bbc – SFRA Review

The Invincible

Media Reviews

Review of The Invincible

Jules Otero i Besolí

The Invincible. Directed by Marek Markuszewski, Starward Industries / 11 Bit Studios, 2023. Played on Windows PC.

Made up of veteran developers coming from teams such as CD Projekt RED and Techland Games and having worked on titles such as The Witcher (2007), Dying Light (2015) and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), Starward Industries was always expected to deliver a solid story and player experience in their first game, The Invincible (2023). However, what they attempted to do was no small feat: to adapt the hard SF novel by the same name written by Stanisław Lem, The Invincible would require a masterful command of pacing, atmosphere and dialogue, all essential to deliver and sustain the classic hard SF ‘feel’ which is often difficult to accomplish in audiovisual media.

In both the novel and the videogame, a spaceship crewed by researchers lands in a largely unexplored desert planet and quickly finds that, although there are no terrestrial life-forms, something dangerous has attacked some of the crew and rendered them incapable of remembering anything, not even how to communicate or take care of themselves. Rather than simply adapting the story of the novel into a videogame, however, Starward Industries chose to create their own characters. They wanted to create a story that was more intimate, Markuszewski told Rock Paper Shotgun in an interview, so they reduced the immense crew of the Invincible in the novel to the six-person crew of the Dragonfly in the game. Of this crew, the player embodies the biologist Yasna (voiced by Daisy May) as she explores the mysterious Regis III with help from the astrogator Novik (voiced by Jason Baughan) who guides and helps her from the ship. Throughout her adventure, Yasna finds the remains of a ship she thinks is the Invincible although it turns out to be a different ship that will later require the Invincible’srescue (effectively making the events of the game a prequel, albeit an inexact one).

Within both Stanisław Lem’s story and the genre of hard SF in general, The Invincible stands its own admirably. Although the videogame medium may not seem the best suited for scientific discussion and hypothesizing, long conversations between characters or the extended build-up of atmosphere with a distant payoff, this game uses all the tools at its disposal to keep the player engaged throughout a version of Lem’s story that doesn’t shy away from being wordy or scientifically fanciful. Instead, it plays into its own and the players’ awareness of the conventions of hard science fiction, making them an active participant in the scientific discussion through dialogue choices that feel impactful and character-building, reveal different bits of information and give the player access to eleven different endings, enhancing the replayability of the experience. Formally, too, in a moment where hard SF has lost some of its former acclaim and readership to more fantastical stories, The Invincible proposes a new way to experience theory-heavy narrative: the audience may choose to deeply engage with the dialogue, but the gaming experience offers the alternative of simply letting it fill the silence as the player explores or interacts with the environment, and the oft-criticised lack of strong female characters and emotive plotlines in hard SF is amended through Yasna’s characterisation and her compassion and camaraderie towards the rest of the crew.

The choice to make Yasna a woman (there are no women in Lem’s original text) and one that has concrete, explicit political opinions regarding the intervention of humanity in space (she is a ‘galactocentric’, believing the needs of the galaxy outweigh the needs of humanity), makes the story feel far from outdated, a modernisation that is further noted in the additions of many discussions regarding the differences between human and artificial consciousness and intelligence and the dangers the latter may pose to the former. Moreover, while the theme of artificial intelligence has certainly been expanded upon, the other themes present in the novel (the horror of losing oneself completely, the uselessness of vengeance against forces of nature, the importance of resilience and care for others) are well-presented through dialogue, actions, and choices for the player to make, especially in the way the endings are approached and the moral judgements they impart. In general, narratively speaking, the impression is that the development team has managed exactly what it set out to do: The Invincible is an example of how a videogame may tell a complex, compelling story with emotional weight, deep relationships between characters and grand ideas (although those were provided mostly by Lem) while keeping the audience at the edge of their seats with the same artful mastery of storytelling of a novel or a film.

This narrative strength does come, however, at the expense of some of the gaming aspects that players traditionally expect. Some reviews by users on Steam point out that it is essentially a ‘walking simulator’ where the central action of the player is to move the character around, and that the non-narrative mechanics of the game (items used to orient oneself and some minor puzzles) are limited and far-between. Another aspect that may drive players away is that, despite having different possible endings, these do not manifest as real differences until the last twenty minutes of the game, while the rest of the content leads the player through a fairly narrow narrative path (a practice often known as ‘railroading’) with some optional stops and detours for additional content. This animosity towards ‘walking simulators’ and, especially, the yet unsettled debate on whether they ‘count’ as videogames at all is an interesting part of the gaming community and, I think, one that impoverishes our understanding of videogames as a medium to explore a story, since it is unavoidable that some stories require linearity and, more practically, smaller studios may not have the resources to create an ‘open-world’ game as is often expected from larger companies in the current videogame industry. In the case of The Invincible, a linear plotline is undoubtedly the right choice, as the hints and clues needed for the scientific hypothesizing of the story to progress need to remain quite similar in content and order to those in the novel.

This brings me to the one fault I found with the game’s storytelling, which is that sometimes it is very heavy-handed with its references to Lem’s novel. Certain quotes, of great weight in the novel, are repeated in the game not one but multiple times, and certain scenes which worked well on paper struggle to impress through the screen. The strongest parts of the game are, I think, the ones that innovate and continue on Lem’s story, adding to it the modern sensibilities and concerns which the novel could not predict. I suggest that scholars wishing to write about The Invincible may find it valuable to analyse those moments of narrative innovation as well as how they may serve the evolution of hard science fiction as a subgenre and its translation into various forms of media. Other interesting avenues of research for The Invincible could be the way dialogue is used to establish a connection between Yasna and Novik, since they never appear in the same place throughout the game and must use only verbal communication to establish their relationship throughout, making the voice-acting take centre stage, or the way the game handles horror elements without becoming a horror game through careful tone-setting and trope subversion.

Jules Otero i Besolí [they/he] is a PhD Student in the Autonomous University of Barcelona and holder of a FPU scholarship. They have a Bachelor’s degree in English Studies with minors in Engllish Literature and Compared Literature and a Master’s degree in Advanced English Studies. Their in-process dissertation explores the role of non-normative embodiment in postmodern space opera universes through a post/transhumanist theoretical framework.

Orwell 2+2=5

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Media Reviews

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Review of Orwell 2+2=5

Alfredo Suppia

Orwell 2+2=5. Dir. Raoul Peck. Velvet Film and others, 2025.

Raoul Peck, the director of the acclaimed I Am Not Your Negro (2016), delivers a deeply moving and intellectually sharp account of recent history and the contemporary world, drawing on the life of George Orwell (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) and his most famous—and perhaps most distorted—novel: 1984 (1949).

Science fiction forms the backbone of the film. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, in their audiovisual adaptations, feed a torrent of images drawn from documentary and fiction alike, weaving together dystopia and contemporary barbarism into a sustained essay-film. The multiple adaptations of 1984 for cinema, television, radio, and theater provide the refrains of the symphony of images and sounds orchestrated by Peck, while excerpts from photojournalism and television news cement the cruel face of dystopian fiction surpassed by reality. This constant movement between fiction and documentary, far from disorienting the viewer, sharpens the perception of how closely contemporary barbarism resembles—and is at times indistinguishable from—the dystopian imagination.

One of the film’s most intellectually provocative moves is its treatment of Orwell’s “Newspeak” as a heuristic tool rather than a literary trope or poetic license. This is epistemologically delicate terrain. There is no scholarly consensus on the extent to which natural language decisively shapes the political organization of human societies, notwithstanding the findings of sociolinguistics and structuralist semiology—including Barthes’s own formulation of the subject who speaks or is “spoken” about by discourses that precede their own existence. What the film presents, particularly in its final third, is essentially a catalog of euphemisms: a “stimulus package” as cover for bailing out financial criminals and a “military operation” as a sanitized label for territorial invasion. These are real and important examples. But the film risks conflating the existence of euphemism with the more radical—and unproven—claim that language itself restructures political reality, thereby naturalizing Orwell’s fictional device as empirical diagnosis. The argument would be stronger, and more faithful to the complexity of the subject, if it engaged with the limits of its own linguistic determinism.

Orwell 2+2=5 is one more essay-film that demonstrates—happily or otherwise—the growing prominence of science fiction in the contemporary political agenda and the genre’s susceptibility to both capitalist co-opting and genuine critical subversion, as in Orwell’s own hands. But the film could have been even more powerful had it resisted a certain relativism endemic to the present moment—most visibly expressed in the unfortunate “horseshoe theory,” the thesis that the extremes of political Left and Right ultimately converge. They do not, and Orwell himself recognized this at key moments in his life and work.

The film handles with considerable skill, drawing on Orwell’s writings and his two most notorious novels (Animal Farm and 1984), the exposure of Western crimes. Footage of Nazi SS officers being executed by the Red Army in the aftermath of the Babi Yar massacre is among the film’s most harrowing moments. Yet for each crime committed by Western fascist leaders and the film scores a significant point in showing that even within democracies the “serpent’s egg” can hatch—Peck inserts references to non-Western governments: Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Donald Trump ultimately emerges as the quintessence of Orwellian evil. But none of these governments are alike or straightforwardly comparable, and leveling them as equivalent distorts more than it illuminates.

The film’s predominantly Western vantage point—acknowledged in some of Orwell’s own recorded comments reproduced by Peck—becomes its most visible limitation. A lone image of Xi Jinping at a military parade floats without context or commentary; one is reminded of Chris Marker’s observation in Letter from Siberia (1958) that a cinematic image is inseparable from its context or voiceover. In this light, certain silences become difficult to ignore: Hiroshima and Nagasaki—unparalleled in the history of mass destruction—go unmentioned. The storming of Brazil’s Praça dos Três Poderes on January 8, 2023—strikingly similar to the Capitol insurrection that features prominently in the film—is also absent. The parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff (2016) and the forced removal of President Evo Morales in Bolivia (2019) receive no mention. Nor does MINUSTAH’s role in Haiti, a significant omission for a filmmaker who is himself Haitian and served as his country’s Minister of Culture. The film does make one pointed and welcome gesture: the inclusion of Brazil’s Marinho media dynasty among the moguls and tech billionaires constituting the architecture of twenty-first-century authoritarianism.

Alfredo Suppia is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil, where he teaches Brazilian cinema, scriptwriting, film theory, and science fiction film for both undergraduate and graduate students. He is the author of books such as Brazilian Science Fiction Film: A Critical History (NYC: SUNY Press, 2024), and Atmosfera Rarefeita: A Ficção Científica no Cinema Brasileiro (São Paulo: Devir, 2013), in addition to numerous articles on Latin-American cinemas, world cinemas, and world science fiction cinemas.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

Andrew Sztehlo

Barsukov, Yaroslav. Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory. CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, 2024.

Much has been made of the prophetic nature of Yaroslav Barsukov’s 2021 novella Tower of Mud and Straw, an expanded version of which forms the first half of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory. Contemporary reviews noted that it anticipated the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is unfortunate that both works have been pigeon-holed as predicting or commenting on this specific conflict, much in the way that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was seen as a response to his experiences in World War I or as an allegory for the dangers of atomic power, a reading that Tolkien famously resisted (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, xxiv). Whilst Barsukov’s fascinating novel does draw on recent Russian history, going so far as to model his protagonist Shea Ashcroft on Alexei Navalny (Barsukov, Fantasy Book Critic), to misread this work as being just about Russia and Ukraine would be to miss one of Barsukov’s main themes: the terror of living under multiple forms of oppression within the shadow of empire(s). As Barsukov stated in a recent interview, “Russia doesn’t have a monopoly on imperialism, though, as many of my dear friends in India and Africa will attest. I feel our fight should not only be against Putin, but rather against the very concept of empires–and if we go one step further, nations” (Barsukov, Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine).

Barsukov’s novel draws on rich traditions, specifically of American science fiction and fantasy, to craft a genre-bending novel dealing with misinformation, political intrigue, oligarchical power, colonialism, and the very nature of (un)reality itself. It is no surprise that Barsukov claims writers as diverse in their approaches as Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, China Miéville, and Ted Chiang as influences (Barsukov, Fantasy Book Critic; The Fantasy Hive), taking something from all their styles and themes and sprinkling in his own viewpoints as a Russian emigre to Vienna: “We’re boats perpetually tossed between currents. And our future is a reflection of our past: I left one former empire only to settle in another, trading the dead USSR for the westernmost splinter of Austria-Hungary” (Barsukov, Rising Shadow).

Barsukov’s chief protagonist, Shea Ashcroft, is also a man caught between cultural currents. After Shea refuses to gas a crowd of protesters, Queen Daelyn strips him of his ministership and sends him to the border town of Owenbeg to oversee a massive construction project: an anti-aircraft tower, over a thousand meters tall, designed to protect the kingdom against the neighbouring imperial power of Duma. Whilst Shea’s exile is first understood as the death of his political career, he soon realises that this could in fact be a test, with further rewards to come. Shea soon meets a gauntlet of political rivals, diplomats, spies, and assassins. There is the Duke, who holds brutal power over the region, practically salivating at the idea of regional autonomy from the far-away crown; then Brielle, the chief architect of the tower, who sees the successful completion of the project as her own personal mission; and finally Lena, the Duke’s lover, who bears a striking similarity both in name and appearance to Shea’s older sister, who died in a freak accident in childhood. Lena is also one of the Drakiri, a race that whilst passing for human, is markedly taller, stronger, and faster than the average person. Despite their agility and scientific progress, the Drakiri have suffered genocides in the past and their diaspora is spread across the realm. Further characters appear, who alternately desire to move against Shea’s influence on the project, to usurp it for their own ends, or even to stop its completion. The project, for all intents and purposes, is a ticking time bomb.

There are three challenges in particular that Shea faces in Owenbeg. First, there is the debate over whether Duma will actually invade, and if the tower is even necessary for defence. Second, the rarity and temperamental nature of Drakiri anti-grav technology, taken from Drakiri refugees in exchange for land, is as likely to aid in the construction of the monolith as it is to maim and kill all those who do not understand how to use it. And lastly, there is the legend that the Drakiri tell in whispers: the completion of the tower will open a portal and manifest a second tower, dubbed the Mimic Tower, from some hellish dimension, unleashing nightmare forces, destruction, and slaughter on all. Whilst Shea is skeptical of the truth of this legend, the evidence of its reality grows harder and harder to ignore. To navigate even one of these could be deadly; to navigate all three, Shea will have to find friends quickly, reconcile with his past, risk everything he has, and trust his conscience absolutely above all else to see the conflict through.

Much like Barsukov’s named influences, Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory blurs the line between the science fiction and fantasy genres. There are many points in the novel where the reader feels the heavy influence of earlier works. It borrows the dynastic power struggles of Frank Herbert’s Dune; the multiversal conflicts of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion sword-and-sorcery stories, particularly his Corum books; and the tenuous nature of reality from writers such as Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin. Most apparent of all are the parallels between Barsukov’s novel and works of the New Weird movement, particularly China Mieville’s Bas Lag trilogy and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, in its attempts to blend different genres and literatures into a new, nebulous form, and the aesthetics of the Mimic Tower and its hellish landscape.

Barsukov also directly challenges commonly accepted notions of worldbuilding within genre fiction, intentionally using anachronism to complicate and muddle our ideas of his world. The realm of Sleeping Worlds leans heavily on the aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries: its class tensions recall the French Revolution, whilst the political culture and imperial might of Duma channels memories of Tsarist Russia. However, this sense of the milieu is permeated by a modern understanding of misinformation and the rewriting of history, holding obvious parallels to the political allegories of George Orwell and other dystopian fiction writers, the history of the Soviet Union, and our own present-day challenges in an oligarchical techno-capitalist post-truth era. There are many moments where Ashcroft struggles to establish a common understanding of the basics of reality with other characters; is Pangania, the ancestral home of the Drakiri, a peninsula, or an island? According to Lena, a Drakiri, it is definitively an island (45); to the Prince of Duma, it is definitively a peninsula, and any suggestion otherwise would be farcical (266). Complicating the sense of unified world-building even further is the fact that most characters speak with a modern, Americanized English, contrasting greatly with the decadent palaces, or the grimy villages filled with the laborers who build the tower. Technology is also remarkably inconsistent; cities do not seem to have advanced beyond a gas-powered energy system, and yet skyrafts (zeppelins) dot the skies of multiple metropolises. The Drakiri technology, never fully explained, also complicates the sense of this technological epoch, being even further ahead than our own. This fractured sense of reality, obviously intentional from Barsukov, is worth exploring further, especially considering the central reveal of the last segment of the novel.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, which Barsukov says is the first part of a larger narrative (although, in this writer’s opinion, stands perfectly well alone), has plenty of academic and scholarly potential. The fractured world-building, and a general study of the emptiness of certain fantastic and science fictional lifeworlds, is worth considering. The placement of this work within the broader context of Russian SF is also worth exploring, as whilst it predominantly draws on American science fiction traditions, it does continue considerations of Russian contributions to the genre. Whilst Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are not named in interviews with Barsukov, their oeuvre casts a shadow over the text, sharing concerns with the place of the individual within larger authoritarian societies and the moral responsibilities that go with it. Likewise, considering Barsukov’s repudiation of the invasion, both through his work and in interviews, it would be worth comparing Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory to other writers of contemporary Russian SF. Sergei Lukyanenko, famously imperialist in his views, would be worthy of a comparison, as well as Dmitry Glukhovsky and Dmitry Bykov, both of whom have spoken out against the invasion (Barsukov, Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine). Similarly, the novel’s preoccupation with colonialism could be further explored in connection with American SF writers, as well as larger world literatures, as pigeon-holing Barsukov’s work as purely “Russian” has been a recurring problem amongst reactions to the novel; it obscures Barsukov’s own complicated national identity, and also resists the novel’s evident connections to other literatures and its own larger concerns about the idea of empire as a whole.

WORKS CITED

Barsukov, Yaroslav. “An Interview with Yaroslav Barsukov.” Rising Shadow, 22 Feb. 2021, https://www.risingshadow.net/articles/interviews/1053-an-interview-with-yaroslav-barsukov. Accessed 17 June 2026.

—. “Author Interview: Yaroslav Barsukov, the Author of Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory.” Fantasy Book Critic, 6 Sept. 2024, https://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2024/09/author-interview-yaroslav-barsukov.html. Accessed 18 June 2026.

—. “Genre Grapevine Interview with Yaroslav Barsukov.” Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine, 9 Sept. 2022, https://www.patreon.com/jasonsanford/posts/genre-grapevine-71744175. Accessed 18 June 2026.

—. “Interview with Yaroslav Barsukov (Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory).” The Fantasy Hive, 8 Nov. 2024, https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2024/11/20557/. Accessed 17 June 2026.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London, Harpercollins, 2005.

By day, Andrew Sztehlo is an academic librarian at York St John University, and has previously managed high school and college libraries in Manchester. He has presented on the intersection of neurodivergence and librarianship across three different sectors at the 2026 NLISN conference. By night he is a cartoonist, creating the anthology comic Tales from the Border and illustrating the horror/comedy mini-series Chimpanzee with a Razorblade, written by Tim Vargulish-Chow. He is currently working on a graphic novel based on the occult history and folklore of northern Italy.

Spread Me

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Spread Me

Shannon Blake Skelton

Gailey, Sarah. Spread Me. Tor Nightfire, 2025.

Popular discourse surrounding body-horror is often situated around cinema, notably horror films that depict the dread and terror of the transformation and loss of agency of one’s own corporeal form. The term body-horror can be traced to Phillip Brophy’s 1983 essay “Horrorality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film” in which the scholar notes that certain contemporary fear films are focused on “the destruction of the body” and that the films “play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it.” In A Dictionary of Film Studies, Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell note that body-horror focuses on “human bodies that are subject to torture, mutilation, mutation, decay, degeneration, and transformation, usually shown in graphic detail” while also probing concerns of embodiment, bodily autonomy, and decay. Sarah Gailey’s brilliantly inventive and squeal-inducing science-fiction horror novella Spread Me seeks to merge the cinematic traditions of body-horror with engaging speculative literary approaches.

Gailey (they/them) has gained acclaim over the past few years not only for their SF/F endeavors, but also for fan writing and contributions to comics in the Buffyverse along with original comic titles such as Eat the Rich (2021) and Know Yor Station (2021). Their 2017 American Hippo pair of novellas (River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow) pose an alternate history in which the semi-aquatic massive mammals imported to the United States in the 19^th century have run rampant and must now be exterminated by a group composed of various identities, including non-binary and Queer characters. River of Teeth was a 2017 Nebula Award Finalist for Best Novella, a 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Novella, and the 2018 Locus Award Finalist for Best Novella. Their 2020 Western novella Upright Woman Wanted centers queer librarians who travel the American Southwest under a totalitarian regime. Gailey also authored the 2019 fantasy/mystery Magic for Liars and 2021’s The Echo Wife, which concerns a scientist who abandons his spouse for her clone.

Spread Me, published by Tor’s newly established horror imprint Nightfire, takes cues from both cinematic and literary precursors. Certainly, we can sense the presence of John Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There? as well as the 1954 Jack Finney novella The Body Snatchers. Yet, the influence of these literary works is less than the impact of their various big screen adaptations upon the novella. In particular, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is repeatedly referenced in Spread Me. At the station, if any member of the team even mentions the film or accidentally repeats a line of dialogue from the Carpenter classic, the offender must deposit money into a jar. In addition, Spread Me mirrors many elements of Alien (1979) but spins and re-spins these scenarios into intriguing, inventive and fascinating moments of tension and ghastly contortions of the human form.

Spread Me depicts a group of six researchers inhabiting a compromised scientific outpost in a desolate, desert region far from other humans or cities. On a survey to catalogue lichens, members of the field team undercover a seemingly deceased, animal-like “specimen”, break protocol, and bring the body back into their cramped lab space. The specimen, described as a “six-legged multi-segmented coyote” with three tongues, fascinates them, but this grotesque creature is much more than they first suspect. Once the team examines the specimen, they all develop various illnesses and isolate from one another. Kinsey, unknown to the others, has not fallen victim to this mysterious virus that has spread amongst the crew. But Kinsey is plagued by unquenchable sexual urges focused on images of bacteria. Following quarantine, the various members exhibit bizarre behavior focused on unyielding perversity and begin to physically transform. As the novella progresses, characters must determine who has come under the influence of the invasive “fungus” transmitted by the specimen, resulting in paranoia, metamorphosis, and body-horror in its most visceral form.

Spread Me’s non-linear structure alternates between chapters. The reader encounters a chapter set in the present, then a chapter detailing the early days of the outpost, and so forth. Though Spread Me on its surface may seem too reminiscent of its cinematic predecessors, this is a wholly new vision and inventive take on these tropes. The inciting incident mirrors Alien, and the paranoia vaguely resembles The Thing, but Gailey’s execution of speculative science, character, and suspense marks Spread Me as a novella worthy of recognition.

Beyond the structure, which compels the reader to consider the larger ramifications of the narrative and subsequent mystery of these terrifying transmutations, Gailey’s array of characters stands as a fascinating, multi-dimensional group of humans who speak and act as individuals. With six characters within the novella form, there is little time or space to differentiate this crew, but Gailey succeeds without tiresome monologues, obvious character ticks, or insipid commentary from bystanders. This crew, with all their boredom and obsession with sleeping one another before the arrival of the “specimen,” reflects the monotony of science labor counteracting the vision of science often romanticized in the SF genre. The unique descriptions of the body transformations are gut-churning and effective, truly expanding the reader’s imagination of what a human body can become. The suspense and terror further pull the reader along; yet, the narrative remains unpredictable, never sacrificing fealty to character for action and plot convenience.

Though we have had contemporary media iterations of “the fungal threat” as science-fiction horror (such as the videogame and streaming series The Last of Us and Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris trilogy), Gailey takes these properties and reformulates the mechanisms of fungal infestation for shocking, yet thoughtful, effect. In all, Gailey’s deft handling of plot, character, and action–carefully balancing horror and speculative science–marks Spread Me as one of the most enjoyable and effective science-fiction horror works of the past decade.

Shannon Blake Skelton (he/him) is a teacher, professor, author, and researcher located in the Midwest. His scholarship, fiction, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals. His volume Interviews: Wes Craven was published by The University Press of Mississippi. He is a proud contributor to the Ad Astra Institute: https://adastra-sf.com/about.htm#about.

Extremity

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Extremity

Shannon Blake Skelton

Binge, Nicholas. Extremity. Tordotcom, 2025.

From H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) to Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s A Time Odyssey Trilogy (2003-2007), writers have probed temporalities to question the nature of existence, our relation to history, and the limits of ethics in relation to technology. Extremity, a 2025 novella by Nicholas Binge, fuses the UK police procedural with the time travel subgenre to concoct a brisk, action-driven work about murder, a nightmarish future, and a mysterious time machine.

Binge’s 2023 breakout Ascension garnered raves from critics and the public. The novel concerns the sudden appearance of a mountain the size of Everest in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and an expedition that explores the mammoth structure. Ascension was selected as a New York Times ‘Editor’s Choice Pick’ with many noting its successful blending of action, suspense, and Lovecraftian elements. Binge’s Dissolution (2025) focuses on a man whose Alzheimer’s may be concealing the erasure of his memory by an external force. Extremity joins multiple novellas published annually by Tordotcom. The Tor Publishing Group imprint remains dedicated to the (re)-emerging novella market.

Constructed from three interwoven testimonies of investigators, Extremity’s action begins with the murder of billionaire tech giant Bruno Donaldson in contemporary London. Across the city, far from Donaldson’s penthouse, an exact replica of Donaldson—also dead—is located under a graffiti scrawled bridge. This bizarre discovery sets into motion a series of rapidly accumulating dead bodies and strange occurrences across the city. The reader traces much of the narrative through Julia Torgrimsen, a celebrity detective who has drifted into retirement and obscurity. She has been asked to return to determine the cause of these odd events. By her side is rookie DC Mark Cochrane and veteran DCI John Grossman. The investigators follow up with Donaldson’s criminal colleagues, bodies begin to pile up, an assassin is revealed, and the investigators stumble across a series of files that have future stock reports, photographs of body parts, and labels such as “date of attempted breach” and “date of disposal.” Eventually, our protagonists uncover a conspiracy that involves Earth in 6 million years, interaction with an unknown malevolent intelligence, boneless clones, and the ability to travel to the future.

Perhaps the strongest part of Extremity resides in its structure and action-driven writing. Composed of three alternating testimonies from our investigators, the narrative cohesively presents the action to its readers. Unfortunately, the three characters’ voices are interchangeable. With three differing perspectives, I was expecting to witness conflicting perspectives on the events. Yet, very rarely do the investigators provide contradictory testimonies. In a structure that could have yielded narrative complexity, the author employs the structure as a contrivance. In essence, the chosen structure and form minimally serve the content of the work.

Undoubtedly, Extremity possesses a strong hook: two dead bodies, identical in all ways, are discovered. The proceduralism sprints quickly from page to page, providing the reader with little time to catch their breath or to consider the logic of the tale or the ideas at play. And perhaps that is effective, because little of the work holds up to scrutiny regarding character, reason, motivation, or science. Extremity works as an excellent “action film” on the page, but not as science fiction invested in anything beyond an entertaining joyride. The writing itself propels the reader along—yet reflection on the events and characters reveals that the pace conceals many of the work’s faults. Extremity serves as a lightning quick read but is rarely challenging. That is not to say there is not a place for literature as pure entertainment crafted for pleasure and action, but this novella could be enriched by embracing complexities, paradoxes, and unseen concepts to captivate the reader beyond action.

The plot owes a great deal to police procedurals that have remained popular on UK screens and pages for decades. The science fiction elements of the novella truly manifest toward the end of the work. The “science” is cursory at best, yet there are a few time travel dynamics that are compelling, but—as with other elements—they are not sufficiently explored. Though one would expect a novella merging the police procedural and science fiction to locate commonalities with the work of Phillip K. Dick, I see little crossover.

Extremity does not further the subgenre in terms of intellectual concerns. That said, Extremity moves at a whiplash pace and illustrates how to propel action forward. Sadly, this results in implausible plot points, shallow characters, and ideas that would benefit from further contemplation. Unfortunately, characters make choices that seem unaligned with their established personalities, information dumps intrude, leaps of deduction are made, and there stands no real probing of the science and consequences of time travel. Further, police procedural cliches abound, while the lack of credibility in action makes one wish for more heavy editorial interference. There is no question that Binge writes solid action. Now, if he could graft the sophisticated ideas and challenging notions that thrive in science fiction to his writing in Extremity, I believe the result would be fulfilling.

In all, Extremity stands as a fast-paced, action-driven novella that is not invested in exploring the power and paradox of time travel but simply in taking the reader for a thrilling jaunt. The work trades in heady ideas of morality and temporal alterations for pushing the characters through a series of kinetic scenes. Extremity owes less to other noteworthy entries in the time travel subgenre and rests firmly in the tradition of many entertaining pulp tales that provided rip-roaring action but very few notions regarding humanity, time, and the consequences of our actions. Extremity does not further the time travel subgenre in any determinable way, but serves as an inoffensive, at times credibility-straining, piece of escapist literature.

Starspawn and Other Stories

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Starspawn and Other Stories

Andy Sawyer

Simsa, Cyril. Starspawn and Other Stories. Invocations Press, 2025.

Cyril Simsa’s previous collection, Lost Cartographies, was sub-titled Tales of Another Europe. Starspawn both expands and contracts his focus, evoking (as he says in his introduction) the techniques of Arthur Machen to summon images of the buried past of Muswell Hill, but also echoing Michael Moorcock’s multiversal cultural snapshots in a story in which “Jerry Comenius” waits at the Berlin Astrodome for the return of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the Moon, and drawing upon 1940s horror film and the undercurrents of New York sf fandom. The result is another collection enhanced by the way Simsa excavates the ambiguous archaeologies of place, time, and narrative to reveal the strangeness of the familiar.

The title story begins with an uncanny vision conjured in a North London pub by the eponymous band, who get it together not in the obligatory country cottage but in a borrowed studio near a golf course: part of a number of green spaces carved out of what was once primordial forest. An attempt to capture the spirit of the pastoral by drumming on the trees takes some of the band into this forest. Two of them return, leaving bass player Dora behind. Band leader Moon and producer Jack later find themselves back in this strange realm. Their encounter with Lilith/Hecate/the Owl Queen results in the return of Dora, but the future career of the band suggests that, in this close encounter of Kenneth Grahame’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, goat-footed Pan is, in a world less bound by gender stereotypes, no longer the embodiment of pleasure. “Moje Sestra” shows a young researcher attempting to uncover the reason behind Elizabeth Russell’s famous cameo in the 1942 film Cat People—a trail which leads him to Jack Williamson’s novel Darker Than You Think (1948) and the feuds and wild stories of sf fandom, and finally to recently-discovered reels of film from a Czech director showing a deeper truth behind Val Newton’s production of Cat People. “Shuffle” is a more conventional science fiction story, if a device that allows you to access alternative pasts and futures is “conventional”. What seems to be a scientific experiment also seems to undermine the very concept of a consensus reality.

“Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue” sweeps through the cultural detritus of the past century: there is a cameo appearance by Hugo Gernsback and an amusing young novelist who writes exciting space-travel stories for boys (and their fathers) waiting to board her first trip to the Moon. Its Moorcockian flavour is offered by “Jerry Comenius”: a professional flâneur, or, as another person notes, “wastrel”, watches: “I soak up the life of the people around me, and I reflect it back at them.” “On the Ridgeway” explores more fully the notion hinted at in “Shuffle” about splicing ancient DNA into the living human genome, but what ensues after one subject, Skutru, escapes (or is allowed to escape) is more thoroughly an exploration of the psychology of landscape, as he is traced to the Ridgeway locations of many psychogeographical emanations to a barrow which might predate even the Uffington White Horse and the travellers who crossed Doggerland to claim the hills on the far side. The final story, “The Shadow of Leaves Under Water”, switches focus but remains a snapshot of space, time, and identity. A former academic, Dr Durnsford, is journeying from Cambridge to Ely. It is the future of our time and much of East Anglia is in the grip of rising sea levels. Most of the story is Durnford’s meditation as she stops off at a hostel before completing her journey. Cambridge University as a symbol of rational learning with Ely Cathedral with its carvings of Green Men serving as a reminder of the new Spirit of the Land. One word which comes to her as she considers the future is “rehabilitation”: the return of the land to its original state of grace.

Like Arthur Machen, Simsa’s writing oscillates between two cultures with London (where Prague resident Simsa was brought up) as the ambiguous place they have in common. It is a place, both writers tell us, vividly evoked through place-names and memory and yet rendered almost invisible by the way it is built upon almost-forgotten networks and architectures which, when invoked, remind us of their presence. Many stories calling up “old gods” drag them to the present as threats or revelation. Simsa is more subtle. Pan, for instance, for Machen an embodiment of monstrosity, is, in “Starspawn,” “Mr P”, a “delinquent upstart”. In “The Shadow of Leaves” we are reminded that, despite the image of the “Green Man”, “wildness had never been gendered”. The great joy in reading Simsa’s psychogeographies is that he makes us look carefully at them. Many of us, revisiting old haunts and places once lived in but long ago departed from, will have encountered a peculiar double-vision: the memory of the streets and landscapes we once knew suddenly and vividly overlain upon those we are seeing. Simsa’s stories offer something like this. The past is something that is never gone, never lost, and in Starspawn we see pasts and former histories sneaking out of the shadows to remind us of their presence.

Andy Sawyer is a retired librarian, researcher, teacher, critic, and reviewer of sf. From 1993-2018 he was librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool Library. From 2002-2012 he directed an MA in Science Fiction Studies for the University’s Department of English. He is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, English Department, University of Liverpool. He was the 2008 recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Clareson Award for services to science fiction. He co-edited (with David Ketterer) Plan for Chaos, a previously unpublished novel by John Wyndham (Liverpool University Press, 2009) and (with Peter Wright) Teaching Science Fiction (Palgrave 2011). He compiled a four-volume collection of significant essays on science fiction for Routledge’s “Critical Concepts” series (2020) and a critical edition of Jane Webb Loudon’s 1827 The Mummy!, one of the earliest British science fiction novels. His most recent book is Terry Pratchett for Liverpool University Press’s “Writers and Their Works” series.

The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction

Timothy S. Miller

Haslam, Jason, Ed. The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction. Broadview Press, 2025.

Editor Jason Haslam’s Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction promises to cover and contextualize two hundred years of speculative fiction in a neat package suitable for course adoption. Because so few anthologies of SF intended for the classroom have been published, especially in recent years, I will dedicate the first part of this review to an extended comparison between this new Broadview effort and the title with which it most obviously competes for a place on the syllabus, the landmark Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, assembled in 2010 by the editors of Science Fiction Studies at the time, Arthur B. Evans, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk. This enormously distinguished roster of scholars makes for a tough act to follow, and I expect that Haslam has studied the Wesleyan anthology carefully and taken some valuable lessons from it. In fact, many of the authors and almost twenty percent of the story titles overlap: H. G. Wells, “The Star” (1897); E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909); Leslie F. Stone, “The Conquest of Gola” (1931); Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950); Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967); James Tiptree, Jr., “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972); Joanna Russ, “When it Changed” (1972); Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983); and Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008). Here in the coinciding nine stories is a spine that we could certainly agree to enshrine in a canon of eminently important but also eminently teachable works of science fiction. The most obvious difference between the two anthologies—apart from individual stories in the Wesleyan not present in the Broadview that one might miss, such as, from my own syllabi, C. L. Moore’s indispensable “Shambleau” (1933)—is that the latter features considerably less “Golden Age” SF from the 1930s–50s, with the Wesleyan containing 17 stories out of its total 52 from these crucial decades, compared with only 11 of the Broadview’s 53 selections. The Broadview therefore is somewhat less useful in offering a historical picture of science fiction in its classic era around the midpoint of the twentieth century, but it more than makes up for this deficiency in other respects that I will detail below.

While quite diverse in comparison with earlier such efforts and for the state of SF and SF studies in 2010, the table of contents for the Wesleyan now looks far less so by comparison. By my count, the Broadview has almost double the number of BIPOC authors and women authors (though in each case still amounting to fewer than half of the total authors included). The story is not really in the raw numbers, however, but rather in how Haslam has so admirably taken steps to incorporate into his selection philosophy and editorial framing several important developments in both SF publishing and SF scholarship from the past decade and a half. Most notably, The Broadview of Anthology of Science Fiction contains an unexpectedly robust history of Afrofuturism and Black SF—with pieces by Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sun Ra, Gil Scott-Heron, Charles Saunders, and Derrick Bell, among others—as well as showing the influence of the broader concept of CoFuturisms recently popularized by The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. While Haslam acknowledges in his introduction that the book does not attempt to cover comprehensively the same range of futurisms treated in the handbook, “it is hoped that the current text can be a starting point for readers’ more in-depth journey into these multiple genealogies” (35). Authors from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa are represented here, as well as multiple Indigenous writers from Canada, although the bulk of the stories come from the US and the UK, and, unlike the Wesleyan, Haslam for reasons of scope has limited selections to works originally written in English (meaning no Verne or Lem). One final feature that distinguishes the Broadview from several other such anthologies including the Wesleyan is the effort to gesture towards additional forms and media via the inclusion of some poetry, song lyrics, and even a few Buck Rogers comic strips.

Haslam’s introduction suggests many possible definitions, histories, and points of origin of SF, grounding an account of SF’s multiple communities of practice in John Rieder’s work, and he prudently opts to begin the book with texts from the early nineteenth century. The choice to open specifically with Washington Irving’s “Men of the Moon” from his History of New York, however, may seem idiosyncratic, as this piece of Swiftian satire, with its speculative content firmly in the subjunctive, could serve as a disorienting beginning to the story of science fiction for a student. Haslam’s handful of vocabulary glosses and other notes will not do enough by themselves to help some students navigate this offering and, say, connect it to Star Wars and Star Trek. Of course, the book need not be read or assigned in order from cover to cover, and Haslam sketches multiple paths through the selections that one might follow other than the strictly chronological, this being the one that necessarily places Irving’s 1809 text first. To this end, the book devotes space to three separate arrangements of the same table of contents, organized by “Period/Chronological”; “Multiple Histories, Multiple Futures”; and “Thematic and Sub-Genre.” Following Irving, the stories in the first chronological section by Poe, Shelley, and Wells provide a more typical foundation for thinking through proto-SF. Florence McLandburgh’s always unexpected “The Automaton Ear” (1873) also serves as a unique glimpse into late 19th-century culture and science, as well as kicking off the book’s clear objective of placing more women writers in the longer history of SF prior to second-wave feminism, and thus moving away from a typical version of that story casting Mary Shelley as anomalous, followed by generations of male descendants. The many women writers who have always been present throughout SF’s history appear throughout the collection situated in their proper historical contexts, a vital step forward from reprinting their stories primarily in anthologies highlighting “forgotten” women writers.

The second chronological section, “Foundations of SF II: Enter the Twentieth Century: 1900-1936,” succeeds in capturing the richness and complexity of the early pulp magazine era while not centering only a handful of familiar SF pulp magazines, beginning with the increasingly popular proto-solarpunk fantasia “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Haslam judiciously includes some verse reprinted in pulp magazines as well as a story by Francis Stevens predating Gernsback’s first issue of Amazing Stories but published in the all-important generalist pulp magazine All-Story (“Friend Island,” 1918), broadening the story of the early magazines beyond the usual emphasis on the Gernsback-Campbell lineage alone. I was also pleased to find here two stories that I teach in just about every course I can because their relevance to the present only continues to increase, Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920). Classic pulp stories by Lovecraft and Leslie F. Stone round out this section, which in my view collectively provides an astoundingly compact and effective introduction to these key decades in SF’s emergence. I also appreciate Haslam’s use of images from this period and elsewhere across the anthology, which help to convey media ecologies quite alien to contemporary students and illuminate the original contexts for these works’ circulation and reading.

The only absence from the second section that I truly felt deeply was, again, C. L. Moore’s, but one of her most famous stories co-authored with Henry Kuttner, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (1943), instead appears at the commencement of the subsequent section on the “Golden Age,” in enviable company sandwiched between Isaac Asimov’s ur-robot story “Liar!” (1941) and Ray Bradbury’s often anthologized apocalyptic story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950). All are superb teaching texts, and this section notably moves on not only to core science fiction luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, and Judith Merril but continues tracing Black speculative writing and thinking through one of James H. Hill’s newspaper stories, “The Space Ship” (1950), and Afrofuturist jazz icon Sun Ra’s poem “The Space Age Cannot Be Avoided” (1957).

The fourth section covers the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, titled “Revolutions and New Waves.” It provides a textbook overview of the new feminist SF of the time (Zoline, Tiptree, Russ) and stories by Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and William Gibson that characterize the experimentation as formal and otherwise of the time. One unique selling point for the book is a previously unpublished version of Delany’s story “Among the Blobs” (1976, 1987), accompanied by a new introduction from the author himself, but, as far as I can tell, the differences are minimal, and largely involve paragraph breaks and a few words switched out here and there. As a meta-history of science fiction and its futures itself, Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) works particularly well in an anthology such as this one, pairing nicely with some of the stories from earlier sections. I will again praise Haslam’s care to highlight works by women and also BIPOC authors in each section: here, the Saunders story, Scott-Heron’s spoken word track on the Apollo program “Whitey on the Moon” (1970)—a piece I have taught in many courses myself to great success—and, in the next section, William F. Wu’s 1983 story “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” help dispel the myth that SF was thoroughly white up until the 21^st century, with Delany, like Shelley, the single exception proving the rule.

The penultimate historical section navigates the later 80s to the early 2000s and as such struggles more than other groupings to tell a coherent story, perhaps because by this time science fiction had begun to mean so many things and pull in so many directions, and Haslam is clearly eager to hasten on to the present. The organizing framework offered by the title is “The Digital Age and Its Discontents,” and cyberpunk stories do appear here in abundance, with an emphasis on women authors such as Pat Cadigan, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Eden Robinson. But Gibson’s story had already appeared in the previous grouping, and, with only two stories from the 90s compared to the ten selections published since the 90s that the book contains, this section flounders somewhat as an implicit historical account or exercise in periodization. It overlaps conceptually and temporally with the preceding section, which shares the 80s, as well as with the following one, with which it shares the early 2000s; it is also impossible to tell the story of SF at this time without extensive consideration of film, games, and other media, so increasingly important to the meaning and understanding of the genre. I do not question the inclusion of any particular text here: I teach Butler’s “Speech Sounds” and Bell’s “The Space Traders” at every opportunity myself, and Nalo Hopkinson and N. K. Jemisin as well, but I am simply observing the high heterogeneity of this section, more a symptom of SF than this SF anthology, in the end.

One of course expects this kind of heterogeneity and lack of clear historical narrative in any account of the present moment, and so the same could be said of the final section on contemporary SF that features work by eight authors published between 2008 and 2019. Beyond showcasing stories by some of the major authors of this century—Ted Chiang, China Miéville, and Ken Liu—it also includes more work from less well-known Indigenous authors—here, Richard Van Camp and Drew Hayden Taylor and from Africa, Dilman Dila’s “The Last Storyteller” (2019), appropriately the final story in the book. I might have grouped Hopkinson and Jemisin in this section myself, key writers of the present and future, to be sure. In the end, the range of different versions of science fiction and futurisms presented here serves as a useful snapshot of the unrepresentable vast phenomenon that we call “SF.”

Any additional complaints or criticisms about the anthology that I could raise would remain quite minor. For example, there are a few too many puns about the book taking a “broad view” of science fiction for my taste, a minor complaint indeed. It is also strange for a historical anthology of English-language science fiction to lack a Heinlein story, although a remark in the introduction suggests that this omission and a few others may have resulted from permissions and/or expense issues (35). The larger and perhaps largest concern might be that the broad approach taken here risks hastening the forgetting of once centrally canonical twentieth-century authors of SF, including those featured in the Wesleyan such as Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, and Frederik Pohl, and a little later Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, among many other multiple Hugo and Nebula winners past. The tradeoff inherent in the rightly more expansive vision of SF presented here is the compressing of certain essential parts of SF history, but Haslam’s introduction, notes, and brief critical bibliography offer solid guidance for further explorations in any era and corner of SF’s history. Finally, because of the expansiveness of that vision of what SF encompasses and the many critical conversations with which Haslam engages, the erudite seventeen-page introduction, while generally accessible, occasionally makes points likely to fly over the heads of truly novice students without much prior exposure to or understanding of science fiction and its history. Nevertheless, I would recommend the book highly as an excellent base classroom text that an instructor can choose to supplement in various ways according to the preparation level of the students. Right now, The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction seems like the best anthology of its kind for adoption in a university-level science fiction course, in that it most effectively captures and communicates the current state of science fiction scholarship as well as science fiction’s diverse historical trajectories.

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

Children of Strife

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Children of Strife

Zorica Lola Jelic

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Children of Strife. Orbit, 2026.

Children of Strife is the fourth novel in the Children of Time series (Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory, and Children of Strife). The novels can be read as interconnected standalones, but it is best to read them in order. If one could choose a word to describe the humans in these novels and what they cause, it would be the word strife. The final conflict happens in this last novel, so the title is appropriate. Hence, who are the children and what is the strife? As in most of his books, Tchaikovsky begins with a conflict between humans on Earth. Different factions are fighting for power, for resources, for political dominance, and of course it is all fueled by their unavoidable hubris. Tchaikovsky also plays with the chronotope, so the reader has to keep track of the different worlds, spaceships, and timelines to understand how the characters developed and how everyone got to that final place. There are quite a few “what ifs” in this series, and the main one is what if science can release a terraforming nanovirus that can accelerate evolution in monkeys and create humans? This is Kern’s quest in Children of Time: creating life, being greater than life, being God. Of course, members of the other faction sabotage the project, and the virus is released on an alien planet named Nod (without the monkeys). Evolution is accelerated and new sentient species are created. This last installment to the series brings together the visitors and inhabitants of all the new worlds from the previous novels in a final conflict for humanity and the other evolved species of the Panspecific alliance.

It seems that no matter how far humans go into the future (the events happen over a few millennia) or away from Earth, they cannot leave behind the anthropocentric worldview. Kern suffers from the God complex, but she treasures her creations more than humans, which makes her somewhat different from Hartmand, who just wants to be a merciless God. Therefore, after millennia away from a destroyed Earth the final conflict is between the creations that God-like humans have made, the human “Gods,” and the human refugees that have survived the trip across space and time. Yet, these creations are not only biological; they are also artificial intelligences. What makes the story even more intriguing is that the creators themselves have transferred their identities, along with their good and bad aspirations, into these worlds as AI.

Apart from nanotechnology and imperialist terraforming, Tchaikovsky explores artificial intelligence and cybernetic immortality. Kern cannot live forever, but she can upload her consciousness into the computer and thus achieve a form of immortality. The question is whether Tchaikovsky treats these entities as clones or different selves of the same person. It appears that in the end Kern is a different identity from the one that set out to terraform alien planets. Another interesting concept is the supercomputer/simulator on planet Imir where humans encounter a virtual reality. They set into it to find the original creators only to realize that virtual reality will not give you the truth; instead, it will give you what you want to find. Alis spends a whole human lifetime in it, going deeper and deeper only to find out in the end that she never scratched the surface of it. She was only exploring her own scenarios. This is an interesting concept considering all the hype and theories regarding ChatGPT and other AI programs of today. She comes out of it traumatized and not able to differentiate reality from a virtual construct, thus, constantly questioning her sanity.

Tchaikovsky revisits the concept of symbiotic relationships (Alien Clay) through the rather comic virtual symbiosis of arachnid-like creatures Portia and Fabian, who struggle to combine their identities and find mutual ground for existence. A new approach is given through the symbiotic relationship of Alis and Mira, who have embraced each other’s personalities via their patient / therapist relationship. Their mutual interaction helps Alis ground herself in reality while helping Mira evolve. Mira is perhaps the most interesting character in the novel. Readers find out that the therapist helping Alis is actually Kern’s first creation. She is the original microbial organism (or group of organisms) that has adapted and transformed into a scientist. However, she struggles to contain her true nature, which involves a keen desire to ruthlessly assimilate all life in her path. Her symbiotic relationship with Alis helps her become a better living being. In the end, Mira displays more humanity and empathy than the humans do. At one point, Mira would rather end her own existence than bring more harm to others. She helps bring together the somewhat torn Panspecific alliance and gives a second chance to those who wish it by creating bodies for the AI entities. In the end, Mira is the dream that Kern set out to create.

Once again, Tchaikovsky takes the “what if” to another level by creating worlds in which life does life. Entities and creations explode in full force by assimilating everything and everyone into their own world. Yet, the highly evolved ones prove to have more “humanity” than humans do. It appears that the only true monsters in this universe are the vindictive and rather petty intelligences that conquer others not for the symbiotic advantages but for absolute power. They are the ones who, though capable of using their knowledge and science to cure Earth, do want to and would rather not share the accolades with their political opponents. With these novels, Tchaikovsky reminds us that in reality there is no terraforming, there is no other planet, and that our efforts should be aimed at saving the only planet we have.

Children of Strife is a good novel for those taking science fiction courses, although it is advised to read all the novels in the series for a better grasp of the concepts and storyline. The series is an excellent example of the Bakhtinian chronotope since the temporal and spatial shifts are layered and well done. Also, Tchaikovsky’s approach to giving different perspectives from various characters can be discussed further. The novel is useful for scholars interested in topics such as empathy, AI, cybernetic immortalities, virtual realities, terraforming theories, ecocriticism, trauma theory, ethics, anthropomorphism, and symbiotic relationships.

Zorica Lola Jelic, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the faculty of Contemporary Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. She teaches English as a foreign language, Business English, Shakespeare, and English Drama. She earned her degrees in Shakespeare studies, but she also loves to write about literary theory and science fiction. She has published scholarly papers, coursebooks, and enjoys attending professional conferences.

Service Model

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Service Model

Jeremy Brett

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Service Model. Tor, 2024.

Service Model has many spiritual predecessors—including every story or novel in which an artificial life form achieves new levels of sentience and independence—but in reading the novel, I found myself most drawn to a memory of the 1950 Ray Bradbury short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”. Soft Rains is a simple story, chronicling the daily routine of an automated ‘smart house’ that unknowingly goes about its preprogrammed and scheduled day even though its owners have been incinerated in a nuclear war. There is a deep sadness in Bradbury’s story, in not only the contemplation of the complete death of humanity but also the bleak realization that the automata that serve us will go on and on in our ruin, trying to perform its duties of service now rendered utterly pointless. What if all that is left of us are the systems and machines we built for our comfort and ease that now have no discernable purpose? What if a service model, a construction that only exists in direct relation to humanity, has no one left to serve? Both Bradbury’s story and Tchaikovsky’s novel ask their readers to consider the longevity of ourselves and our built environments in relation to the value of the legacies they leave behind for their survivors.

Tchaikovsky takes these stark existential questions and answers, “Well, obviously, what remains must learn to serve itself, serve alternates, or else accept its eventual extinction.” Service Model’s protagonist, the electronic valet Charles, embarks on something of a Dantean-level quest for a new identity and sense of purpose in a world where he has been rendered gradually, and then quite suddenly and violently, obsolete. Charles (whose evolution is initially signified by a name change, first to Undesignated Valet Unit and then to Uncharles—the latter a clear thematic abandonment of his former existence) is a valet for an isolated, introverted rich man, following the typical range of assigned tasks of pampering and ease for which a footman is traditionally responsible. When his master becomes abruptly removed from the equation, Charles/Uncharles is forced to come to grips with his existence in the wake of a slow apocalypse that has disappeared the vast majority of humanity. What remains in its place, and which provides at times moments both of high comedy and deep sadness in the novel, are the maddeningly slow and inefficient bureaucratic processes that made a modicum of sense when humans were running them, but which result in a Kafkaesque hell realm of unintentional cruelty to innocent bots endlessly awaiting resolution for their malfunctions. In one nightmarish scene, Uncharles, after travelling through neighborhoods of empty streets and abandoned manors, reaches the monolithic Central Services in hopes of repair or reassignment, only to confront long lines of lost, broken robots, many of whom Tchaikovsky presents as heartbreaking in their desperate attempts to retain their identities and functions. Robots stranded at Central Services exist in a forever holding pattern, without human officials to make accepted processes workable, and many are destroyed in the mindless process of “Data Compression,” supposedly a way to efficiently store robot memory for the future but quite fatally literal in its effects on robot physicality. It is a powerful moment in Uncharles’ existential journey, as he, already believing himself defective, becomes increasingly aware that something is badly askew in the world, something his machine logic cannot process or accept. (“Uncharles looked from the great static mass of robots awaiting a diagnosis that would never come, to the shattered remains of Data Compression. Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay. Neither of which seemed to be natural behavior for wolves, but Uncharles could only assume this was another aspect of his undiagnosed defect. He let them fight until one ate the other.”) As then-Charles reports to the AI that governs his master’s house near the novel’s beginning, “House…Everything is wrong. I am aware of a very large number of inefficiencies…None of these things are efficient or logical. I wish to report an error in the way that everything works.” All at once, “as his systems tried over and over to establish a new queue of tasks in a world that wanted absolutely nothing from him, he found that he could conceive of a world where things worked better.”

From that first moment of realization, Service Model becomes a story of expanding one’s worldview, as Uncharles migrates from a mental and emotional self-image of himself as the malfunction to a holistic worldview that considers alternatives to the way things are. His journey is one not only dedicated to self-definition and self-fashioning, but to the meaning that those things represent in a greater world. The house in “Soft Rains” is particularly sad, carrying out its functions mindlessly because it knows no better, understands no other way to be, and is incapable of reevaluating its purpose. It is forever trapped in a meaningless cycle, and only an accidental fire puts its existence to an end—and even then, a remnant of the system goes on, forever reciting the current date to an absent audience. Uncharles, on the other hand, develops a self-image independent of his dead creators and that instills in him an independence from unworkable, unjust systems. It’s a development with clear emotional resonance for sf readers; witness, for example, the rabid popularity of Martha Wells’ Murderbot, who similarly evolves out of its programmed constraints into a freer, more autonomous life.

As Uncharles proceeds through the novel, he encounters various ways in which both humans and robots have sought to create alternative ways of survival and societal revitalization in the face of apocalypse, as well as their catastrophic failures to do so. Each encounter is a learning experience for Uncharles, who is searching for a place where he and the new world can meet and function efficiently together. At one point he states to another robot, “I was constructed for only the one purpose. Since leaving the manor I have witnessed many things I did not understand…I have travelled through many places that functioned at less than a satisfactory level and did not seem to fulfil their purposes. The world, as I have witnessed it, is a place lacking in efficiency, rationality, and cleanliness. I am driven to find a place in it nonetheless.” Uncharles seeks to escape the reality of illogic by trying to find a place in which he logically, purposefully exists and functions. In a parallel quest, he is accompanied by The Wonk, a human disguising herself as a robot (the book’s longest running joke is Uncharles’ complete failure to recognize The Wonk as a human rather than a bot, even as the reader realizes this from Sentence One). The Wonk wants to know why and how the apocalypse happened, desperately hoping that the cause was a revolution by robots recognizing, like Uncharles, the ability to choose for themselves. “Because if it was just…economics, or climate, or plagues or something then that’s…pointless.” For The Wonk, the only escape from meaningless chance is to believe that robots rose up and destroyed the humanity that enslaved them; that would mean justice and fairness exist in a mad world. Without ethical meaning, what good were we? What is the good of a world where little survives of us but the detritus we thought made our lives purposeful but ultimately prove as pointless as the endlessly date-droning house of “Soft Rains”? In the end, The Wonk, like Uncharles, is obliged to consider different ways of living in the world and different reasons for its prevailing disorder. In sum, Service Model carries on the venerable sf tradition of evolving machine autonomy but adds to those works new dimensions of philosophical complexity by pairing that quest with a wider exploration of meaning on both the world macro- and the individual microlevel.

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.

The Tusks of Extinction

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 56, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of The Tusks of Extinction

Adrián Pla Ángel

Nayler, Ray. The Tusks of Extinction. Tor Publishing Group, 2024.

Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction (2024) is a conceptually dense novella that confronts the vanity of the Anthropocene through the lens of de-extinction. The narrative centers Dr. Damira Shakhbazova, a preeminent mammoth expert and digital ghost. In her past life, Damira was a brilliant behavioral ecologist who was brutally murdered by poachers while trying to protect elephant herds. In the narrative’s present, her digitized consciousness—salvaged from a cold-storage backup—is uploaded into the mind of a cloned mammoth matriarch. Resurrected by the shadowy, oligarchic “Moscow Corporation,” this mammoth is meant to anchor a newly-bred herd in the Siberian “Pleistocene Park.” Conflict arises because the cloned mammoths, lacking generational memory and social structures, are dying of behavioral failure; they do not know how to be mammoths. Damira’s human mind must synthesize with the ancient, dormant instincts of the mammoth body to teach the herd how to survive.

Nayler articulates the novella by weaving Damira’s internal, posthuman experience alongside two parallel plotlines. The first follows a team of highly weaponised eco-defense mercenaries hired by the corporation to protect the multi-billion-dollar herd from heavily-armed poaching syndicates. The second follows a wealthy, elite modern hunter who has purchased the ultimate luxury experience: the legal right to hunt and kill one of these resurrected giants. Instead of yielding to the technophilic spectacle typical of modern clone-and-capture narratives, Nayler introduces a stark, suspenseful eco-thriller that quickly shifts away from the mechanics of genetic engineering to examine the structural violence of ecotourism and late-stage capitalism. The narrative converges in an inevitable, bloody confrontation where human greed clashes directly with the ancient, newly-awakened instincts of the herd, resulting in a bleak interrogation of human supremacy.

Within the broader trajectory of science fiction, The Tusks of Extinction actively converses with and subverts the long-standing “resurrection” lineage depicted in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990). While Crichton’s foundational text explores the chaotic collapse of human systems under the weight of genetic pride and chaos theory, Nayler alters this trope by shifting the focus from the scientific how to the socio-ecological why. The novella draws deeply upon the conventions of climate fiction and contemporary posthumanism, trading the typical pulp-adventure thrills of rampaging monsters for a somber, philosophical exploration of digital reincarnation, interspecies trauma, and synthetic ecology.

Furthermore, by choosing the mammoth, a creature deeply tied to actual, contemporary scientific efforts regarding Siberian permafrost restoration, Nayler grounds his speculative world in immediate, real-world ecological debates. He draws on the traditions of classic eco-speculative fiction, such as the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K. Le Guin, where the natural world is not merely a passive backdrop for human drama but an active, agentic protagonist. Nayler employs the genre’s historic capacity for cognitive alienation to mirror our current climate anxieties, playing with the generic boundaries between the hard sci-fi cyberpunk matrix (the digitised mind) and the gritty, visceral reality of climate-altered landscapes.

From a scholarly and formal perspective, the novella offers immense critical potential for science fiction studies. Its formal structure, juxtaposing the corporate-funded resurrection of megafauna against the continuous, low-intensity warfare of modern poaching, powerfully complicates the historical science fiction trope of the “technological fix”. Nayler suggests that merely resurrecting a biology does not resurrect an ecology, nor does it dissolve the capitalist frameworks that caused the extinction in the first place. Thus, the text introduces a profound, dialectical tension between the physical flesh of the mammoth and the digitised ghost of the human mind inside it. This raises crucial posthumanist questions regarding where human agency ends and animal subjectivity begins, directly contributing to the intellectual and philosophical concerns of contemporary science fiction.

Compared to contemporary science fiction texts that favour lengthy space operas or techno-optimistic solarpunk, Nayler’s approach stands out for its concise, razor-sharp focus on the ethics of the Anthropocene. The prose is stripped of excess, functioning like a clinical yet deeply poetic case study in extinction economics.

For researchers and educators in the English Studies domain, The Tusks of Extinction possesses remarkable pedagogical utility. It serves as an ideal anchor for undergraduate or graduate modules focusing on the Environmental Humanities, Critical Animal Studies, or contemporary speculative fiction. The novella can be productively paired with classic extinction literature or contemporary eco-theory, such as Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble or Ursula K. Heise’s Imagining Extinction, to ground its narrative in biopolitical theory. It also pairs brilliantly alongside Crichton’s Jurassic Park for a comparative study on how the Science Fiction genre’s attitude toward genetic engineering has evolved over three decades. An effective classroom exercise would involve a discourse analysis of the corporate rhetoric utilised by the novella’s “Moscow Corporation” versus the real-world promotional material of actual de-extinction startups (such as Colossal Biosciences). Students can map out how speculative literature exposes the hidden neocolonial and neoliberal motivations embedded within contemporary science, analysing how Nayler seizes form to critique the commodification of the non-human world. Ultimately, the text offers a compact yet theoretically rich intervention that challenges students to rethink the boundaries of conservation, memory, and species justice.

Adrián Pla Ángel holds a Cum Laude PhD with international distinction in Applied Languages, Literature, and Translation from Universitat Jaume I, where he serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies. Besides, he is also lecturer of the Education department at the European University of Valencia. As a member of the IULMA research institute and the SPARK research group, his research focuses on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and the multimodal analysis of digital and textual genres. His extensive university teaching experience includes courses in complex text production, advanced registers, and technical English, backed by international research stays in Germany and the Czech Republic. He is also actively involved in educational innovation and funded research projects.