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Families of the Future

Nina Niskanen

In this essay I want to explore family in science fiction through the lenses of Octavia Butler, Charlie Jane Anders, Starhawk, John Scalzi, and Martha Wells. Be forewarned that there are spoilers for the following books: the Xenogenesis series by Octavia Butler, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, The Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi (specifically, Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Sagan Diary, The Last Colony, and Zoe’s Tale), and the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. These books all have a very different view as to what family means and also, in some ways, a really similar one.

On Chinese author Hai Ya's Hugo Award-winning novelette “The Space-Time Painter”

christine yunn-yu sun

Chinese author Hai Ya received the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for his story “The Space-Time Painter” (Shikong huashi). It is the title story in the ninth volume of the “Galaxy's Edge” series (Yinhe bianyuan) published by Beijing's New Star Press (Xinxing chubanshe) in April 2022. According to the publisher, “Galaxy's Edge” is “a series of science fiction stories specially designed for young sci-fi fans and their fast-paced urban lifestyle”, “produced as small-format books designed for ease of reading and carrying”, and “gathering outstanding sci-fi works from China and overseas to integrate distant universe and brilliant starlight into every reader's life”.

As of the writing of this essay, there is no evidence that an official translation has been published for English readers to peruse “The Space-Time Painter” as a novelette. This reviewer has produced an English translation of the story. While the translation cannot be published here, it lends assistance to this review, which aims to (a) analyse the story's historical and cultural significance and (b) assess the story as a literary work.

Brutes, Villains & Bureaucrats 

7a Baddest Discworld Bad Guys

tansy rayner roberts

They sneer, they stab, they laugh maniacally… and sometimes they stare through you as if you’re worthless. Terry Pratchett is great at many things, but crafting horrifying villains is one of his superpowers. While he has certainly introduced many memorable female villains to the Disc — the Duchess of Lancre, Lily Weatherwax and the Queen of the Faeries for example — and many iconic antagonists that are entirely (or mostly) ungendered such as the Auditors, the Gonne, and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, there is something deeply and deliciously sinister about his male villains. What do many of them have in common? Competence, ruthlessness and a talent for admin.

Rub your hands together in glee, it’s time for an octagonal listicle!

The Redemption Arc

Amy Salley

There you are, mid-book. The good guy is face-to-face with the bad guy. The good guy knows that the bad guy, deep down inside, isn’t evil, that there is a chance to bring the good guy back to the light. The bad guy scoffs! Indeed no! The good guy’s virtue is a weakness! But in a private moment, the bad guy has second thoughts. You are riveted. Will the bad guy come around? If he does, will he deserve forgiveness? Yes, you think. He will.

On that satisfying note, you put your book down. You blink in the light of the real world. You scroll your apps. There’s another accusation of wrongdoing against an author. In fact, the author wrote the book you just put down. The accusation is just one example of behavior that has been going on for years, one of SFF’s worst-kept secrets. No one on the convention circuit ever called him on it and now the simmering collective discomfort has boiled over.

Critical Choices

Time Travel and Identity

Rjurik davidson

Regrets, who doesn’t have them? Who hasn’t made mistakes? Relationships, jobs, passions, living locations. Sometimes we took too long to end them or change them. Sometimes we jumped too early. Sometimes we never jumped at all and are now trapped in some hellish half-life. ...

These questions are of special interest to psychologists and philosophers, who reflect on life’s choices, on its possibilities and constraints. Each in their own way try to construct an adequate model of free will and determinism, of agency and structure, of identity and personal change – of who we are, of what makes us, of what we can do and what we can’t, and why this is so. 

Science fiction has its own privileged sub-genre for examining these questions, one particularly suited to thought experiments about personal timelines, decisions and their consequences, of who we are and how we became that person and not someone else, another version of ourselves – the time travel story.

AND! Read Davidson’s time-travel short story “Domine."

The Solarpunk Garden

Moving Beyond Eden

phoebe wagner

The garden seems to be the solarpunk story in the U.S., in part due to the prominence of garden stories in early solarpunk like the wonderful Glass and Gardens anthologies (World Weaver Press) or the guerilla gardener in Phoebe Shalloway’s fun indie game Solarpunkification. It should be noted that solarpunk is a global genre, but at the same time, “western” storytelling tropes have dominated anglophone literature. And that’s really what I think the garden might be: a comfortable, western motif or plot. In my solarpunk writing, I work to shift each story away from different aspects of “western” storytelling in order to not repeat the ideology that pushed us toward climate change. 

The garden is deep in our imaginings, which makes it worth questioning. In this essay, I will explore the garden and question why stories featuring gardens flourish while other, much needed, stories depicting alternate ways we can separate from capitalism seem less prominent.

Men Who Respect Witches III:

Male Supporting Characters in Witches Abroad

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Far more than in Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters, the men of Witches Abroad exist to serve (either literally, providing skills or assistance, or figuratively, pushing forward the narrative) the female characters, and witches in particular. There are still so many speculative fiction stories in the world where women exist as shadows, love interests and vulnerable plot tokens in comparison to the more active male roles; fantasy has come a long way over the decades, but it was a big deal in 1991 to find a story that so thoroughly turned these tables.

I’ve divided the male characters of Witches Abroad into four handy categories: men who listen, men who assist, men who aren’t men, and men who aren’t there.

Space is Dead.

Why do we keep writing about it?

Andrew Dana Hudson

The truth is that for over half a century since the moon landing, we’ve made little progress on the interplanetary manifest destiny I grew up believing in. Today manned spaceflight has no cultural or political momentum to speak of. China and America talk about returning to the moon in the next decade or so, but who knows if it’ll happen. To date less than 700 people have ever been to space. Orbit is filling up with junk.

None of this is to discount the real and meaningful work that NASA and others have done over these past few decades. The unmanned craft they have sent all across the solar system have been great scientific and technological achievements. I have friends who work on such probes, and they are marvels of ingenuity.

However, a big part of futures thinking is projecting current trends and trajectories into the future, and right now—despite 75 years of rocket ships, space stations, moon bases, and Mars domes being the dominant signifier of futurity—our present trends and trajectories point only down, back to our ever-warming Earth.

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‘That's not cosy!’

The Foundations of Cosy Fantasy in Deerskin

S.L Dove Cooper

Deerskin isn’t cosy fantasy. It’s one of my go-to examples of books that led to this emerging genre, but it isn’t cosy fantasy. Whenever I bring up Robin McKinley’s 1993 novel about surviving rape and healing from trauma, I’m always met with some variant of “Really? That book isn’t cosy at all!” It’s not surprising, given the novel’s age and topic, and the tendency of general discussions on cosy fantasy to focus on the emotive meaning of ‘cosy’ over more concrete aspects of the genre. Discussions of cosy fantasy have tended to fall into discussing it as a genre with definable aspects, as a general ‘vibe’ a book has or doesn’t, or as a marketing trend. This essay will disregard the latter, if only because Deerskin is too old to be a part of any trend, but it will address the former two elements as McKinley’s book contains the building blocks for the contemporary genre of cosy fantasy yet clearly fails to meet the general emotive sense people seem to look for in the genre.

On putting the opera in space opera

Mary Fan

“Space Opera.” The term brings to mind a certain kind of science fiction: one that not only takes place in outer space, but also embraces a certain dramatic—even melodramatic—flair. Heroes and villains of galaxy-spanning civilizations. Passionate romances with world-changing consequences. Fantastical cultures from across the stars that stretch the imagination. Often light on science, but rich in story. …

The term “space opera” was originally meant to be pejorative. Coined in 1941 by writer Wilson Tucker, it was used to mean “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn[s]” (as he wrote in his long-running fanzine, LeZombie, in its 36th issue) and came about around the same time as the original soap operas—serial radio shows sponsored by soap companies.

It’s the “opera” part of both terms that conjures up the dramatic vibes of their respective genres. Big emotions, high stakes, unabashed sentiment. Even those who’ve never been to an opera but have cultural knowledge of it through other mediums (cartoon satires, movies, etc.) often make these associations. In fact, the term “melodrama” originally meant text set to music.

Goofiness and Horror in Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth

Applying the Lens of Cosy Catastrophe to Tamsyn Muir’s Post-Apocalyptic Necromantasy

Paula Aamli

The Locked Tomb series is multi-tone and cross-genre. It is enemies-to-lovers x locked-box mystery x necromancers-in-space, its melodrama punctuated by earthy wit. This essay argues that its “dystopia but funny” narrative pitch offers a potent blend of catharsis and hope.

Deconstructing the Fantasy Hero since 1983

Tansy Rayner Roberts

“Lord Veterinari sighed again. He did not like to live in a world of heroes. You had civilisation, such as it was, and you had heroes.”  (The Last Hero)

Heroes don’t actually need to be deconstructed. They enter the narrative ready-deconstructed, with all their raw parts on display.

When people think about the kind of male hero that an anti-hero isn’t, they have a certain type in mind — a genuinely good man, with superpowers or a sword, having adventures and saving the day.

We know that hero. It’s Superman. Specifically, it’s all versions of Superman that appeared in the 20th Century before adapters of his story got embarrassed about him being too nice to be interesting. You can scrape up more examples; I see your Superman and raise you Captain America and the Shazam! Captain Marvel. But they’re all pretty recent inventions.

The Curse of Culture and Context

Lee Murray

Born in small-town New Zealand, in 1965, during the Chinese year of the wood-snake, I’ve been an anxious Piglet my whole life, prone to bouts of deep and debilitating Eeyore-gloom. For my New Zealand-born Chinese mother, this was entirely understandable, given that I was born with a dark mole on my shoulder. That blemish proved it: I was cursed, destined to forever carry the weight of the world’s sorrows on my back. It didn’t help that I was born a wood snake, a zodiac sign known for its tendency to overthink things. The sort who hate to fail. Perfectionists. Pedants. For my mother, it was a given that I would be highly-strung and driven. Plus, I’m a first child, and a daughter, which meant there were examples to be set, chores to be done, studies to complete—the Chinese cultural burdens of submissiveness, filial duty, and achievement to uphold.

Magic and Objects of Enchantment in Flemish Folklore and Fairytales

Signe Maene

In this essay, we will discusses some of the magical objects that feature in Flemish folklore and fairytales. We will discover that some of these objects are things that anyone would desire to have, such as a grimoire that allows its owner to shapeshift into any animal they choose. Others would frighten anyone who walks in a forest at midnight, like the screaming trees in which ghosts dwell. And then there are those that would make life significantly easier, but the price of acquiring them is simply too high to pay.

The Space that Ships are Built For

Nina Niskanen

Whenever the story is happening in a place that isn’t the international space station, even writers striving for realism have to make leaps of imagination. Writers have been moving towards as much realism as they can. Part of that is giving a lot of attention to the problem of faster than light travel, FTL. I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that according to physics as we know it, it is not possible to go faster than light in space. And space opera as a genre has answered that challenge in various ways. Some, like Hannu Rajaniemi, solve the problem of faster than light travel by not having any. Many others, like Becky Chambers, C.J. Cherryh, Valerie Valdes, and Nathan Lowell opt for gates between solar systems and then other, less theoretical, means of travel from the gates to the planets or space stations their characters visit.

But one thing that seems constant in these stories is the merry band of troublemakers who stand as one, at all times, a chosen family against the unfeeling universe that always seeks to ground them from their cargo-running ways. And I am here to carry away that bit of unobtainium. My problem with the tropes involved are two-fold: the ship and the crew.

Men Who Respect Witches II:

King vs Witch in Wyrd Sisters

Tansy Rayner Roberts

While Wyrd Sisters (1988) is famous for introducing Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick alongside a soft reboot of Granny Weatherwax, it’s also a book that leans into themes of masculinity, particularly fatherhood, legacy and the question of what makes a good or bad king.

The most significant male characters in the story are all some form of king: King Verence I (deceased), his Macbeth-style murderer and usurper cousin Duke Felmet, and the two young men who will be revealed at various points in the story to be Verence’s rightful and “rightful” heirs to the kingdom, though it is likely that neither of them are his sons. While several scenes show us the POV of these four male characters, this is the Discworld and POV does not a protagonist make. This is called a witch book for a reason. The four kings might be vital to the plot, but this is not their story. …

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