Tag: science fiction

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“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.”  – Fred Rogers

These words, from a 1999 interview, were famously posted in a viral Facebook post by PBS in response to the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, and to this day are frequently resurrected after countless other senseless tragedies. Apocalyptic SF is replete with examples of the worst of humanity coming to the fore in the face of adversity and catastrophe. Another well-worn trope in such works is the helpless damsel in distress, doomed to sell her soul, or her flesh, in a desperate attempt to survive. More often than not, she is the victim of physical and/or sexual assault. Lastly, teamwork by male and female protagonists inevitably ends in comfort sex, a one-night stand (or sudden sequence of such events), often to be regretted in the morning or soon pushed out of the narrative as unimportant, fading into the background as if it were just one more trite plot device to be ticked off the author’s standardized to-do list. To Risse’s credit, her debut novel, Inland, only features the last of these three over-used tropes. Risse’s novel quietly celebrates Mr. Rogers’ “helpers,” although it takes some of her characters considerable time and effort to come to the same realization.

The tale begins soon after the beginning of a vaguely described weather catastrophe that, without warning, floods the eastern seaboard of the US. Speculations by Martin (who, it is insinuated, has some scientific background in climate change) sprinkled throughout the novel suggest it is related to years of rising sea levels and the mass thawing of glaciers and Antarctic ice, coupled with sudden shifts in the ocean currents (think The Day After Tomorrow with Noachian rain and waves rather than flash-freezing Arctic superstorms).

In contrast to many fictional cli-fi catastrophes, Risse’s is set just around the corner, in 2026, the author explaining that she wanted to portray climate change as “unwinding faster than was initially thought, or at least communicated to the public…. I decidedly didn’t want my novel to be a dystopian story set in the far-flung future. I wanted it to be about where we might possibly be heading soon and how that’s not a good direction” (Semel).

Boston native Kate Risse is intimately familiar with the Florida Panhandle coastline and barrier island where the novel begins, having spent many summers vacationing there. In interviews she credits the destruction she witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in 2018 as a major motivation behind the novel (Rowland; Semel). In addition to her lived experience along the eastern seaboard, Risse also draws upon her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies (Boston College) and her climate justice and Spanish language/culture courses at Tufts University in crafting details for her story (“About”).

This cli-fi ecocatastrophe is written in first person, the unfolding disaster described through the eyes of Juliet and the younger of her two sons, sixteen-year-old Billy. Individual chapters focus on Juliet’s desperate attempt to get home to Boston from her mother’s Dog Island beach home on the Florida panhandle and Billy’s equally desperate attempt to survive as the ocean swallows his Boston neighborhood and unexpectedly leaves him to fend for himself. The story of a second family, who lives a few blocks away, comprised of Martin (in Florida for a business deal) and his two teenage daughters, schoolmates of Billy (also stranded without adult supervision in the wake of the disaster), is intertwined (figuratively and literally) in the narrative.  

A MacGuffin of a complete disruption of all communication systems cuts off the parents from their stranded children, significantly raising the tension and driving Juliet and Martin’s desperate road trip north—or, rather, north-ish—following an inland path that allows them to not only play the role of good Samaritan, but be the repeated beneficiaries of similar grace. This is fortunate for the characters, as there is an apparent complete lack of governmental aid above some very limited local help within selected communities. While Juliet is openly skeptical of the basic goodness of humanity and repeatedly expects the worse from others, she is more often than not surprised to find that there are, indeed, as Fred Rogers offered, plenty of “helpers,” even in the worst of situations. This is not to say that Risse’s story is a Pollyanna tale; her characters also encounter realistic brutality and harrowing situations. But through these challenges they also discover their inner strength and hone their resiliency, all while learning to let go of parts of their old lives that no longer seem important while simultaneously holding fast to what truly matters.

The widespread failure of most radio, television, flip phones, and internet communication is exacerbated in the novel by a government smartphone ban that had gone into effect some months before. This ban was not intended to save the country’s youth from the mind-rotting effects of social media per se, but literally to prevent their brains (and bodies in general) from being poisoned by “toxic metals and radiation” supposedly associated with the phones (152). Again, the specifics behind the ban are doled out sparingly in the novel, alongside conspiracy theories and banal parroting of the government’s official pronouncements of the dangers. Fortunately, Billy and Juliet have contraband smart phones, and manage to send a few precious texts to each other, enough to convince Martin and Juliet that their children are still alive and attempting to leave Boston together.

While the first part of the parents’ road trip is told in great detail (from Dog Island, Florida, through West Virginia), the rest is either apparently uneventful (which seems strange given the trials the characters endure before this time) or held back for some other reason, until their arrival in southern Vermont. The novel ends with more questions than answers (not the least of which being an unshakable feeling that there is more to Martin than he is letting on), but does give the reader some closure in the form of the main characters’ emotional and physical status. There is certainly room for a sequel, which Risse has considered writing (Semel).

Taken in total, the work did not strike me as necessarily suitable for intense scholarly analysis. However, it would be interesting to see how different aged audiences might read the cellphone subplot in particular, especially given that the story is told from the viewpoints of individuals from two generations. I could see this book being used in a Climate Change Literature or Science and Society class at the college level; it could lead to some quite interesting class discussions and student personal reflections.

WORKS CITED

“About.” KateRisse, accessed 27 Sept. 2025, https://www.katerisse.com/about.

“Mr. Rogers Post Goes Viral.” PBS News, 18 Dec. 2012, www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fred-rogers-post-goes-viral.

Rowland, Kate. “Creativity Never Ends: Kate Risse on Writing ‘Inland’ and Thinking About the Future of Our Planet.” The Justice, 22 Oct. 2024, www.thejustice.org/article/2024/10/creativity-never-ends-kate-risse-on-writing-inland-and-thinking-about-the-future-of-our-planet

Semel, Paul. “Exclusive Interview: ‘Inland’ Author Kate Risse.” PaulSemel, 1 Aug. 2024, paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-inland-author-kate-risse/.

Kristine Larsen, Ph.D., has been an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University since 1989. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections between science and society, including Gender and Science; the links between pseudoscience, misconceptions, and science illiteracy; science and popular culture (especially science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien); and the history of science. She is the author of Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19^th Century, Particle Panic!, Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters, and The Sun We Share: Our Star in Popular Media and Science.

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What does it mean to meet history face-to-face? In Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, the past is not a distant tableau but a living presence, and the future is something to be negotiated. Bradley, a British-Cambodian author, constructs a novel in which temporal encounters become both deeply personal and ethically charged. The narrative alternates between two storylines: a near-future Britain, where the Ministry of Time, a secretive government agency, manages “expats from history”, and 1847, through the perspective of Commander Graham Gore, a naval officer aboard the ill-fated Franklin Expedition. The protagonist, an unnamed “bridge”, works at the Ministry’s Language Department, guiding historical figures as they navigate the modern world. The novel explores how people from different eras perceive and interpret one another, balancing the ethical and emotional challenges of cross-temporal interaction. Chapters in the contemporary timeline are numbered in Arabic numerals, while historical chapters employ Roman numerals, signalling shifts in perspective and highlighting the contrasts between past and present. The novel arrived with considerable anticipation, supported by an extensive marketing campaign and a wide distribution of advance review copies, which meant it had already generated significant discussion before its official release. Its reception was further boosted by its longlisting for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Placed within the broader history of SF, The Ministry of Time aligns with a tradition in which speculative devices are deployed to probe ethical, social and philosophical questions. Bradley’s use of time travel emphasises moral responsibility and cross-temporal understanding rather than adventure or spectacle. Her focus on romance across temporal and cultural divides situates the novel within a lineage of speculative love stories, while expanding the form to encompass postcolonial and environmental concerns. Even the historical elements (references to the Franklin Expedition) participate in a long-standing SF practice of revisiting the past to illuminate contemporary anxieties, although Bradley foregrounds intimate human connection rather than survival or horror. Through these combined strategies, the novel contributes to the interest in character-driven, ethically and politically engaged storytelling, demonstrating how speculative narrative can illuminate questions of identity, responsibility and the consequences of human action. Unlike many earlier works of SF, often celebrated for their focus on world-building, The Ministry of Time situates its speculative premise in a world that closely resembles our own. This allows the narrative to devote more energy to character, emotion and moral dilemmas, while leaving some readers wishing for a fuller exploration of the mechanics of time travel itself.

The title, The Ministry of Time, immediately evokes associations with speculative and political literature, notably Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Both titles suggest governmental authority over temporal matters, positioning time as a domain requiring oversight and intervention. This framing aligns with Bradley’s exploration of a bureaucratic institution managing time travel and historical figures, emphasising the ethical complexities of such power. Additionally, the title may resonate with the Spanish television series El Ministerio del Tiempo, which similarly engages with time travel and historical encounters, though Bradley’s novel distinguishes itself through its focus on intimate, cross-temporal relationships and postcolonial themes. With some critics noting striking similarities between The Ministry of Time and El Ministerio del Tiempo, discussions around the novel have been complicated by a plagiarism controversy. While the publisher and author have denied any direct borrowing, the debate takes up questions of originality, adaptation and cultural borrowing.

It is also noteworthy how the novel has circulated internationally: while most translations retain a direct equivalent of The Ministry of Time, the Spanish edition avoids El Ministerio del Tiempo, the title of the TV series at the centre of the plagiarism controversy. Instead, it is published as Un puente sobre el tiempo (“A Bridge Across Time”), a striking shift that seems to signal both a distancing strategy and an attempt to reframe the novel for Spanish readers. This small but telling change does a lot: it raises questions of originality, intertextuality and ownership that shape the novel’s global reception.

It is also noteworthy how the novel has circulated internationally: while most translations retain a direct equivalent of The Ministry of Time, the Spanish edition avoids El Ministerio del Tiempo, the title of the TV series at the centre of the plagiarism controversy. Instead, it is published as Un puente sobre el tiempo (“A Bridge Across Time”), a striking shift that seems to signal both a distancing strategy and an attempt to reframe the novel for Spanish readers. This small but telling change does a lot: it raises questions of originality, intertextuality and ownership that shape the novel’s global reception.

While historical references appear, they primarily enrich the speculative backdrop rather than drive the plot. At its core, The Ministry of Time is a love story that explores the challenges and intimacy of relationships that span vast temporal divides. The bridge-narrator develops a profound connection with historical “expat” Graham Gore; through their story, the reader learns about both the dissonances and resonances that arise when individuals from very different times encounter one another. Through this central relationship, Bradley foregrounds questions of ethical responsibility, empathy and the consequences of human action: concerns that echo contemporary societal debates on postcolonial legacies and climate change.

Characterisation and emotional depth are central to the novel’s impact. Gore’s perspective conveys the physical and moral realities of nineteenth-century naval life, from survival and hierarchy to the assumptions embedded in imperial and colonial structures, while his encounters with the twenty-first century expose profound cultural dissonances and ethical tensions. The bridge-narrator reflects on her role with a mixture of fascination, care and responsibility: “It was so hard not to treat the expats like blank slates onto which I might write my opinions. […] Every time I gave Graham a book, I was trying to shunt him along a story I’d been telling myself all my life” (156). Her emotional engagement is inseparable from ethical reflection: in guiding historical figures, she must navigate the consequences of her influence, balancing empathy with moral responsibility. The romance between narrator and expat thus functions less as a conventional love story and more as a lens through which the novel examines moral agency, the ethical stakes of mediation across time and the lingering effects of colonial frameworks. By interweaving emotional intimacy with ethical and historical inquiry, Bradley demonstrates how SF can explore the complex interplay of personal connection, cultural understanding and human responsibility across temporal divides.

While The Ministry of Time clearly draws on SF and time travel tropes, its narrative structure owes just as much to the conventions of romance fiction. The novel is less invested in the technical details of time travel than in the emotional arcs that unfold around it. For many readers of SF, the absence of an explanation of the time-travel mechanism might be frustrating, but this absence also shifts the focus: relationships, intimacy and desire become some of the central motors of the plot. Reading the novel through a romance lens reveals how Bradley uses affect and attachment not only to anchor the speculative premise, but also to complicate questions of power, dependency and care across historical and cultural divides.

Bradley also engages thoughtfully with postcolonial and historical reflection. Gore’s nineteenth-century assumptions, his navigation of Arctic landscapes and encounters with Indigenous peoples reveal the legacies of imperial hierarchy and the categories imposed by colonial governance. The narrator reflects on this inheritance: “The great project of Empire was to categorise: owned and owner, coloniser and colonised… I inherited these taxonomies” (181). Through time travel, Bradley interrogates not only individual actions but the structures and epistemologies that shape historical events. Language again emerges as central: the act of naming, translating and interpreting carries moral and political consequences. By highlighting these stakes, the novel demonstrates how speculative narratives can illuminate the ethical and cognitive work involved in historical understanding and postcolonial critique.

A more troubling element lies in Gore’s attraction to the protagonist, which is explicitly linked to her resemblance to an Inuit woman against whom he has transgressed in the past. This “interchangeability” risks reproducing colonial logics, reducing both women to symbolic vehicles for Gore’s guilt and potential redemption. At the same time, it may be read as a deliberate narrative device to stress how thoroughly Gore remains trapped in the worldview of his own era: even as he is displaced into the present, he cannot shed the racialised and gendered assumptions that shaped him. Intentional or not, this aspect leaves a lingering feeling of unease with the reader and raises questions about the novel’s negotiation of colonial history through personal relationships.

Time travel (even though the novel could have done more in terms of explaining how it works) functions as a mechanism for ethical and philosophical exploration. The Ministry, ostensibly a bureaucratic institution, highlights the limits and responsibilities of human intervention across temporal contexts that are, by extension, social and environmental contexts. In this framework, language and cultural understanding become essential tools: “One of the many hypotheses coagulating in these early days of time-travel was that language infirmed experience — that we did not simply describe, but create our world through language” (56). This insight underscores the stakes of Bradley’s work as a bridge: guiding historical figures is not only a matter of translation but also of shaping their perception of the present, influencing how they act and how the world is subsequently understood. Bradley uses this premise to explore the ethical dimensions of mediation across time and, consequently, stresses the responsibility inherent in naming, interpreting and narrativising events. The language concerns that Bradley brings up also resonate with broader SF traditions, where language often functions as a lens to question the relationship between consciousness, society and reality itself. Ultimately, she links speculative narrative with philosophical inquiry and proposes that our engagement with the past carries both cognitive and moral weight.

The Ministry of Time resonates strongly with broader societal reflections on how nations reckon with their pasts. In Britain, debates around colonialism, restitution and reconciliation have intensified in recent years, and Bradley’s novel can be read as part of this cultural moment. By resurrecting a figure of imperial exploration and displacing him into the present, the novel forces readers to confront unresolved colonial legacies rather than allowing them to fade into comfortable amnesia. This mirrors wider movements, within Britain and globally, that insist on engaging critically with history, acknowledging its violence and considering possibilities for repair. At the same time, The Ministry of Time extends beyond national boundaries: it participates in an international literary conversation about the importance of grappling with the entanglement of past and present, recognising how colonial structures still shape today’s societies and futures. Similar questions are being asked in Canada, Australia and other (settler-)colonial contexts, where literature can become a key site for negotiating historical injustices and imagining new, more just futures.

Formally, the novel benefits from its dual timeline and alternating perspectives, which allow for nuanced explorations of temporal, ethical and emotional concerns. Vivid descriptions of Arctic landscapes and period detail provide texture and authenticity, while the focus on emotional and cognitive mediation ensures that the narrative remains both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling. Bradley’s careful structuring, numerical versus Roman numeral chapters, reinforces the contrasts between past and present, which supports the thematic centrality of perception, interpretation and responsibility across eras.

While The Ministry of Time succeeds in its exploration of temporal ethics, linguistic mediation and emotional depth, certain narrative choices limit its impact in other areas. Readers with a particular interest in Arctic history or expedition narratives may find the historical sections comparatively brief and underdeveloped. The Franklin Expedition, though thematically resonant, serves more as a backdrop for cross-temporal ethical reflection than as a fully realised historical setting. This raises questions about why Bradley chose this particular historical context: the Arctic environment, survival challenges and the broader expeditionary framework are evocative but largely peripheral to the novel’s central concerns. While these choices are understandable given the novel’s focus on ethical mediation, language and cross-temporal encounters, the historical and geographic richness of the Arctic is not fully leveraged, leaving readers with the sense that the setting could have been more integrated into the narrative’s speculative and philosophical ambitions.

Beyond its literary and philosophical achievements, The Ministry of Time offers rich possibilities for scholarly engagement, particularly around the question of how understanding the past informs the present. The novel’s emphasis on cross-temporal mediation and responsibility encourages reflection on the ethical, environmental and social consequences of human action in the Anthropocene. Students and researchers could explore how Bradley’s narrative addresses the ongoing relevance of historical knowledge for contemporary challenges such as climate change, showing how interventions (temporal or societal) carry moral weight. Similarly, the novel’s attention to colonial hierarchies, historical encounters and the epistemologies inherited from empire invites analysis of how historical legacies continue to shape structures of power, cultural understanding and systemic inequities, including ongoing issues of racism. It is through the linking of speculative, historical and ethical inquiry that Bradley’s work provides a platform for discussions that span literature, environmental studies, postcolonial critique and social ethics. Doing so, she showcases how fiction can illuminate the stakes of grappling with history to better navigate present and future challenges.

Overall, The Ministry of Time is a richly imagined speculative romance that engages both the heart and the intellect. Bradley demonstrates how love across time can illuminate ethical, cultural and environmental stakes. Bradley shows that human connection, even across centuries, reflects ongoing societal concerns about climate, history and moral responsibility. The novel combines emotional resonance with intellectual rigor, making it a distinctive and compelling contribution to contemporary SF.

Lena Leimgruber is a PhD student in English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research examines representations of the Arctic in contemporary literature, with a particular focus on colonial histories, ecological crisis and more-than-human agency. Lena explores how speculative and environmental narratives challenge dominant cultural imaginaries and expose entangled legacies of imperialism and climate change.

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Adrian Tchaikovsky is possibly one of the best writers of science fiction today.  In his novels, he imagines and creates futuristic worlds as soft dystopias. The problems that arise in his novels are a result of human greed and bad politics rooted in the everlasting campaigns of acquiring more commodities. With this novel, Tchaikovsky puts forth a premise: the possibility of intelligent life evolving in complete darkness. In some distant future, humans have exhausted Earth’s resources and have colonized other planets. Children live in impoverished and confined shared spaces (hubs) with little food and even less opportunities unless they prove themselves to be potentially useful workers on spaceships. They travel throughout star systems in search of ore and other materials with the same colonial zest that humanity has cultivated over the centuries. Their bodies hibernate while doing so, and if there is no need for their particular skills, they can stay “shelved” indefinitely. By the same token, life spans can be prolonged since people can be re-shelved many times. The Garveneer Composite Mission Vessel approaches a moon in the Prospector413 system, which is always on the dark side of a planet and is, therefore, forever hidden from light. Due to its pitch-black nature that is hidden under layers of gasses, it is named Shroud. What appears to be an easy mission of doing pre-excavational research turns into a first-contact mission. The entity inhabiting the moon is named Darkness, and the reader soon finds out that Darkness is rather loud and has quite a story to tell. Yet, Tchaikovsky expands his premise and stretches the readers’ imagination further; it turns out that Darkness is a fast learner.

As in his previous novels, Tchaikovsky plays with the limits of science and describes the unknown with scientific knowledge known to readers. In this case, he shows how creatures living with no light develop a complex system of deciphering and tracking sound as it is done with natural sonars. However, sound is also a learning and communicating tool, which turns out to be too evolved for humans to understand. Tchaikovsky goes back to the greatest downfall of humanity—dismissing what cannot be understood as primitive and unworthy. Per instructions, the crew cannot afford to admit that intelligent life exists simply because not acknowledging life legitimizes the destruction of the same. Turning a blind eye for the sake of plundering and the never-ending prosperity of mankind seems to be the go-to modus operandi even in the distant future. Nevertheless, like any good hard science fiction work, this one opens the discussion on what it means to be human. For every colonizer throughout history, the category of humanity is stripped down to the notion that white man’s superiority implies morality. Darkness proves more than once that it has higher moral standards of understanding the other and alien life than humans do. It wants to learn and communicate in order to share knowledge and acquire new ones. It recognizes that learning about a different life form can benefit its own existence. Yet, ruthless human behavior forces the alien entity to become shrewd and recognize people for the threat that they truly are. Once more, Tchaikovsky shows how alien life does not have basic human emotions; yet, it has appreciation and a fascination with the workings of other life forms, which puts them in a morally higher category than people are. The lack of morality and respect of all life on the Garveneer shows that humanity, even though it has the technology, has still not evolved enough to make first contact with unknown life. This seems to be the strongest criticism of present-day people that Tchaikovsky provides. He also creates Darkness as an entity that has a learning curve similar to AI, which brings the reader back to the present moment and the debate on whether we should create more sophisticated AI machines when we are morally so corrupt that we do not recognize the responsibility that goes with such an endeavor. In other words, man’s hubris blinds him from recognizing his inability to compete with and monitor the rapid pace of AI innovation.

Furthermore, Tchaikovsky returns again to the representation of genderfluid people as well as the use of the ever so popular pronouns they/them for some of his characters. This could be his giving into or supporting certain social trends, which according to his novels will undoubtedly survive and make it into the future, or it could simply mean that humanity in some distant future will forego strict male/female interactions in favor of more conformable relationships, bodies, or identities. Perhaps, in the distant future, affinities will be based on proximity, because one cannot choose with whom one will be joined while mindlessly going through space in a pod ad infinitum. Still, the use of these pronouns and strange names can be misleading at times, as it was toward the end of this novel. Empathy also seems to be an ability that Tchaikovsky likes to use and explore. In the novel, it is quite clear that the humans have barely any empathy (except for a few crew members), while Darkness has a level of curiosity that prevents it from destroying life. On the other hand, the readers are left with difficult choices regarding who the villain in this story will be. In the beginning, one empathizes with the lithe crew members who are dispensable to the owner (Opportunities). However, as one finds out about Darkness, empathy is slowly transferred to the entity, while leaving only vague sympathy for the humans. In his previous novel, Alien Clay, alien symbiotic life did not have intelligence, although it acted and reacted based on innate hyper altruism. Darkness shows that it prefers not to destroy, but once its existence is threatened it chooses to learn and outwit the aliens (humans). The outcome of the story is suggested and, considering the exponential learning curve of Darkness, the readers will figure it out on their own.

Shroud is a well-written novel intended to pique one’s interest into the possibilities of alien life and how it might interact with humans. As a novel, anyone interested in science fiction will have a good time reading it. For science fiction courses, it is a good example of hard science fiction writing with an emphasis on space exploration (and excavation), space travel technologies, alien encounters, hive minds, and a fascinating concept of an alien species that processes learning as AI does. This novel can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses. I also find it as a valid work for scholarly explorations of narrative empathy, the aesthetics of peace, corporate exploration, and the evolution of consciousness and how humans can/cannot keep pace with it.

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.

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This competently written pseudo-historical fantasy novel is a textbook example of essentially everything that’s wrong with book publishing under late capitalism. I’m going to thoroughly spoil the novel here and also likely make it appear that Bacigalupi is my primary target, but he’s not: it’s the industry, the structure, not the individual. The story is set in an alternate-world version of the Italian Renaissance. Davico di Regulai is the only son and heir to a great and powerful banking house. The first three-quarters of the text centers around Davico’s being simply too nice and decent a person for the role that has been chosen for him by his patrimony. He’s kind, sensitive, naïve and open in a culture that values viciousness, indifference, cynicism and duplicity. He rather wishes he could become a physician and help people: he’s quite aware that he’s a bad fit for what he’s supposed to be. This is in no way a terrible setup for a good story. Either Davico is going to find a way for someone else to replace him so he can go pick mushrooms and heal people, or he’s going to grow into the role, lose just as much of his naïveté as he needs to in order to thrive, and take the banking house one step closer to domination. Or he’s going to grow into the role of patriarch/CEO but do it in a kinder, gentler fashion. But none of this happens; in fact, by the end of this 200k-word novel, we only get to the first couple of scenes of Act Two of how this sort of story typically works. I found myself nearly finished, thinking “well, this is all going to need to get wrapped up in a hurry, here”, and then it… doesn’t, really.

The initial chapters foreground a magical artifact in this otherwise non-magical world. Davico’s father has acquired at tremendous expense the eye of a long-dead dragon and has placed it on his desk as a symbol of his power and wealth. Davico comes to view the eye differently: he can sense the dragon’s dormant power and consciousness and is constantly fascinated by the glowing orb. The text does not explain why Davico in particular senses power through the eye, when neither his father nor any of the minions, allies, and rivals who sit across the desk from his father look at it as anything more than a trophy. We’re to infer, I suppose, that his sensitivity is the reason for why the eye reacts differently to him, but like many things in this story, we don’t get a clear explanation. Were I feeling charitable, I’d argue that Davico’s general head-in-the-clouds demeanor prevents him from looking too closely into the matter, and this is reflected in the text. The eye does enter into the final act of the story, or rather, what would be the final act were it a complete story.

Yet, aside from the eye, this world is mundane. Herein lies the true problem with Navola: it is much too close to our own world and yet too different to be literature worth the name. When I first picked up the book, I flipped to the first pages of actual text and so missed that there was a map before the first chapter. As I worked my way through the first third of the text, I kept thinking “this is a pastiche of our own world”. I was willing to accept pseudo-Italian city-states separated by rough terrain, on the premise that this was going to be an estrangement of the Italian Renaissance, and the developments in the book were going to defamiliarize me just enough with our own world to give insight into… any number of aspects of the time and place, such as how and why art flourished so much or how modern banking arose, etc. Compare Navola to, e.g., Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which hews closely to our own world save for a few characters and does real work in not only telling a banger of a story but also providing a great deal of food for thought about how attitudes toward science and economics shifted during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Bacigalupi’s story takes so very long to get going, and is so filled with endless, loving detail about how this society functions, that an experienced reader of SF or fantasy is going to expect a similar payoff, only maybe with a dragon. But “the Italian Renaissance was real cutthroat” doesn’t justify a buildup this long. Why was it cutthroat? What was it about the city-states’ relative freedom from domination by larger imperia or kingdoms that produced such an environment? How did the flourishing of arts and culture dovetail with politics and economics? None of these questions is answered or meaningfully addressed by the text.

It was at this point that the kingdom of “Cheroux” to the northwest is introduced, and some part of my eyeroll made tangible led me to finding the map in the front material. Oh, look: it’s the Mediterranean, only some catastrophic event, distant enough in the past to be mostly legendary, has erased Greece, Turkey and the Balkans and left empty sea in their place. The city-states look more or less like Italy; Cheroux is in the place of France. Navola is simultaneously too close to and too uninvolved with our own world to function as a work of literature. The first three-quarters of the text is constantly filled with pseudo-Italian words for things. I’m proficient enough in Italian to be able to read a book or hold a conversation in the language, and nearly everything was just the regular Italian word but with one or two letters different: this was both very distracting and, like most of the rest of Navola, fundamentally very lazy writing, though in fact the sentences are lovingly constructed and very smoothly edited.

There are two effective ways to write a fantasy novel that estranges the Italian Renaissance and makes us rethink what we understand about the time and place. One of them is to do what Stephenson did with northwestern Europe during the Baroque period: carefully research everything, get the times, dates and personalities right, then insert fictional characters through whose points of view the action takes place, all as a means of showing us what it was like for the dominant paradigm to shift from ancien regime to something approaching the Enlightenment. There are ample sources on the events and personalities of the Italian Renaissance and the long history of French meddling in the affairs of northern Italy for Bacigalupi to have done this. The other way to write such a novel would be to give us some completely different world, mundane or magical, that reproduces the conditions of existence of the Italian Renaissance: geography gives rise to city-states whose main source of income and power is trade and banking rather than production, and while their internal rivalries usually dominate, they can unite to fend off larger powers. They might even have dragons. Consider, for example, the Song of Ice and Fire series, which Martin has stated has its roots in the real-world Wars of the Roses, but is its own, internally-consistent world (with dragons) that can be read as its own world without reference to its estrangement of English politics of the era, but which becomes that much better if you’ve read too many of Shakespeare’s history plays.

Yet, Navola does neither of these; rather, it’s a (very) thinly disguised version of our world without the depth, and it’s one that doesn’t give us any meaningful insight as to what the Italian Renaissance was really like. The real Renaissance gives us all kinds of vivid, three-dimensional people about whom quite a bit is known, but in Bacigalupi’s text the only person we get to know is Davico, who in fairness is a carefully drawn and internally consistent character. His father is a caricature; he has friends who each have one trait; the family’s household is generic but perhaps for the spymaster. The actual de’ Medicis were much more interesting. The text makes constant reference to the Navolese being “twisty” people, always concealing their true plans, but the novel doesn’t go anywhere with this: there’s no reflection on what it means to be twisty other than that Davico can’t pull it off, and the text isn’t twisty in form nor content, either.

For example, one way in which this world does differ significantly from ours is that it’s a fundamentally pagan society. There’s a monotheistic church, but it’s more first-among-equals than truly dominant: there’s also a whole pantheon of gods that have magisteria and mythology that is both detailed within the text and referenced by the characters. And to Bacigalupi’s credit, this is all done quite well. It just doesn’t go anywhere. The real Italian Renaissance was dominated from top to bottom by Catholicism: look at the intrigues of the Borgias to make one of their own the pope. Look at the art. If a fantasy novel that is a work of literature is going to change this and make its analogue of Italy polytheistic, that needs to tell us something about the role of monotheism in the events and paradigm of the time and place. But it doesn’t: it’s just lore and worldbuilding. It’s actually interesting and plausible, but irrelevant to any estrangement value the novel might have. The same goes for the giant gaping hole where Greece, Turkey and the Balkans used to be, which is not detailed with the same care as the polytheism. Remove those lands from the world, and then the novel can estrange how much of the Italian Renaissance had to do with refugees from recently conquered Constantinople fleeing to Italy. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Children of Earth and Sky series actually does this, though it too suffers from being both too close and not close enough to our world. But in Navola, the Italian traders and bankers just do business with the lands on the periphery of the sea.

There’s also a long subplot in the novel where Davico grows up with a “sister”, Celia, who is in fact the daughter of a family his father has removed from the power structure. It’s never clear quite why his father brings her into the family: is she a hostage, or the natural child of the father? Throughout the first three-quarters of the book, we consistently see that Celia is far better at twisty intrigue than Davico is. It’s easy to think “oh, they’re going to get married, and Davico can be the genial patriarch while Celia is the power behind the throne with a knife up her sleeve”, or else have the two of them think this and then we find that they’re actually half-siblings.

But none of this happens at all: the novel plays with our expectations, but very poorly. At the three-quarter point, Davico’s father’s adversaries pull off a surprise plot, and nearly every character we’ve met gets killed, including the father. Celia pulls a Villainous Heel Turn out of nowhere and blinds Davico, then completely disappears from the book. The adversaries put Davico in the oubliette, from which he gradually plots a way to get close enough to the dragon eye and use it to see through to effect his escape. The novel then ends rather abruptly with his riding off into the woods to plot his revenge. And it becomes clear that Navola is not a story at all, but rather the first installment in a cash-cow million-word series.

This is what I mean when I say that this novel represents everything that’s wrong with modern publishing. Somewhere out there, an unpublished writer has meticulously researched the Italian Renaissance and written a wonderful stand-alone historical fantasy about it: Lorenzo de’ Medici, Action Hero. Somewhere else, a different unpublished writer has written a wonderful fantasy novel with city-states and bankers and so forth, set in its own world that doesn’t look like Italy. I want to read both these books. Yet they won’t be published, because their authors have no track record and those two novels are both outside the bounds of easily-categorizable marketing copy. Rather, the publishing industry, concerned only with shareholder value, has let Bacigalupi publish a long prologue, and then marketed it with “by the Hugo and Nebula award winner.” I’ve read The Windup Girl, and while it evidently gets some details about Thai culture wrong, it’s a remarkable text that deserved the awards. I’ve taught it to undergrads three times now, and it’s a real, complex estrangement of colonialism, climate change and a host of other things. So, when I needed a beach book a couple of weeks ago, I thought “this will be good”, and it’s… not. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s basically the notes for an undergrad’s D&D campaign. I want to be clear here that I don’t blame Bacigalupi. It’s difficult to write award-winning literature, and were I such a writer, I’d absolutely jump at the chance to write something much easier and know I’d make a lot of money from it because of my past writings. I blame the industry that only answers to the profit motive and puts sales over quality.

Ian Campbell is the editor of SFRA Review.