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Review of The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935

Paul March-Russell

Jim Endersby. The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935. The University of Chicago Press, 2025. Paperback. 424pg. $37.50. ISBN 9780226837567.

One of the key aspects of Jim Endersby’s magnificent study is the emphasis he places upon ‘participatory culture’: the extent to which different audiences reinterpreted and made use of the new—and as yet incomplete—theory of mutations, generating cultural meanings that went beyond its initial formulation in 1901 by the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries. As a result, Endersby’s analysis foregrounds the historical moment in which these reinterpretations and new uses were made. His book, though, is itself a participant, and an intervention, in the history of mutation theory which, as Endersby clarifies, has had a long, enduring afterlife even though de Vries’s account was largely discredited by 1930. Reading this book now, in the current context of neo-eugenics; demands for racial and sexual purity; the dismantling of the state in the name of efficiency; technological boosterism; and the distorting media effects of celebrity and propaganda, it is hard not to have a sense of déjà vu. History, by itself, does not repeat, but those who do not read history—who regard it, like the high prophet of efficiency Henry Ford, as ‘bunk’—are condemned to repeating its mistakes (usually at other peoples’ expense). The salutary effect of Endersby’s book, as detailed and as comprehensive as it is, is that it goes beyond a mere historical account and addresses concerns that are vital to the culture in which we currently participate. By revealing how contentious, unstable and, in many respects, downright wrong scientific knowledge was in the early twentieth century, Endersby compels us to also question the supposed certainties that are currently being trumpeted in the age of the ‘tech-bro.’

Joshua Glenn, on behalf of his series of MIT Press reprints, has dubbed the period 1900 to 1935 ‘the Radium Age.’ Yet, as Endersby convincingly argues, it should really be called ‘the Mutation Age,’ so powerfully did de Vries’s theory capture the public imagination. At the heart of its meteoric rise, dramatic decline and trailing iridescence was a single question: how did new species emerge? Although Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, still hotly contested and disputed by biologists at the start of the twentieth century, had indicated how certain species survived, it failed to explain how new species arrived. Since the process of natural selection was incalculably slow, how could new variants take hold without being swamped by the dominance of pre-existing biological forms? The apparent failure of Darwin’s theory to explain this discrepancy suggested that, if Darwinism was not totally wrong, it was seriously flawed, and open to new or resistant theories.

This space generated not only competing versions of Darwinism—alongside Darwin himself, there was still the legacy of Jean-Baptise de Lamarck’s theory of inherited characteristics as well as the work of Darwin’s contemporaries such as Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, and August Weismann—but also contested definitions and usages of keywords, most notably, that of ‘evolution’ itself. Endersby pays particular attention to the concept of ‘experimental evolution’: that the process of evolution could not only be studied by experiment but also intervened in and accelerated. In a rebuff to historians of science, Endersby shows, both in his main text and the appendices that examine the contents of over 150 science textbooks published between 1900 and 1932, experimentalism was not primarily associated with the rediscovery of the work of Gregor Mendel. Mendelism, and the realization that the answer to the question of how new species arrived was a new theory of heredity based upon Mendel’s focus on hybrids and Darwin’s natural selection, only gradually took hold after T.H. Morgan’s work on fruit flies in the 1910s. As Endersby notes, even as late as the mid-1920s, biologists such as Julian Huxley were still conflating Morgan’s discoveries with de Vries’s theory of mutations: something that even Morgan and his colleagues did themselves.

However, the other key factor in de Vries’s greater popularity was that his work was simply more exciting and sensationalistic than Mendel’s plodding and seemingly esoteric observations with pea plants. Into the space opened up by the irresolution of Darwin’s theory poured the new journalistic literature, hungry for attention-grabbing novelties. Endersby draws extensively upon concepts such as bricolage, familiar from fan and subcultural studies, to show how ideas, still contested and unproven within the scientific community, slid into popular discourse and became entangled with other cultural and political ideologies. In a further critique of his own discipline, Endersby demonstrates that a narrow focus on the work of scientists, as evidenced by the elite readerships for scientific papers and academic journals, offers a drastically one-sided account of how scientific knowledge was popularly understood. Instead, although de Vries’s description of apparently spontaneous plant mutations was not translated until the 1910s, the idea was appropriated by US magazines a decade earlier. In an era of mass circulation and limited copyright laws, the thrilling concept of sudden mutations was rapidly disseminated, often in apocalyptic terms that declared the end of Darwinism and the revelation of how the evolutionary principle could be seized and manipulated. Whilst on the one hand, mutation theory seemed to offer the possibility of developing new foods at the expense of Malthusian fears of overpopulation, on the other hand (as Endersby shows), the apocalyptic rhetoric enmeshed with both theosophical ideas and the peculiarly Californian pseudo-religion of ‘New Thought’ in claiming that scientific discoveries, such as those by de Vries, could revive the occult knowledge of Chaldean wisdom and presage a new developmental stage in human consciousness. Although Endersby’s focus is on biology, his analysis dovetails with how physics and mathematics were also viewed in the same period as part of a spiritual awakening, for example, the role of theosophy again in Mark Blacklock’s 2018 account, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension.

This odd mix of American can-do and mystical otherworldliness was embodied by Luther Burbank. Endersby compares Burbank’s experiments with new plant species with his near-contemporaries, fellow botanist Lewis Hyde Bailey and electrical inventor Thomas Edison. Bailey, unlike Burbank, retained a pastoral view of nature: that the natural world was inherently good and morally sustaining, but that humanity’s role was to work with nature and cultivate it for the greater good of human need. Consequently, although Endersby portrays Bailey as a more conservative figure than Burbank, he nonetheless embodies what Endersby calls the ‘biotopian’ tone of the popular literature: a forward-looking view in which nature is not there to be managed but actively intervened in and reshaped for the progress of human society.

Burbank, like Bailey, was portrayed as a simple folksy figure—sensitive, caring, even maternal—but in his ruthless destruction of aborted experiments, Burbank also appeared to be indifferent to the natural world except as a vessel for human needs. His relentless approach led Burbank to being compared with Edison, the epitome of the engineer paradigm, as Roger Luckhurst has argued in relation to pulp SF, but (like Edison) Burbank was also called a ‘wizard’: the very folksiness attributed to him also seemed to describe a mystical wisdom, an ancestral knowledge that came from working with the very processes of natural development. Although such descriptions were patently false (one of Burbank’s chief proponents was Garrett P. Serviss, author of the Wellsian rip-off, Edison’s Conquest of Mars [1898]), Burbank was nevertheless content to go along with them. Again, like Edison, he was a ruthless and talented self-promoter, riding the wave of boosterism that was a keynote of the popular journalism. Whereas de Vries also attempted to promote himself through the same channels, he was hampered not only by his non-US identity but also by his academic background; Burbank’s lack of formal training was actually an advantage by playing up to his public image as an untutored, supposedly natural genius. In fact, as Endersby drily observes, nearly all of Burbank’s results were disasters, but that didn’t stop US governmental departments throwing lucrative contracts in his direction or academic institutions falling over themselves to be associated with him (although Burbank’s idiosyncratic and undisciplined approach proved a nightmare for his more professional colleagues). Who knows what might have happened if Theodore Roosevelt or W.H. Taft, so impressed by Burbank’s vaunted skills, had offered him a place in their administration, maybe heading up a department of national efficiency? Instead, as Endersby deftly describes, Burbank’s rhetoric of weeding out undesirable elements and cultivating previously unsophisticated ones neatly overlapped with the racialist discourse surrounding the contemporaneous US invasion of the Philippines.

As Burbank’s fame eclipsed de Vries’s initial popularity, calling into question public understanding of what constitutes ‘science’ or a ‘scientist,’ whilst also extending the biotopian impulse afforded by mutation theory, a very different trajectory emerged in Britain. Endersby takes as his starting point T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1894), arguing that while Huxley rejected the idea of nature as innately good and viewed it instead as a plastic, material resource for human need, he was constrained by the Malthusian reinterpretation of original sin: that humans were inherently competitive and destructive. How could nature, on the one hand, be repurposed and improved at the expense, on the other hand, of the human desire for violence and conflict? Was it possible to not only intervene in the natural world but also human nature, if the ends justified the means?

As Endersby concedes, Huxley’s exploration of this ethical dilemma was inconclusive, but in the process, he outlined not only the terms of the argument to be taken up by his successors but also supplied a science-fictional (and residually Christian) imaginary: the bio-engineered future as a new Eden; a planned and cultivated garden that complemented the visions of Bailey and Burbank. This garden imagery, though, is profane rather than sacred, populated with artificially grown hybrid species. In describing the perversity of this biotopian nature, Endersby slightly misses a trick by not also noting the contemporaneous imagery of the hothouse flower that runs through the Decadent writing of the same period or, indeed, Arthur Symons’s description (only a few months before Huxley) of Decadence’s ‘spiritual and moral perversity’ as ‘a new and beautiful and interesting disease.’ H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), to which Endersby turns, is also in dialogue with the Decadent movement—the Eloi as lotus eaters, the Morlocks as vampiric predators—whilst Men Like Gods (1923), a central text for Endersby, fully embraces the artificial paradise favored by both Huxley and Symons. Endersby also glosses over the post-WW1 context of Men Like Gods, a vitriolic riposte to such apocalyptic novels as Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922), but convincingly sets it alongside such key speculative essays as J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1924) and J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929). One of the most important aspects of Endersby’s analysis is the extent to which he troubles the blanket use of ‘eugenics’ to describe these writings. Whilst Wells’s infamous winnowing of African and Asian peoples in his essay Anticipations (1902) embodies some of the worst aspects of negative eugenics, both Men Like Gods and the essays of Bernal and Haldane either switched to more positive forms of eugenics or rejected the pseudo-science altogether, famously proposing, for example, the uses of artificial reproduction.

Both Bernal and Haldane had published in the pioneering pamphlet series To-day and Tomorrow, which sought to communicate both a world of ideas and competing visions of the future to a curious general audience. This democratization of scientific thought is also explored through Endersby’s extensive analysis of science textbooks, to which Wells contributed via The Science of Life (1929), his collaboration with his son G.P. and Julian Huxley. Besides detailing how The Science of Life offers a non-fictional counterpart to Men Like Gods, Endersby convincingly demonstrates how textbooks not only kept alive the now discredited theory of mutations but also preserved its authority by setting it alongside the more accepted theories of Darwinism, Mendelism and heredity.

Textbooks and pamphlets, seemingly more temperate than the hyperbole of popular journalism yet nonetheless infused with the same biotopian vision, were an important interpreter for political activists. Whilst Darwinism, in the form of social conservatives such as Galton, Haeckel and Spencer, seemed to offer a biological justification for the status quo, its emphasis upon the perversity and mutability of nature also lent succor for those seeking the overthrow of capitalism or patriarchy. Yet, the gradualism of natural selection, although approved by reformers such as Ramsey MacDonald, was anathema to more radical campaigners. Consequently, de Vries’s mutation theory, by declaring the spontaneity of change, seemed like a gift, and it rapidly became recommended reading (in one or other popularized form) for those on the revolutionary Left. Endersby pays particular attention to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) as both a feminist and socialist utopia which, unlike Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), actively argues for the re-engineering of nature. Although Endersby examines the Darwinian roots for Gilman’s racism, he balances this ideological blemish by stressing the extent to which she viewed gender as a cultural category and (like other turn-of-the-century feminists, it might be added) appropriated Darwin’s concept of sexual selection as a means of female intervention.

Another demographic for the textbooks were the young, predominantly but not exclusively male, readers of the early pulp SF magazines such as Amazing Stories. Just as he deftly alludes to fan and subcultural studies as part of his interdisciplinary approach, Endersby makes respectful use of critics such as Samuel R. Delany and Paul Kincaid to consider pulp SF as a discourse that effectively rehearses many of the themes that preoccupy his earlier chapters. In a survey of writers from David Keller and Jack Williamson to John Michel and Clare Winger Harris, Endersby explores not only how the concept of mutation was reinterpreted as part of an exciting series of optimistic technological visions but also how it informed the participatory culture of First Fandom: the so-called ‘backyard’ of the letter pages overlapped with Hugo Gernsback’s encouragement for readers to pursue their own ‘backyard science’ like miniature clones of Burbank. There is more that could be said here about Gernsback’s support of technocracy—a 1930s movement that has acquired contemporary relevance thanks to the fascist sympathies of Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather—but Endersby wisely leaves that for other writers to investigate.

Endersby contrasts the emergent pulp SF with the post-Wellsian scientific romances of J.D. Beresford, Julian Huxley and Olaf Stapledon. However, whilst Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) clearly utilized the speculative visions of Bernal and Haldane, Endersby also observes how Stapledon’s work, alongside Wells’s Star Begotten (1937), influenced its US counterparts. To that end, Endersby pays close attention to how Huxley’s ‘The Tissue-Culture King’ (1926) was reframed within the pages of Amazing Stories, and how Beresford inserted a scientific dialogue into The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911) for its US publication, so as to clarify the origins of the mutant prodigy. (I will admit I was unaware of the details of this addition when I wrote about the novel in my own Modernism and Science Fiction; equally though, Endersby pays less attention than he might to Beresford’s usage of Henri Bergson’s ‘creative evolution.’) Leaping forward to such movie franchises as the X-Men, Endersby astutely observes that it is SF which has kept the folk-science of mutation alive long after the original theory’s demise; an observation that could have been developed further by noting how Stapledon’s concept of homo superior passed into the wider culture via David Bowie’s song ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971).

In his conclusion, Endersby addresses the elephant in the room, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but does so by emphasizing that what Huxley offers is not a eugenic but a bio-engineered future, coupled to Pavlovian conditioning, which critically reflects the optimistic visions of Wells, Haldane, Bernal and his own brother Julian. Endersby tends to downplay, though, Huxley’s own complicity in these same ideologies which adds greatly to (at least for this reader) the unpleasant ambiguity of his novel. However, in noting that Brave New World is ultimately a satire on the Americanization of modern life, Endersby observes that it can also be read as a critique of the hollow promises of Luther Burbank (albeit written by an elite English intellectual). Despite these criticisms, though, Huxley tended to side with the burden of ancestral heredity, the dilemma that his grandfather had contended with, rather than the potential of speculative heredity as proposed by his brother. Endersby concludes that the cultural effect of novels such as Brave New World is to dissuade us from intervening in nature—that nature, somehow, knows best—whereas existential crises such as climate change dictate that intervention, in recognizing and embracing the perversity of nature, may actually be the right course of action.

Lavishly illustrated, engagingly written, and beautifully packaged by the University of Chicago Press, The Arrival of the Fittest is a substantial achievement. Its capacious approach to the subject is testament to both the generosity and humility of its author. This is interdisciplinary research of the highest order: it transforms our understanding of the period into more complex and subtle forms whilst also setting a high bar for those to follow. Meeting that challenge would be the perfect response for a work that dramatically alters how we view the cultural field of the early twentieth century.

Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-commissioning editor for Gold SF (Goldsmiths Press). His most recent book, J.G. Ballard’s Crash (Palgrave Macmillan), was shortlisted for the BSFA Awards in 2025.

Review of Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

David K. Seitz

Stefan Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs, and Stefan L. Barndt. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. UP of Mississippi, 2022. Paperback. 322 pg. $35.00. ISBN 9781496836632.

MANTIS (1994-5) is perhaps best remembered for having brought one of the first Black superheroes to American television. Starring Carl Lumbly as the scientist turned vigilante Miles Hawkins, MANTIS piqued my interest as a child with a burgeoning interest in geography due to its memorable vision of security and surveillance in the dystopian metropolis of Port Columbia. In “The Eyes Beyond,” Hawkins must overthrow the City Eye, a fascistic, panoptic supercomputer, whose spherical lair made inventive use of the iconic dome of Vancouver, British Columbia’s Science World as a filming location. To this day, the booming voice of the City Eye, voiced by Malachi Throne, still occasionally haunts my dreams, perhaps summoned by the police helicopters I regularly hear overhead living in downtown Los Angeles.

Cities provoke fantasy, and speculative fiction has long been a powerful site for both reiterating and interrupting ideological common sense about relationships between urban space, race, class, violence, and power. Yet it is only recently that the city of speculative fiction has been afforded the sustained collective attention it deserves as an object of analysis in its own right. Originating in a 2014 American studies conference in Europe, Fantastic Cities gathers sixteen essays from scholars of film, literature, history, and urban studies examining visions of the urban in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with a principal, though not altogether exclusive, focus on cities in the United States.

The volume opens with a first-rate theoretical essay by editors Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs that surveys cities’ seeming ubiquity and recurrence in speculative fiction and enumerates some recurring characteristics of the Fantastic City. Understanding cities’ imagined incarnations, they argue, matters because fantasy is so constitutive of “the world we know”. (14) Shaped by conventions, but assembling and juxtaposing forms of life in sometimes-unexpected configurations, Fantastic Cities are at once national and transnational, vertical and horizonal, and simultaneously bounded, expansive, and mobile.

Perhaps most crucially, Rabitsch and Fuchs contend, Fantastic Cities are palimpsestic, “in perpetual flux of (de)construction and (re)development, constantly redefined”. (25) This invocation of the figure of the palimpsest is an important early indication of this volume’s potential interest to critical geographers as well as literary and film scholars, as the physicality of the palimpsest’s persistent traces accords well with contemporary human geography’s materialist approach inquiry into the contested production of urban space. To undertake a palimpsestic inquiry into fantastic urban space is also a necessarily ethico-political project, requiring an openness to being haunted by remainders, ghosts whose presence is never fully erased.

The editors of Fantastic Cities are to be commended for the consistent standard of rigor and accessibility met by all the contributions, which are organized into sections on imagination, apocalypse, freedom, and ecology. Yet the volume’s most successful chapters are arguably those that embrace the palimpsestic approach outlined in the introduction, holding in consistent tension cities’ simultaneously material and fantastic dimensions, and remaining in meaningful dialogue with the normative and critical as well as descriptive aims of contemporary American studies as a field that has been revolutionized by critical political economy, a postnationalist turn, and the rise of critical ethnic studies.

Carl Abbott’s contribution, for instance, persuasively explicates Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical optimism about cities—which are so often troped in speculative fiction as spaces of alienation and anomie—as sites of experimental coalitions and provisional solidarities across race and class. From Washington, D.C. to Orange County to New York City to Mars, Robinson figures cities as places where people make do amidst the quotidian emergencies of climate change, capitalist development, and an overgrown military-industrial complex. In such perilous places and times, Abbott observes, Robinson nevertheless holds out hope and imaginative space for forms of urban “community animated by vigorous democracy”. (75) Chris Pak’s chapter, on visions of terraforming in the work of Robinson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frederick Turner, takes a complementary angle, considering how fantastic cities can give rise to human relationships to nonhuman nature on terms that exceed capitalist and anthropocentric logics.

Though its source material hardly shares such optimism, Jacob Babb’s treatment of Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One (2011) is equally sophisticated. For Babb, Whitehead’s zombified New York is at once apparently “postracial” and brutal in its treatment of both zombies and the workers tasked with “clearing” the city of them. In such a grim scenario, Babb speculates, “Whitehead seems to be telling us that the only hope… is to abandon hope and face the bleakness”. (99) Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s chapter, on the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), likewise finds considerable bleakness in extractive urban capitalist landscapes. That both films present sympathetic protagonists who eke out nourishment, beauty, enchantment, and pleasure however they can, Weinstock astutely suggests, renders “the vampiric taking of blood… preferable to the capitalist creation of human misery”. (115)

Three other chapters distinguish themselves in their theoretically rigorous dialogues with postnational and hemispheric visions of American Studies. María Isabel Pérez Ramos brings the cutting-edge decolonial criticism of Walter Mignolo to bear on dystopian visions of desert cities in the U.S. Southwest, praising writers like Leslie Marmon Silko and Rudolfo Anaya, who turn to Indigenous and Chicanx ancestral knowledges for viable alternative visions of eco-futurity. J. Jesse Ramírez’s interpretation of Peruvian American director Alex Rivera’s dystopian film Sleep Dealer (2008) intervenes in longstanding debates on alienation in Marxist science fiction criticism, rightly insisting that cognitive estrangement is always relative, and materially anchored in specific histories and geographies of race, class, and nation. And James McAdams finds in Samuel Delany’s novel Dhalgren (1975) experimental, innovative, and radical visions of social selfhood that become possible only in a postnational urban America—an American city in which “the social mythology America has created for itself [is] removed”. (192)

As an urban geographer and American studies scholar with a foot (or at least a few toes) in science fiction studies, I read Fantastic Cities with great interest. The book’s accessibility makes its eminently teachable. In fact, I began referring undergraduate students to it before I had even finished it. Although not every chapter excited me as much as those foregrounded in this review, as is perhaps inevitably the case for anyone reading an edited volume cover-to-cover, the volume fully succeeds in bringing the city from the background to the foreground of speculative fiction studies, and will no doubt be an important touchstone for subsequent research.

David K. Seitz is Associate Professor of Cultural Geography in the Department of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California and extended faculty in the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of A Different ‘Trek’: Radical Geographies of ‘Deep Space Nine’ (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and essays on Star Trek published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, Science Fiction Film and Television, Geopolitics, The Geographical Bulletin, and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. He lives in Los Angeles.

Review of Bioware’s Mass Effect

Dominic J. Nardi

Jerome Winter. Bioware’s Mass Effect. 1st ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon. Hardcover, Ebook. 96 pg. $44.99. ISBN 9783031188756. eBook ISBN 9783031188763.

Bioware’s Mass Effect is an unexpected but welcome entry in this Palgrave series on canonical texts in science fiction and fantasy. Jerome Winter’s book achieves Palgrave’s stated goal of “destabilizing” traditional notions of the canon by placing the videogame franchise alongside more traditional classics of the genre such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). Winter focuses on the first three Mass Effect games—released between 2007 and 2012 (and remastered in 2021)—in which players control Commander Shepard using third-person shooter and roleplaying mechanics to rally the galaxy against Lovecraftian space monsters known as Reapers. Winter explores the thematic and narrative elements of this trilogy, but also focuses on how the unique interactivity of videogames enhances and complicates the storytelling.

Winter situates the Mass Effect trilogy within the “well-worn conventions of the SF genre, specifically the familiar subgenre of space opera” (2). Yet, while he notes that space opera has influenced videogames since at least 1962, the trilogy stands out as unique both for its embrace of genre tropes and its subversion of those tropes. Mass Effect echoes the pulp sensibilities of authors such as E.E. “Doc” Smith, and indeed contains direct allusions to those texts, but rejects their “cardboard characters, black-and-white morality, torturous plotting, and dated ideological baggage” (4). Instead of retreading the pulp-era trope of human colonization of exotic planets, humanity in Mass Effect is a junior partner in an established galactic civilization.

The first chapter of BioWare’s Mass Effect focuses on the text’s unique features as a videogame, combining analysis of the skill-driven shooting gameplay and narrative agency afforded by the player’s ability to choose dialogue options. Indeed, the game’s binary morality options—in which players can choose ‘paragon’ or ‘“renegade’ responses at critical points in the story—bestows meaningful agency on players by allowing them to exercise their unique political, social, and personal values. Mass Effect uses this mechanic to force players to engage with problematic space opera tropes, such as the implicit xenophobia in how these stories depict insectoid alien species. Winter pushes back against the perennial moral panic about videogames by citing BioWare data showing that 92% of players chose paragon options (17).

Winter then examines the Mass Effect trilogy’s treatment of politics, which he interprets as a “blistering satire of modern war” and “neo-missionary eco­nomic colonialism” (29-30). Unlike most military shooter videogames, Mass Effect does not glamorize violence as the only or necessary response to threats. Indeed, depending on the player’s choices, some of the nonplayer characters’ arcs undercut traditional justifications for vigilante justice. The story even underscores the importance of diplomacy, righting historical wrongs, and overcoming bigotry as the player must build an alliance of alien species against the Reaper threat. Mass Effect also points out the economic injustices caused by corporate exploitation in ways its pulp-era predecessors rarely did.

This chapter provides a helpful corrective to stereotypes about the politics of videogame storytelling, but perhaps overstates the extent to which Mass Effect subverts genre tropes. The Citadel Council, the story’s equivalent to a galactic government, refuses to heed Shepard’s warnings about the Reaper threat, leading the player character to join the human-supremacist militant group Cerberus in the second game to continue the fight. The final game clearly rejects Cerberus’ worldview and requires the player to defeat the group, but continues to perpetuate genre tropes depicting soldiers as uniformly honorable and political institutions as untrustworthy or ineffectual. The human representative to the Council even ends up betraying the player character and the anti-Reaper alliance in the third game.

The third chapter of BioWare’s Mass Effect covers one of the most celebrated aspects of the Mass Effect trilogy, namely its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Players can choose the gender of their character, with a female version of Commander Shepard that challenges the default straight white male option in military shooters. Winter situates this version of Shepard in the tradition of female science fiction action heroes such as Ellen Ripley in Aliens (1986). The game also has homosexual characters and LGBTQ-coded romance options, allowing players either to roleplay based on their own sexual identity or to explore sexualities different from their own. Importantly, Winter notes that players still confront story content dealing with sexuality and discrimination even if they choose to play as a straight white male Shepard.

The book concludes by showing how Mass Effect incorporated contemporary real-world extrasolar planetary science into its world-building, making it a vehicle to educate players about astronomy. The later games have options to scan planets for mineral resources, which provides scientifically plausible information about the planet’s atmosphere and geology. The games leverage this scientific research to inform the evolution of the aliens that populate the galaxy. These exotic planets and species have the defamiliarizing effect typical in science fiction, while the scientific plausibility helps maintain the player’s suspension of disbelief.

Other books in this Palgrave series typically start with biographical information about the author and historical context of the canonical text, but the Mass Effect trilogy is the product of a corporation with a team of writers and developers. Winter spends little time in chronicling the history of the BioWare studio or its staff. This approach is probably necessary for analyzing a text with so many creators, especially as no single auteur had creative control over the whole story (the lead writer left midway through the series). Bioware’s Mass Effect engages more with authorship in the chapter about representation, where Winter quotes several BioWare writers who defended the studio’s commitment to LGBTQ representation against backlash.

Winter’s decision to cover only the original Mass Effect trilogy is understandable for a Palgrave series focused on individual canonical texts, but it does have the effect of overlooking key texts in the franchise that would complicate his analysis. The fourth game, Mass Effect: Andromeda, revives the older colonialist and discovery genre tropes that Winter claims the trilogy eschewed. The player character goes to a new galaxy to terraform planets for human habitation while rescuing the Angara, an alien species coded as ‘noble savages.’ At the same time, the game also builds on the trilogy’s then-groundbreaking LGBTQ representation with more options for same-sex romances, including five bisexual characters. Both the pulp-era tropes and LGBTQ representation were controversial with players at the time, albeit for different reasons. Winter’s brief treatment of two tie-in novels to the game suggests fascinating possibilities to interrogate genre tropes and settings. A coda to Bioware’s Mass Effect that engaged with Andromeda and other tie-in media would have been appreciated and helped clarify the extent to which Winter’s analysis of the original trilogy applies to the rest of the franchise.

Bioware’s Mass Effect is a concise and persuasive argument for treating the videogame trilogy as part of the science fiction canon—the only interactive media so far covered in this Palgrave series. Readers unfamiliar with Mass Effect might be surprised to learn about its thematic depth, subversion of genre tropes, and engagement with sexual identity. Those familiar with the games might learn how Mass Effect draws from and challenges a long tradition of space opera.

Dominic J. Nardi received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan and teaches about human rights at George Washington University. He coedited The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV (Palgrave, 2020), Discovering Dune (McFarland, 2022), and Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations (Bloomsbury, 2025). He has written academic articles about politics in Blade Runner and Lord of the Rings, and has been a guest on various podcasts to discuss science fiction. He has played through the Mass Effect trilogy twice.

Review of Star Trek and the Tragic Hybrid: Children of Two Worlds from Spock to Soji

Jeremy Brett

Carolyn Burlingame-Goff. Star Trek and the Tragic Hybrid: Children of Two Worlds from Spock to Soji. McFarland and Company, 2024. Paperback, 224 pg. $49.95. ISBN 9781476694849.

One of the philosophical cornerstones of the Star Trek universe is the Vulcan concept of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” Drawn from Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s belief in a human future marked by joy in difference, IDIC embraces the joys and possibilities signified by the vast array of variables inherent to existence. That concept has been personified multiple times in the various televised iterations of Trek through a number of ‘hybrid’ characters that are either products of Human/Alien reproduction, meldings of machine and organic, or sites for the merging or irreconcilability of two vastly different cultures. These attempts at living expressions of IDIC, designed not only to demonstrate the difficulties of finding one’s identity and place in the universe but to provide captivating foci for character development, though, have been imperfect at best. They achieve to some degree Roddenberry’s double goal of asking audiences to consider and reconsider the state of racial conflict in America and to imagine a future where racial differences are ignored and diversity embraced as a core value; however, as Burlingame-Goff’s thoughtful study shows, hybrid characters in Trek are problematically rooted in the hoary old literary stereotype of the 19^th century “tragic mulatto.” She also describes how many of the hybrids—characters designed specifically to showcase the limitless potential of creation—are governed by a simplistic essentialism (for non-Human species) that cuts against that potential. (All Klingons are violent and prone to anger, all Vulcans are pitilessly logical, all Ferengi are greedy capitalists, all Romulans are sneaky and duplicitous, all Orions are pirates, and so on. This is an aspect of Trek that has always bothered me as well as Burlingame-Goff, that Humans are allowed to be all sorts of things, but aliens in this franchise bend towards cultural and behavioral uniformity even as Humanness is always presented as the norm towards which aliens and hybrids should strive.) However, even in her criticism of aspects of hybridity in Trek, Burlingame-Goff is also careful to delineate the ways in which hybrids have shone light on the positive aspects of the Trek universe and been successful in expressing Roddenberry’s original intent to encourage an optimistic future in which we can all be what we choose to be.

Burlingame-Goff opens her study with a comprehensive look at the “tragic mulatto” figure from which Trek’s hybrids draw much of their inspiration. The “tragic mulatto” (a term coined by Black writer Sterling A. Brown in 1933) is a classic victim of dualistic, binary thinking where a person is one thing or the other: in this case, a mixed-race person with both White and Black ancestry (“blood”). “Tragic mulattos” were originally introduced in 19^th-century American abolitionist literature as living examples of the tragedies of African-American enslavement and the ways in which slavery pits Black against White. The objective of the writers who created these characters was to inspire empathy among primarily White, primarily female reading audiences, an empathy that hopefully would result in a greater popular agitation against slavery. Well-meaning, the “tragic mulatto” quickly evolved into a stock character delineated by certain common features, which Burlingame-Goff distinguishes as fourteen particular ‘core identifiers’. These include, among others, “Otherness and passing,” “tragic love,” “split nature,” “collective representation,” and “mediation.” It is indeed striking how many of these identifiers Burlingame-Goff defines code themselves to the various hybrids appearing on Star Trek, suggesting the ongoing attraction for audiences of the kinds of dramatic dilemmas these sorts of characters have presented for almost two centuries. Usage of this sort of stereotypical image can result in simplistic narrative shorthand that makes for easy, predictable storytelling, but it also has the potential for expanding our understanding of human (or alien) nature via a combination of familiarity and distance. Burlingame-Goff notes that one of Roddenberry’s stated goals for Star Trek was “to create a liminal space where he could examine racial issues” (13), but he also wanted to use race—as expressed through ‘mixed-blood’ Human/Alien hybridity —as a comforting and distancing shield to explore issues of human identity. To do this, she argues, he and his writers (as well as writers and producers of subsequent Trek series) relied heavily on the familiar “tragic mulatto” image, though incorporating into it evolving real-world attitudes towards difference and the struggles of multiracial people. 

Though Star Trek is rife with hybrid characters, this study focuses primarily on eight, above all the franchise’s arguably most well-known figure, Vulcan-Human hybrid Mr. Spock. Also considered are Data and Worf (both introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation), B’Elanna Torres and Seven of Nine (both introduced in Voyager), Odo (Deep Space Nine), Soji Asha (Picard), and Michael Burnham (Discovery). Burlingame-Goff divides these into three categories of hybridity (while noting that some characters exist across multiple categories): Biological, Technological, and Cultural. The chapter on Biological Hybrids (characters who are half-Human, half-Alien) opens by noting how Roddenberry “circumvented the need to rely on hackneyed derivatives of the outdated and socially problematic “tragic mulatto.” Repositioning the “tragic mulatto” in a science fiction universe populated by Aliens as well as Humans was a bit of sleight of hand that distracted audiences from the racist ideology connected to the original stereotype” (55). Trek hybridities rely heavily on racial essentialism to set the problems of interspecies existence in sharp relief. Burlingame-Goff looks at two characters in particular here. One is Spock, the child of a Vulcan father and Human mother. Spock’s internal war between his two heritages is a basic part of his character throughout Trek, as is his determination to identify purely as Vulcan, the dominant caste (allegorically, Spock’s Vulcan half, with its intelligence, self-control and reason, is equated with the “White blood” possessed by 19^th-century “tragic mulattos”, while his Human half, defined by emotion and instinct, equates to “Black blood”). Spock is forever unable to harmonize the two halves of his nature into a new, singular identity, but remains constant that his Vulcan nature (which is essentially unchanging) is superior. We do see Spock’s tragic hybridity given more expansion in later versions of the character, including his Kelvin Universe counterpart and his younger self as shown on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but he remains a figure trapped by duality and his mapping to Burlingame-Goff’s core identifiers. The chapter also looks at B’Elanna Torres and her own struggles between her Human and Klingon biological heritages. Though Torres and Spock are both at war within themselves, Torres works over the course of Voyager to overcome her traumatic childhood (and ongoing Federation prejudice against Klingons) and reconcile her early rejection of her Klingon mother’s attempts to acculturate Torres to a new identity that incorporates both sides.

Burlingame-Goff turns her attention next to Trek’s Technological hybrids. She notes J.P. Telotte’s observation that “robots, androids, and cyborgs can serve as compelling images for ‘our’ current notions of self, as well as an effective metaphor for that sense of ‘otherness’ which underlies all our recent discussions about gender, race, and sexual orientations” (92). The closeness of machine to Human represented by this class of hybrids makes us question what it really means to be Human. When considering the android Data (admittedly entirely synthetic, but  still a key example of hybridity because of his paramount desire to experience humanity), note must be made of several Next Generation episodes that specifically examined Data’s ability to exist as an independent sentient being connected to a Human nature, particularly Melinda M. Snodgrass’ 1989 courtroom drama “The Measure of a Man.” Data’s struggles to embrace Humanness instill him with the same core identifiers that mark other tragic hybrids. His “daughter” Soji (as seen in Picard)—an organic being infused with fragments of Data’s positronic neurons—also carries many of these identifiers, including a “doomed love” and the possession of a “dark secret”: in this case, her synthetic nature (which is feared and hated by Romulans seeking synths out for destruction). However, Soji successfully combines her Human and machine natures into a being that can mediate between synthetic and biological beings and create a third way of living. Burlingame-Goff notes that “Soji’s narrative may come closest to Lydia Maria Child’s and Gene Roddenberry’s dream of mixed-heritage individuals bringing together the best of Humankind and ushering in a new era of harmony among the races” (128). Although she is prey to the same “tragic mulatto” stereotypes that mark her fellow hybrids, Soji demonstrates the hopeful possibilities inherent to the harmonizing of dual identities. This chapter also looks at the Human-Borg hybrid Seven of Nine and her own particular condition, as a former member of the Borg Collective forced by Captain Janeway and the crew of U.S.S. Voyager to embrace her humanity, collapsing her multitudinous identity into a simple binary and separating her Human nature from her previous collective Borg identity. Seven, certainly in her early stages as a character, is particularly tragic in her ongoing disconnection from her Human side that produces fear, mistrust, and disrespect by her crewmates, as well as in her distaste for her Human side as corrupt and inefficient and finding advantages to Borg existence. Although over time she comes to embrace more of her humanity, she is a constant example of Donna Haraway’s observation about cyborgs representing particular kinds of ‘breached boundaries,’ (121) calling into question established dichotomies in the Federation about organic life vs mechanical.

Finally, Burlingame-Goff looks at Michael Burnham, a Human fostered by Vulcans (specifically Spock’s parents). The young Burnham enthusiastically embraces Vulcan culture but is continually discounted by the society she wishes to join; her joining Starfleet inspires her to create a new, more integrated identity that brings together Vulcan logic with Human emotion. Burnham is a particularly visible example of the potentials of hybridity: Discovery is the first iteration of Trek to achieve visible racial and gender inclusivity, and Burnham herself, as a Black woman, is “a perfect representation of how race, class, gender, and cultural heritage intersect and overlap with one another” (166). Even as she, like her fellow hybrids, draws on the 19^th century “tragic mulatto” and its racially fraught implications for much of her character and her internal and external conflicts, Burnham is an embodiment of the Trek franchise’s evolving and strengthening commitment to IDIC and the truth of a diverse universe. Even imperfectly, all the tragic hybrids under investigation here take viewers forever forward towards thought-provoking examinations of our own humanity, and in them we see much of what makes Star Trek continually relevant to our changing times.

Jeremy Brett is an archivist and librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, Texas A&M University. There he serves as Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. Both his M.A. (History) and his M.L.S. (Library Science) were obtained at the University of Maryland, College Park. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.