practical tool and a source of inspiration. In an era when algorithms and simulations define so much of our world, Shapiro’s call to “decode” digital culture feels both urgent and empowering.

Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction is more than just a book about literature or technology; it is a call to action. By positioning science fiction as both a critical lens and a creative practice, Shapiro urges readers to move beyond passive story consumption and toward active engagement with digital systems. For educators, scholars, and practitioners across philosophy, literary studies, digital humanities, and futures thinking, this book offers an essential framework for navigating our algorithmic age. It has been pivotal in my own work, highlighting that science fiction is not just a genre but a method for creating better futures. As our world becomes increasingly shaped by algorithms, simulations, and automated decisions, Shapiro’s work feels urgent and necessary. It is a book that should be read widely, not only for its intellectual depth but also for its potential to change how we teach, create, and imagine digital futures. Overall, Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction offers a critical yet hopeful vision of our technological future. This is a book I strongly recommend to anyone seeking to understand, critique, and reimagine our technological futures.

Nanditha Krishna graduated in 2024 with a Five-Year Integrated Master’s (M.A.) degree in English Language and Literature from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Amritapuri, India). She is a Future Days 2025 Fellow (Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Media Lab Bayern, and Future Days). Previously, she was a virtual research intern at the Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments (University of South Australia), contributing to projects on interactive narratives, news games, digital art, virtual reality (VR), and creativity in immersive performance. From 2021 to 2023, she was a HASTAC Scholar and a research intern at the Empathic Computing Lab (University of Auckland). Her interests span speculative fiction, media studies, and futures studies, exploring how digital technologies shape culture and society.