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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On 6 September 1966, the general television-watching public got its first look at a little show called Star Trek. It had already been previewed at the World Science Fiction Convention, where it was greeted with enthusiasm by an audience ready to embrace a science fiction television series which took itself—and the genre—seriously. Lost in Space was for kids; Doctor Who… was also for kids, and in any case, wouldn’t reach an American audience for another decade or so. Star Trek was sophisticated and intelligent, and so was its audience.
Just ask them. Frederick Pohl, editor of Galaxy Magazine, predicted a swift cancellation, citing low ratings and suggesting that “Star Trek made the mistake of appealing to a comparatively literate group.”
In speculative fiction, tea has appeared as an important cultural fixture most often in fantasy, but a number of science fiction stories have featured the drink. This includes C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books, Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe tales (particularly the tellingly named The Tea Master and the Detective) and Becky Chambers’ recent Monk & Robot series.
The book that first comes to my mind, however, is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, first in her ongoing Imperial Radch series. In the domineering empire of the Radch, tea and its attendant rituals are luxuries for humans—nonhumans bound in service to the empire, like the “corpse soldier” main character, Breq, must make do with water. (Or fish sauce.) Beyond tea, I have always been interested in exploring social and political domination, and Leckie’s thoughtful, culturally vivid first novel has been a major influence on my work, especially my own debut novel.