Science fiction literature has undergone profound transformation from its early days, shaped by technological, cultural, and social forces, and increasingly enriched by diverse voices.

The genre’s evolution can be traced from the foundational works of H.G.

Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the mid-century “Golden Age,” to the dynamic, inclusive, and interdisciplinary field it is today.

**Early Influences and the Foundations of Science Fiction:** The emergence of science fiction as a distinct literary genre coincided with rapid technological advancements and shifting intellectual paradigms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Authors like H.G.

Wells and Jules Verne are credited with laying the groundwork for modern science fiction by exploring speculative technologies and societal critiques.

Wells, often called the “father of science fiction,” used works such as *The Time Machine* and *The War of the Worlds* to address anxieties about imperialism, class struggle, and the societal impact of technological progress, reflecting the political and social climates of his era .

The genre’s early development was also influenced by the rise of secularism, Darwinian science, and the tension between science and religion, as seen in Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, which blended Gothic and Romantic elements with scientific inquiry to probe ethical dilemmas .

The early 20th century saw science fiction reflecting contemporary ideologies such as capitalism and communism, and engaging with fears surrounding nuclear power, religious abuses, and civil rights movements .

The proliferation of pulp magazines provided a platform for new writers and helped popularize the genre, making it accessible to a broader audience and encouraging rapid diversification .

**The Golden Age and Mid-20th Century Developments:** Following World War II, science fiction entered its “Golden Age,” characterized by a focus on scientific plausibility, space exploration, and the ethical implications of technological advancement.

Authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.

Clarke, and Ray Bradbury prioritized “hard” science fiction, examining humanity’s relationship with technology and the cosmos .

This period was marked by optimism about scientific progress but also by anxieties about war and the potential dangers of unchecked technological development .

**Expansion of Themes and the Rise of Social Commentary:** As the 20th century progressed, science fiction increasingly became a vehicle for social critique.

The genre began to address issues such as war, colonialism, environmental degradation, and the human condition, often using speculative settings to explore ethical dilemmas and societal transformations .

The rise of subgenres like dystopian fiction and, more recently, climate fiction (“cli-fi”), reflects the genre’s engagement with pressing global issues such as climate change and resource depletion .

**Inclusion of Diverse Voices and Underrepresented Perspectives:** A major shift in science fiction literature has been the increasing representation of women, people of color, LGBTQ+ authors, and other underrepresented groups.

Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein* established a precedent for women’s contributions to the genre , and early 20th-century writers like Rokeya S.

Hossain imagined futuristic technologies from a feminist perspective .

However, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that women and authors of color began to gain significant visibility and recognition.

Authors such as Ursula K.

Le Guin challenged traditional gender roles and explored complex social structures in works like *The Left Hand of Darkness* .

Octavia Butler’s novels addressed intersections of race, gender, and power, enriching the genre’s thematic range .

Jemisin’s *Broken Earth* trilogy, which won multiple Hugo Awards, explores oppression, resilience, and identity, reflecting the genre’s capacity to address contemporary social justice issues .

Nnedi Okorafor’s works blend African mythology with speculative fiction, broadening the genre’s cultural horizons .

Indigenous authors like Rebecca Roanhorse and genderqueer writers such as Foz Meadows have further diversified science fiction, exploring themes of identity, community, and social justice .

**Contemporary Developments: Genre-Bending, Interdisciplinarity, and Globalization:** Modern science fiction frequently blends elements of fantasy, horror, romance, and other genres, reflecting a broader acceptance of diverse storytelling methods and the breakdown of rigid genre boundaries .

The distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction has become increasingly important, with speculative fiction serving as an umbrella term that includes science fiction, fantasy, and other genres that imagine alternative realities .

Interdisciplinary collaboration has become a hallmark of contemporary science fiction.

Initiatives like the Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project foster partnerships between authors and scientific researchers, grounding speculative narratives in scientific realities and engaging with real-world issues such as climate change and technological ethics .

This approach has produced works that are both imaginative and informed by current scientific discourse.

The globalization of science fiction has introduced new perspectives from non-Western authors, such as Chinese writers Liu Cixin and Wang Jinkang, whose works reflect their countries’ socio-political landscapes and have gained international acclaim .

The rise of digital platforms and self-publishing has enabled experimentation with new formats, including interactive and multimedia narratives, making the genre more accessible and varied .

**Emerging Subgenres and Thematic Shifts:** Since 2000, science fiction has seen the rise of new subgenres that address contemporary concerns.

Afrofuturism, exemplified by N.K.

Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, explores the future of the African diaspora through the lens of race, identity, and social justice .

Cli-fi focuses on climate change and environmental crises, while solarpunk envisions hopeful, sustainable futures centered on social justice and ecological harmony .

Space opera has evolved to feature more complex narratives and diverse characters, moving beyond classic tropes .

**LGBTQ+ Representation and Intersectionality:** Contemporary science fiction increasingly features LGBTQ+ characters and themes, moving beyond stereotypes and tokenism.

Authors like Samuel R.

Delany, Foz Meadows, and N.K.

Jemisin have explored the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and power, contributing to a richer and more inclusive genre .

The genre now frequently addresses intersectional narratives, fostering empathy and understanding while challenging traditional norms .

**Science Fiction as Social Commentary and Activism:** Science fiction has long served as a lens for social critique, using speculative settings to examine issues such as surveillance, government overreach, and systemic oppression .

The genre’s engagement with social movements has intensified, with works addressing feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights, and environmental justice .

Solarpunk and other optimistic subgenres aim to inspire hope and action, contrasting with the dystopian outlook of earlier science fiction .

**Recognition and Literary Merit:** Science fiction has gained greater literary recognition, with prestigious awards like the Hugo and Nebula increasingly acknowledging diverse voices .

Authors such as Benjamín Labatut and Kim Stanley Robinson have blended fact and fiction to explore complex scientific and philosophical themes, elevating the genre’s artistic merit .

**Conclusion:** The evolution of science fiction from the era of H.G.

Wells to the present is marked by a shift from technologically focused, often male-dominated narratives to a vibrant, inclusive, and socially engaged genre.

Influenced by technological innovation, political and

Science fiction literature has undergone profound transformation from its early days, shaped by technological, cultural, and social forces, and increasingly enriched by diverse voices.

Science fiction literature has undergone profound transformation from its early days, shaped by technological, cultural, and social forces, and increasingly enriched by diverse voices.

Science fiction literature has undergone profound transformation from its early days, shaped by technological, cultural, and social forces, and increasingly enriched by diverse voices.

The genre’s evolution can be traced from the foundational works of H.G.

The genre’s evolution can be traced from the foundational works of H.G.

Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the mid-century “Golden Age,” to the dynamic, inclusive, and interdisciplinary field it is today.

Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the mid-century “Golden Age,” to the dynamic, inclusive, and interdisciplinary field it is today.

Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the mid-century “Golden Age,” to the dynamic, inclusive, and interdisciplinary field it is today.

**Early Influences and the Foundations of Science Fiction:** The emergence of science fiction as a distinct literary genre coincided with rapid technological advancements and shifting intellectual paradigms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

**Early Influences and the Foundations of Science Fiction:** The emergence of science fiction as a distinct literary genre coincided with rapid technological advancements and shifting intellectual paradigms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

**Early Influences and the Foundations of Science Fiction:** The emergence of science fiction as a distinct literary genre coincided with rapid technological advancements and shifting intellectual paradigms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Authors like H.G.

Authors like H.G.

Wells and Jules Verne are credited with laying the groundwork for modern science fiction by exploring speculative technologies and societal critiques.

Wells and Jules Verne are credited with laying the groundwork for modern science fiction by exploring speculative technologies and societal critiques.

Wells and Jules Verne are credited with laying the groundwork for modern science fiction by exploring speculative technologies and societal critiques.

Wells, often called the “father of science fiction,” used works such as *The Time Machine* and *The War of the Worlds* to address anxieties about imperialism, class struggle, and the societal impact of technological progress, reflecting the political and social climates of his era .

Title:

Content: HomeScienceIf Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?

If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?

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Fiction

Future Imperfect

What kind of world would humanity build with another chance to do it right?

The Terraformers

by Annalee Newitz

Tor Books, 2023 ($28.99)

Great stories often start from a tantalizing “what if?”—the more irresistibly original the premise, the better. In The Terraformers, the new novel from i09 founder and former Gizmodo editor in chief Annalee Newitz, the central question points straight at our planet’s existential crisis: Given the painful lessons we’ve learned about how not to build a sustainable, equitable future, what if people had a chance to create a cleaner, fairer Earth 2.0? Could we succeed?

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It will surprise no one that the answer is a resounding “well, maybe.” Newitz’s formidable imagination can’t change the fact that people are people. Yet the novel smartly argues that people—particularly when the term expands to include sentient forms far beyond humans—might just be a planet’s best resource. Even if takes a millennium’s worth of creativity to offset rapacious corporations, unethical developers, ineffective governments and standard-issue corruption.

The novel’s first scene sends up a classic trope of science fiction, the “first contact,” in which representatives from two civilizations meet on an alien world. Except in this case, the alien world is an early-stage planet called Sask-E, which has been modeled after the original Earth by a terraforming corporation known as Verdance, and the first encounter is between two very different versions of Homo sapiens. One is a resource-plundering, trash-talking, trash-generating, remotely operated proxy, and the other is Destry, an Environmental Rescue Team ranger who proceeds to show what happens when someone tries to mess with her boreal forest.

Sask-E appears at first to be an Eden of wild beauty and limitless potential. But as the good-hearted Destry discovers, the developers who created Sask-E—and who hold both her job and her life in their clutches—aren’t out to make a better world. Their true goal, not shockingly, is profit. The discovery of an underground civilization on Sask-E forces Destry to choose sides in a conflict that alters her beloved planet’s future.

From here the novel takes running leaps through time. Terraforming is a slow process after all, and readers who get invested in Destry’s character might be saddened to learn that this isn’t really her story. Newitz’s plot skips across generations of people who come after Destry—an appealingly diverse cast of rangers, scientists, engineers and an utterly endearing autonomous collective of sentient flying trains. If the antagonists in Newitz’s novel are thinly outlined, it is perhaps because the novel’s big “what if?” demands some fairly broad strokes. Each character plays a part in answering whether well-intentioned people can save the best parts of Sask-E from the worst depredations of runaway consumer culture fostered by slimy corporate interests and lazy government.

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As the story of Sask-E’s rise, ruin and slow road to redemption unfolds over thousands of years, Newitz’s attention is on the complex symbiotic relation between technologies and cultures, another classic trope of science fiction that they also explored in their 2021 nonfiction book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. The same technological innovations that push a civilization to new heights of achievement can also be complicit in that civilization’s undoing.

On Sask-E, however, technology has made possible an entirely new definition of personhood. Animals, robots, hybrids, and even doors and worms are in communication with the humans of the future. And thanks to a galactic accord known as the Great Bargain, they all have a valid seat at the negotiating table. Once the assumption that only humans are people is swept away, thorny questions of natural resource allocation, representative government, inclusive language and sexual freedom are up for reevaluation. (If you’ve ever wanted to know how a sentient train can couple with a robot or a cat, your answer is here. As one character remarks, “Where there’s desire, there’s data.”)

As messy as all this sounds, it opens up thrilling new pathways of hope that Earth 2.0 might succeed. The Terraformers, refreshingly, is the opposite of the dystopian, we’re-all-doomed chiller that’s become so common in climate fiction. Newitz’s mordant sense of humor steers the story clear of starry-eyed optimism, but it’s easy to imagine future generations studying this novel as a primer for how to embrace solutions to the challenges we all face. If we’re ever going to save ourselves from ourselves, then maybe what we need is a new way of thinking about self. —Siobhan Adcock.

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Siobhan Adcock is a writer and editor whose most recent novel is The Completionist.

Nonfiction

Blood Money

A cinematic tour of ambition, greed and desperation in biotech

For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug

by Nathan Vardi

W. W. Norton, 2023 ($30)

“Finding new therapies that target only cancer cells and did not kill healthy cells had become the holy grail of cancer drug development,” writes Nathan Vardi, a managing editor at MarketWatch and former editor at Forbes. For Blood and Money follows the path of one class of such products (“targeted small-molecule drugs” designed to fight blood cancers) that ultimately pits two biotech companies against each other in a race to market—and to an unimaginable payday. Readers are introduced to scientologists, restless entrepreneurs, clinical experts and the machinations of magnate financiers searching for the next billion-dollar blockbuster. In the middle of that friction of ambition and greed are the patients, desperate for cures and more time.

The story begins with Pharmacyclics, a small biotech company in California that is working on a drug to treat leukemia. Along the way, we meet charismatic and sometimes capricious executives and investors, as well as revolving doors of employees being hired, fired and starting new companies (and competitors).

Vardi examines the fraught, infamously slow FDA market-approval process, but the pacing of the book remains quick. With the focus on characters shifting from chapter to chapter and a vast number of names—people, companies, drugs—included for detail, it can feel at times that one needs a color-coded organizational chart to keep up.

In the quest for magic-bullet biopharma drugs, a particularly disquieting element is how powerful investors become drivers of medical strategy. The scientific search for cures often seems overmatched by the outsized desire to be first and to reap the highest returns; one could be forgiven for wanting to rename the book For Money and Blood. The profits are astronomical, yet investors still consider how much they’ve left “on the table.”

Still, there are meaningful collaborations, and many characters in the book genuinely want to do right for patients with deadly diseases. Readers remain distinctly aware of those who have benefited (and continue to benefit) from these drugs. Yet the banks, investors and hedge funds leading the search underscore an overall health-care system that feels skewed in its priorities.

Vardi, who is clearly knowledgeable about Wall Street and biopharma, depicts the nuances of both in a vivid, cinematic fashion. One can already imagine the movie version. —Mandana Chaffa

In Brief

The Land Beneath the Ice: The Pioneering Years of Radar Exploration in Antarctica

by David J. Drewry

Princeton University Press, 2023 ($39.95)

Glaciologist David J. Drewry takes readers to the frigid research outposts where he and his colleagues pioneered the technique of radio-echo sounding to plumb the depths of the Antarctic ice sheet. Drewry explains how this new technology emerged to compensate for inadequacies of past methods, then shares his own experiences mapping invisible mountain ranges and, worryingly, lakes deep under the ice that are hastening melt. A peppering of photographs and delightful personal anecdotes show the excitement and frustration that are inevitable during scientific expeditions. —Fionna M. D. Samuels

The Deluge

by Stephen Markley

Simon & Schuster, 2023 ($27.99)

Stephen Markley’s epic novel creates a full-scale panorama of a world bludgeoned by climate change, even as it magnifies the struggles of those caught in its vast and unrelenting chaos. Activist groups A Fierce Blue Fire and 6Degrees both attempt to provoke government and industry into addressing the climate crisis, but their divergent philosophies take them down different paths as society unravels. Markley’s dark depiction of the near future is filled with vivid descriptions of climate catastrophes, but his intricate network of complex characters balances precision with pathos, offering a kaleidoscopic view of humanity’s fraught relationship with its changing planet. —Dana Dunham

The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics

by Heinrich Päs

Basic Books, 2023 ($32)

Which is more fundamental, the many or the one? Author Heinrich Päs believes physics gestures at an underlying unity simple enough to count on one finger. If only physics would embrace monism, its deepest mysteries would yield to that magic number. But monism was declared a heresy, first by the medieval Church and second, in Päs’s telling, by physicist Niels Bohr. Even if the connections between ancient monism and modern science are a stretch and Bohr is reduced to caricature, the history is thoroughly researched, the physics is cutting edge and Päs’s larger point resonates: much, or maybe all, of what we take for reality is an artifact of our limited perspectives. —Amanda Gefter

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Title:

Content: Benjamín Labatut: ‘Literature which simply bleats “baaaad” at monsters is not doing its job’

The Chilean novelist on quantum physics, why he doesn't read modern fiction – and the time he once lived with a pack of wild dogs

In March 2016, the DeepMind computer AlphaGo and the Korean master Lee Sedol played five games of Go in Seoul. Originating in ancient China, Go requires two players to move black and white stones on a board in order to gain territorial advantage over the other, and is considered to demand significantly more skill than chess. In the second game, the 37th move by AlphaGo was deemed so extraordinary no human would ever consider it. In game four, the 78th move by Sedol was equally unthinkable and AlphaGo never recovered. The final part of Benjamín Labatut’s new novel The Maniac features an account of the games (all won by the computer, apart from game four), but he is really only interested in those two moves. “I know nothing about Go but I can spot a miracle when I see it,” he tells me over Zoom from his home in Santiago, Chile. “Those moves were both magical and almost incomprehensibly beautiful. Everything I write has a fundamental mystery at the heart of it.”

The 42-year-old is fast emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges. It helped that Obama included his 2021 novel When We Cease to Understand the World (originally published in Spanish as Un Verdor Terrible in 2020) in his summer reading list, but it’s also clear there is no one writing like him anywhere in the world. His books, hybrid hallucinations of fact and fiction, draw on moments in the history of science so brain-shattering they seem to hover beyond reality itself; the aim of his work is not so much to educate the layman as inspire feelings of wonder. And also dread: When We Cease to Understand the World, which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, spun connective webs between such discoveries as the dye Prussian Blue – and its lethal byproduct, cyanide – in an 18th-century laboratory, Schwarzschild’s singularity (also known as black holes), and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” which forms the basis of quantum physics, with the gas chamber horrors of the Second World War.

The Maniac, meanwhile, turns the world of abstract physics into a living nightmare. The first section is a potted biography of the Austrian Paul Ehrenfest, part of the radical wave of early 20th century theoretical physicists detonating Einstein’s conviction that uncertainty had no place in science and who in 1933 shot dead his son Vassily – who had Down’s syndrome – before killing himself. The final section ends with the 2017 invention of AlphaZero, a program that learns not by crunching human data but by teaching itself, and which within eight hours of doing so had become unbeatable at chess and Go. The main section centres on John von Neumann, whose mathematical advances in the 1930s sit between quantum physics and modern computer technology (the book title takes its name from an early computer, the MANIAC, built in the late 1940s under his direction) and who worked on the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Collapsing the borders between beauty and horror, the novel is composed of the ghosts of brilliant men, haunted by their scientific epiphanies; of computers possessed of unfathomable skill; of digital dystopian futures. Not that Labatut, who believes literature has a sacred power, intends his novel as a warning. Quite the opposite.

“I don’t think there is a need to say the sky is coming down on us,” he says. “It already did. I mean, there is nothing scarier than opening up your phone. If you’re not having panic attacks about AI and climate change, then you haven’t been paying attention. But facts can only take you so far. My work is obsessed with the void of unknowability. Books are incantations, they are spells. You spend years casting them, then people try and reduce them to a headline because they are looking at them with their forebrains, only thinking about what I’m trying to say.”

He is adamant his books are fiction, even though they rely heavily on fact. In 2021 a New Yorker review of When We Cease to Understand the World suggested it was unethical of writers to blur the distinction between truth and untruth when writing about verifiable science. Would he agree? “I don’t comment on what other people think. All the science in that book [and The Maniac] is true. Yet everything a writer writes is fiction. Science has cut out a slice of the world. Reason has certain aspects of reality that it can comprehend. But at the heart of literature there is delirium.” Despite his extraordinary felicity with the language of science – it’s quite possible he is the only person on earth who understands quantum physics – he never considered becoming an academic. “No! These poor people are limited to dealing only with the world. It’s a form of poverty. I’m interested only in the deranged landscapes of the imagination. I write with the gods in mind. Writing is the last remaining dark art.”

In the beige world of contemporary literature, Labatut styles himself as an iconoclast. With his silky curls, he resembles more a romantic poet than a novelist. He has contempt for most modern fiction, which he never reads. “Why would I? All the great writers are dead. People now think the novel is just another form of entertainment. It’s like cinema: you used to go to be taken to another world. Now people go to watch Barbie. My God.” (He hasn’t seen Christopher Nolan’s new film about the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer.) He’s not even sure he would want to read his own novel, which tells the story of Von Neumann – a Hungarian Jew with a prankster’s sense of humour who escaped Germany just before the Nazis came to power – from the perspectives of people who knew him, including his long-suffering second wife, Klára. “Von Neumann’s story is so big, he is such a scientific God, an angel, a demon, there is no way he could appear clearly from a single perspective. But I don’t find alternative perspectives remotely interesting. I used them only to keep readers interested. I myself am completely bored by the normal mechanisms of fiction.”

Labatut was born in Rotterdam in 1980 to Chilean parents (his mother is half Italian; his father half French). He moved with his family to Chile when he was two and then back again to Holland when he was seven, finally returning to Chile when he was 14. As a teenager he lived under the legacy of the Pinochet regime in a part of Chile that was supportive of the dictator, as indeed were members of his own family, although not his parents. “It was a f---ing horror,” he says. “I would get kicked out of class just for pointing out they had tortured [thousands of] people. Everyone was in denial about what was happening. [As a country] we’re still reeling from it.”

He resists the idea that to grow up with atrocity shaped his interest in humanity’s capacity for evil. “I had a boring upbringing. I spent my childhood in the Netherlands. There is no concrete detail about my life that has fed into my books.” Does he regard Von Neumann, who calculated the correct height from which to drop the atom bomb in order to maximise its destruction, as evil? “Oh I wouldn’t call Johnny evil. The same way you wouldn’t call a computer evil. But his brain was a mathematical weapon. He had this cutting intelligence that could be weaponised. Literature which simply points at the monsters and bleats ‘baaaad’ is not doing its job. Most human beings, and even the most grotesque political figures, usually have the capacity for good and evil. I’ve read enough and I’ve done enough with my own imagination to know that we all have this animal inside us.”

He knew from a young age he wanted to be a writer but also, he says, that he would never be as good as his heroes: Borges, Bolaño, Sebald, Lovecraft, Cormac McCarthy. “You know that line at the beginning of [the Coen Brothers’ film version of] No Country for Old Men, when the sheriff says that to become a sheriff, to become part of that world, is to put your soul at risk? Writing is like that for me. I knew that to become a writer I had to undergo a profound transformation. I put myself through a couple of things, very irresponsibly.” Does he mean he took a lot of drugs? He scoffs. “No, drugs are not enough! Transcendental experiences are not enough. Being a father [he has a young daughter with his artist wife] is not enough. It was a long process, involving lots of silly things, including spending long periods of time alone, not talking to anyone, just living with a pack of wild dogs. There was even a time when I thought I’d never write again.”

Does he believe programs such as ChatGPT threaten the future of literature? “Not yet. To write like Büchner, Lispector, Chatwin, Quignard or Calasso requires above all a soul, and a very long – and very well cared-for – shadow. But I think we will benefit from thinking on the limits and delusions [of AI]. If it can mirror our capacity for reason, it may need or develop our talent for madness; and if it does not care at all for the beauty and horror that it creates, then we will be fools to give ourselves over to such technology.”

I show Labatut his author photo on the back of my copy of The Maniac, in which with his gleaming locks and earrings he looks like a rock ’n’ roll renegade. He is horrified. “I didn’t know that photo was there! See, that’s the problem, I grew up not knowing what the writers I read looked like. Whereas that picture is pornography.” Not that he wants to look like an ordinary writer. “I’ve nothing in common with most of them. I’ve no interest in being that at all.”

The Maniac (Pushkin Press, £20) is published on Sept 7

Title:

Content: Solarpunk – a worldview that imagines hopeful futures of social justice, planet-friendly technologies, decentralisation and harmony – has come quite a long way since its first appearance in an online article in 2008. Today this genre of science fiction is being explored by multiple authors, poets, academics and critics all across the world. The ultimate goal of these stories and the associated politics is to imagine and work towards a future of coexistence, which acknowledges our kinship and interdependence with all beings big and small, as an alternative to wandering about a zombie apocalypse or sinking in dystopian gloominess.

After the publication of the much-acclaimed anthology Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, the editors decided to publish another anthology focusing on creatures, the more-than-human allies who would live with and among us in a possible future. The editors, Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Norie Tamura, Rajat Chaudhuri and Sarena Ulibarri have collectively brought this second offering, a second anthology titled Solarpunk Creatures, three years after the first.

A multispecies imagination

Explaining the rationale for this collection of stories, the editors write in their introduction, “Where Multispecies Cities sought to broaden the spotlight and highlight the multitude of actors on the stage, Solarpunk Creatures introduces a whole new cast of more-than-human protagonists: organic and digital, alien and fantastic, tiny and boundlessly large.” These creatures are not only restricted to animals and plants but also include AI who take the role of the main protagonist in some of these engaging tales. “The AI characters that made it into the anthology are gentle and loveable – not disturbing and often a malevolent presence that is unsettling the role and value of artists around the globe,” explains the introduction. In these stories, AI creatures do not try to destroy or dominate humankind but often are companions and co-participants in humanity’s engagement with a hopeful and sustainable futures.

Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Norie Tamura and Rajat Chaudhuri have efficiently and strategically framed the “Introduction” by referring to other critics and writers who have discussed multispecies communities such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s memorable Braiding Sweetgrass. It would also not miss the careful reader’s notice that the team of editors, true to the sense of community harboured by Solarpunk, represent far-flung regions of the world and that the book also includes at least two stories written by collectives. The editors have also provided tasting samples of the stories in the anthology which will intrigue and draw the readers to explore the book.

“Multispecies imagination can heal us from our chronic isolation from nature,” the editors write. The lucid introduction, which will interest academics and genre-readers alike, ends with this possibility of healing, it says, “breath-taking encounters and a sense of wonder, await not only among the stars, but at the end of every one of the countless threads connecting us to the world and its inhabitants.”

Indian writers

Apart from writers from advanced industrialised countries, this anthology, like the one before it, has also featured stories from the Asia-Pacific region among which we have three stories by Indian writers, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Rimi B Chatterjee, and Tashan Mehta. Casting its net wide this anthology has managed to portray multifarious perspectives, problems and ideas of people spread out across the globe, weaving them together into thought-provoking tales.

Tashan Mehta’s “Leaf Whispers, Ocean Song” is a beautiful tale about the influence of Opi, a deep sea creature on the life of humans when it arrives on the coastline of Goa. Opi is showcased as a humongous yet loveable creature who somewhat transforms the lives of humans. Here, this alien creature does not come from the sky but from the ocean and as soon as it reaches the shore, Opi is perceived differently by different people. While the local fishermen call it “a visiting God from the sea”, marine biologists, conservationists and researchers wish to study and understand this creature. On the other hand, the linguists in the story, Jen and Lu are interested in studying Opi’s language and Jem soon admits that the speech of this creature is “too vast. Its sound, scent, song, feeling, thought – just everything…” The presence and effect of this creature are beyond human understanding because Opi somehow seems to unite animals like dogs, crabs and starfish – something unimaginable to humans. This story, rejecting anthropocentric beliefs, reiterates the fact that humans are just a tiny part of the wide unknown world around us. This is best conveyed by Jen when she says, “…[Opi] is a reminder of how insignificant we are, of how life plays out in a magnitude we cannot imagine.”

From a sea creature, we move on to a comet in Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s story “Flyby”. Comet Izumi is the protagonist of this memorable tale which blends poetic language with a capacious imagination, to portray the dynamics of non-human beings which are boundlessly large. Chabria writes, “Unlike planets, beautiful and rounded as melons, with moons circling and circling them, comets are loners, each speaking a unique language of elliptical orbit and ellipses from sight. Pilgrims of the universe, they plunge in and out of the neat orbital paths of the planets, streaking their immense fiery tails over unknown skies”

Readers can also visualise the future of the Earth through the eyes of Comet Izumi, “A series of climatic changes has altered Earth’s topography; begun by Capitalocene greed in the brief human geological epoch…Earth’s invisible armour that protects life, the radiation shield is temporarily ripped.” Though the story may seem to showcase destruction in the beginning, it gradually takes a soothing turn towards hope and most importantly, towards the importance of sound which has the power to regenerate life. The author has beautifully blended the wisdom of ancient texts in this unique solarpunk narrative which will definitely help us think far beyond our limited human and planetary sphere of being.

After Mehta’s sea creature and Chhabria’s comet, we travel to the land of our four-legged friends, in Rimi B Chatterjee’s “Hopdog” which is reminiscent of her “Arfabad” in the previous volume. The story begins with “Dog number 834” who is rescued from a dogfighting ring where “her masters would watch as she and her competitors tore the prey to shred and wolfed down whatever they could snatch from each other’s jaws.” Dog number 834 is finally rescued from a place that smelt of fear, trouble and death by the survivors of Zigsa’s Nest, referring back to Chatterjee’s “Arfabad”. Arfabad is a land inhabited by dogs and everything is dog-sized there, which is where the central character, Zigsa had created a survivarium where dogs could be protected.

The dog of the present story, after trials and tribulations, arrives in this gentler, kinder place of love and happiness. Here, “…for the first time since she could remember, Peaches was sharing space with other breathing creatures that manifestly did not want to kill her.” But can she continue to live there and be protected from all dangers lurking outside? You have to read the story to find out.

AI and other friends

Apart from these engaging and thought-provoking stories by the three Indian writers, Solarpunk Creatures includes a wealth of tales from other parts of the world. “An Inconvenient Unicorn” by Geraldine Briony Hunt is a Solarpunk fantasy set in a distant corner of Arcadia where nothing had grown in the last twenty years due to war: “It was not the sort of war where soldiers take up arms and march against one another, but a war waged in peoples’ kitchens, local pubs and schoolyards.” This land had faced a lot of adversities until a magical creature, a unicorn arrives to rejuvenate the land, bless it with harmony and greenery. “An Inconvenient Unicorn” evokes hope, telling us the importance of preserving the wild and being wary about the false dreams of ecomodernism.

Lyndsey Croal’s “Hunting for Rain”, is written from the perspective of a robotic dog who hunts for rain in a world affected by drought. This AI-guided creature has the ability to geolocate an area even before it begins to rain, hence it can signal people to head for those areas. Here, a robot has not been projected as something alien, industrial or dangerous, instead, it behaves like kin, fulfilling the common responsibility of sustaining life by pointing out where it will rain. When it finally begins to pour, the drought-stricken people give credit to this mechanised dog by patting its head and scratching behind its ears and it absorbs all the love from its beloved humans and wags its mechanical tail. This beautiful tale gives us hope that AI and robots can also be kin and can join with us in more-than-human connections of life-giving, reciprocal care.

Another story, “The Business of Bees” by Andrew Knighton is simple, funny, and memorable. Told from the perspective of the cat, Luna, who is frustrated about the fact that her human hosts don’t seem to notice some weirdness about the bees. Luna gets so curious that she leaves home to find out what the bees are up to. This will definitely be a memorable journey for the curious cat.

This is a necessary collection for a time in the planet’s history when shifts in collective imagination are the need of the hour. In these times of climate doom, growing inequity and injustice, books like Solarpunk Creatures help us think and imagine differently, beyond our insular selves, together and in community with others, human and non-human, visible, invisible or fathomless.

Sayantani Sengupta is a PhD student at St Xavier’s University, Kolkata. She is researching Solarpunk literature and movement.

Solarpunk Creatures, edited by Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Rajat Chaudhuri, Sarena Ulibarri, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Norie Tamura, World Weaver Press.

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Content: Homegrown horror: Does book entry prove Frankenstein’s monster was born in Dundee?

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and his monster – could well have been conceived on the banks of the Tay whilst their creator was living in Dundee.

She wrote in the introduction to her novel that her intention was “to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart”.

She succeeded.

Shelley’s tale of Baron Frankenstein, who created a destructive monster from parts of corpses, has become one of the most influential novels of the past 200 years.

Frankenstein still has a ghoulish power – and has become a classic of the genre, spawning macabre movie after frightening film.

Indisputably the most famous Frankenstein film of all is the 1931 feature, still regarded as a classic, starring a then little-known British actor called William Henry Pratt.

He, of course, became better known as Boris Karloff.

What are Dundee’s connections to Shelley’s Frankenstein?

First published anonymously in 1818, Frankenstein is believed to have been heavily influenced by Shelley’s time in Dundee and includes a journey to Orkney.

While the connection to the Northern Isles is undeniable, as Victor Frankenstein creates a new monster on a remote, isolated island in an attempt to right the wrongs of his first creature; the ties to the City of Discovery are more cryptic.

Sàr-sgeòil: Frankenstein – produced by Caledonia TV for BBC ALBA’s literary series – is an hour-long look at the origins of Shelley’s iconic book and delves deeper into the story of its connections to Dundee.

Cathy MacDonald presents as she travels to Dundee to speak to local experts and fans of Shelley’s finest work – believed to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction, written at a time when science itself was advancing at a rapid rate.

There Cathy finds tales that run as deep as the Tay and where a young Shelley spent her formative years living with 19th century jute barons, the Baxter family.

It was mused that Shelley, born into an academic and influential family to mother Mary Wollstonecraft and father William Godwin, went to Dundee for reasons of education and health.

However, it is also suggested a teenage Shelley – whose mother died shortly after childbirth – was sent north from London to put distance between her and love interest, poet Percy Shelley, whom she would later marry.

The Dundee of the early 1800s, that Shelley observed, was a growing industrial settlement.

In the introduction to the 1831 edition, Shelley wrote: “I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland.

“I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay near Dundee.

“It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination were born and fostered.”

Living with the Baxter family in Dundee

It is even suggested Shelley, who is believed to have lived in a house near what is now Dundee’s South Baffin Street, took her inspiration from the whalers and the ships coming back into port.

Speaking to Cathy, Dr Daniel Cook of the University of Dundee, set the scene at the time, including “The Cottage” where Shelley lived with William Baxter and his family.

Dr Cook also spoke about the Frankenstein Steps – that were attached to the now-demolished mansion. The steps, however, remain standing to this day.

He said: “There are two major theories about The Frankenstein Steps.

“One is it’s located exactly where ‘The Cottage’ would’ve been in which Mary Shelley lived while in Dundee.

“The other theory, which is quite popular with locals, is that it’s really named after the Boris Karloff movie – Frankenstein (1931) – because the Royal Cinema was located there as well and that was a big source of pride.

“It was one of the first places in the world to screen the movie.

“The Cottage, unfortunately, no longer stands. It was demolished in the 1890s, in the spirit of progress and is now the site of tenement buildings.

“It might’ve been named that with classic Dundee humour, a kind of ironic nickname and it would’ve been in the grounds of an acre, perhaps as many as four acres.

“I think she would’ve been very comfortable there.”

Dr Cook added: “There is certainly a sense that the sailors and the seamen and shipmen and people involved in that industry would have been known to Mary through family connections.

“The Baxter family did have their hand in all kinds of industries… and overlooking the harbour, the sounds, the smells, everything would’ve been there.”

It wasn’t just the industry of Dundee that had an impact on Mary, but the morbid, darker side of the city, too.

Arriving in Dundee shortly after plague and the Battle of Culloden scarred a generation, Shelley also heard stories of witch-burning and grave-robbing in Scotland.

Cathy speaks to academics such as Dr Peter Mackay and Thomas Elliott, author Mairi Kidd and local arts enthusiast John Morrison about 19th century Dundee and Shelley’s place in it.

Cathy visits The Howff – a city centre cemetery that dates back to the 16th century – and hears tales of similar graveyards that were raided by resurrectionists, who sold body parts to anatomy classes of the day.

Shelley’s story would haunt and define her

Speeding things up to the present day, Cathy also hears from Professor Chris Murray of the University of Dundee about the evolution of Frankenstein into comics.

She spent 15 months with the Baxter family in Dundee – staying in the South Baffin Street property which was originally constructed as the Countess of Strathmore’s dower house – before embarking on travels in Europe with Shelley.

He had already left his wife, though he was still married to her at the time.

In the summer of that year, and still aged just 18, Mary found herself in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in a company which included Lord Byron and John William Polidori, the man credited with creating the vampire genre of fantasy fiction.

Byron’s reading of Fantasmagoriana in the atmospheric setting of the lightning storm-struck lake would prove to be the catalyst for the creation of two iconic works – Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Vampyre by Polidori – a tale which influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Shelley’s story would haunt and define her for the rest of her life.

Sàr-sgeòil: Frankenstein (Classic Tales: Frankenstein) airs on BBC ALBA on Thursday June 9 at 9pm and is available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days afterwards.

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Content: Portland Author Alissa Hattman Shortlisted For 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize For Fiction

Hattman’s debut novel, “Sift,” is inspired by modern calamities.

Portland author Alissa Hattman has made the shortlist for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Sift (The 3rd Thing Press, 120 pages, $24.00). After an open nomination process last April in which authors and fans alike could nominate fiction novels that represented ideas reflected in Le Guin work, Hattman joins nine other authors on the shortlist. This year’s recipient of the prize will be chosen by a panel of authors including writers such as The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood and The Paper Menagerie author Ken Liu.

Le Guin was one of the 20th century’s most prolific science fiction writers, and lived in Portland most of her life. First striking critical success in 1964 with the beginning of her Earthsea series, Le Guin won numerous awards during her lifetime, even making history as the first female author to win both of the prestigious Hugo and Nova sci-fi literary awards.

The winner of the $25,000 Le Guin Prize will be announced through Le Guin’s website on October 21, marking what would have been the author’s 94th birthday.

“It’s a huge honor,” Hattman says of Sift’s nomination. “Since I first moved to the Pacific Northwest and I was first introduced to Le Guin, which was in 1999 with this short story called “Omelas,” I have been such a deep admirer of her work. I think having been shortlisted and having this book be in the orbit of Le Guin feels so meaningful to me.”

First published in 2023, Sift follows two women as they search for a place to plant crops in a world that’s structures and order have collapsed. Hattman was inspired to write Sift while doing a morning writing exercise. In an attempt to capture her biggest fears, she ended up delving down the sorrowful inevitability of the death of her loved ones, specifically her mother.

“It started becoming a letter to my mother that became fictionalized overtime into something larger, sort of an anticipatory plea for humanity as a whole,” says Hattman.

What resulted was a book inspired by the pandemic, social unrest, and the climate crisis. Sift’s characters are forced to deal with the struggle of a ruined world  “I started to envision these two characters that might be stronger than I could be in those moments,” says Hattman.

This isn’t the first time Le Guin has impacted Hattman’s life. She says attending a live conversation between Le Guin and Atwood at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in 2010 was particularly important to her as a fellow writer.

“It was so amazing to see the two of them on the stage,” Hattman says. “It was awe inspiring to me, like witnessing an eclipse or something.”

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.

The genre’s early development was also influenced by the rise of secularism, Darwinian science, and the tension between science and religion, as seen in Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, which blended Gothic and Romantic elements with scientific inquiry to probe ethical dilemmas .

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It took me 20 years to realise the meaning of “you can’t be what you can’t see”. I went through years of erasure, omission, passive and harmful silence about LGBTQ+ identities before this changed for me – when I met a fellow LGBTQ+ woman of colour.

I was sat with friends at a conference. She was an author in the last panel of the day talking about the projects carried out at the magazine she worked at. It was her confidence, her centered energy and her openness that made me go up and speak to her afterwards.

Her energy for her community was infectious and when she discussed her life, being LGBTQ+ wasn’t a part to hide or a segment from her other work – it sounded like it ran throughout everything she did as it was just who she was. This was the start of the puzzle pieces fitting together in my head, which over the next year helped me come out to myself and then to friends.

It’s a bit ironic that I threw myself into reading novels with no characters like me to understand my identity. Instead, it took meeting an author in real life to put in motion a path to understanding myself better.

By meeting someone who I could see myself in and by living openly in an LGBTQ+ partnership, I started to see what had been so misty before: I could have multiple, intersecting identities; be mixed race and LGBTQ+, and that this is a wonderful thing.

I tell this story because that moment was so powerful. Since coming out to myself, I no longer have to pretend to be someone else to feel confident and I’ve danced in rooms filled with LGBTQ+ people who have taught me so much about love, resilience, and community.

In sharp contrast to the present, I now see the absence of representation, that lack of language – visual, physical, and verbal – to understand myself throughout my early life, as a failure not just of our education system, but also our media and our workplaces and sadly, this isn’t just the case for me.

Cast your net back further than 50 years in history’s gilded guidebooks. You’ll be lucky if you find an openly LGBTQ+ British person. Now try to find one that’s mixed race, British and LGBTQ+.

This absence in the social fabric of much of our history is so important to remember as we celebrate LGBTQ+ history month in February. In many cases, this erasure was conscious, whether by record keepers or policy makers.

Thankfully, we can share more and more about recent incredible LGBTQ+ people in our history books, like Marsha P. Johnson, Audre Lorde, and those who are shaping history as I write this: Lady Phyll, Liv Little, Munroe Bergdorf and Shiva Raichandani.

So for me, LGBTQ+ history month is a time to remember that history isn’t only found in textbooks, it’s in the stories we share, the fiction we read, and the art we create. It’s baked into how we live our everyday lives. It’s LGBTQ+ people of colour bringing the intersectional representation we need and making history right now.

That said, the burden shouldn’t be on us to educate everyone around us constantly – sometimes some self-care is needed! It took me a while to be at a place where I felt ready to share my experience and no one should feel forced to share their story to be representation for others.

There are people working on filling this gap of diversity in our understanding of LGBTQ+ history including Free Black University, Stonewall and Just Like Us, the LGBTQ+ young people’s charity. Read what they have to say, visit their exhibitions and encourage schools to use their resources.

Just Like Us helped me with bringing the representation I needed growing up to schools. I volunteer with the charity, giving school talks so pupils can have the moment I had when I finally saw that I can be me – fully me.

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Content: 7 dark fantasy books that we recommend if you like Elden Ring and FromSoftware games

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That Hidetaka Miyazaki has turned to a bestselling author like George RR Martin to reinforce the setting of Elden Ring should not surprise anyone. The author of the Song of Ice and Fire literary saga has enormous experience in creating fantastic universes. But Martin isn’t the only author FromSoftware fans can turn to for a dark fantasy epic.

In general, when we think of fantastic literature, the first name that usually comes to the fore is that of J.R.R. Tolkien. He was not the first author of the genre, but the mythology that he created for his Middle Earth is the benchmark of a genre that has not stopped growing and evolving. In Tolkien’s books we have dragons, necromancers and curses. A literary body heir to the medieval European epic that drinks from different mythologies, from Celtic to Greco-Latin and Nordic, and in which it cannot be said that FromSoftware has not looked for references.

Although Tolkien is the first great author to be cited when we talk about fantastic literature, he is only the first of a very long list of writers. Over the years and according to readers’ tastes and publishing trends evolvewe have seen how epic fantasy and sword and sorcery has gradually mutated to a sub-genre that today we could label, simplifying a lot, as dark fantasy. we can’t forget about Conanthe blue-eyed Cimmerian barbarian created by Robert E. Howard; nor of the picaresque and original fantasy of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber; or the leisurely melancholy of Ryhope Forest Cycle by Robert Holdstock. There are hundreds, thousands, of books that have explored, from the fantasy genre, a darker perspective, raw, violent and gloomy. A subgenre that has been taking ideas and scenarios from Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Ramsey Campbell or Lin Carter, mixing epic fantasy with horror. Its authors have found a fertile middle ground between these themes that in recent decades has flourished with great literary sagas and magnificent novels that will surely delight lovers of games developed by Hidetaka Miyazaki.

At this point we are no longer going to recommend (although we do) the saga of Saga de Geralt de Rivia (The Witcher) from Andrzej Sapkowski. But there are other books, perhaps less well known, full of the ruins of decadent empires, cursed warriors, dark mythologies, necromancy, werewolves, legendary weapons, dragons… At 3DJuegos we offer you some of the most interesting dark fantasy readings for fans of FromSoftware.

Chronicles of Elric

The lisergicos The early years of the 70s of the last century witnessed the publication of an exceptional, and for the time atypical, literary saga starring the emperor of a decadent empire. This sorcerer is far from the stereotype of the protagonist of the fantasy genre. Beyond the epics and heroics expected of the genre, Elric’s story moves from tragedy to the struggle between balance and chaos.

Few literary worlds are as dark and seductive as the one created by Michael Moorcock for this series. It mixes the classic elements of the famous “Campbellian hero path” with the drugs, vampirism, desolation and black magic.

Buy The Elric Chronicles.

The Black Company

This trilogy of Glen Cook It always appears as one of the essential readings of the epic fantasy genre when exploring its more mature and darker works. With this series of three books Cook approaches the style of Leiber and Howard that Tolkien’s “High Fantasy” when presenting the story of a group of mercenaries caught in a conflict between two sides.

The publication of the first of the novels in the 1980s marked an opening of the genre to a tone that distances itself from the morality of classical epics and traditional heroes. The ethical grays that the different characters in the story display make him one of the best exponents of the grimdark, as this literary subgenre is beginning to be known. It is surely one of the most influential works for many of the authors cited in this article.

Buy The Black Company.

The First Law

Since The voice of the swordsthe first novel of the series The First Law, arrived at bookstores, the name of Joe Abercrombie It has become a phenomenon among fans. An author who rubs shoulders with current big names in the profession such as Martin or Brandon Sanderson without any blush. And he does it thanks to a constant series of books with a medieval setting in which fantasy has less weight than acid realismbut that is glimpsed from paragraph to paragraph.

Abercrombie has become one of the most acclaimed authors of the genre thanks, in addition to his addictive style, to the ease with which mix genres with this medieval fantasy setting: robberies, political intrigues, war… And dodgy wizards. Even the echoes of the western reach its pages in a succession of stories where the characters are solid and charismatic. Without a doubt, one of the favorite authors of the 3DJuegos newsroom.

Buy The voice of the swords.

Malaz: The Book of the Fallen

The readers of Steven Erikson e Ian Cameron Esslemont They have been enjoying one of the most complex, intense, dark and fascinating of the genre. The different novels that make up the series narrate three plot lines that take place at the same time. In each of them, the reader enters the different fronts of a huge large-scale war where there is no lack of trenches, guerillas, rebels, immortal emperors, battalions of magicians and demons.

The universe created by Erikson and Esslemont is surely one of the richest, most complete and surprising in fantasy literature. When one accompanies the military divisions of “Bridgeburners” in the campaign of conquest of him, one cannot help but feel in the mud of the battlefield.

Buy Malaz: The Book of the Fallen.

The Fragmented Earth

NK Jemisin is one of the most original and unique authors dedicated to fantasy. Her novels represent a tremendously personal revision of the genre, and the series of the Shattered Earth perhaps it is one of the best examples of it. With these three novels Jemisin has managed to win, for the first time in history, three consecutive Hugo Awards for the best novel of the genre, in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

The writer takes us to a land that suffers a series of natural disasters of apocalyptic scale in a cyclical manner. How civilization develops and survives in such a scenario gives rise to several plots that try not so much to save a chaotic world as to give meaning to their own lives of the protagonists. The personal dramas weigh as heavily on this story as the global desolation that recurrently plagues the scene of the action. You will find few fantasies as dystopian as the ones in this series.

Buy The Shattered Earth.

Hawkwood’s Journey.

Paul Kearny offers a peculiar plot inspired by the Renaissance Europe in which epic and political intrigue they go hand in hand throughout five novels. Kearny’s works stand out for the intensity and realism of the descriptions of his battles and combats. But in this series what really stands out is the treatment he gives to religion and how it links with magic and science.

Although the different belief systems in each culture presented in this fantastic scenario serve as the driving force behind the narrative, it is the relationship that each character establishes with it. personally which enriches the story. As a tip, there will be some amazing supernatural elements.

Buy Hawkwood’s Journey.

The Vatidic Trilogy

The enormous talent of Robin Hobb allow this author to move comfortably within the fantastic genre, jumping from series closer to costumbrism, such as the Laws of the Sea Trilogy, to the grimdark of this Vatídico Trilogysurely his most recognized work.

The story of these novels is perhaps the one that most adheres to the classic schemes of heroic fantasy, but it is the way of dealing with the traditional elements of the genre that makes this story stand out, especially in its final stretch. Lovers of Miyazaki games will find in these pages some themes that they have also seen in FromSoftware video games, such as the heritage of great civilizations that have already disappeared.

Buy The Vatídico Trilogy.

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Understanding ‘Rick and Morty’ and Its Influence on Modern Sci-Fi

When ‘Rick and Morty’ burst onto the scene in December 2013, few could have predicted the show’s immense impact on modern science fiction. Created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, this Adult Swim flagship series introduced us to the cynical adventures of an alcoholic scientist and his grandson. It’s a show that defies easy categorization, blending humor, philosophy, and a touch of madness into a concoction that’s as intoxicating as one of Rick’s interdimensional cocktails.

Delving into the narrative labyrinth

The show’s narrative is a veritable maze of timelines and dimensions, a feature that has redefined storytelling within the genre. ‘Rick and Morty’ takes viewers on a wild ride through alternate realities where anything is possible and everything is connected. This narrative complexity is not just for show; it serves as a vehicle for exploring deeper themes and pushing the boundaries of what animated series can achieve.

Laughing in the face of convention

The humor in ‘Rick and Morty’ often walks a fine line between irreverence and insight. By parodying classic sci-fi tropes and real-world events within its fantastical settings, the series offers a satirical take that resonates with viewers. For instance, in an episode like Promortyus, we see Rick and Morty engage in a battle that skirts around an allusion to the Twin Towers, choosing to attack a harbor instead. Such moments are emblematic of how the show uses humor to comment on society and our collective consciousness.

Contemplating the cosmos

It’s not all laughs with ‘Rick and Morty’, though. The show delves into philosophical quandaries that challenge our understanding of reality and our place within it. Drawing from Lovecraftian horror and Absurdism, ‘Rick and Morty’ confronts us with the human struggle to find meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. It’s this blend of cosmic horror and existential dread that gives the show its unique flavor.

The journey of characters

Character development is another area where ‘Rick and Morty’ shines. Over multiple seasons, we witness the growth of its titular characters as they navigate their bizarre reality. From Morty gaining confidence to Summer’s quest for attention, each character evolves in unexpected ways. This evolution is not just about individual growth but also about how these characters interact with their multiverse.

A cultural phenomenon

The cultural impact of ‘Rick and Morty’ can hardly be overstated. From spawning fan theories to influencing other media, it has become more than just a show; it’s a cultural touchstone. The fervor of its fanbase is evident in events like the Szechuan Sauce incident at McDonald’s, showcasing how deeply the show resonates with its audience.

Inspiring the storytellers

The influence of ‘Rick and Morty’ extends beyond its viewership to inspire other creators within the sci-fi genre. It has paved the way for new platforms like ‘Rick and Mortify’, where fans can create storyboards for unseen episodes. This innovation highlights how much ‘Rick and Morty’ has become a springboard for creative storytelling.

Charting new territories

As we look to the future, it’s clear that ‘Rick and Morty’ will continue to shape sci-fi narratives. With creators dreaming of running the show for 100 seasons, we can only speculate on the new directions it will take. What is certain is that ‘Rick and Morty’ has left an indelible mark on modern sci-fi, one that will influence generations of stories to come.

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Content: (Credits: Far Out / Picryl / LSE)

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The classic science fiction movie that H.G. Wells hated: “Originality there is none”

Although the English author H.G. Wells wrote in many genres of fiction and also extended his writing to the realms of politics and social commentary, his contributions to the creative world of science fiction are perhaps what he is best known for and which led to him sometimes being considered the “father of science fiction”.

But it’s fair to say that the very nature of science fiction often makes it the perfect literary and artistic output to explore the ills and issues of a collaborative society, and Wells’ utopian works at points foresaw the rise in technology that seems to be almost symbiotic with humankind today, whilst his science fiction works explored concepts such as time travel and the existence of aliens.

Seeing as Wells’ science fiction work, including The Time MachineThe Island of Doctor MoreauThe Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, are so well admired, we’d think that the writer would be well positioned to consider other notable efforts in the genre, whether in fiction or other mediums. With that in mind, it’s worth bringing to attention that Wells was no great fan of one of the most significant science fiction movies of all time, at least from a pioneering perspective.

Wells once reviewed Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expression science fiction silent movie Metropolis and called it “the silliest film” that he’d ever seen, claiming “it would not be possible to make one sillier.”

Via Wired, Wells wrote: “It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.”

Metropolis is one of the first-ever feature-length science fiction movies and takes place in a futuristic urban dystopia, focusing on the affluent son of a city’s master who tries to help the workers of the city rise up out of their lowly position in partnership with a saintly figure of the workers, Maria, and the city master, Joh Fredersen.

Upon release, Lang’s film was praised for its art direction and special effects, but the story was considered a touch naïve and cliched, which Wells also took issue with. The writer criticises Metropolis at great length, but some highlights from the review see him point out the production’s expensive cost, the film’s title, its characters and pretty much everything in between.

“Originality there is none. Independent thought, none,” he wrote. “The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent, sentimentalising, and make-believe film, wastes some very fine possibilities.”

Evidently, Wells was no great fan of Metropolis and considered it “a waste of money”.

What is considered the first true science fiction novel of the modern era, which foreshadowed genetic tinkering?

What is considered the first true science fiction novel of the modern era, which foreshadowed genetic tinkering?

What is considered the first true science fiction novel of the modern era, which foreshadowed genetic tinkering?

What is considered the first true science fiction novel of the modern era, which foreshadowed genetic tinkering?

The early 20th century saw science fiction reflecting contemporary ideologies such as capitalism and communism, and engaging with fears surrounding nuclear power, religious abuses, and civil rights movements .

What time period produced science fiction works that included idealogies such as capitalism, and communism, and also threats of nuclear power, racism, pollution, and more?

The proliferation of pulp magazines provided a platform for new writers and helped popularize the genre, making it accessible to a broader audience and encouraging rapid diversification .

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Content: 60 Sci-Fi Books That All Science Fiction Fans Must Read

Are you looking for a new science fiction book to read? Looking to fill up your reading list with journeys to strange new worlds and fast-paced science fiction adventures? You're in luck because we've compiled a list of the best sci-fi books.

Whether you're looking to dive into the great sci-fi classics you missed out on or you're looking to delve into brand new tales from up-and-coming indie authors, you're sure to find something that will spark creativity and excitement for you. Science fiction and fantasy novels provide us with allegories, cautionary tales, and deep dives into the human condition told through the lens of the fantastical and the cutting-edge.

The Best Sci-Fi Origins Books

Where did it all begin? Read these early tales with impossible futures, fascinating creatures, time travel, and alien invasion!

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein brought us the iconic monster made by Victor Frankenstein. Considered the first true science fiction novel of the modern era, it would foreshadow genetic tinkering stories of the future.

The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (also called The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World)

Considered to be the first science fiction work, in the 17th century, Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish wrote of a utopian world.

Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum

The third Oz book by L. Frank Baum features Tik-Tok, the wind-up clockwork man Dorothy Gale encounters in the Land of Ev. Tik-Tok is basically one of the first robots in literature. Other wacky features in Ozma of Oz include a sand-sailing boat and lunch pail tree.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

A 19th century classic by Wells, depicting time travel and inspiring science fiction tales for over a century.

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

The book would go on to inspire a radio program that terrified people into thinking Martians were actually invading Earth. Wells would kickstart first contact stories and alien invasion at the same time, offering up a cautionary tale that touches sci-fi to this day.

The Best Sci-Fi Space Epics Books

Transport yourself across the universe with these pillars of world-building in science fiction, all of which are either now adapted for TV or film or soon will be.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s Dune is considered a masterwork of world-building and family intrigue, inspiring other famous series and their respective houses. In the first book, Paul Atreides encounters the resident free people of the planet Arrakis (Dune), the Fremen, and achieves a destiny of messianic proportions. Dune recently graced the big screen in a new adaptation by Denis Villeneuve.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor's Binti novella series begins with Binti, a Hugo-award-winning Africanfuturistic science fiction horror story published by Tor.com. Binti is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the most exalted institution of higher learning in the galaxy. She faces the choice to accept the offer and give up her place in her family so that she can travel among the stars. Hulu has ordered a pilot for Binti.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The beginning of the Foundation series reveals the “psychohistory” developed by mathematician Harry Seldon. Seldon would establish a new empire called Foundation to preserve the culture from societal collapse. Foundation debuted as a TV show on Apple TV in 2021.

Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

Gareth L. Powell's award-winning trilogy Embers of War follows the war-weary crew of the sentient spaceship Trouble Dog, who after becoming disgusted by her role in war joins the House of Reclamation. Trouble Dog and her captain Sal Konstanz are sent on a rescue mission, which intersects a mission to find missing poet Ona Sundak. The galaxy teeters on the brink of another war, just as an alien presence makes itself known, altering the course of things to come. Now under development for TV.

Rendezvous with Rama by Sir Arthur C. Clarke

A strange spacecraft enters the solar system, and humanity investigates. The secrets within the enormous craft, called Rama, reveal the heritage of an advanced alien civilization. Rendezvous with Rama is in development for a film adaptation with Denis Villeneuve at the helm.

The Best Hard Sci-Fi Books

If you like your science fiction taut with the edginess of battle and the implication of future wars, you must add these books to your collection!

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

This classic military sci-fi epic details the tragic effects of time dilation on a group of soldiers fighting a seemingly endless war.

Ringworld by Larry Niven

Set in the 29th century, Louis Wu and his companions explore a vast, Earth-orbit-sized, constructed world. Their adventures uncover the alien civilization that built it.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

First set with the backdrop of China’s cultural revolution, this new epic involves secret scientific experiments, alien invasion, challenging moral dilemmas, and impressive world-building.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

A man in his 70s is recruited as a soldier in the Colonial Defense Force, and altered physically in unexpected ways. Strong on character development, this kickstarts the Old Man’s War Series.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

This classic military sci-fi tale follows Johnny Rico and military recruits who become involved in a battle between humans and aliens nicknamed Arachnids or “Bugs.”

If you love Starship Troopers, check out our review of the wisdom of Grand Admiral Thrawn – Michael

The Best Sci-Fi Robot Stories

The future of robots is here and is complex and necessary reading in these sci-fi tales.

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov’s intriguing work introduced the laws of robotics that all robots must adhere to work alongside humans.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

The first novel in the Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red, follows a cyborg that goes by the name Murderbot contends with self-awareness in the corporate-dominated future.

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

The beginning of the Lunar Chronicles series is a retelling of Cinderella from the point of view of a cyborg.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

Famed for its eventual big-screen adaptation, Blade Runner, this novel recounts a future in which highly realistic artificial fugitives are on the run from bounty hunter Rick Deckard.

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

Mattie is an automaton in this steampunk and urban fantasy novel involving gargoyles, Mechanics, and Alchemists.

The Best Sci-Fi Mars Stories

Our neighbor, the red planet Mars, beckons to us. What would it be like to walk on the shifting red sands of Mars? Find out in these Martian classics.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s mesmerizing prose introduces us to a Mars full of exotic possibility, soon plundered by humanity’s arrival.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

The first in the Mars Trilogy, Red Mars, involves the colonization and terraforming of Mars and the conflicting moral questions that result.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Astronaut Mark Watney is left behind on a Mars mission and must draw upon his skills and ingenuity in order to survive.

Mars by Ben Bova

Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman joins the first expedition of scientists exploring Mars. The grounded approach Bova takes to all the interaction, politics, and bureaucracy help achieve a plausible future story.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

The first book in the Red Rising Trilogy envisions a future of planetary colonization in which caste systems abound. Darrow must fight against this system of overlords.

The Best Sci-Fi Fantasy Books

Fly high with dragons, roam lands on epic quests, and learn the hearts of true heroes in the fantasy masterpieces.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnum opus spans three books, opening up a fantastically detailed and wholly invented universe in Middle Earth that was hinted at in The Hobbit. Considered the ultimate work of fantasy, The Lord of the Rings brings myth, allegory, poetry, song, war, and melancholy to heights of realism and wonder.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

The first novel in The Earthsea Cycle tells the tale of the wizard Ged, and his journey to redeem his reckless past.

A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin

Beginning with A Game of Thrones, Martin’s elaborate, dark fantasy series covers land in which seasons last decades, and a terrible force from the north threatens to bring an icy apocalypse to an area filled with rulers jockeying to take the Iron Throne.

The Dragonriders of Pern Series by Anne McCaffrey

This remarkable series takes place in the world of Pern, where people telepathically bond with dragons. Dragonflight is the first in the series.

The Fifth Season: The Broken Earth, Book 1 by N.K Jemisin

The Fifth Season marks the first book of the award-winning The Broken Earth trilogy. Set against civilization’s collapse and natural disaster, Essun endures great personal tragedy in her quest to rescue her daughter.

The Best Sci-Fi Dystopian & Apocalyptic Books

Set in a nightmare future, these dystopian and apocalyptic legends will keep you up at night.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

In a totalitarian future America, handmade Offred is forced to bear children to men of a ruling class. The tale follows her harrowing life in a bleak future, and the attempt to escape and bring down the subjugating class to restore rights.

The Stand by Stephen King

A deadly pathogen escapes a military installation, rapidly spreading and bringing civilization essentially to an end. A group of survivors makes its way to a form of a promised land while battling a malevolent group seeking domination.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

In the near future breakdown of the society of Los Angeles, empathic teenager Lauren believes in a better future entailing traveling to other planets. Lauren gathers followers to her belief as she makes her way north.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Set in the Great Lakes region of America, a group of nomadic creatives picks up the pieces after the fall of civilization due to pandemic flu. Station Eleven has been adapted for HBO Max.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The first book in the Hunger Games Trilogy follows the immense challenges that Katniss Everdeen faces in the post-apocalyptic version of America called Panem. She takes her sister’s place in the government-sponsored Hunger Games to compete for survival in a no-holds-barred and deadly competition.

The Best Sci-Fi Near Futures Books

The future is here, or nearly so, in these ground-breaking novels set close to our present day.

Contact by Carl Sagan

Scientist Ellie Arroway detects a potential extraterrestrial signal from space, which appears to instruct humanity in how to build a machine. She faces self-doubt amid scrutiny to uncover the mysteries of the discovery.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

This cautionary tale about genetic engineering in which scientists make living, cloned dinosaurs for an amusement park. Mayhem ensues.

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

Mysterious monoliths appear across many worlds, seeding life with intelligence. Following the discovery of one such monolith on the moon, Dr. Bowman and a team of scientists investigate the signal it sends to Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The onboard AI begins exhibiting dangerous behavior during the journey.

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer

A physics experiment creates an unintended consequence of everyone on earth losing consciousness for two minutes. Each person sees a “flash forward” decades in the future while they are unconscious. The resulting accidents and visions challenge everyone’s ideas of free will.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

In dystopian 2044, impoverished Wade Watts navigates through the virtual reality world of the OASIS, seeking to reverse his fortune.

The Best Sci-Fi Books for Younger Readers

Take adventures through time and space, no matter your age!

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

The Murry children and Calvin O’Keefe crosses universes and space-time to try to find their missing father. Their tale is a mind-bending adventure of good vs. evil.

His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass/The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass/Northern Lights begins this sweeping saga of two children, one born in a parallel universe, one born in our own. In Lyra’s world, people’s souls exist in animal form, called daemons. Her father and mother represent warring factions determined to control all universes. Filled with talking animals, witches, airships, and strange creatures, His Dark Materials packs an emotional punch.

The Apothecary Series by Maile Meloy

Set in the 1950s, The Apothecary starts this highly entertaining, thrilling adventure series in which American Janie Scott meets Benjamin Burrows, the son of an apothecary. After Benjamin’s father is kidnapped, the teenagers uncover a terrifying plot that could result in humanity’s end. They use potions with magical effects to try and stop the impending doom.

The Serpent's Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1) by Sayantani DasGupta

The first of the Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series, book one begins with Kiranmala discovering her parents are missing, and there is a demon in her kitchen! Two princes recruited her and sent to another dimension, where she must battle the Serpent King and the Rakkhoshi Queen to rescue her parents and save the Earth.

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

This delightful middle-grade novel recounts a discarded robot named Roz and her search for love and acceptance.

The Best Sci-Fi Ponderous Books

These mind-bending sci-fi novels will have you thinking for a long time afterward.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Raised on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith returns to Earth and tries to fit in. His unusual upbringing makes him seem superhuman, but he attempts to help his Earth kin understand things from a different perspective.

The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

Set in the 24th century when telepaths (“Espers”) are common, and police are telepathic as well. Ben Reich tries to evade the telepathic police for a murder he wants to commit. The story opens up the moral issues of using telepathy, regulated mostly by a guild, but raises concerns about the exclusion of telepaths who run astray as well as psychological intrigue.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Solaris follows humans’ failed attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence. The sentient planet tests the researchers with their memories and emotions.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

A story spanning time and space and connections between various characters, Cloud Atlas explores the theme of fate with a mind-bending narrative.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

This classic tale follows the journey of Genly Ai on his mission to the planet Gethen. The ambisexual Gethenians present challenges and growth for Ai.

The Best Sci-Fi Cyberpunk Books

If you dream of the future lit by neon, shadowed by noir, and fueled with intrigue, these seminal cyberpunk novels are for you!

Neuromancer by William Gibson

In the first novel of the Sprawl Trilogy, hacker Henry Case is hired to help an AI take over the global network called The Matrix.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

A modern cyberpunk tale is weaving together magic and science, with wit and feeling.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Set in the 25th century, humans have spread through the galaxy and can be preserved after death via cortical stacks, then essentially regenerated or “re-sleeved” into another body. Takeshi Kovacs stumbles upon a vast conspiracy after his latest “sleeve.”

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

This early entry into cyberpunk sci-fi follows teleporter Gully Foyle, an outcast considered dangerous.

Synners by Pat Cadigan

The synthesizers, or Synners, are people who can turn mental images into products for consumption. The story is told via various characters’ viewpoints.

The Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books by Indie Authors

Discover the latest sci-fi and fantasy stories, while supporting independent authors!

Mindful Things by Mya Duong

Nineteen-year-old Lauren begins to experience visions and uncovers the fact her deceased parents were witches. A madman hungry for power pursues her, and she must embrace her magical heritage to try to stop him.

The Infinite by John W. Akers

The inventor Pax works on a secret project that can revolutionize human cognition. His plans are derailed by a computer virus that could end civilization, so Pax is forced to choose how he can help humanity survive.

Threadwalkers by Joanna Volavka

Miranda Woodward undergoes a discordant series of events following her father’s death. This is a young adult time travel tale.

Resonance by Jennifer Greenhall

In Book One of the Resonance Series, Sophia Walsh uses her psionic abilities for good but finds herself the next target of a killer.

Heliopause: The Questrison Saga®: Book One by J. Dianne Dotson

Heliopause by J. Dianne Dotson kickstarts The Questrison Saga®, a four-book series science fiction and fantasy series. In Heliopause, a mystery at the edge of the solar system reveals a galactic menace. A galactic natural disaster unfolds, aiding the monster in the void. Human Forster and human-looking, ageless Galla-Deia team up with telepaths, galactic mages, aliens, and androids to face the greatest threat to all life in the galaxy. Full of diverse characters and exotic worlds, found and made families, heartbreak, and whimsy, this space opera recalls Star WarsDoctor Who, and Game of Thrones.

At Your Money Geek, we are huge fans of the science fiction genre, everything from military science fiction to novels about space travel, parallel worlds, and fantasy novels. We are always looking for new books to read and exciting sci-fi writers to profile, let us know in the comments what authors you are currently enjoying.

This post was produced and syndicated by Wealth of Geeks.

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J. Dianne Dotson dreamed up other worlds and their characters as a child in the 1980s in East Tennessee. She formed her own neighborhood astronomy club before age 10, to educate her friends about the universe. In addition to writing stories, she drew and painted her characters, designed their outrageous space fashions, and created travel guides and glossaries for the worlds she invented.

As an adult, Dianne earned a degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, and spent several years working in research. She published Heliopause: The Questrison Saga®: Book One (2018) and its sequels Ephemeris: The Questrison Saga®: Book Two (2019), Accretion: The Questrison Saga®: Book Three (2020) and her last novel in the saga, Luminiferous: The Questrison Saga®: Book Four (2021).

Dianne is also a science writer, content writer and manager, short story writer, watercolorist, and illustrator. She lives with her family.

**The Golden Age and Mid-20th Century Developments:** Following World War II, science fiction entered its “Golden Age,” characterized by a focus on scientific plausibility, space exploration, and the ethical implications of technological advancement.

**The Golden Age and Mid-20th Century Developments:** Following World War II, science fiction entered its “Golden Age,” characterized by a focus on scientific plausibility, space exploration, and the ethical implications of technological advancement.

**The Golden Age and Mid-20th Century Developments:** Following World War II, science fiction entered its “Golden Age,” characterized by a focus on scientific plausibility, space exploration, and the ethical implications of technological advancement.

Authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.

Authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.

Clarke, and Ray Bradbury prioritized “hard” science fiction, examining humanity’s relationship with technology and the cosmos .

Title:

Content: 15th Annual Xingyun Awards for Chinese Science Fiction Finalists

The finalists for the 15th annual Xingyun Awards for Chinese science fiction have been announced by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association. Winners will be revealed at a ceremony to be held in Chengdu, Sichuan, China on May 18, 2024.

BEST NOVEL 2023

  • Gods of the Earth: Return of the Dead, by Fenxing Chengzi (Shenzhen Publishing House; Science and Fantasy Growth Foundation)
  • The City in the Well, by Liu Yang (People’s Literature Publishing House)
  • Cosmo Wings, by Jiang Bo (People’s Literature Publishing House; 8-Light Minutes Culture)
  • The Age of God Making, by Yan Xi (Sichuan University Press; Science Fiction World)

BEST NOVELLA 2023

  • “The Fleeting Gravity of Words”, by Zhou Wen (Visiting the Stars: Chinese Stories of Flying to the Outer Space)
  • “The Solar System on Set: The Teahouse at the End of the Universe”, by Shuang Chimu (Shanghai Literature, No. 4 2023)
  • “Our Martians”, by Bao Shu (Visiting the Stars: Chinese Stories of Flying to the Outer Space)
  • “The Salt Bridge”, by Liang Ling (Lighting up Mars: Collection of Winning Stories from the 6th Lenghu Awards)

BEST SHORT STORY 2023

  • “Lake Breezes that Brush Over the Palace of Moon”, by Wanxiang Fengnian (Visiting the Stars: Chinese Stories of Flying to the Outer Space)
  • “A Window with a View”, by Bao Shu (Non-Exist SF, January 24 2023)
  • “Let the White Deer Roam”, by Cheng Jingbo (Science Fiction World, November 2023)
  • “City of Choice”, by Gu Shi (Beijing Literature, July 2023)

BEST TRANSLATED WORK 2023

  • Babel, by R.F. Kuang, translated by Chen Yang (CITIC Press)
  • The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi, translated by Gen Hui (New Star Press)
  • SF Soul: Autobiography of Komatsu Sakyo, by Komatsu Sakyo, translated by Meng Qingshu (Sichuan Science & Technology Press; Science Fiction World)
  • Escape from the Future, by Kobayashi Yasumi, translated by Ding Dingchong (Yilin Press)

BEST NON-FICTION 2023

  • Unlocking the Future: The Urban Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction, by Luo Xiaoming (Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House)
  • Gazing at the Stars: My Personal Encounter with Chinese Science Fiction, by Yang Xiao (Sichuan People’s Publishing House; Science Fiction World)
  • “Impressions of Chinese SF Practitioners on Foreign SF Culture: A Brief Analysis of the History of Introducing Foreign SF Culture”, by RiverFlow (Zero-Gravity SF, No. 12)
  • Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, Vol.1-Vol.3, edited by Yang Feng (Chengdu Times Publishing House; 8-Light Minutes Culture)

BEST REVIEW 2023

  • “From the Valleys to the Stars: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology”, by Jiang Weihe (The Beijing News, September 22 2023)
  • “The Curve of Human Destiny and the Poetics of Humanity: Reading ‘Last and First Men’”, by Shuang Chimu (Imagining Science: Reading SF Literature Classics)
  • “A Specter of the Anthropocene is Haunting: A Review of Mark Bould’s ‘The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture’”, by Lyu Guangzhao (Science Writing Review, Issue 1 2023)
  • “‘Journey to the West’: An Atypical Segment of the Science Fiction Community”, by Xi Xia (Literature Press Wechat Official Account, April 4 2023)

BEST NEW WRITER 2021-2023

  • Lu Hang*
  • Qi Ran*
  • Wang Cencen*
  • Wang Xiaohai**

(*Finalists in their 3rd year of eligibility, **Finalist in his 1st year of eligibility)

[Thanks to Feng Zhang and the World Chinese Science Fiction Association for the story.]

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Who are considered great masters of the golden age of science fiction?

Who are considered great masters of the golden age of science fiction?

This period was marked by optimism about scientific progress but also by anxieties about war and the potential dangers of unchecked technological development .

**Expansion of Themes and the Rise of Social Commentary:** As the 20th century progressed, science fiction increasingly became a vehicle for social critique.

**Expansion of Themes and the Rise of Social Commentary:** As the 20th century progressed, science fiction increasingly became a vehicle for social critique.

**Expansion of Themes and the Rise of Social Commentary:** As the 20th century progressed, science fiction increasingly became a vehicle for social critique.

The genre began to address issues such as war, colonialism, environmental degradation, and the human condition, often using speculative settings to explore ethical dilemmas and societal transformations .

Title:

Content: Overcoming The Noble Lie: Great Narratives & Compelling Futures

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 6 (Dec 2021)

If the last two years taught us anything, it’s that humanity is now at its most critical inflection point. We stand at the precipice of a major turning in western civilisation – the culmination of a millennium of human development, seminal events, knowledge, and culture.

It is undeniable, yet not at all clear, the direction we are headed, or what the future holds, and who will be around to see it come to fruition. We are not seers or prophets and cannot peer into the future, but we can read the signposts of the past and present.

We have a wealth of shared experience and a vast living memory – a collective consciousness updated and added to every day. If we search humanity’s archive, we find answers to many of these questions. Those answers have always been available, gleaned from understanding ourselves, our journey as a family, and the human race.

French novelist Alphonse Karr famously coined the saying, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” or, the more things change, the more they are the same.

Yes, we have been here before.

Let’s step back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries – a time of upheavals and period of great turbulence on many human fronts – politically, spiritually, and technologically. The western world was in the midst of an existential crisis as secularisation brought with it two disruptive forces to the traditional order of knowledge and influence: the rise of the intellectual and mass media.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the world finds itself in a very similar impasse approximately a century later, with many of the same conditions present today, only on a much more pervasive level.

The parallels between then and now are astonishing. This should not be viewed as ‘history repeating itself’ but rather as a more intense interlude of what had already come to pass – only this time events are unfolding at much greater speed, propelled by advances in communication technology on a global scale inconceivable to previous generations. Such changes were equally profound in 1900, as were the transformations that took place across society.

As the 20th century approached, theology was supplanted by evolutionary science. An ascendant Darwinian authority presided over existential questions like “Who are we?” and “What is man’s purpose?”

Undoubtedly, this was a tumultuous time, intellectually and spiritually, with acrimony leading to heated exchanges between clergy and scientists, even leading to violent confrontations. But, with its newfound status, it was inevitable the secular power of Darwinian science would colonise the political and social sciences before giving rise to the sordid science of curative breeding known as eugenics.

Recent history leaves no doubt that if left unrestrained by morals and ethics, wanton destruction and incredible suffering are wrought in the name of science and progress. These forces of modernity materialise in today’s advances in genetic engineering that have brought us back to that point once again: humanity faces the dilemma of resisting game-changing advances of technology and innovation or surrendering to it and prostrating at the altar of science and progress.

We are an entire century into a fully secularised society in the West. Today’s tech gurus, vaccinologists, and public health officials now occupy positions of prestige and command the reverence once reserved for pontiffs, philosophers, and poet laureates. The divine mysteries have given way to the ‘divine’ algorithm, and timeless sublime prose to the transience of the latest epidemiological model – from Gandhi to Gates, Whitman to Whitty, in just a few generations. How else could a man like Dr Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old career gatekeeper for the transnational pharmaceutical cartel, still occupy the US government’s highest-paid job, and recently voted People Magazine’s “sexiest man alive”? Albert Camus once said, “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.” Indeed, if not for the wave of mass hysteria and fear that swept over the world in February 2020, few would even know of Dr Fauci, let alone revere him as a demigod. On one level, we may be deluded into believing that today’s gaudy exhibitionists are mere frivolities of pure media spectacle, but behind the facade of political celebrity is an unforgiving ideology called technocracy.

You will often hear the trope that “more people have been killed over religion than anything else.” If only it were true. The 20th century serves as a potent reminder of the misleading nature of that statement, for no other century witnessed the sheer brutality and crimes against humanity on an industrial scale perpetrated in the name of various despotic interpretations of some variant of social Darwinism or political science, reaching levels of totalitarianism never seen before in human history. There are too many examples: WWI, WWII, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to name only a few. In almost every instance, the preservation of secular dogma took precedence over the lives and souls of humans who were unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire of ‘progress’. Fascism, socialism, communism, neoliberal capitalism – each would justify collateral damage as a means to achieving the goal of transformation or the formulation of a new order.

In the 21st century, the forces that inherited the mantle of power – the dynastic families and special interests – are preparing the next act in this worldly saga.

The Grand Narrative

So often it’s been said that in war, history is written by the victors, who impose what is known as the ‘living memory’ of a nation or people, chronicling a shared experience, generally of collective sacrifice undertaken for the greater good, and paying tribute to the martyrs along the way. These become the narratives that post-war orders and worldviews are built upon, a central pillar around which the reorganisation of society and economies occurs. Without marshalling the “narrative,” a ruling establishment cannot lead and steer society in its direction of choice.

What happens in the absence of a bona fide world war? Can elites still construct an equally compelling living memory which the people can rally around?

Grand narrative management is precisely what Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) has been attempting from the onset of the ‘global pandemic’ crisis. In 2021, the WEF announced its “Great Narrative” initiative, although evidence for this project can be traced much further back through a number of their documents and website presentations.

To create the requisite living memory, Schwab and the WEF replaced the usual military war piece with the new war on microbes. “The pandemic has revealed the acute need to focus on the future and long-term health of our societies,” said the globalist luminary.

While the rhetoric sounds innocuous, everything we’ve witnessed over the last 24 months proves beyond any doubt that their hyper-centralised ‘public health’ planning has little to do with the health of the individual and more about how the individual can be more effectively managed to serve the collective, that in turn is to be administered by the new technocracy. The WEF is merely the latest avatar for this elitist ideology whose primary goal is always to meet the ruling oligarchy’s financial and consolidation goals and objectives. This was true 100 years ago as it is today.

Just as with the global financial crash in 2008, when elites privatised their profits and socialised their losses through gargantuan government bailouts, so too will elites seek to consolidate their baronial individual asset wealth portfolios and privileged asset classes while demanding infinite self-sacrifice for everyone else – all for the greater good, of course. It is also about managing expectations, as the WEF states:

“The Great Narrative Meeting [in November 2021] is a linchpin of the Great Narrative initiative, a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.”

You might be asking: what is their endgame? Put simply, every new world order needs a financial reset, and in the WEF’s Great Reset, the plan is to intentionally overinflate and collapse the current fiat money system, reimagined and replaced by a new globalised economic system backed by a new superficial asset class under the guise of the “financialisation of nature.”

That plan gained a significant foothold in October 2021 when the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange announced the creation of a new asset class that will effectively monetise the natural world as well as the processes underpinning all life. All in the name of “sustainability.” The lifeblood of this system will be a new Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which will be fully programmable, meaning that the currency issuer can stipulate how the digital money is spent.

This is the highest form of social engineering conceivable and can become the payment mechanism for Universal Basic Income, allowing the government issuer power over what you are allowed to purchase. It could limit your transactions to green spending and ‘carbon-neutral’ activities. It’s also a system designed to eliminate upward mobility unless you gain promotion through the political economy.

It could lead to the ultimate victory of the technocracy. However, its Achilles heel might be that it seeks to remake the world in such a short space of time, presumably so these masters of the universe can marvel at their ‘remarkable achievements’ in this lifetime – the ultimate act of hubris by these self-anointed stewards of the planet.

When the technocracy movement first emerged in the early 20th century, contemporary thinkers raised the alarm that pseudo-intellectualism and the mechanised worldview augured an eventual collapse of western civilisation. The timeframe wasn’t clear, only that it was inevitable. In his historical literary work, The Decline of the West (1928), Oswald Spengler described the event horizon that eventually consumes all major cultures, and which generally have a limited lifespan of roughly one thousand years. He examined eight major civilisations as examples: the Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indian, Greco-Roman, Mayan-Aztec, Arabian, and European-Western. He envisioned the West being consumed by its intellectual vortex:

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery, the media, that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

Now realise what is at stake. The unconstrained vision of Davos elites may become the final revolution within a larger civilisational cycle. The Covid-19 pseudo-pandemic would be one of the catalysing events in this process, followed by global cyberwar, and then finally ending in something more outrageous like a nuclear conflagration before ushering in a New World Order.

Such a protracted multi-phased upheaval would mark the end of the main features of modern western civilisation: the post-Westphalian nation-state, the era of enlightenment and rational thought, self-governing democracy and republican forms of government. The world would move into what Zbigniew Brzezinski called a Technetronic Era. Compared to the 20th century, this would more resemble a centralised command and control economy and a highly automated society. In terms of individual rights, it would look like a neo-feudal dark age.

This cycle was discussed by American writers William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book The Fourth Turning (1997), which illustrated how the development of Anglo-American society is a feature of a much larger centuries-old cycle. Or, as Italian commentator Federico Dezzanidescribes it, “like a snake biting its own tail over the span of a century, Anglo-American societies are born, grow, mature and die, only to rise again and begin a new cycle.”

The Noble Lie

In the end, it all comes back to Malthus – Malthusianism – which is ultimately the ideological standard hoisted by the likes of Schwab, Bill Gates, Stanley Johnson, Prince Charles, and globalist outfits like the Trilateral Commission. These elites believe that the people must bear the brunt of this epic existential predicament of an overcrowded planet in a state of terminal decline due to man and his industrial exploits, which is said to be driving anthropogenic global warming to the point where Earth will be uninhabitable. To save humanity from itself, we must be forced to accept that there are too many of us, so we play their globalist game of musical chairs. We know what they mean, but they won’t state their intentions openly, not yet anyway. Only it’s not true.

In Plato’s Republic, in the dialogue of the myth of the metals (social castes), Socrates explains that to maintain order and social continuity, the ruling class must act under the aegis of “the noble lie.” This is based on the belief that from time to time, the ruling class must feed the general populace an ennobling fiction to maintain order and continuity. The noble lie is noble because it benefits the soul of the person who believes it. From an elite’s perspective, this is done for their own good and that they might feel better about their station in life.

If you think about our living memory, or what happened in the West over the last half-century, it’s been a continuum of such lies, although hardly noble: the assassination of JFK, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Saddam’s WMDs, 19 Arab hijackers on 9/11, spreading freedom and democracy in Afghanistan, overpopulation, climate chaos, Trump-Russian collusion, Covid-19, the Great Reset, and soon it will be the coming war on China. Each epic yarn spun with the help of a 24/7 mainstream and social media barrage of propaganda and misinformation. By brainwashing the population incessantly, the establishment creates the illusion of a ‘bottom-up consensus’, so much so that the people believe they’ve collectively arrived at a grassroots consensus.

Drifting out noble lies in the 21st century has become a pretty efficient process with the consensus enforced by digital dragnet: dare oppose any noble liedeployed by the globalist caste for your own good to ‘reimagine’ and reorganise socio-economic systems, and you’re treated the same as a blasphemer in medieval times – silenced, excommunicated, banished from view, and no longer permitted to speak in the public commons. Deplatformed, depersoned, cancelled.

At the same time, however, a very real great awakening is also taking hold with a rising level of political and conscious awareness much broader and wide-ranging than anything before in human history. This is a consequence of the same global panopticon wielded against the people by the elites. Such awareness is the prerequisite to ultimate liberation, or as philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff once said, “If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realise that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”

Which brings us back to the philosophical and existential question: why are we here? What is the purpose of humans on this planet? Darwinian genetic science says we are here to promulgate our genes and advance the species. On a fundamental level, this is what makes us human. But the new green technocracy says this is no longer possible, and we must embrace a higher truth – a new altruism imbued in the Great Reset doctrine.

The irony is that collectively speaking, humanity might not survive this new ‘empty planet’ initiative. Elite technocrats will contend that only a planned society modelled after Huxley’s vision of a technocracy organised by functional castes and selective breeding in vitro can save the planet from the alleged existential menace of human consumption and climate change.

Whose compelling future is this? Is this not the ‘scientific dictatorship’ that H.G. Wells foresaw, with a global government run by an elite committee of scientists and technocrats who hold the reins of power over every aspect of life and dictate how society is organised and run minute to minute? This is unconstrained totalitarianism. Under such a system, the individual will have no agency, no conscience, and eventually no soul.

The last 250 years have been an extraordinary progression from monarchies to democratic nations, in which the state eventually assumed a god-like status. It set the stage for what is heading towards us now: the advent of globalist transhumanism and a one-world unified state.

Far from being its crowning victory, this crescendo of technocracy and the perversion of ‘progress’ exposes how materialism and the scientific priesthood cannot satisfactorily answer the fundamental questions we’ve asked since time immemorial, those eternal questions and divine mysteries pursued by monks, sages, and sannyasi. The forces of modernity cannot resolve this predicament, so people are left searching for something more grounded – where through the natural world they may also know the supernatural. Once again, people reach for religion and spirituality to find meaning and purpose, including (and not surprising as one may think) the younger generation.

We should be under no illusion about the challenges lying before us. But even beyond an awareness of what you face, you need to have a vision of a world you wish to live in. Elites have always been adept at occupying the minds of the people with propaganda, and the latest war or catastrophe, so we never settle long enough to formulate our vision of a compelling future. Instead, our vision is mired in a never-ending procession of reactive emotions, leaving us vulnerable to the power of suggestion – and a ‘compelling future’ is instead continually served up to us by our rulers. They create the problem (a noble lie) that elicits our reaction before they present us with a solution to which there is usually no alternative.

Make no mistake: the great and the good in Davos are busy designing your ‘compelling future’, and if no other counter-narrative is offered, they will decide your future for you. It’s that simple.

Qui tacet consentit. Translated: your silence is your consent.

There is still much work to be done, but the work is never done. Throughout time, this has always been the case. The more things change, the more they are the same.

This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 6.
If you appreciate this article, please consider a contribution to help maintain this website.

Footnotes

1. Albert Camus (1963), quote from “Carnets: 1935-1942”
2. Wall Street’s New Asset Class Will Put Natural World ‘Up for Sale’, childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wall-street-new-york-stock-exchange-natural-asset-company
3. Federico Dezzani, www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/covid-destruction-institutions-and-beyond
4. What is a Noble Lie?, kenyonreview.org/2007/02/what-is-a-noble-lie/

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

About the Author

Author Patrick Henningsen is the founder and editor of the news and analysis website 21st Century Wire, and is an independent foreign and political affairs analyst for RT International. He is also the host of the SUNDAY WIRE radio program which airs live every Sunday on the Alternate Current Radio Network. Learn more about this author at: www.patrickhenningsen.com

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What concepts does Ishiguro's literary science fiction novel bring up?

What it means to be human
enviromental issues

What did Frank Herbert's "Dune" manage to achieve?

What concepts does Ishiguro's literary science fiction novel bring up?

What it means to be human
enviromental issues

What did Frank Herbert's "Dune" manage to achieve?

The rise of subgenres like dystopian fiction and, more recently, climate fiction (“cli-fi”), reflects the genre’s engagement with pressing global issues such as climate change and resource depletion .

Title:

Content: Science Fiction and Politics in Literature and the Arts (Symposium, Toulouse)

Science Fiction and Politics in Literature and the Arts

The aim of this symposium run by the LLA-Créatis laboratory at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès is to develop open thinking about “political” questions, in the broad sense of the term, that science fiction narratives allow. Different types of stories can be considered, in different literary genres or in cinema, video series and comics. It can be studied and interrogated from a historical, political and social perspective by involving, where appropriate, the possible contributions of different analyzes (anthropology, semiotics, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, etc.) Diversity of perspectives and questions raised by gender.

The entire twentieth-century period produced works in San Francisco that were marked by ideologies such as capitalism and its “communist” counterpart, but also by threats associated with civilian and/or military nuclear power, religious-related abuses, racism, minority liberation struggles, and pollution. , etc. These perceptions persisted, but in the period from the last 20 years of the 20th century to the first 20 years of the 21st century, other concerns were voiced: ecological pesticides, the climate crisis, demographic crises, resource depletion, or the danger. The scientific and technical potential (transhumanism, “artificial intelligence”, etc.) is being carried away.

The link to the realities of the times (as in the collection “Le Passager Clandestin / Dyschroniques”) can of course depend on one or more authors, take into account a work or compare several (especially in the case of short stories and short films). The broader perspective will consist in considering the basic ideologies, either in relation to the literary prizes awarded, or in relation to the works themselves, the semantics of these presenting themselves from the outset sometimes as criticism, sometimes as propaganda, the two being able to be combined according to modalities that tend to be ironic, Satirical, disruptive, etc.

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In any case, it would be a matter of highlighting the “exploratory potential” in these works, of identifying the “problematic tools” and of making the ideas put forward in fictional form productive from the point of view of political theory. (Y Rambhala).

Of course, it is advisable to include works belonging to different geographical and linguistic fields so that the panorama of this search is sufficiently realistic.

Provisional schedule of courses (date adjustments possible)

Oct 20, 2-4 PM / Nov 17, 2-4 PM / Dec 15, 2-4 PM / Jan 19, 2-4 PM / Feb 9, 2-4 PM / Mar 15, 2-4 PM / May 31 , 2-4 p.m

Contribution proposals must be sent Before October 1, 2023 To the following addresses: frederics[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Title:

Content: Westland Books invites submissions for speculative fiction anthology

NewsDrum Desk
New Update

New Delhi, Jul 31 (PTI) Publishing house Westland Books has invited submissions from budding and established writers of speculative fiction for an anthology of new writing.

The entries, to be curated by author Guatam Bhatia, are to be in the format of short stories (2,000–8,000 words) and novelettes (8,000–20,000 words). The selected works will be published in Westland's new imprint 'IF'.

"When the editors at Westland and I discussed the scope of this anthology, we thought of it as a showcase for the breadth and diversity of Indian SF. We are looking for new stories as well as new voices—from writers old and new. I'm really looking forward to reading the submissions and curious about what the anthology will look like," said Bhatia in a statement.

The winners will be awarded Rs 12,500 for each accepted short story (to a limit of 10 short stories) and Rs 25,000 for each selected novelette (to a limit of three novelettes).

"We are keen to build IF as a home for exciting new writing in the realm of speculative fiction, and this anthology is an attempt to broaden and deepen the list with fresh writing from established as well as first-time writers. We could not have asked for a sharper and more committed editor than Gautam Bhatia to curate the anthology, which we hope to publish in early 2025," said Karthika VK, publisher of Westland Books. PTI MG MAH MAH

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What concepts does Ishiguro's literary science fiction novel bring up?

What concepts does Ishiguro's literary science fiction novel bring up?

What concepts does Ishiguro's literary science fiction novel bring up?

**Inclusion of Diverse Voices and Underrepresented Perspectives:** A major shift in science fiction literature has been the increasing representation of women, people of color, LGBTQ+ authors, and other underrepresented groups.

**Inclusion of Diverse Voices and Underrepresented Perspectives:** A major shift in science fiction literature has been the increasing representation of women, people of color, LGBTQ+ authors, and other underrepresented groups.

**Inclusion of Diverse Voices and Underrepresented Perspectives:** A major shift in science fiction literature has been the increasing representation of women, people of color, LGBTQ+ authors, and other underrepresented groups.

Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein* established a precedent for women’s contributions to the genre , and early 20th-century writers like Rokeya S.

What is considered a major breakthrough in science fiction publication?

What is considered the first true science fiction novel of the modern era, which foreshadowed genetic tinkering?

What time period produced science fiction works that included idealogies such as capitalism, and communism, and also threats of nuclear power, racism, pollution, and more?

What is considered a major breakthrough in science fiction publication?

What is considered the first true science fiction novel of the modern era, which foreshadowed genetic tinkering?

What time period produced science fiction works that included idealogies such as capitalism, and communism, and also threats of nuclear power, racism, pollution, and more?

Hossain imagined futuristic technologies from a feminist perspective .

Title:

Content: Samuel R. Delany

Thursday, March 24, 2022
6:30 pm Central Time, 7:30 Eastern Time
Crowdcast

Rain Taxi is honored to celebrate one of the great writers of our time, Samuel R. Delany, with a special conversation broadcast live during the AWP Conference in Philadelphia! An acclaimed writer whose works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction through their formally consummate and materially grounded explorations of difference, and who has also made voluminous contributions to literary theory, queer literature, memoir, and more, Delany addresses topics such as sex and sexuality, race, power, literature, and art in two new anthologies of essays, talks, and interviews, Occasional Views Volumes I and II (Wesleyan University Press). These collections richly display Delany’s trademark towering intelligence, and you get to pull up a chair from the comfort of your own space as we present the author in conversation with writer and historian Lavelle Porter.

Free to attend, registration required. Registration allows you to view a replay of the event if you cannot attend during the live broadcast. Either way, we hope to “see” you there!

Purchase the books!

A limited number of copies will include a signed bookplate by Samuel R. Delany! Bookplates will be allotted in the order books are purchased while supplies last, and books will be shipped shortly after the event.

Have the book shipped to you: our partner bookseller, Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, will ship the books via US Media Mail only — if you wish to have this book shipped internationally, please contact orders [at] raintaxi [dot] com for pricing. If you wish to pick up your copy at Magers & Quinn, please contact orders [at] raintaxi [dot] com.

About the Presenters

SAMUEL R. DELANY is the author of more than 40 books, including groundbreaking science fiction novels such as Dhalgren and Nova and the essential nonfiction study Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, recently released in a 20th anniversary edition. He has won four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards, as well as the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other honors. Retired from years of teaching at the State University of New York, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia.

LAVELLE PORTER is an Assistant Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. He holds a B.A. in history from Morehouse College, and a Ph. D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. His writing has appeared in venues such as The New Inquiry, Poetry Foundation, JSTOR Daily, and Black Perspectives. He is the author of The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual published by Northwestern University Press in 2019.

However, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that women and authors of color began to gain significant visibility and recognition.

However, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that women and authors of color began to gain significant visibility and recognition.

However, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that women and authors of color began to gain significant visibility and recognition.

Authors such as Ursula K.

Authors such as Ursula K.

Le Guin challenged traditional gender roles and explored complex social structures in works like *The Left Hand of Darkness* .

Octavia Butler’s novels addressed intersections of race, gender, and power, enriching the genre’s thematic range .

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Analysts can gain useful insights on China’s global strategy from studying Chinese science fiction, in light of tight restrictions around factual information, says a new strategic update from LSE IDEAS, the London School of Economics’ foreign policy think tank.

Professor William A. Callahan, the report’s author, puts particular emphasis on the work of Hugo Award-winning author Liu Cixin. Liu’s novels are enjoyed by readers around the world, including top leaders in Beijing, he says.

Rather than cluing researchers in to specific policy decisions, Callahan believes Chinese science fiction showcases the underlying themes and worldview that shape these decisions.

At the heart of these novels, he sees a debate which explores whether perceived threats to China’s future international goals should be viewed through the lens of science and technology, or politics.

“As the trade war becomes a tech war, China sees itself as the underdog in a scientific and civilizational struggle with the US. The main point is to appreciate how Liu frames this experience as the ‘key problem’, and then deterministically limits its ‘solution’ to particular strategies,” he says.

According to Callahan’s reading, the fictional worlds created by Liu and other authors reveal the values that would underlie a real-life Chinese world order.

Even during China’s policy of economic reform and opening up to trade from the 1980s-2010s, he reads a strong lean towards a zero-sum game approach to international relations and away from cosmopolitan societies, favouring instead ones which are majority ethnic Chinese.

“With Xi Jinping, China’s global strategy seems to be catching up with Liu’s vision of the future, looking to science to solve political problems. Indeed, while the Chinese leadership of the 2010s was dominated by social scientists and lawyers, since the 20th Party Congress in 2022, the PRC is led by natural scientists,” says Callahan.

/ENDS

For more information, to see a copy of the strategic update, or to hear from Professor William A. Callahan, contact Jamie Hose at BlueSky Education on jamie@bluesky-pr.com, or call +44 (0)1582 790 706.

This press release was distributed by ResponseSource Press Release Wire on behalf of BlueSky Education in the following categories: Business & Finance, Public Sector, Third Sector & Legal, Manufacturing, Engineering & Energy, for more information visit https://pressreleasewire.responsesource.com/about.

Jemisin’s *Broken Earth* trilogy, which won multiple Hugo Awards, explores oppression, resilience, and identity, reflecting the genre’s capacity to address contemporary social justice issues .

Title:

Content: ‘Never-Ending Youth’: Urariano Mota’s Novel-Memoir of Resistance to Brazilian Fascism

The illusion of a constant present hides how most of our lives are experienced through memory. The physical imminence of the present—the sensation of concreteness, odors, sounds, vividness of sight, or tastes of the objectivity of the immediate now—continuously slips into memory. Still, memory may haunt the present, rendering it painful with an overwhelming sense of loss, despair of failure or falling short of goals, or perhaps with the emotions of nostalgia over missing loved ones, a favorite café, or homesickness for an old neighborhood that housed the milestones of youth. The struggle to withstand the perceived motion of time through the creation of a narrative that restores memories of human companions and yesterday’s vitality into the present is the subject of Urariano Mota’s semi-autobiographical novel, Never-Ending Youth.

Based on real people or composites of real people, Mota’s work offers snapshots of 1970s Brazil’s radical youth movement. It chronicles the students’ anti-fascist struggle in Recife, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, during the dictatorship which, with U.S. backing, had overthrown the democratically elected government and came to be ruled by generals for two decades. As part of the story about these few years in the lives of a handful of young people, Mota’s novel also invokes a larger global context rooted in the European slave trade, colonialism, race and patriarchy. The book explores themes of male supremacy and racism and the significant changes in how people of the left understood these long enduring systems in their analysis of class struggle. Mota’s book restores the personalities, actions, and idiosyncrasies of the men and women who fought the repressive dictatorship.

They drew inspiration from ongoing anti-imperialist movements led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. The vibrant music, poetry, and fiction comprising Brazilian arts and culture served as a constant reference point for their emotions, ideas, and relation to their history and future. Manuel Bandeira, Jorge Amado, Waldick Soriano, Solano Trindade, Alfredo da Rocha Filho, Vinícius de Moraes, and Paulo Freire are the philosophers, activists, singers, and writers who shape the atmosphere, ideas, and words of this radical world. Beyond those boundaries, Don Quixote, the works of Marcel Proust and Gabriel García Márquez, the poetry of Goethe and Lorca, Marx’s dialectics, and Mao Zedong thought, even the vocal renderings of Ella Fitzgerald, inhabit the deliberations and debates of our heroes and heroines.

Indeed, Mota’s narrative constructs imaginative bridges to the historical past through cultural connections, the lived past through memories of political struggle, and the present and future. This philosophical sense of transcendent collectivity, of an identity with other humans and strugglers for liberation, with the creators of life, ideas, and the world itself, rises over the present of the alienated individual under repressive capitalism. The death and funeral of his close friend Luiz do Carmo, whom the narrator-protagonist describes as “my Sancho Panza,” motivates the writing of the book. He attempts to reconstruct a narrative of the memories of his youth, his friends, close comrades, and fellow travelers.

Júlio first met Luiz when the student organization tasked him with hiding Luiz. The latter had been labeled a terrorist by the regime for distributing pro-democracy literature. Júlio is enthusiastic about being able to help the movement, but completely embarrassed and ashamed of his poverty. His home is a tiny, overheated one-room cubby hole at the top of a boarding house. He doesn’t have enough money to feed the two of them adequately and relies on the generous housekeeper of the boarding house who understands his situation and gives him larger helpings.

His desire to tell a story about the richness of Luiz’s life and his role in the struggle against the dictatorship invokes memories of others: Zacarelli, Selene, Gordo, Célio, Lucas, Tonhão, Zé Batráquio, Joana, Antônio, Nelinha, and Vargas. The novel is made up of several dozen short episodes with developed characterizations of each. These youngsters are flawed, obsessed with sex and alcohol and music, imperfect in their politics, displaying anarchistic tendencies, male chauvinism, or reformist orientations. Still, in perfect and indelible ways, they made the main period of the novel’s chronology (1969-1973) what it was. Júlio, the narrator-protagonist, says that this time and place was not utopian or an era to which he would want to return. It was not the most beautiful time. It was marked by the terrorism and torture of the regime. But it was ours, and we, together, made it good.

Above all, it lives on: “our world is not dead.” While the fascists create a false image of the world that reflects their values, brutality, and their culture of death and hate, the revolutionary struggle for democracy and socialism fights for life and the future. Júlio observes that despite the limits posed by the dictatorship on freedom, the students and the strugglers were “the agents of their time.” Their decision to struggle against oppression and fascism was an essential ingredient that made that time worthwhile. As a chronicler of the moment and culture of the struggle, Júlio tasks himself with the creation of a text, a narrative that will bridge memory with the newly emerging and dynamic present. A text is something, he believes, that will outlive the moment, that will recuperate the past that survives only as a memory.

As Júlio leaves Luiz’s funeral, he contemplates the pain felt at the memories of his loved ones, his siblings in struggle, and his comrades lost both to the dictatorship’s brutality and to time. He sees a mass protest of teachers and students marching through the city demanding better pay and resources for the public schools. He signs the petition and calls forth his past comrades. “The young people are continuing to do what we did.” The new generation of young strugglers also awaits their chroniclers who will extend their lives beyond the moment. The cycle of generations, of struggles for democracy and justice, and the difference and continuity across time in the service of collective human liberation, join together to comprise our never-ending youth.

Joel Wendland-Liu is the author of Mythologies: A Political Economy of U.S. Literature, Settler Colonialism, and Racial Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century (International Publishers) and The Collectivity of Life (Lexington Books).

Title:

Content: STOCK MARKET BSE NSE

Women & writing

I started the year by reading Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook and Other Stories which was hilarious.

Published: 09th March 2022 06:50 AM  |   Last Updated: 09th March 2022 06:50 AM   |  A+A-

Express News Service

BENGALURU: When I relocated to a new house and was arranging all my books, I realised that I had an unintended bias. Most of my books were by male authors. So I decided that in 2022, I would read mainly women authors, preferably those I hadn’t read before, and in as many genres as possible. I realised that magic happens when you leave your comfort zone!

I started the year by reading Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook and Other Stories which was hilarious. I could relate to it because many stories were based in Bengaluru and Kerala — both places that I have lived in. Similarly, I related to Letter from New York by Helene Hanff, which my bibliophile friend Pradeep Sebastian gifted me, since New York is a place that I visit at least thrice a year; descriptions of the city resonated in me although they were from 1978.

Looking for the Good War by Elizabeth D Samet is one of the best military books I have ever read. The book reexamines the literature, art and culture that emerged after World War II. It looks into American beliefs about the use of military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the 21st-century’s decades of devastating conflict.

I have been fortunate to have worked with two outstanding co-authors Sudha Menon and CK Meena. So, it was obvious that I read their books. Sudha Menon’s most recent Recipes for Life recreates the memories of the foods we have grown up with. CK Meena’s Seven Days to Somewhere is a reflection of our education system that does not allow children to follow their hearts.

I also realised that most of the popular women authors wrote fiction, my least favourite  genre, and that those who veer towards non-fiction seem to write mostly personal essays or memoirs — the most recent ones being Kiran Bedi’s Fearless Governance and Indra Nooyi’s My Life in Full. In contrast is a book I look forward to reading: 1619 Project by Nicola Hannah Jones, a long-form journalism endeavour developed by Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine. It aims to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative”.

As one would guess, there are plenty of books on feminism written by women. My reading list for 2022 includes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All be Feminists. One of my favourite genres being the graphic novel, which has long been dominated by men, I picked The Story of My Tits by breast cancer survivour Jennifer Hayden. Friends have recommended to me books by writers as divergent as Jan Morris and CS Lakshmi (Ambai).

One of the highlights of my last visit to London was visiting the bookshop, Persephone Books. This independent publishing house specialises in reprints of forgotten fiction and non-fiction from the mid-20th century mostly by women writers like EM Delafield, Diana Athill and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Each book is reprinted with a dove-grey cover and beautiful endpaper inspired by vintage fabrics. After spending a happy hour browsing, I purchased Fidelity by Susan Glaspell, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 and Few Eggs and No Oranges: The diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-45. Now that I have decided what to read in 2022, I have cleared my desk and kept these books in front of me. They are now calling out to me to be read!

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Title:

Content: © Timothy A. Ceary/AFP/Getty Images
Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology.

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science — and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.

Nevertheless, despite the cynical realization that the methodological norms of science had been neglected (or perhaps because of this realization), voices struggling for more communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism had been multiplying among scientific circles prior to the pandemic. Reformers were often seen as holding some sort of a moral higher ground, despite being outnumbered in occupancy of powerful positions. Reproducibility crises in many scientific fields, ranging from biomedicine to psychology, caused soul-searching and efforts to enhance transparency, including the sharing of raw data, protocols, and code. Inequalities within the academy were increasingly recognized with calls to remedy them. Many were receptive to pleas for reform.

Opinion-based experts (while still dominant in influential committees, professional societies, major conferences, funding bodies, and other power nodes of the system) were often challenged by evidence-based criticism. There were efforts to make conflicts of interest more transparent and to minimize their impact, even if most science leaders remained conflicted, especially in medicine. A thriving community of scientists focused on rigorous methods, understanding biases, and minimizing their impact. The field of metaresearch, i.e., research on research, had become widely respected. One might therefore have hoped that the pandemic crisis could have fostered change. Indeed, change did happen — but perhaps mostly for the worst.

Lack of communalism during the pandemic fueled scandals and conspiracy theories, which were then treated as fact in the name of science by much of the popular press and on social media. The retraction of a highly visible hydroxychloroquine paper from the The Lancet was a startling example: A lack of sharing and openness allowed a top medical journal to publish an article in which 671 hospitals allegedly contributed data that did not exist, and no one noticed this outright fabrication before publication. The New England Journal of Medicine, another top medical journal, managed to publish a similar paper; many scientists continue to heavily cite it long after its retraction.

The hottest public scientific debate of the moment — whether the COVID-19 virus was the product of natural evolution or a laboratory accident — could have been settled easily with a minimal demonstration of communalism ("communism," actually, in the original Merton vocabulary) from China: Opening the lab books of the Wuhan Institute of Virology would have alleviated concerns immediately. Without such openness about which experiments were done, lab leak theories remain tantalizingly credible.

Personally, I don't want to consider the lab leak theory — a major blow to scientific investigation — as the dominant explanation yet. However, if full public data-sharing cannot happen even for a question relevant to the deaths of millions and the suffering of billions, what hope is there for scientific transparency and a sharing culture? Whatever the origins of the virus, the refusal to abide by formerly accepted norms has done its own enormous damage.

The pandemic led seemingly overnight to a scary new form of scientific universalism. Everyone did COVID-19 science or commented on it. By August 2021, 330,000 scientific papers were published on COVID-19, involving roughly a million different authors. An analysis showed that scientists from every single one of the 174 disciplines that comprise what we know as science has published on COVID-19. By the end of 2020, only automobile engineering didn't have scientists publishing on COVID-19. By early 2021, the automobile engineers had their say, too.

At first sight, this was an unprecedented mobilization of interdisciplinary talent. However, most of this work was of low quality, often wrong, and sometimes highly misleading. Many people without subject-matter technical expertise became experts overnight, emphatically saving the world. As these spurious experts multiplied, evidence-based approaches — like randomized trials and collection of more accurate, unbiased data — were frequently dismissed as inappropriate, too slow, and harmful. The disdain for reliable study designs was even celebrated.

Many amazing scientists have worked on COVID-19. I admire their work. Their contributions have taught us so much. My gratitude extends to the many extremely talented and well-trained young investigators who rejuvenate our aging scientific workforce. However, alongside thousands of solid scientists came freshly minted experts with questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent credentials and questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent data.

Social and mainstream media have helped to manufacture this new breed of experts. Anyone who was not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by reporters who often knew little about those fields but knew immediately which opinions were true. Conversely, some of the best epidemiologists and health policy specialists in America were smeared as clueless and dangerous by people who believed themselves fit to summarily arbitrate differences of scientific opinion without understanding the methodology or data at issue.

Disinterestedness suffered gravely. In the past, conflicted entities mostly tried to hide their agendas. During the pandemic, these same conflicted entities were raised to the status of heroes. For example, Big Pharma companies clearly produced useful drugs, vaccines, and other interventions that saved lives, though it was also known that profit was and is their main motive. Big Tobacco was known to kill many millions of people every year and to continuously mislead when promoting its old and new, equally harmful, products. Yet during the pandemic, requesting better evidence on effectiveness and adverse events was often considered anathema. This dismissive, authoritarian approach "in defense of science" may sadly have enhanced vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement, wasting a unique opportunity that was created by the fantastic rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. Even the tobacco industry upgraded its reputation: Philip Morris donated ventilators to propel a profile of corporate responsibility and saving lives, a tiny fraction of which were put at risk of death from COVID-19 because of background diseases caused by tobacco products.

Other potentially conflicted entities became the new societal regulators, rather than the ones being regulated. Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms. Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science — and science lost.

Honest, continuous questioning and exploration of alternative paths are indispensable for good science. In the authoritarian (as opposed to participatory) version of public health, these activities were seen as treason and desertion. The dominant narrative became that "we are at war." When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers explore maneuvering to the left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be shot, no questions asked. The orders were clear.

Who gave these orders? Who decided that his or her opinion, expertise, and conflicts should be in charge? It was not a single person, not a crazy general or a despicable politician or a dictator, even if political interference in science did happen — massively so. It was all of us, a conglomerate that has no name and no face:
a mesh and mess of half-cooked evidence; frenzied and partisan media promoting parachute journalism and pack coverage; the proliferation of pseudonymous and eponymous social media personas which led even serious scientists to become unrestrained, wild-beast avatars of themselves, spitting massive quantities of inanity and nonsense; poorly regulated industry and technology companies flexing their brain and marketing power; and common people afflicted by the protracted crisis.
All swim in a mixture of some good intentions, some excellent thinking, and some splendid scientific successes, but also of conflicts, political polarization, fear, panic, hatred, divisiveness, fake news, censorship, inequalities, racism, and chronic and acute societal dysfunction.

Heated but healthy scientific debates are welcome. Serious critics are our greatest benefactors. John Tukey once said that the collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel. This applies to other scientists, too. But "we are at war" led to a step beyond:
This is a dirty war, one without dignity. Opponents were threatened, abused, and bullied by cancel culture campaigns in social media, hit stories in mainstream media, and bestsellers written by zealots. Statements were distorted, turned into straw men, and ridiculed. Wikipedia pages were vandalized. Reputations were systematically devastated and destroyed. Many brilliant scientists were abused and received threats during the pandemic, intended to make them and their families miserable.
Anonymous and pseudonymous abuse has a chilling effect; it is worse when the people doing the abusing are eponymous and respectable. The only viable responses to bigotry and hypocrisy are kindness, civility, empathy, and dignity. However, barring in-person communication, virtual living and social media in social isolation are poor conveyors of these virtues.

Politics had a deleterious influence on pandemic science. Anything any apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political agendas. Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction. This process undermines the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective. Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science. It also shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather than obligated and humiliated.

A scientist cannot and should not try to change his or her data and inferences based on the current doctrine of political parties or the reading du jour of the social media thermometer. In an environment where traditional political divisions between left and right no longer seem to make much sense, data, sentences, and interpretations are taken out of context and weaponized. The same apolitical scientist could be attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and by alt-right commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to silence themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship has been a major loss for scientific investigation and the public health effort. My heroes are the many well-intentioned scientists who were abused, smeared, and threatened during the pandemic. I respect all of them and suffer for what they went through, regardless of whether their scientific positions agreed or disagreed with mine. I suffer for and cherish even more those whose positions disagreed with mine.

There was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.

I worry that science and its norms have shared the fate of the disadvantaged. It is a pity, because science can still help everyone. Science remains the best thing that can happen to humans, provided it can be both tolerant and tolerated.
About the Author:
John P.A. Ioannidis is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, as well as Professor (by courtesy) of Biomedical Science and Statistics, at Stanford University. His complete COVID-19-related publications can be found here.

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Literary Spotlight: Solarpunk Magazine

Optimistic speculative fiction – plus poetry and nonfiction – is welcomed with open arms at this bimonthly magazine.

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The word “solarpunk” refers to a genre of speculative fiction informed by equity, community, optimism, and – frequently – the natural world; think Frank Herbert’s Dune and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Solarpunk Magazine is a bimonthly publication featuring idealistic short stories, poetry, nonfiction, and art. As editors write on the magazine’s website, “the time has never been more urgent for an explosion of utopian stories to light a path forward out of the darkness into which humanity has dug itself.”

This is a magazine about hope, informed by its subtitle: “Demand utopia.” Here, you’ll find stories about blimps powered by chlorophyllectrics (“Tillandsia” by Josie Kallo, Issue #2) and harmonious settlements rich with plant life (“The Last of the Mbahuku Tribe” by Oyedotun Damilola, Issue #1). You’ll also find nonfiction pieces, including “Utopianism: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.”

Justine Norton-Kertson is co-editor-in-chief, along with Brianna Castagnozzi. Norton-Kertson enjoys poetry that captures the aesthetic of solarpunk in a lyrical way and explores themes “like radical hope and harmony between technology and nature.” They prefer fiction populated by characters compelling enough to fall in love with. “A solarpunk aesthetic is important too, but that’s the packaging for the juice, which is the characters and thematic threads,” Norton-Kertson explains.

Tone, editorial content

Editors at Solarpunk look for pieces that depict cooperative, sustainable communities and futuristic technologies that work in conjunction with nature. They’re passionate about work that dismantles the cultures of white supremacy and patriarchy and depicts a more balanced sharing of wealth.

The July 2022 issue is a celebration of speculative fiction written and edited by BIPOC creators. The issue includes Jeremy Nelson’s “Sweet Water from Salt,” a story that Castagnozzi says captured readers’ imaginations. “The main character is fleeing corporate seizure and a wicked thunderstorm on his late parents’ boat, all while attempting to preserve its precious cargo: bees and beehives,” she explains. “[The plot] joins heritage, inheritance, rebellion, and entomology in one fantastic survivalist story.”

Norton-Kertson points to Brazilian author Renan Bernardo’s story “Look to the Sky, My Love” (Issue #1) as the type of piece the editors like to publish. In one scene, the protagonist waits in line with another character at a party. Bernardo writes:

While we waited in line, Alana told me how thirty percent of all party-generated energy in Quadrilha da Perpétua came from the feet stomping on the ground, all the frisking and rhythm translated into energy and dignity for all the surrounding communities. And she told me how it could reach seventy percent if the party itself was able to trim its energy expenditure, and how so many possibilities could come from that.

“The story does an excellent job of capturing the spirit of hope and optimism, particularly with its theme of the power of celebration, that are the hallmarks of solarpunk,” Norton-Kertson explains. “As well, it illustrates the futuristic, art nouveau, clean energy aesthetic of the solarpunk genre.”

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Contributors

Past contributors include poets Gabriela Avelino, Vanessa Jae, and Marisca Pichette; fiction authors include Otancia Noel, Sarena Ulibarri, and Endria Isa Richardson.

Elizabeth Sutterlin has published in the magazine – a nonfiction piece titled “Solarpunk and She-Ra: How Netflix’s She-Ra Reboot Invites us to Imagine a High-Tech, Just, and Sustainable Future” (Issue #3). Nina Munteanu’s “Why Eco-Fiction Will Change the World – from CliFi to Solarpunk” appears in Issue #1, as does Lindsay Jane’s “Helping Your Garden Transition with Climate Change.”

Castagnozzi is eager to publish T.R. Siebert’s poem “Choice” in the November 2022 issue, devoted to lunarpunk (think solarpunk but more spiritual and introspective). In it, the poet describes a decision faced by the narrator. “They may join their sisters in a beautifully monstrous transformation and live powerfully in the ocean, or they may continue to live as a human,” Castagnozzi explains. “The imagery of the starlit seas fits well with our visions of lunarpunk, as does the narrator’s sense of agency.”

Norton-Kertson notes that Solarpunk looks forward to publishing the magazine’s first solarpunk story for middle-grade readers, written by J. Dianne Dotson, in 2023. “It’s a really sweet story that leans on into the lunarpunk aesthetic and takes place in a utopian world,” they say.

Advice for potential contributors

Check Solarpunk’s website for upcoming themes; Issue #5 (deadline Sept. 13) focuses on solarpunk labor, while Issue #6 (deadline Nov. 8) focuses on lunarpunk. The magazine hosts a monthly microfiction contest with a monetary prize for the best story of 250 words or fewer, adhering to that month’s theme. (Check the website regularly for an updated list of contest themes.)

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Editors would love to see more creative nonfiction submissions related to solarpunk themes and the fight against fossil fuels. They’re not interested in academic pieces full of jargon or political rants. “For fiction and poetry,” Castagnozzi says, “emphasize joyful, hopeful, or otherwise positive endings.”

They’re committed to publishing pieces by marginalized writers; they encourage potential contributors to identify themselves in a cover letter as BIPOC, LGBTQIA, neurodivergent, or disabled, for example. “We love to amplify voices from marginalized communities that are most impacted by climate change and other global problems,” Norton-Kertson writes on the magazine’s website. “In fact, it’s one of the key characteristics of solarpunk.”

Solarpunk Magazine at a glance

“An online publication imagining a better world through optimistic speculative literature.”

Reading periods: See website for reading periods and themes.

Length: Prose up to 7,500 words; poems up to five pages.

Genres: Fiction, nonfiction, poetry.

Submission format: Through Moksha.

Payment: Yes.

Contact: Co-editors Justine Norton-Kertson and Brianna Castagnozzi at [email protected],
solarpunkmagazine.com

Melissa Hart is the author, most recently, of the novel Daisy Woodworm Changes the World. melissahart.com

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N.K. Jemisin is best known for which of her books?

N.K. Jemisin is best known for which of her books?

N.K. Jemisin is best known for which of her books?

N.K. Jemisin is best known for which of her books?

N.K. Jemisin is best known for which of her books?

N.K. Jemisin is best known for which of her books?

Nnedi Okorafor’s works blend African mythology with speculative fiction, broadening the genre’s cultural horizons .

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Analysts can gain useful insights on China’s global strategy from studying Chinese science fiction, in light of tight restrictions around factual information, says a new strategic update from LSE IDEAS, the London School of Economics’ foreign policy think tank.

Professor William A. Callahan, the report’s author, puts particular emphasis on the work of Hugo Award-winning author Liu Cixin. Liu’s novels are enjoyed by readers around the world, including top leaders in Beijing, he says.

Rather than cluing researchers in to specific policy decisions, Callahan believes Chinese science fiction showcases the underlying themes and worldview that shape these decisions.

At the heart of these novels, he sees a debate which explores whether perceived threats to China’s future international goals should be viewed through the lens of science and technology, or politics.

“As the trade war becomes a tech war, China sees itself as the underdog in a scientific and civilizational struggle with the US. The main point is to appreciate how Liu frames this experience as the ‘key problem’, and then deterministically limits its ‘solution’ to particular strategies,” he says.

According to Callahan’s reading, the fictional worlds created by Liu and other authors reveal the values that would underlie a real-life Chinese world order.

Even during China’s policy of economic reform and opening up to trade from the 1980s-2010s, he reads a strong lean towards a zero-sum game approach to international relations and away from cosmopolitan societies, favouring instead ones which are majority ethnic Chinese.

“With Xi Jinping, China’s global strategy seems to be catching up with Liu’s vision of the future, looking to science to solve political problems. Indeed, while the Chinese leadership of the 2010s was dominated by social scientists and lawyers, since the 20th Party Congress in 2022, the PRC is led by natural scientists,” says Callahan.

/ENDS

For more information, to see a copy of the strategic update, or to hear from Professor William A. Callahan, contact Jamie Hose at BlueSky Education on jamie@bluesky-pr.com, or call +44 (0)1582 790 706.

This press release was distributed by ResponseSource Press Release Wire on behalf of BlueSky Education in the following categories: Business & Finance, Public Sector, Third Sector & Legal, Manufacturing, Engineering & Energy, for more information visit https://pressreleasewire.responsesource.com/about.

Who wrote "Binti," a Hugo-award-winning African futuristic science fiction horror story?

Who wrote "Binti," a Hugo-award-winning African futuristic science fiction horror story?

Who wrote "Binti," a Hugo-award-winning African futuristic science fiction horror story?

Indigenous authors like Rebecca Roanhorse and genderqueer writers such as Foz Meadows have further diversified science fiction, exploring themes of identity, community, and social justice .

What is considered a major breakthrough in science fiction publication?

What is considered a major breakthrough in science fiction publication?

**Contemporary Developments: Genre-Bending, Interdisciplinarity, and Globalization:** Modern science fiction frequently blends elements of fantasy, horror, romance, and other genres, reflecting a broader acceptance of diverse storytelling methods and the breakdown of rigid genre boundaries .

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Content: Review: Queer love and redemption from newly minted royalty of sci-fi fantasy

For those who have been paying attention, the field of science fiction and fantasy has entered a spectacular Platinum Age.

Among the cohort of exciting new writers who have emerged in the past decade is Foz Meadows, a genderqueer fantasy author and essayist born in Australia and living in California since 2018.

Meadows has been nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award and its Australian equivalent, the Ditmar, in a category she describes as “yelling on the internet” (a.k.a. “fan writing”). She won the Ditmar in 2017 and the Hugo in 2019 for exceptional yelling, but in recent years, the awards and nominations for her fiction have been piling up as well. Her fantasy novel “An Accident of Stars” was a finalist for the Bisexual Book Awards in 2017, and in 2018, her novella “Coral Bones” received Australia’s Norma K. Hemming Award for Excellence in the Exploration of Race, Gender, Sexuality, Class or Disability in speculative fiction.

Her fifth novel, “A Strange and Stubborn Endurance,” is a high fantasy tale of queer romance and political intrigue, featuring two heroes who find themselves in a snarl of murder and mayhem arising from their arranged marriage. The tale begins with a familiar scenario, as the youngest son of one noble family is pressured to wed the youngest daughter of another — the problem being that the lordling they’ve chosen to play the groom, Velasin vin Aaro, not only has never met this woman but has no interest in women at all.

The novel becomes genuinely engaging when the foreign envoy, completely unfazed by the revelation that Velasin is gay, simply pivots to marry him off to a more gender-appropriate partner — instead of Laeca Aeduria, the ambitious daughter of a foreign satrap, Velasin will be promised to Caethari, the battle-hardened son.

What emerges is a complex portrait of love and recovery focused mainly on one character. Caethari Aeduria is the hard-bodied cinnamon roll that every romance novel needs, yet it is Velasin who holds our attention. The survivor of a viciously homophobic parent culture and brutal mistreatment from loved ones, Velasin has a past that will be sadly relatable to many readers. But his will to live and his profound emotional intelligence are also familiar, and it is Velasin’s refusal to surrender to despair or hate that gives the book its title.

The quest to find love, home and family in a hostile world really does require “a strange and stubborn endurance” from queer people, now more than ever. Despite the many content warnings in the author’s note (the book contains sexual assault, suicidal ideation and self-harm as critical points in the plot), Velasin’s world is better than our own in many ways. My own hope is that we will all live happily ever after in Tithena someday — a land where marriage equality is taken for granted, all gender identities are respected and no one ever stumbles over a pronoun.

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance
By Foz Meadows
(Tor/MacMillan; 544 pages; $27.99)

  • A.D. Cirulis
    A.D. Cirulis A.D. Cirulis is a tech writer in Washington state.

The distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction has become increasingly important, with speculative fiction serving as an umbrella term that includes science fiction, fantasy, and other genres that imagine alternative realities .

Interdisciplinary collaboration has become a hallmark of contemporary science fiction.

Interdisciplinary collaboration has become a hallmark of contemporary science fiction.

Interdisciplinary collaboration has become a hallmark of contemporary science fiction.

Initiatives like the Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project foster partnerships between authors and scientific researchers, grounding speculative narratives in scientific realities and engaging with real-world issues such as climate change and technological ethics .

This approach has produced works that are both imaginative and informed by current scientific discourse.

This approach has produced works that are both imaginative and informed by current scientific discourse.

The globalization of science fiction has introduced new perspectives from non-Western authors, such as Chinese writers Liu Cixin and Wang Jinkang, whose works reflect their countries’ socio-political landscapes and have gained international acclaim .

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Content: Swords & Spaceships

8 Excellent Genre-Bending Sci-Fi Tales To Take You to the Next Frontier

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Lyndsie Manusos

Senior Contributor

Lyndsie Manusos’s fiction has appeared in PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has worked in web production and content management. When she’s not nesting among her books and rough drafts, she’s chasing the baby while the dog watches in confused amusement. She lives with her family in a suburb of Indianapolis.

Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald, published by Grove Atlantic

The must-read queer sci-fi thriller of the summer! In a world just one perilous step from our own, an unlikely pair sets out on the most dangerous and otherwordly mission of their lives. When a diner suddenly appears in a remote field, Adam and Rao are confronted with the most devastating weapon they have ever seen: Prophet. No one knows who created it, or why, but this spooky substance is bringing happy memories to life, then stifling people with their own joy. Despite their troubled past, the two are drawn closer than ever to defend what they hold most dear.

As I said in my 2022 science fiction subgenre primer, the genre of science fiction is expanding. Like our universe, it is expanding quickly, redefined with every story, be it short or long-form. And beneath the large umbrella of science fiction, subgenres are added and redefined. All in all, there are endless ways to tell a science fiction story (don’t let any old guard tell you different).

And then — subgenres aside — there is genre-bending science fiction. There is science fiction that centers horror and science fiction that is fabulist and weird. There’s science fantasy, as well as science fiction romance. There’s science fiction that is nearly unclassifiable, a mixture of so many things, or even all the things. I’ve mentioned in my Book Riot oeuvre that genre-bending of any shape or size is my kind of work. When writers are bold and brave in their genre weaving, that’s when the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. That’s when I rub my hands together and think, “oh, this is going to be good.”

Genre-bending science fiction doesn’t have to be confined to the novel form, either. Short fiction science fiction is in a golden age right now. Check out the latest finalists and winners for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards, and I promise you will find mindblowing, genre-bending, exceptional work.

Below I will showcase eight tremendous genre-bending science fiction tales, ranging from short stories to novels, and everything in between. I believe I’ve mentioned at least one in a previous post from last year, but you’ll notice the genre coverage is different. Ergo, these stories are genre-bending.

In any case, I hope you’ll enjoy these stories as much as I do.

Genre-Bending Science Fiction: Novels & Novellas

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor

Fatima had a past before she became known as Sankofa. Before those around her called her the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. With a mere glance, an entire town could fall. But before that, the world was different.

So much of what Okorafor writes is genre-bending science fiction (the Binti trilogy!). This novella begins in an almost fantasy-horror like fashion: Sankofa walking, leaving fear and horror in her wake. But as the story unfolds, it becomes this all-encompassing tale of African futurism, how the world shapes us, and then how we might reshape the world.

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

One of the things I love about including this book is seeing this title on Goodreads and reading all the genres it’s described as. Hint: it’s like all the genres. Fantasy, science fiction, time travel, magic, dragons, robots, portals, you name it, Hexwood probably has it. And clearly, none of this should surprise you coming from the legendary Diana Wynne Jones.

The tale follows Ann Stavely as she watches people disappear through the farm’s gate. She meets a sorcerer, and time begins to move differently in the woods nearby. Little does she know that far beyond Earth, Controller Borasus receives word that an ancient machine has been awakened.

I mean, clearly, genre-bending at its finest.

Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo

I love how Victor Manibo is always able to craft the perfect mystery within his brilliant science fiction worlds. Manibo is a master at showing Earth just around corner, especially if we keep on our current trajectory. Picture a world of hyper-capitalism, a luxury liner — Space Habitat Altaire —and a ruthless world of amassing “points” in order for the chance to start a new life on Mars.

Now, add a decadent mystery of whodunit with a sprinkle of who’s willing to do anything to get what they want: Ava wants to find out who murdered her brother; Laz wants to win Ava’s heart; Sloane wants to collect secrets as his family’s wealth declines; Henry will do whatever it takes to get to Mars.

And all this is set during a class reunion on a luxury space liner, with twists and turns you won’t see coming. Get your science fiction Knives Out fix with this one.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

I still think about this book. I still think about Borne and that giant bear, Mord. This book is solidly science fiction, but it’s also just fucking weird. That’s honestly the best way to describe it, too, which is why I love it so much. It’s post-apocalyptic, and it manages to be both epic and extremely intimate.

Rachel is trying to survive in a world that wants to kill her at every turn. Then she finds Borne, an amorphous creature, in the fur of a Godzilla-sized bear named Mord. Rachel cannot bring herself, nor allow her lover Wick, to destroy Borne. Borne reminds her of better times and better places, and an attachment grows between them. This book is personal as well as out of this world. It’s weird fiction at its finest. It’s science fiction at its most profound.

Genre-Bending Science Fiction: Short Form

This list includes short fiction, though that ranges in word count. Below you’ll find tales that are short stories or novelettes.

Foxfire, Foxfire” by Yoon Ha Lee from Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Let me begin by saying that the publication of this story is in a highly respected (and one of my personal favorites) genre magazine called Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Its mission: to publish the very best in “literary adventure fantasy.” And yet, this story also has beautifully crafted science fiction elements.

This novelette follows Baekdo, a magical, shapeshifting fox who is able to speak to gods. Baekdo is set on becoming human, which requires him to kill — and devour the liver of — 100 humans. Baekdo has no qualms about coming to his 100th kill, but things don’t go as planned. Baekdo’s 100th victim is the pilot of a Cataphract, a giant battle mech. Baekdo swears on the tiger-sages that he will keep his oath with the pilot, Jong, and finish her mission. It’s an intimate, magical tale while also being epic in scope. Truly, a genre-bending masterpiece.

The Gondoliers” by Karen Russell from Orange World and Other Stories

Karen Russell is a masterful genre-bending writer. I fell in love with Russell’s work over ten years ago, with her first collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like Kelly Link, Russell was vital in redefining, for me at least, what fiction, especially literary fiction, can do. “The Gondoliers” is a wonderful example of this.

It follows Janelle Picarro, a.k.a Blister, in a post-apocalyptic world where parts of Florida have fully submerged underwater and is now called New Florida. Blister is a gondolier, ferrying people across the waters. Blister and her sisters use echolocation to communicate and steer. There is a little bit of everything in this story, and you won’t be the same when you reach the end.

Memories of Memories Lost” by Mahmud El Sayed from khōréō

khōréō is one of my favorite speculative fiction magazines. “In Memories of Memories Lost,” El Sayed crafts a devastatingly personal short story of memory, loss, and sacrifice.

After aliens take over Earth, humans must pay a “memory tax” to their cosmic invaders. The story follows Ahmed, who chooses, for his tax, to give a large family memory in the form of a heirloom. In doing so, he can assure the comfort of his father, who suffers from dementia. It’s a story of complex relationships and love. It’s a story that begs hard questions of ourselves, our souls, and our loved ones: What if we could give traumatic memories away? Would we regret the loss?

The Dizzy Room” by Kristina Ten from Nightmare Magazine

Look, I know I’ve mentioned this story before, and it’s because the story is that good. Published in the renowned horror magazine Nightmare, this story is about a video game, but it’s also a horror story about memory and language. There are images and a multitude of sensory details that will haunt me forever.

This is science fiction horror at its best, with a mounting dread that will have you tempted to lean back while also leaning forward, closer to the page, admittedly desperate to hear the sounds of the game itself beckoning you. I am not at all surprised that this story is a finalist for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Find Genre-Bending Stories Everywhere

Every genre has trailblazers, writers who take a genre and build upon it, question and criticize it, and remold it into something new. These are the writers I seek out again and again to dissect and study these genres, rediscovering them and also falling in love with them all over again. They are out there now, and their stories are waiting.

If you’re interested in more genre-bending work, check out these other Book Riot gems:

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Content: 10 Science-Fantasy Books for You Funky Space Sorcerers

Science-Fantasy isn’t a new genre, per se, but it is one that is starting to get some clearer definitions within publishing, making it a buzzy place to read. Combining tropes and conventions of both science-fiction and fantasy, magic and time-space travel often go hand in hand. There are often unexplainable forces are at work alongside high tech machines and gadgets. Jumping off from the Spelljammer media list (which included a couple great science-fantasy books), I’ve conspired to get even more science-fantasy books on Gizmodo! Check out some of my favourites.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

I love This is How You Lose the Time War — it’s genuinely one of my favourite books. Two rival time agents leave messages for each other across worlds and universes, attempting to win the never ending Time War… and avoid falling in love. The twist at the end is so tone-perfect that it’ll make you want to read it again immediately.

How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse

Taking fairy tale retellings and mashing them into a planet-jumping adventure/romance, How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse is a subtly magical space romp.

Winter’s Orbit

Definitely light on the actual science, Winter’s Orbit is much more of a romance than anything else, but it’s also a fun space opera full of court intrigue and politics. If you enjoyed Leia’s standalone Star Wars novel Bloodline, Winter’s Orbit is for you. Read an essay from the author on Gizmodo here.

Iron Widow

An absolute genre wreck of a novel, Iron Widow combines Confucian-based wuxia fantasy tropes and mashes them into giant evolving battle machines as the main characters fight aliens in this alternate-history retelling of Chinese historical figures. Read an excerpt on Gizmodo here.

The Unspoken Name

I’ve screamed about The Unspoken Name before, and I’ll do it again, but this debut epic fantasy novel has it all. It’s definitely more fantasy than science fiction, but with jump gates, flying ships, and ancient stasis technology, it definitely belongs here.

The All-Consuming World

Clones, a sentient universe, and the magic of memory all come to play in The All-Consuming World. With fervor and flair, this book navigates trauma and technology without missing a beat. Read an excerpt on Gizmodo here.

Saga

If you haven’t heard of Saga at this point, I’m just thrilled I get to introduce you to this incredible science-fantasy epic comic run that took the nerd world by storm nearly 10 years ago. It’s just been picked up again after a few years on hiatus, and I cannot recommend this emotional and fantastic tale of a family who are fighting the whole universe to stay together.

Dreadnought

I can’t mention science fantasy without at least one steampunk novel, and while Dreadnought is technically the sequel to Boneshaker, it stands entirely on its own, and was my first introduction to the Clockwork Century books. With an incredible heroine in Mercy and enough world-building to make you really believe in the proposed alt-history, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

With a stunning magic system that spans an entire universe, making up the very code of existence, A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe is one of those books that starts out fast (literally, during an intergalactic space-race) and never stops.

Phoenix Extravagant

Following up the science-heavy science-fantasy Ninefox Gambit (which launched a rather wonderful series), Yoon Ha Lee dove into fantasy-heavy science-fantasy with Pheonix Extravagant, which takes place in an alt-fantasy Korea amid invasions and occupations and explores how different cultural magic systems interact with technology in a beautiful and totally original way. Also there’s a mecha-dragon. So if that doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.

Want more Gizmodo news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.

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Content: Summer reading: 5 books on the joys and challenges of LGBTQ teen and young adult life

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Jonathan Alexander, University of California, Irvine

(THE CONVERSATION) In recognition of LGBT Pride Month, The Conversation reached out to Jonathan Alexander – an English professor with a scholarly interest in the interplay between sexuality and literature – for recommendations of young adult fiction books that feature LGBT characters. What follows is a list that Alexander – who serves as the children’s and young adult fiction section editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books – considers as “must-reads” for this summer.

1. “Juliet Takes a Breath”

Written by Gabby Rivera, this novel focuses on the experiences of Juliet, a Latina lesbian living in New York who takes an internship to serve as the research assistant for a famous white feminist writer, Harlowe Brisbane, living in Portland, Oregon.

Juliet heads to Portland, a bit unsure of herself and still trying to figure out what being a lesbian will mean for her life, particularly given how unsettled her mother is at the prospect. She hopes that Harlowe will help her out. Complications ensue. “Juliet Takes a Breath” is a super-smart book that challenges readers by looking carefully and critically at feminist and feminist-of-color histories and interactions.

2. “Heartstopper”

This book is getting a lot of attention as a television series. What you might not know is that the heartwarming queer story began as a webcomic and then morphed into a series of immensely popular graphic books.

Originally written by Alice Oseman, the narrative focuses on the burgeoning relationship of Charlie and Nick. Charlie is an “out” teenager at his school, and he falls in love with the charming and sporty but not-so-sure-of-his-identity Nick.

What makes “Heartstopper” engaging – and even groundbreaking – is how it presents sexuality as an identity for some but a possibility of exploration for others. Charlie knows he’s gay, but Nick might be gay or bi; he’s still figuring it out. Validating sexuality as fluid and even changeable seems like an important next step in representing intimacy, love and identity itself as complex experiences.

3. “Felix Ever After”

This work of fiction by Kacen Callender also refuses to shy away from complexity. Felix is a young African American trans boy trying to make his way through a summer arts program.

A talented young person, he is still struggling somewhat with his gender identity, despite having commenced his own transition. He eventually finds the term “demiboy” while researching gender identity and comes to identify with this term as an apt description of his deeply felt sense of gender.

A challenging but immensely relatable book, “Felix Ever After” also presents frankly the experience of transphobia while ultimately offering readers a message of empowerment for those working on their gender identity.

4. “The House in the Cerulean Sea”

This book by TJ Klune follows very much in the vein of young adult books that feature the presence of young people with magical abilities trying to make their way in a world of “normals,” or people who do not have such abilities and fear those who do.

Such a narrative formula, popular in young adult fiction as it sets up dramatic conflict between two distinct groups, gets a twist in Klune’s novel. The narrative is told primarily from the point of view of Linus Baker, a nonmagical caseworker who is assigned the task of visiting and inspecting various orphanages or homes that house magical youths who have been taken from their parents and relocated to be raised separately. This is much like Native peoples’ children across the North American continent being relocated to white-run schools throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries to assimilate them into white society and culture.

What makes “The House in the Cerulean Sea” particularly queer is not just the queerness of many of its characters, including Linus, but the ways in which it shows us how outsiders have generally been ostracized, and how many outsiders have in turn learned to embrace their queerness, not just to survive, but to thrive.

5. “The Outsiders”

This is a “classic” or older work of young adult fiction, one of the first written by a relatively young person for other young people: S.E. Hinton. She started writing the book at age 16.

For those who say this isn’t a queer book, on the surface, no, it’s not. But many contemporary readers, including many of my students, have picked up and enjoyed the book from a queer perspective, “queering” it in the process.

Set in rural Oklahoma, “The Outsiders” concerns a group of working-class teen boys. These “greasers” are always rumbling with the “socs” or “socials,” the middle-class preppy kids. The book’s focus on class conflict still resonates, but even more so does its portrayal of intimacy between the boys.

While they are never overtly sexual, there’s something delightfully warm, caring and intimate about these relationships that could serve as a model for young men today, whether or not they are questioning their gender or sexuality. Read – or reread – “The Outsiders” and think about how gender roles continue to change and as humanity evolves in its understanding and acceptance of what is “normal,” and what should be.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/summer-reading-5-books-on-the-joys-and-challenges-of-lgbtq-teen-and-young-adult-life-184631.

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Content: Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project considers next steps for the genre

The project brings together authors and Dartmouth professors to collaborate on new speculative fiction work rooted in scientific research on campus.

by Sophie Chadha | 53 minutes ago

From April 13 to 16, speculative fiction authors from around the country came to Hanover to participate in the Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project, a series of events which included interdisciplinary activities between visiting authors and Dartmouth faculty, as well as readings and panel discussions open to the public. The project aimed to foster collaboration between authors and Dartmouth faculty – with a focus on designing stories rooted in scientific research – and addressed the present and future of the speculative fiction genre.

The project was co-organized by engineering professor Solomon Diamond, English professor Rebecca Clark, the Design Initiative at Dartmouth program manager Paula Olson, Hugo award-winning speculative fiction editor Liz Gorinsky and author and former visiting film and media studies professor Sharang Biswas Th’13.

According to Hugo and Nebula awards finalist Nibedita Sen, speculative fiction is a general term that provokes valuable questions.

“The term ‘speculative fiction’ … works as an umbrella term: It is fiction which imagines things that do not currently exist, things that may come into being through science or through magic,” Sen said. “It could be advancement, or it could be, ‘What if we went backwards? What if we stepped to the side?’ It could be a different dimension, a different timestream.”

In a Q&A panel on April 15, some authors touched on the exchange of knowledge that occurs between scientific researchers and speculative fiction writers. Author K.M. Szpara said he believes the future of speculative fiction will become increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative.

Nebula award-winning author Sam J. Miller  said we should reframe one stereotype about fiction — that it is dismissive of reality’s problems — and instead view its creation of a world without societal problems as proof of the possibility that our society could exist without them.

“It is as simple as, ‘ … And then the housing crisis is over … And then all the people standing in the way of progress are gone.’” Miller said.

Calvin George ’24, who attended the Q&A, said he was intrigued by Miller’s concept of speculative fiction as a tool for social change.

“It was really interesting to hear from these authors [about] how imagining worlds where a huge problem like climate change is gone can actually help us solve those problems by giving us a sense of hope that they are not absolute or inevitable,” George said.

Sen said she views fiction as an important lens through which we can better understand the reality of our problems.

“A lot of people view escapism as a form of writing that is less than, but I don't believe in that. Like Tolkien said: Is it not a prisoner's duty to try to escape? Fiction is the spoonful of sugar that helps the truth go down,” Sen said.

Sen said this belief manifested in her own writing following the results of the 2016 presidential election, when she pivoted into the realm of horror as a form of catharsis.

“[In 2016,] people like me were being viewed as monsters, so I decided, ‘Well, I will show you what a monster really is,’” Sen said.

Looking to the future of speculative fiction, teacher, linguist and author Rob Cameron points to the genre’s growth over the past few decades from a niche, isolated faction of enthusiasts to a universal mode of entertainment.

“With the popularization of science fiction through film, especially Marvel, ‘geek culture’ has become much more expansive — you do not have to be a geek to enjoy it,” Cameron said. “At the same time, authors’ expectations of their readers have changed with these new mediums: Are people really going to sit down and read this book? This kind of thinking sparks novel ideas like ‘choose your own adventure’ narratives, comic books, video games and more.”

According to Biswas, the Speculative Fiction Project came to life when pitched the idea of centering speculative fiction around scholarship at Dartmouth to Diamond. When selecting the authors for the panel, Biswas shared that the organizers primarily aimed to represent diversity in both background and writing experience.

“If you’re claiming to do a project that looks at the future of humanity, you need to represent diverse perspectives,” he said.

Biswas added that if the project were to happen again, he hopes it can bring together an even more diverse group of people with more funding.

“In the future, with better channels of funding, we hope to have more geographic diversity and be able to bring in international authors,” Biswas said.

The Speculative Fiction Project will continue as authors workshop their stories with their research partners. These works of fiction will be presented at a Dartmouth symposium in June and will subsequently be synthesized into an anthology in Lightspeed Magazine next year.

According to Clark, students will be invited to submit their own stories and up to four of them will be chosen and featured in the professional collection.

The rise of digital platforms and self-publishing has enabled experimentation with new formats, including interactive and multimedia narratives, making the genre more accessible and varied .

**Emerging Subgenres and Thematic Shifts:** Since 2000, science fiction has seen the rise of new subgenres that address contemporary concerns.

**Emerging Subgenres and Thematic Shifts:** Since 2000, science fiction has seen the rise of new subgenres that address contemporary concerns.

**Emerging Subgenres and Thematic Shifts:** Since 2000, science fiction has seen the rise of new subgenres that address contemporary concerns.

Afrofuturism, exemplified by N.K.

Afrofuturism, exemplified by N.K.

Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, explores the future of the African diaspora through the lens of race, identity, and social justice .

Cli-fi focuses on climate change and environmental crises, while solarpunk envisions hopeful, sustainable futures centered on social justice and ecological harmony .

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Content: Westland Books invites submissions for speculative fiction anthology

NewsDrum Desk
New Update

New Delhi, Jul 31 (PTI) Publishing house Westland Books has invited submissions from budding and established writers of speculative fiction for an anthology of new writing.

The entries, to be curated by author Guatam Bhatia, are to be in the format of short stories (2,000–8,000 words) and novelettes (8,000–20,000 words). The selected works will be published in Westland's new imprint 'IF'.

"When the editors at Westland and I discussed the scope of this anthology, we thought of it as a showcase for the breadth and diversity of Indian SF. We are looking for new stories as well as new voices—from writers old and new. I'm really looking forward to reading the submissions and curious about what the anthology will look like," said Bhatia in a statement.

The winners will be awarded Rs 12,500 for each accepted short story (to a limit of 10 short stories) and Rs 25,000 for each selected novelette (to a limit of three novelettes).

"We are keen to build IF as a home for exciting new writing in the realm of speculative fiction, and this anthology is an attempt to broaden and deepen the list with fresh writing from established as well as first-time writers. We could not have asked for a sharper and more committed editor than Gautam Bhatia to curate the anthology, which we hope to publish in early 2025," said Karthika VK, publisher of Westland Books. PTI MG MAH MAH

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Space opera has evolved to feature more complex narratives and diverse characters, moving beyond classic tropes .

**LGBTQ+ Representation and Intersectionality:** Contemporary science fiction increasingly features LGBTQ+ characters and themes, moving beyond stereotypes and tokenism.

**LGBTQ+ Representation and Intersectionality:** Contemporary science fiction increasingly features LGBTQ+ characters and themes, moving beyond stereotypes and tokenism.

**LGBTQ+ Representation and Intersectionality:** Contemporary science fiction increasingly features LGBTQ+ characters and themes, moving beyond stereotypes and tokenism.

Authors like Samuel R.

Authors like Samuel R.

Delany, Foz Meadows, and N.K.

Delany, Foz Meadows, and N.K.

Jemisin have explored the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and power, contributing to a richer and more inclusive genre .

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Content: Politics Foreign Affairs Culture

Catastrophic Cold

A new climate fiction novel brings critiques of climate hysteria to another audience.

(Photo by LARS HAGBERG/AFP via Getty Images)

Winter Games, by Daniel Church, New Wave Books, 248 pages.

How cold does it have to be for someone to freeze to death?

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Apparently, not very cold at all. If by “freeze to death,” you mean hypothermia resulting in one’s heart shutting down, the answer is 59 degrees Fahrenheit—provided there is a light breeze, and one isn’t bundled up for a winter storm.

This factoid comes from the opening pages of an odd new novel, Winter Games, by an anonymous American academic writing under the pseudonym Daniel Church. This Mr. Church is not to be confused with the well-known British horror writer of the same name. Perhaps the author of Winter Games was paying tribute to his namesake, the author of The Hollows. In that novel, a village is trapped in a prolonged snowstorm and some characters die of hypothermia. The Brit’s novel, however, is a supernatural thriller, while our American writer has his crampons firmly planted in the glacier of scientific fact.

Winter Games belongs to a sub-genre of science fiction that fans call “cli-fi”—climate fiction. In its most familiar form, cli-fi conjures the results of run-away global warming. But Church’s book entertains a contrary view: that the great danger that faces humanity in our decade is climate hysteria. The readiness of vast numbers of Europeans and Americans to believe in the imminent danger of global warming, says Whit Thorgason, the protagonist of Winter Games, is causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people by hypothermia. How so?

If we check what the fictional Thorgason says against the record of what has happened in England since the British government began its all-out assault on fossil fuels, we find, “an average of 9,700 deaths each year are believed to be caused by living in a cold house, according to research by National Energy Action and the environmental group E3G.” The numbers vary according to the source, but not the general picture. A study in Lancet Planetary Health in 2022 found that, each year in England and Wales, about 800 people die of excess heat, but about 60,500 die of excess cold.

The pseudonymous Church has constructed a bit of science non-fiction fiction out of such numbers. He pictures the United States in 2028, by which time the “climatists” have achieved unquestioned domination of the news media, government, industry, all levels of education, the organs of scientific research, and, of course, popular opinion. This is hardly any extrapolation from 2023, but in Church’s imagined 2028, a lonely band of physical scientists operating in secret reject the great “climate consensus.” Most of them dare not speak lest they forfeit their careers and endanger their families, but a few choose to defy the iron hand of conformity.

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These are scientists who work in such fields as volcanology, geology, glaciers, and ocean currents. They have detailed understanding of how the earth’s climate is actually changing and how it has changed continually over eons past. In their view, humanity is flourishing during the temperate inter-glacial period that commenced some 10,000 years ago. And mankind has benefited especially in the last several centuries from our capacity to generate cheap and abundant energy.

Fossil fuels have, among other things, allowed us to thrive at temperatures that could easily kill us. The increase in the percentage of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere resulting from our burning fossil fuels, they say, may have increased Earth’s temperature ever so slightly, but by an increment too small to measure in any meaningful way. The “evidence” in the form of dramatic events—the melting of ice caps, the rise of oceans, the increase in catastrophic storms and droughts—is illusory. It comes from manipulation of the actual record and efforts to play upon the psychological susceptibility of the public to scary stories.

Those of us who already consider ourselves skeptics of the so-called “climate consensus” will see nothing very science-fictiony about Church’s story set-up. He has simply taken the basic realities of our rocky, watery, wind-swept, and sun-drenched world and dressed them in the guise of a potboiler. No doubt he hopes this will go down more easily than just laying out the facts.

Others have attempted the path of setting out lucid summaries of the science that contradicts the main climate consensus narrative. In fact, there is no shortage of these. High up on anyone’s list would be Steven Koonin’s Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021). Koonin was Obama’s undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy. A highly regarded physicist, he simply reached a breaking point when the story he was expected to sell had diverged so far from the scientific record that he couldn’t take it anymore. Unsettled ought to have unsettled the global warming fantasies of millions of Americans—and Europeans for that matter—but it is hard to see that it had much effect.

The stalwart Rupert Darwell is a British writer who has spent a decade writing sophisticated and eloquent works such as The Age of Global Warming: A History (2014) and Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (2017). Darwell’s forte is showing how the climate change movement emerged out of progressive politics as early as the 1970s.

Darwell is a conservative, but his concern about the twisting of environmental claims to advance left-wing politics gets amplified by the activist Michael Shellenberger, who was a Democratic candidate for governor of California in 2018. Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (2020) offers the insight, as he puts it in one chapter head, that the contemporary movement is “destroying the environment to save it.”

Danish “skeptical environmentalist,” Bjorn Lomborg, is perhaps the most famous advocate of a cost-benefit assessment of global warming claims. His most recent book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2021) gives full cry to the need to address the world’s social problems, which he argues are only exacerbated by the war on fossil fuels.

Having gone this far down the path of mentioning non-fiction works that aim at the sort of refutation that Church puts in the mouth of his protagonist let me acknowledge that I have merely picked out five of several dozen such books that I have shelved next to the tract that Rachelle Peterson and I published in 2015, Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism. Some of the other works are argued with vehemence, some with sweet reason, some tersely, and a few with prolixity. Michael Hart’s Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change (2015) achieved an unsurpassed depth for its time, but it would take most readers another Ice Age to work through its nearly 600 pages of fine-toothed argument. At the other end of the scale is Stephen Einhorn’s Climate Change: What They Rarely Teach in College (2023), which is scientifically literate and reliable, but happily succinct and aimed at the general reader.

With so many plain factual critiques of climate catastrophism available, why did our pseudonymous Church resort to cli-fi? Plainly he hopes to reach an audience that Koonin, Darwell, Shellenberger, Lomberg, Hart, Einhorn, et al. didn’t or haven’t reached yet. But Church is plainly not a science fiction writer who just happened to hit on a likely theme. Winter Games shows little sign of having been penned by a sci-fi regular. Rather its author is a scientist who knows his way around volcanos, glaciers, American universities, international science conferences, and the often-vicious attempts to cancel academics who dissent from the “official” positions of their departments.

I have no idea who “Daniel Church” really is, but he is plainly an insider at a very high level of his discipline. And he is an insider who has decided that the only way he can get his message to a broader audience is to resort to a novel.

As a novelist Church lacks any hint of subtlety. The male protagonists are dashing and brave. The women are all smart and beautiful. The heroes all have tragic backstories. Characters make improbable decisions. They become incredibly lucky at opportune moments. Television news is the catspaw of millionaire manipulators and the news folk themselves are the embodiment of prideful ignorance, but at the necessary moment they discover a capacity to listen to reason. The book ends suddenly with an optimism that belies everything that came before.

Those are all good reasons not to mistake Winter Games for literature. But it is nonetheless quite remarkable storytelling, and worth the attention the author bids for.

The basic plot is this: The dissenting scientists have hit upon an appalling tactic of despair. Unable to get their voices heard in any other way, one by one they stage public suicides. Their method of exit is to film themselves at intervals, one at a time, each sitting in his laboratory somewhere around the world, delivering a message about the falsity of the climate consensus. After that, each simply sits still in a 59-degree room with a fan blowing a light breeze, for 18 hours or so, until they die of hypothermia.

That’s all it takes. Is it a plausible way to die? Actually, yes. Not that anyone would actually do it. A real person would stand up and walk out of the room; do some jumping jacks; put on a sweater; turn up the heat. But the point for these fictional scientists is that those are not options for millions of people living some distance from the equator, suffering through winters as their governments have decided to raise the cost of energy beyond their ability to pay. Replacing relatively low-cost fossil fuel-produced heat with high-cost (and unreliable) wind, solar, and other “alternative” sources of energy is a death sentence to those who are impoverished and elderly—or simply impoverished. Governments get away with it (in Church’s not-so-fictional world) because it is an “invisible holocaust.” Elderly people dying one by one in the winter is a statistic, not an engineered calamity.

The “climatists” not only see no calamity, they come away with an image of themselves as champions of the Earth and humanity’s greatest benefactors. But in Winter Games, dissenting scientists lay down their lives to teach ordinary people just how vulnerable we all are to the ever-lurking cold. While I doubt a single “climate denier” would ever actually perform this experiment, plainly one was willing to devote his off-hours to imagining a narrative where thirty-some so-called “59ers” (as they die at 59 degrees) see this as the only way to break through the controlling fable backed by authorities ranging from Al Gore to the International Panel on Climate Change.

Serial suicide makes for a dramatic tale, but in fact dissenters from the climate faux consensus do have some opportunities to make themselves heard. Not on NPR or the BBC, or on network television, and certainly not in America’s classrooms, where what now passes as “science” instruction is mainly indoctrination in the evils of the industrial revolution. But outside this bubble, word is getting around.

I do not just mean in that collection of books I cited, but also in an increasingly articulate broad movement. In Britain, the race to de-carbonize the economy is running into large-scale tragedy. And even in far-flung corners of the world where hypothermia is not an issue, the efforts to starve people of energy are undermining health. In southwest Africa for example, Namibia has been bamboozled into forfeiting its abundant energy resources in the name of fighting “climate change.” The power grid in much of Africa has been jeopardized by these make-believe efforts to stave off global catastrophe.

Bit by bit, the public is noticing the holes in the climatists’ garment of altruism and concern for human flourishing. The climatist narrative is beginning to unravel. Not fast enough, I must say. Last year a French journal invited me to present my views on climate change, which it promised it would translate and publish. My essay appears to have almost melted the Mer de Glace and denuded Mont Blanc in the heated editorial debate that ensued. But I am pleased to report that “Unsustainable: The Imaginary World of Global Warming” will soon appear in that Parisian journal. It is not my first such battle.

I gave a talk on global warming at a conference in Switzerland a few years ago, which was the only occasion in my public speaking career in which a portion of the audience got up and stomped out—literally. One of the co-editors of the conference proceedings resigned rather than have my paper published. But I note with satisfaction that my skeptical voice in both cases ultimately defeated the guardians of climatist conformity.

How awful and offensive were these two excursions about manmade catastrophic global warming? No more provocative than anything I have written here. They just help me see how clearly the censorious spirit of control presides over this topic. It would probably be easier to publish an article in the mainstream press advancing an argument for the restoration of Aztec human sacrifice in the name of indigenous rights than it is to question the legitimacy of the climate consensus.

Even so, large numbers of ordinary people have begun to doubt the gospel that fossil fuels are bad and windmills and solar are good. Perhaps we will reach a compromise on nuclear energy or one day on fusion energy, but at the moment we face a no-compromise determination by the world’s ruling regimes that climate change poses an existential crisis, a permanent state of emergency in which nothing will suffice but windmills, solar, EVs, and the banning of everything from gas stoves to hot showers.

Winter Games may be a quixotic attempt to open the public mind. I certainly don’t expect it to find its way on to high school reading lists. But it offers a window into some of the actual and but almost always unheard scientific debates in American universities. And it offers at least one good mystery: What prominent scientist wrote it? Grab a sweater, put a carboniferous log on the fire, and read it.

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Content: Julia Nagel/Sun Photography Editor

Fantasy author N. K. Jemisin speaks at a Bartels World Affairs Lecture in Klarman Hall on Oct. 4.

8 hours ago

N.K. Jemisin Gives Bartels World Affairs Lecture, Speaks on Building a Better World

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N. K. Jemisin, best-selling science fiction and fantasy author well known for her book trilogy “The Broken Earth,” spoke about building a better world at this year’s Bartels World Affairs Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 4 at 5:30 p.m. in a packed Rhodes-Rawling Auditorium. Jemisin spoke about how building fictional worlds helps her discuss the reality of our society, and concluded by calling on the audience to make choices in order to build the world they wish to see.

Following her talk, Jemisin joined a panel of Cornell faculty to kickstart the latest Global Grand Challenge: The Future. Global Grand Challenges bring together people and resources to understand and develop solutions to humanity’s most urgent challenges. The first challenge launched in 2019, and this year’s challenge, “The Future,” focuses on how to employ creativity to build a more equitable and sustainable future world.

Supported by the Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellowship, the Bartels World Affairs Lecture is an annual, signature event hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies that brings renowned individuals to Cornell’s campus to speak on international matters with students and faculty.

Seats at the event sold out and an estimated 330 people attended. In-person watch party tickets were made available as well, where attendees live streamed the lecture from an adjacent classroom near the auditorium. More than 270 local, national and international viewers who registered through eCornell also streamed the event live.

Vice Provost for International Affairs Wendy Wolford said that in addition to launching this year’s Global Grand Challenge, this event also fits into Cornell’s academic year theme of Freedom of Expression. Wolford explained that the world building, kindness and empathy in Jemisin’s work encouraged the Einaudi Center to select this event as the launch for the University’s new Global Grand Challenge.

“The theme of this new challenge is fittingly ‘The Future.’ With this challenge, we invite all of you, students, staff and faculty to step back from the immediate questions of your studies, your work and your research, to think about the world you want to live in,” Wolford said. “The Global Grand Challenge calls on us to go beyond the cutting edge… to imagine what the world would look like if we asked not just what can I do, but what do I want? What do we want?”

Jemisin began her lecture by describing her background in higher education, in which she spent 20 years working as a career counselor, academic counselor and director of experiential education before becoming an author. Jemisin writes science fiction and fantasy novels that explore a variety of themes, including power, cultural conflict and systems of subjugation.

“Many of the questions I tend to get are: Why science fiction? Why fantasy? Why would you, an ostensibly intelligent and mature person, write this kid’s stuff? And I tell people the same thing that Octavia Butler has said in interviews, which is in science fiction, I can do anything,” Jemisin said during her lecture.

Jemisin explained how people’s fears in a specific time period are reflected in their writing, especially in science fiction. She cited underlying fears of the sexual revolution displayed in 1960s feminist science fiction as an example.

“There’s another misconception out there that typically happens, which is that people think of science fiction as being about the future. They think of fantasy as being about the past,” Jemisin said. “It’s neither. Science fiction and fantasy are actually about our present world.”

Jemisin also described the process of science fiction worldbuilding on two levels — macro and micro. Macro worldbuilding involves creating the physical world of a story, including planets, continents, climate and ecology. Micro worldbuilding is crafting the society the characters will exist in, which includes species, morphology, racialization and power, among other things.

“The point of this [worldbuilding] exercise is to get people to start questioning their assumptions,” Jemisin said. “Understanding how our society functions is a lot more constructive than they think, so it’s important that I get across that all of this is changeable.”

Jemisin also spoke about how real people build worlds, and how our current world is not arbitrary, but rather the result of a series of choices. She emphasized that different choices remain possible, and that our understanding of ourselves and self-identity is evolving. Jemisin encouraged the audience to consider reasons for both creating and resisting change.

“We are being blasted with a constant firehose of disinformation which is fueled by a whole lot of money,” Jemisin said. “The only thing that we can do in order to resist this is begin to question and push back on how we became the society that we are and begin to recreate that society in our own design.”

Following her lecture, Jemisin joined a panel with Cornell faculty members Prof. Anindita Banerjee, comparative literature and feminist, gender and sexuality studies; Prof. John Albertson, civil and environmental engineering; and Prof. Kaushik Basu, international studies and economics. Each professor took turns briefly speaking about how their field of expertise relates to building a better world, and Jemisin followed with her thoughts.

“We see society now envisioning futures and being bold, making pledges of decarbonizing our energy supplies, decarbonizing our economy and setting ambitious timelines on which to do that,” Albertson said. “It’s relatively straightforward to plan the direct linear path of what you need to do there. But the question is: where are all the other parts of society that are touched by each of these changes?”

Asher Bergmann ’26 said his goal going into his sophomore year was going to more school  events, and was excited to find this lecture as someone who reads a lot of fantasy.

“I think she did a good job of not diving too deep into fantasy to where some people wouldn’t be interested, because while she’s a fantasy author, the point of this lecture wasn’t actually writing fantasy,” Bergmann said. “I think she did a good job of balancing her goal with what other people may have come here to see her speak about.”

Annabel Baniak ’24 decided to attend the event at the encouragement of both her professor  and her mom, whose favorite book is “The Fifth Season” by Jemisin. Baniak said she enjoyed the event and left feeling motivated and inspired to create change in the world.

Jemisin left the audience with a message to continue questioning the current world and to work towards building an ideal society.

“I have been having conversations all day with the students here, and they’re thinking ahead of me. I have to catch up. It is an innate part of youth to question our reality, and if the way that we live makes any sense,” Jemisin said. “I have to retain my own youthful questioning. They are right to question reality, and the rest of us need to keep doing that.”

Grace Liu ’27 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at [email protected].

The genre now frequently addresses intersectional narratives, fostering empathy and understanding while challenging traditional norms .

Title:

Content: China is producing and consuming the largest amount of web fiction in the world, with an estimated 20 million full-time, part-time, and dabbling writers. The grind is hard, and the conditions can be exploitative, but those who do it are on the vanguard of a reading revolution.

In 2018, Jue had life all planned out. The 21-year-old from Ulankhad, Inner Mongolia was set to graduate with a degree in railway signaling, destined for a job as a technician in the country’s railway system. But this plan unraveled when he fell down a staircase and broke a leg just before graduation. The injury ruined his chances of being hired. Employers simply would not take on someone on crutches, and there was no guarantee that he would be eligible for entry-level positions for fresh graduates the year after. Jobless, temporarily disabled, and too proud to ask his parents for money, he tried to earn an income in the only other way he could: he logged onto a fiction platform and started writing web novels.

In a few months, Jue was making enough money to support himself. He is now writing full-time on Qidian, a top platform where writers like Tang Jia San Shao (TJSS), Tian Can Tu Dou, and Mao Ni have made a name — and hundreds of millions of RMB — for themselves. With his time-travel historical novels, Jue can bring home 15,000 yuan ($2,222) a month in royalties, as long as he writes 10,000 words per day — not bad for a now-26-year-old in a medium-sized town in northwestern China.

China is producing and consuming the largest amount of web fiction in the world. Jue is one of more than 20 million full-time, part-time, and dabbling web fiction writers who churn out hundreds of millions of words daily on platforms to satisfy the appetite of 502 million readers, almost half of China’s entire online population. It is a 28.8 billion yuan ($4.4 billion) business with more than 26 million published titles. China Literature, the biggest player in the country, alone boasted 1.2 million new titles and 36 billion words on its dozens of platforms last year.

China’s web fiction has even reached the international market. Websites of translated Chinese web novels mushroomed in recent years, translations of danmei novels — a popular genre of web fiction that features male same-sex romance — have made New York Times bestsellers list recently, and the business model of Chinese web fiction has been exported overseas through international fiction platforms like Webnovel and Wuxiaworld that cultivate native English-language writers as well as readers.

The web fiction that drives this boom is known as wǎngwén 网文, meaning, literally, “web literature.” It is a type of user-generated genre fiction serialized on online platforms where users write, publish, read, and interact with each other. These novels are typically curated according to genres, subgenres, and gender orientations — only two genders, male and female, are available — and tagged with specific tropes and themes.

If this does not sound like “serious” literature, that is because it is not. It is pleasure reading, escapist fiction, or popular literature, whatever you want to call it, a broad category that had been banned in the People’s Republic before the 1980s as a kind of corruptive and demoralizing bourgeois literature that went against socialist ideals.

In 1981, leader Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 famously declared himself a fan of the novels by the legendary Hong Kong wuxia writer, Louis Cha, a.k.a., Jīn Yōng 金庸. A decade later, genre fiction from Hong Kong and Taiwan, mostly pirated copies, flooded the streets of China. The internet, a nascent medium at the time, quickly became a new territory for fans to share pirated novels. Some fiction forums also started to publish original works by mainland writers modeled on these wuxia novels, romances, and fantasies. And web fiction was born.

The early days of web fiction

In 2003, Qidian, founded only a year earlier, launched its VIP membership program, charging members two cents for every 1,000 words. Others followed suit. Paid original content went mainstream. Mobile technologies and payment systems accelerated the market’s growth in the 2010s. Money poured in, and investors, including IT giants like Tencent and Baidu, cultivated web fiction as both a revenue generator and a channel to bring traffic and resources to their core businesses. In the past few years, ads-supported free reading platforms have brought more readers into the fold. Now, one in every three Chinese is reading some fiction on the screen.

“In the early days of web fiction, there was not a single government agency in charge of regulating it,” said Huang Quan, one of the first staff writers of Qidian and former assistant editor-in-chief with the platform. (He and others interviewed for this story preferred to use aliases to protect their identities.) “You could write whatever you wanted, and publish whatever you wanted. There was a regulatory vacuum, and so the market grew wild.”

The longest-running novel on Qidian to date has more than 41 million characters. In comparison, a Chinese translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace runs merely 1.25 million characters.

Huang, who now owns an animation company and plays an online guru for wanna-be writers and editors on the popular social platform Zhihu, is convinced that China’s unique regulatory environment is a condition that has allowed web fiction to grow so big. Even with the increasingly tightened censorship, web fiction still has an edge over other media like print publishing, TV, and, more recently, TV’s web incarnation, web shows, which since 2019 have required pre-approval from the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) before going into production.

“In an American TV series…the episodes are shown as they are produced,” Huang said. “Depending on the feedback, the future plot and characters’ parts are adjusted dynamically to satisfy the audience. Through feedback, the audience in fact is participating in the creative process.”

In China, however, TV is not allowed to be produced without the full script being pre-approved. That makes web fiction an unmatched avenue in producing long serialized content that is extremely sensitive to audience response.

“Generations of readers grow up reading these novels, and they become writers themselves,” he said. “Through their practice, these writers and readers are participating in perhaps the biggest psychological experiment in human history on how to create content that responds to human beings’ basic instincts, stimulates their primal desires, and prays on their weakness.”

Content labs

Governed by the rule of the market, supported by the largest pool of human resources in the world as well as data-driven digital technologies, web fiction has become a gigantic content laboratory in China, where stories and elements of stories are created and tested by hundreds of millions of humans again and again for years on end. The result? Some of the most pleasurable, commercially successful, and/or addictive texts we have ever seen in the Chinese language.

That is, in spite of their ridiculous length. These novels can easily run hundreds or even thousands of chapters and several millions of words, as writers’ earnings on the platforms depend heavily on the length of the novel. The longest-running novel on Qidian to date, Dài Zhe Nóngchǎng Hùn Yì Jiè 带着农场混异界 by Míng Yǔ 明宇, has more than 41 million characters. It started serializing in 2017 and is still being updated daily. In comparison, a Chinese translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace runs merely 1.25 million characters (it is about 600,000 words in its original Russian).

Yet readers read them, and if they do not get their daily updates, they leave angry comments and make sure the writer knows it. In these novels, readers find their desires — the good, the bad, and the ugly — satisfied in the most unabashed ways. Even the act of reading itself, of following a seemingly endlessly serialized novel for months or even years, is almost a ritualistic performance that has a certain intrinsic value and offers something desirable — comfort, company, or even a sense of accomplishment.

“I can only say that it’s like an obsession,” said Jue, who grew up on a steady diet of web fiction. “It’s like collecting cards. If there are 100 cards in a set, when you’ve collected 99 of them, you will exhaust all means to have that last one. When you’re already following a book, at a few million words, you’ll keep reading to 10 million, and if (the writer) writes more, you’ll want to keep reading.”

Among the 100 most popular TV and web shows produced in 2018 and 2019, 42 were adapted from web fiction.

Web fiction’s reach, however, does not stop at fiction readers. In China’s popular culture pipeline, web fiction is a key supplier of raw materials (in the form of so-called IPs) for TV shows, audio dramas, animations, cartoons, and video games. The downstream cultural products derived from web fiction from 2019 to 2020 were valued at over 1 trillion yuan ($148 billion). In 2019, at the height of the “IP fever,” China Literature grossed over 4.4 billion yuan ($652 million) from IP licensing, or 53% of its revenue that year.

It’s safe to say that web fiction is shaping China’s pop culture in significant ways. Among the 100 most popular TV and web shows produced in 2018 and 2019, 42 were adapted from web fiction. My Heroic Husband, Joy of Life, The Untamed, and Word of Honor were some of the recent hit TV and web adaptations that captured not only a domestic audience but an international one.

It has also made top writers multimillionaires. In 2018, the TV and film rights of Heaven Official’s Blessing (天官赐福 tiān guān cì fú) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (MXTX, 墨香铜臭) were sold for 40 million yuan ($6 million). TJSS, China’s highest-earning web writer, made 130 million yuan ($19.5 million) in royalties in 2020 alone.

These are the so-called “deities” who have inspired millions to try their hands at web fiction. Most web writers, however, will never see a contract. Even for signed writers, it is still a struggle to get paid for their writing.

“I typically make a few tens a month,” a signed writer with Jin Jiang Wen Xue Cheng (JJWXC), a leading female-oriented fiction platform with big-name writers like MXTX and Priest, told the online magazine Vista. “Just enough to buy two milk teas.”

JJWXC is no outlier in the business. According to iReader’s data, less than 1% of writers on the platform earn an annual income that exceeds 100,000 yuan ($14,800).

Among web writers, “one in thousands can make a living by writing, and one in 100,000 can make good money,” said Huang, the former Qidian editor. The rest? They become “cannon fodder,” he said. “If it were a game, this is worse than gambling.”

But to Jue and many like him, writing is not a game. It is a job. It provides a kind of freedom and autonomy that may not be found in other jobs, though ironically, its most basic requirement, more than artistic talent, is the ability to produce continuously. When a novel is being serialized, Jue has to update it daily. The only way for him to take a break — and that includes weekends — is to write and save enough new material in advance. He can take some time off when a novel is completed, but not for long, because his income will dip and eventually dry up if he is not writing.

To motivate himself, Jue often gathers with a few writer friends online and writes together, competing with speed, a practice called pīnzì 拼字 — linking words. On a good day, Jue can write 10,000 words in two and a half hours, but sometimes, it can take an entire day for him to write that much. To do this consistently, day in and day out, takes stamina. A lot of it.

Yet what attracts many to web fiction writing is this dogged belief, no matter how realistic it is, that no matter who or how (un)talented one is, what counts in the end is how hard one works. The legend of TJSS, in the eyes of many aspiring writers, does not lie in his artistic talent — his fantasy novels are often mocked as only plausible for elementary school kids — but in how he transformed himself from a jobless young nobody to one of the richest writers in China by working harder than anyone else. TJSS is said to have written every day since 2008, except for a period during his first wife’s sickness and a mourning period after her death.

Competition and exploitation

But this is no longer 2008: the competition has become much stiffer. Gen-Zs born between 1995 and 2009 have become the biggest group of new writers in recent years, accounting for nearly 80% of the new writers on China Literature’s platforms in 2020. In addition, many professionals in technology, engineering, business, medicine, and law have also joined the ranks, many during the pandemic, bringing readers fantasies of a different kind — dramas centered on those of desirable professions commanding high socioeconomic status.

The competition renders many of these writers as merely gig workers, just like those in any other digital industry that relies on user-generated content and data while exploiting the people who generate them. In a 2020 survey of 461 writers on various fiction platforms, including China Literature, iReader, Zhangzhongyun, Motie, and Alibaba Literature, 51% were “very unsatisfied” with their contracts while only 5% were satisfied. Eighty-three percent of these writers reported that they did not have an option to negotiate before signing their contracts, and 34% were unaware that they had actually signed copyright transfer contracts.

In a 2020 survey of 461 writers on various fiction platforms, 51% were “very unsatisfied” with their contracts while only 5% were satisfied.

In 2020, after China Literature was acquired by Tencent, middle- and lower-level writers on its platform staged a strike in protest of the new contracts they were offered, where they had little control over the copyright of their work. The protest ended with a meeting between writer representatives and the management and the subsequent rewriting of the contracts, but it brought little substantive changes to the unfair conditions the writers found themselves in. A year later, they staged another strike on the same day, but this time, they did not make a splash like a year ago, and the matter was soon forgotten in the public consciousness. Without the support of the top writers, who sided with the company because of their financial interests, these writers did not have much leverage in their negotiations.

“(The contract) is extremely unfair,” said Jue, “but after all, your livelihood is on the line, so when you have to put up with it, you just do it.”

Because if they do not, there are many others who will.

“There are too many writers in China, which leads to involution,” said Zong Cheng, a 25-year-old literary writer and critic based in Shanghai. “Involution” is one of the most trendy words in China at the moment, and in this case implies high-pressure competition within a closed group. “Now, some writers have created a space where when one encounters a problem, others will help them by speaking up. Of course, they are not powerful as unions, just friends helping each other, so it has its limits.”

What bothers Jue the most, however, is not the unfairness of his contract, nor the rampant piracy — “I won’t beg my readers to read my licensed copies,” he said, and he is not keen on the platform’s efforts to crack down piracy, because his contract stipulates that all the compensation for piracy will be paid to the platform and “has nothing to do with us writers” — but the physical toll writing takes on his body. Jue suffers from chronic back pain developed from sitting and writing at a computer for long hours. He had an especially bad episode last year when he suddenly felt excruciating pain and couldn’t straighten up his back. At the hospital, he was told that some of his muscle fibers were torn. He was bedridden for weeks.

“It’s very hard. Among the writer friends in my circle, we have all the problems that writers have,” he said, things like tenosynovitis, frozen shoulders, spondylosis, and, of course, back pain.

A new “literary” genre?

Like wuxia and romance novels, web fiction has a reputation — depending on the critic’s generosity — of having little literary value or being corruptive, erosive, and distracting from what is real and important. This is certainly the opinion of the government, which has launched large-scale campaigns once every few years since as early as 2004 to purge fiction platforms of undesirable content. Chapters and even entire novels have been locked because of offending content, often including descriptions of sex, gambling, substance abuse, or gore. In 2020, the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) issued a notice requiring web fiction platforms to implement a real-name registration system and tighten up administration within their platforms.

To tame the wild child, authorities have also made efforts in recent years to promote realism in web fiction to tell the “Chinese story,” properly. Shanghai Press Publish Bureau, for instance, has teamed up with China Literature and co-hosted six Realistic-Themed Web Literature Contests since 2016. Dozens of winners have been published in print or sold for TV or film adaptation. Another similar contest has been held twice, in 2019 and 2021, co-hosted by the Web Literature Center of China Writers Association, a number of official provincial and municipal writers associations, and Zhulang.com. Last month, led by the China Writers’ Association, more than 40 managerial personnel of fiction platforms, provincial web literature organizations, and well-known web writers and critics pledged to better self-regulate and improve the quality of web literature.

To tame the wild child, authorities have also made efforts in recent years to promote realism in web fiction to tell the “Chinese story,” properly.

The opinion that web fiction tends to be of lower quality, or trashy (烂文 làn wén), is widely shared by the literary establishment. British journalist Megan Walsh, for instance, in her book about the Chinese public’s reading habits, The Subplot, notes that a Chinese version of toxic masculinity, known as “straight-man cancer” (直男癌 zhí nán ái), is embodied in popular male-oriented web fiction. “Lack of character development and moral maturity is almost certainly a by-product of the speed with which these novels are produced,” Walsh writes.

She is not wrong, but web fiction is hardly the harbinger of Chinese literature’s death as some have claimed.

“The novel itself emerged as something very popular,” said Zong, the writer based in Shanghai. “Didn’t authors in the past have pressure to ‘update’ their novels as well? Those great novels by Dostoevsky were all serialized or written under economic pressure.”

Zong does not write this type of serialized genre fiction himself, though he has self-published fiction on Douban Read. As a critic — his latest book is a rumination on reading literary masterpieces — he is unwilling to dismiss the possibility of creativity within the format of web fiction.

“Can formulaic writing kill creativity completely? Not necessarily,” said Zong. “Fiction is often created by making something new within an old predictable form. Web fiction’s formulaic tendency may discourage most writers from trying different things. On the other hand, because readers have read too much of the same stuff, if you want to break through, you have to force yourself to create something new.”

To illustrate his point, Zong cited Blossom (繁花 fán huā) by Jīn Yǔchéng 金宇澄, originally serialized on a local forum, as among the web novels of higher literary value, in which the creative use of Shanghai vernacular is “undoubtedly groundbreaking.” Other examples are Priest’s danmei novels like Shā Pò Láng 杀破狼 and Silent Reading (默读 mò dú), in which the writer plays with a mixture of different genres, e.g., steampunk, crime novels, and queer literature, in creative ways.

“I think we should be patient and see how long these works will survive, and see if they are imbued with a certain creativity that will endure the passing of time,” Zong said.

As for Jue, one thing he likes to imagine is his books lined up on shelves at the head of his bed when he is an old man. “I’m realistic,” he said, admitting that he would consider what his readers want and whether his novels will make money when he writes. But pleasing his readers is not everything, either.

“When I was writing my first novel, I tried listening to readers’ suggestions and making adjustments, and that left me with my biggest regret,” he said.

In that novel, Jue created a character who belonged to a different ethnic group from the protagonist. Originally, he wanted to make the two into a romantic couple, but later had to abandon the idea after readers attacked that character and warned him not to pair them.

“In the end, alas! What a shame!” he said. He no longer does what readers say. “I write novels that I like.”

Title:

Content: Interview with Wang Jinkang, 2024 Hugo Finalist

INTRODUCTION: Eight Light Minutes(8LM) Culture of Chengdu has given permission for File 770 to reprint the series of interviews with Chinese science fiction writers which they have been running this week on Facebook. The first one is a question and answer session with Wang Jinkang, whose novella Seeds of Mercury is a 2024 Hugo Award finalist.

SUPPORTING CHINESE WRITERS SERIES (1): 2024 HUGO AWARD NOMINATION INTERVIEW WITH WANG JINKANG

Translated by Joseph Brant.

Wang Jinkang(王晋康) was born in Nanyang, Henan Province in 1948. He is a senior engineer, and a member of the Chinese Writer’s Association (CWA), The China Popular Science Writing Association (CPSWA), The Committee of Scientific Literature and Art, and the Henan Writers’ Association. Since the publication of his first story, The Return of Adam, in 1993, he has published over 90 short works, and 20 full novels, including Cross, We Together, Escape from The Mother Universe, Parents of Heaven and Earth, and Cosmic Crystal Eggs, totaling over six million words. He has won China’s Galaxy Award 16 times, as well as The Chinese Science Fiction Nebula’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He is considered one of Chinese science fiction’s ‘Four Heavenly Kings’, and his emblematic work Seeds of Mercury was shortlisted for the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novella.

Hello Mr. Wang! Before we start, I would like to congratulate you on Seeds of Mercury’s shortlisting for 2024’s “Best Novella” Hugo Award. This is news that has excited countless Chinese science fiction fans. Ever since the publication of Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, readers have commented that your contributions have particularly appealed to them and would like to know more about your life and work. Hopefully, this long-awaited interview will provide some of the insights the sci-fi community has longed for.

Q1Mr. Wang, despite having produced many great works, this is the first time you’ve been shortlisted for the Hugo. How did you feel when you learned that you’d been shortlisted?

Wang Jinkang: Of course I was elated. Although I’ve won many awards in China, in fact the most Galaxy Awards in history, this is the first time I’ve been shortlisted for a Hugo. It felt like 31 years ago, when I first saw The Return of Adam in print, and when I won my First Galaxy Award. I think every author experiences these moments of excitement. It’s excellent that Chinese science fiction has reached a certain level, after years of growth, it’s now more and more visible internationally, which is fantastic. Of course, what we value even more, is these works transcending their era, and surviving the tides of time to reach future generations.

Religion and Science are enemies who love each other.

Q2Mr. Wang, as one of the ‘Four Heavenly Kings’ of Chinese science fiction, you’re already very well known in China, with a creative career spanning over thirty years, with works such as Leopard Man, Ant Life and Survival Experiment and so on. This shortlisted work is such a quintessential piece. However, this interview is not just intended for the Chinese sci-fi fans, but for readers around the world, who may not be familiar with Seeds of Mercury. Could I ask you to introduce it for the benefit of the overseas sci-fi fans?

Wang Jinkang: Seeds of Mercury is a two-threaded story. The first one follows a female scientist named Shawu, who discovers a new formula for life, and creates a fluid metal nano life form. When she dies, she entrusts that formula to Chen Yizhe, a businessman with a pure heart, along with the message “real life cannot be bred in pens. In the Solar System, there happens to be a suitable place for it to breed freely – Mercury”. Chen Yizhe accepts this monumental legacy enthusiastically, using his personal wealth to maintain the laboratory. In order take the next step, of “seeding Mercury”, he must turn to the society around him. Mr Hong, a multi-billionaire with a disagreeable personality but a benevolent soul, decides to liquidate his empire to facilitate the spaceship’s construction. Furthermore, Hong makes another astonishing decision: to relocate to Mercury, have his body frozen in the millennia-old ice caves of the planet’s north pole, to be awakened every 10 million years, to assist the evolution of these micro-lifeforms. In just 15 years, Chen Yizhe sends Hong to Mercury to seed the nano-life into the liquid metal lakes of Mercury, after which Hong settles down in its polar caves. Meanwhile, Hong’s lawyer, and soulmate named Yin, bids her painful farewells from the distant Earth.

The second storyline is set 100 million years later, when the Suola race have evolved on Mercury, their metal bodies adapted to the hundred-degree temperatures of the planet. They are sustained by light (drawing energy directly by photosynthesis). With no sense of hearing, they rely on the flashing of light through two orifices in their abdomen to communicate in binary. The entire Suola race are devout followers of Shawu, venerate the Star Father, the great god Shawu and her earthly incarnation. They have been initiated in science, and after studying their Holy Book, scientist Tu Lala discovers that much scientific knowledge has been disguised and hidden within. From this he deduces that life on Mercury originates from The Blue Planet. He implores the high priest to send an expedition to search for the Holy Site in the depths of the ice, with the excuse of reviving the incarnation of Shawu, as the Book prophesied. The high priest consents, sending a chaplain to supervise the mission. Tu Lala actually locates the Holy Site, and discovers the incarnation of Shawu (Mr Hong), frozen in the ice, along the sacred rites of “how to revive the incarnation of Shawu”.

However, unexpected occurrences, mainly due to the ignorance and blind devotion of the believers, result in Tulala’s unfortunate violent death (as metallic organisms, the Suola can easily resurrect after a sudden death, but those who do are considered an untouchable caste). In order to protect Mr Hong’s body, Tu lala risks the humiliation, but tragically, his student Qi Qiaqia denounces him, exposing his untouchable status, and inciting the crowd to him, During which time, Mr Hong’s body is destroyed in the scorching sunlight. To avoid blame, Qi Qiaqia suddenly declares that the incarnation of Shawu was a false god, which is why the Father Star could destroy it. This narrative is accepted by the devotees, who hail him as their new high priest. In the thousands of years that follow, Suola society descends into darkness, religious cruelly suppressing science, but from among the population comes a new “Sect of Repentance”, apparently founded by an untouchable. Silently they preserve everything related to science, awaiting the next rebirth of Shawu in future millennia.

Q3Seeds of Mercury was first published in 2002, and its appeal still endures, even after all this time. What inspired you to write this story?

Wang Jinkang: The initial inspiration probably came from a sad epiphany I had as a teenager. The human body is too fragile. Our proteins start to coagulate above 80°C, our brain suffers irreversible damage if we don’t breathe for five minutes, our body can’t withstand radiation, and we can die from disease, hunger, dehydration, drowning and freezing… It’s admirable that such a fragile life form has been propagated on for billions of years, but it also makes me apprehensive that humanity would not survive a disaster. Human civilisation is a great achievement, which is why we are proud of it; but it also makes me anxious, worrying that humanity may not survive the next cataclysm. I couldn’t help but imagine, what if a creator, or god of evolution, created a metallic life, invulnerable to fire and flood? Many years later, I combined these youthful imaginings with my subsequent concept of “Templates for Life” and turned it into this novella.

Q4Seeds of Mercury is a piece about the sublime act of Creation, and a reflection on the transitory nature of life. Did you write it with the intention of exploring the contradiction between Science and Religion? Or did that grow naturally out of the creative process? Also, do the sentient beings you write about reflect your own views and positions?

Wang Jinkang: I didn’t intend to construct that dichotomy between Science and Religion, but it’s exactly what happened on Earth, so when I created a history for Mercury’s civilisation, those episodes just appeared naturally. Religion and Science are enemies who love each other. European Papacy cruelly persecuted Galileo, Bruno, and other ‘heretics’, and strictly forbade the theory of evolution, but medieval Europe became the birthplace of modern science. When we look back at the history of Civilisation over millennia, you can’t help but sigh that history is full of paradoxes, and that The Creator is always full of mischief, making fun of the theories of Cause and Effect. As to whether this new life carries some of my own views or positions? Of course. Tu Lala is the heir to the human spirit, with his scientific rationality, adventurous spirit, sense of responsibility, fortitude, and self-sacrifice. In the story, when Tu Lala meets the holy body of Shawu Incarnate, and he figures out that the great god was a scientist. Thus, demonstrating that the intellectual spirits of all scientists are inter-relatable, even if they are alien. That is what I believe in my heart.

Today’s AI isn’t quite up to the standard of “Return of Adam”

Q5Mr. Wang, the world has moved on 22 years since the first publication of Seeds of Mercury. What changes do you think have occurred in science fiction writing in the present day, compared to the early years both in terms of the environment, and the core themes?

Wang Jinkang: These 22 years have brought great changes, and it could be said that civilisation has reached a critical point, that we’re on the cusp of drastic changes. However, for the science fiction writer, who is used to seeing the world from a god-like point of view (through the eyes of science) we think in millennia, so 22 years is too short a period to affect the themes of my work. For example, my debut story Return of Adam showed a society where AI had overcome natural humanity, though it had taken on a parasitic approach, augmenting the processing power (IQ) of the human mind to far outstrip the basic brain, and in fact, became the core of human consciousness. The rapid development of AI today, especially the LLM systems, is amazing, even frightening, but in general, today’s AI isn’t quite up to the standards of Return of Adam. Still, I’m saddened that some things I wrote about, which I assumed would be far in the future have come to pass in my lifetime. For example, in 1997, when many Chinese people asserted that AI could never triumph in the field of Weiqi (Go), I was convinced it eventually would, and wrote a scene of an ‘AI beating a human chess master’ in one of my stories, before it actually happened. I just never expected to see it in my lifetime.

Q6Before Liu Cixin appeared, you “held up half the sky” in Chinese Sci-fi. When you first appeared in China’s science fiction circles, you were relatively older, and more experienced. Do you think that maturity allowed your work to appear more rounded?

Wang Jinkang: My life and experiences have been quite unique. I’ve lived through a very special time in China’s history, worked as a rusticated youth, a miner and model maker. I went to university at 30, became a mechanical engineer, wrote literary novels, and only broke into the science fiction world by chance at 45, publishing my first sci-fi story. If anything, my near-fanatical reading of literature at university paved the way for my future writing. At that time, the reforms were already happening in China, and it was opening up to the world. A huge amount of foreign literature was pouring into the country, dazzling readers like me. There may be another special factor, which is, because I was studying engineering, I was standing atop this wall of science and watching this river of literature racing by, I had a sense of detachment. Add to that I only started writing SF decades after experiencing the rise, fall and distilling of the wave of literature. I suppose that’s why my writing style has a poised, bleak, and sombre character.

Q7What sort of stories do you think are expected from the current literary ecosystem? Which sci-fi genres do you expect to take off in the future?

Wang Jinkang: I have always felt that science fiction is unlike any other form of literature. The richness of mainstream literature does not necessarily coincide with the strength of a country. As the aphorisms go, “classics are born from chaos”, and “poets are fortunate when the country is not”. However, the success of science fiction is reliant on enough readers and authors being educated to a certain threshold, and so depends on the country’s economic, scientific, and technological development, which can be proven by the movement of science fiction’s centre from Britain and France to the United States over the last century. Over the past 40 years, China’s overall economic development has been good, and as one of the oldest sci-fi writers in the country, I’ve experienced this first-hand. I feel that as China continues to modernise and converge with the rest of the world, the creative environment of Chinese sci-fi will continue to improve. As for which themes, I feel will start to emerge? It’s expected that artificial intelligence and space themes, with more emphasis on exploring the human condition, are going to be the stories of importance, but other themes will also develop immensely.

Science fiction writers are used to seeing the world from a god-like viewpoint.

Q8 Mr. Wang, science fiction has taken root in China now for around a century, and you have played a pivotal role in the history of science fiction in the country. Irrespective of whether or not you win this Hugo Award, you have influenced a generation of sci-fi fans and creators. How do you view your own Creative Achievements?

Wang Jinkang: I’m flattered, but I only really played a leading and inductive role in the early stages of the so-called “New Generation” of Chinese sci-fi back in the 1990s. I’m content with the two aspects of my writing career, firstly, in forming the genre of Philosophical Science Fiction, which is based on the latest technological advances, and digs deep into the influence it has on alienation, civilisation, and so forth, to discover this genre’s philosophical uniqueness. This genre did not originate in my work, foreign writers including Mr. Arthur C. Clarke have long created excellent works of philosophical sci-fi, but these elements in my work are more concentrated. Furthermore, with regards science fiction as “the most cosmopolitan form of literature”, I consider my work, whilst still cosmopolitan, to be imbued heavily with Chinese styles and themes, which adds a certain flavour to the genre.

Q9Do you feel that science fiction writing is shifting from short-form to long form, and what difficulties do you feel are associated with that?

Wang Jinkang: In my experience there are three main issues faced when moving into the long-form. Firstly, there must be enough knowledge, from the accumulation of experience and information. Secondly, there must be a more mature view of Nature and human society, in their entirety. These are not necessarily the dominant trait of the novel but will play important roles in the story’s development. Thirdly, the ability to comprehend the entirety of the larger story. This ability to grasp the complete story is equally important to mainstream literary writers, but in science fiction, concepts always play a driving role in the whole work and should be logically consistent in themselves.

Q10In your eyes, what is the role of Morality and Ethics in Science Fiction?

Wang Jinkang: Science fiction authors often look at the world from a godlike point of view, and in the eyes of a creator, survival comes first, and morality and ethics are just auxiliary codes established by humans once they reached a certain level of civilisation. They are also conducive to the overall survival of the human race. As Humanity develops, and “co-operation” becomes more central to society, the role of morality and ethics becomes more and more important, but they certainly won’t stay the same, and the rules will certainly have additions and deletions. For example, once technology becomes suitably advance, the ethics of “strict prohibition regarding editing the genes of a human being” are very likely to change.

Q11Throughout your career, which of your stories are you most satisfied with?

Wang Jinkang: Of my short and medium length works, I like Seeds of Mercury’, Bee Keepers and The Song of Life, and of my longer works, I’m most satisfied with Ant’s Life and the Alive Trilogy (Escape From The Mother Universe, Parents of Heaven And Earth, and Cosmic Crystal Eggs).

Thank you, reader, for giving meaning to my life.

Q12Mr. Wang, some sci-fi fans have pointed out you are ‘the oldest non-American writer shortlisted for the Hugo Award’, which is an impressive feat. What are your hopes for the Hugo Awards?

Wang Jinkang: There’s a bit of a special circumstance here, where a story I wrote 22 years ago, was only translated into English last year, and shortlisted according to the translation’s publication date, even though, I’m very happy to hold this “World Record”. I hope it will go further than just being a finalist, but even if it doesn’t, I still consider it a great honour to be shortlisted.

Q13What would you like to say to the readers regarding the inclusion of Seeds of Mercury in the Hugo Awards shortlist, which was voted for by individual sci-fi fans one after another?

Wang Jinkang: I’ve always had a reverence for my readers. The two most common inscriptions I write to fans at signings are “The reader is the god of authors”, and “Thank you reader, for giving meaning to my life”. Out of the millions of publications each year, in a sea of stories, to have any number of people read your work, enjoy it, and keep it in their memory after that relentless tide of time, is a rare blessing. One might even call it a great gift from the readers to the author.

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Ramacharitamanas, Panchatantra inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Regional Register

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New Delhi, May 13 (PTI) Illustrated manuscripts of ancient Ramacharitamanas and the 15th century manuscript of the Panchatantra fables are among the 20 items from the Asia-Pacific which have been inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Regional Register for the 2024 cycle.

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The decision was taken at the 10th General Meeting of the Memory of the World Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP), which was convened during May 7-8, in Mongolia capital Ulaanbaatar, officials said here on Monday.

The illustrated manuscripts of Ramacharitamanas of Tulsidas, the manuscript of the Sahrdayaloka-Locana: a seminal text of Indian poetics, and the 15th century manuscript of the Panchatantra fables have been inscribed in this list, they said.

The 10th General Meeting was hosted by the Ministry of Culture of Mongolia, the Mongolian National Commission for UNESCO, and the UNESCO Regional Office in Bangkok, the world body said in a statement on May 8.

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This year, the MOWCAP Regional Register celebrates "human research, innovation and imagination," it said.

"Genealogical records were especially notable among 2024 inscriptions, with Mongolia's Family Chart of Hereditary Lords of the Khalkha Mongols, the House of Genghis Khan; as well as the communities of Huizhou in China, and Kedah State in Malaysia, as testaments to the importance of collating regional family histories," the statement said.

The 2024 cycle also celebrated science and literature, recognising Bangladesh's sci-fi feminist author Rokeya S Hossain, who imagined both helicopters and solar panels before they had been invented in her 1905 utopian narrative, Sultana’s Dream.

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Also inscribed in 2024 was Australia and Tuvalu's joint documentation on the findings of scientific expeditions investigating the formation of coral reefs, it added.

Documents recording significant innovations in business and industrial technology were also recognised, such as tea-drinking business entrepreneurship in China, as well as globally applied sugar research and regional cement production in Indonesia, the UNESCO said.

"Regional literary traditions were celebrated through the recognition of Philippines' Indigenous Hinilawod chants, the East Asian legend of the Nine Tripods found on the bronze bas-reliefs in Viet Nam’s Nine Dynastic Urns and the globally re-adapted Panhcatantra Fables of India," it said.

Ramesh Chandra Gaur, dean (administration) and head of the department, Kala Nidhi Division, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), was present at the meeting when the inscription happened, officials said.

"This inclusion (of three items from India) is a proud moment for India, a confirmation of the country's rich literary heritage and cultural legacy. It signifies a step forward in global cultural preservation efforts, highlighting the importance of recognising and safeguarding the diverse narratives and artistic expressions that shape our shared humanity," a senior official of IGNCA said. PTI KND VN VN

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**Science Fiction as Social Commentary and Activism:** Science fiction has long served as a lens for social critique, using speculative settings to examine issues such as surveillance, government overreach, and systemic oppression .

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The 13 best fantasy novels of all time

Fantasy novels are some of the most influential cultural touchstones in modern history. Let’s get to know the very best examples of all time.

Complex world-building, deeply nuanced character development and wildly inventive storylines are just some of the reasons that the fantasy genre has become so beloved and transformative for Western culture.

Many modern critically-acclaimed films, TV shows and theatre performances have been adaptations, or cited inspiration, from the most iconic novels of this genre. Below, we’ve collected a list of some of the greatest fantasy novels of all time.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis (1950)

The first of seven novels in the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis’ masterpiece The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is a cultural cornerstone of fantasy fiction. It follows the journey of Lucy, and her three siblings, Susan, Edmund and Peter, who discover the secret of the wardrobe in their professor’s mysterious old house.

Set in the fantastical world of Narnia, where four ordinary children embark on an extraordinary magical adventure — Lewis’ beloved novel has been adapted three times for television, multiple times for the stage, as well as being turned into a feature film produced by Disney.

The Lord of The Rings  – J.R.R. Tolkien (1956)

The Lord of The Rings really doesn’t need an introduction. Written by J.R.R. Tolkien as a follow-up to his novella The Hobbit, the enormously intricate novel is considered to be one of the most legendary examples of high fantasy in modern literary history. It’s also one of the best-selling book series (now generally sold in a trilogy: The Fellowship of The Ring, The Two Towers, Return of The King) of all time, and has been credited as irrevocably shaping the fantasy genre into its modern form.

The story is told mainly through the perspective of the hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, as they being their journey from The Shire, through the expansive terrains of Middle-Earth to destroy the One Ring — the vehicle of mass power created by the villain, Dark Lord Sauron — to prevent Sauron from powerfully dominating all of Middle Earth.

A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle (1962)

Having generated two feature film adaptations, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet series and follows Charles Wallace Murry as he goes searching through a ‘wrinkle in time’ for his lost father. An exhilarating blend of sci-fi and fantasy, the novel details Charles, his sister Meg and his friend Calvin’s epic journey through another planet, guided by three comedic guardian angels Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which.

Dune – Frank Herbert (1965)

It’s pretty hotly debated whether Dune belongs in the sci-fi or the fantasy genre but its iconic status made it difficult to erase from the list. Originally published as two separate serials in Analog magazine in 1965, Dune is widely considered one of the greatest science-fiction/fantasy novels of all time.

Notoriously complex, the novel follows the journey of a young Paul Atreides, whose family accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis. Arrakis is the only planet where melange a.k.a “the spice” grows, a valuable natural drug that enhances mental powers and life expectancy. Thus, begins an epic saga of complex land politics, religion, ecology, technology and humanity, as factions of the empire struggle for control of Arrakis.

A Wizard of Earth Sea – Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)

One of the most influential fantasy writers in literary history, Ursula K. Le Guin is an American novelist whose bildungsroman A Wizard of Earthsea — the first novel in her Earthsea series — is widely known as one of the best novels written in the high fantasy genre.

A Wizard of Earthsea details the life of Sparrowhawk, one of the greatest voyagers on Guin’s island of Gont — a realm known for its powerful wizards. It follows Sparrowhawk’s quest in defeating the evil shadowbeast he accidentally releases into his world, weaving a portrait of Taoist themes of cosmic balance, adolescence and a tumultuous coming-of-age.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy – Douglas Adams (1979)

In the moments before Earth is demolished to make way for a spacial, intergalactic highway, Arthur Dent is saved by his friend Ford Prefect — researcher for the eponymous “Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.” The novel follows the adventures of the duo as they wander through space, running into quirky, richly drawn characters — all fellow travellers of the Galaxy.

Originally a 1978 radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy has been adapted into several formats beyond the novel, including: theatre, video games, comic books, TV adaptations and a feature film. It’s had an insane impact on Western culture; there’s even a Wikipedia article dedicated to phrases from the series that have made a mark on the fandom and the scientific community.

Outlander – Diana Gabaldon (1991)

With the novel being a work of historical fantasy, Outlander details the journey of 20th-century British nurse Claire Randall who finds herself thrown back in time to 18th century Scotland, and must navigate love and loss alongside Highland warrior Jamie Fraser. For the avid Netflix watchers, Outlander is most famously known for its Starz television adaptation starring Caitríona Balfe and Sam Heughan.

The Northern Lights – Philip Pullman (1995)

The first of three novels in Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials, The Northern Lights is one of the most critically acclaimed fantasy books of all time. Often seen to be a reimagining of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, it explores themes of religion, theocracy, self-determination and coming-of-age.

Set in a parallel universe, where the world is controlled by an international theocracy called The Magisterium, The Northern Lights details the life of teenage protagonist Lyra Belaqua. She is accompanied on her journey to the Arctic in search of her Uncle Asriel — a researcher on a mysterious substance called Dust — by her dæmon Pan, a physical manifestation of her soul in animal form.

A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin (1996)

I doubt there’s any millennial that doesn’t know what this novel is, but just for the sake of transparency: A Game of Thrones is the first novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, most famously known for spawning the eponymous, Emmy-winning HBO television show.

A Game of Thrones introduces the world of Westeros and has multiple protagonists, the main three storylines occurring in The Seven Kingdoms (introduction to the Houses of Lannister, Baratheon and Stark), on The Wall (depicting the life of Ned stark’s bastard son Jon Snow and the guardians of The Wall, the Night’s Watch) and across The Narrow Sea (introduction to House Targaryean and the Dothraki). The first of a planned seven volumes — which Martin has yet to finish — A Game of Thrones is one of the most famous works of fantasy in recent memory.

Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone – J.K. Rowling (1997)

Speaking of famous fantasy, again, I don’t think this one needs to be explained. Probably the most iconic fantasy series in Gen Z memory, and one of the most successful franchises in history — yes, J.K. Rowling became the richest author of all time — the Harry Potter universe was conceived with this small novel, Harry Potter and the Philosophers’ Stone. Which by the way, was rejected 12 times before becoming a billion-dollar, multi-media franchise.

American Gods – Neil Gaiman (2001)

A genre-blurring work of fiction, American Gods integrates Americana, both ancient and modern mythology and fantasy to construct a narrative that peers into the soul of America. It follows the journey of Shadow, grieving from the mysterious death of his wife, and Mr. Wednesday, an enigmatic stranger who claims to be a “refugee from a distant land, a former God, and the king of America” as they embark on a bizarre, yet profound road trip across the country, as a storm of mystical forces threatening builds around them, ready to come crashing down at any moment.

The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)

Literary icon, and Nobel-prize winning author, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant follows the lives of an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in post-Arthurian England where no one is able to retain long-term memories. As reviewed by the Guardian:

“The Booker-winner’s excursion through Britain’s mythical past is a rumination on memory, love and war worthy of a place among the greats…For all the deconstruction The Buried Giant performs on its manifold sources and inspirations, the ultimate measure of Ishiguro’s achievement is that his novel is more than worthy to take its place alongside them. The quest undertaken by Axl and Beatrice is not merely a search for their son, but one that follows in the footsteps of Sir Gawain, and Tennyson’s King Arthur, and Frodo. “

Who Fears Death – Nnedi Okorafor (2018)

Set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, Who Fears Death describes a world that has changed in many ways, yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. Onyesonwu — whose name translates as the eponym — has survived the annihilation of her village wanders into the desert, hoping to die. But she as she begins to manifest remarkable magic, she realises she is being hunted by a powerful, unknown enemy.

Hence begins Onye’s journey to understand herself, and elude the force that is persecuting her, with Nnedi Okorafor constructing a complex investigation into the role of nature, tradition, history, love, and the spiritual mysteries of Onye’s culture.

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Flix at :48: They Cloned Tyrone

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I normally don't like surprises, because they usually mean something bad or disappointing is about to happen. But once in a while, I'm can be pleasant. And who recently reminded me this but Netflix (of all places), which released the film They Cloned Tyrone a few weeks ago.

Directed by Juel Taylor, who has never worked on a feature length film before as the sole director, They Cloned Tyrone is
from an original screenplay co-written by Juel Taylor and Tony
Rettenmaier. And this original screenplay is an energizing, funny story.

When a drug dealer (John Boyega, The Woman King, 2022); a hooker (Teyonah Parris, Candyman, 2021); and her pimp (Jamie Foxx, Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021) discover an elevator leading to an underground laboratory in their poor, broken down neighborhood, they uncover a government conspiracy of surveillance, mind control and clones.

But how do you bring down a huge government operation when you're part of such a Black, and forgotten, part of the country?

They Cloned Tyrone is a snappy, humorous, science-fiction mystery that feels like The X-Files (1993 - 2002) meets Boyz n the Hood (1991) meets Black Dynamite (2009).

The actors Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx are the most entertaining parts of this film, because their comedic timing is hotter than a bucket of freshly fried chicken. (I'm using this comparison to purposely hint at one of this film's important scenes.) All of their line deliveries have so much spice, I couldn't wait to see what they would say next.

Keep in mind this film is not for kids. It's very rated R due to adult
language and drug references. The success of this film's funny writing is made by realistically creating the speedy style of urban, African American, slum vernacular and combining it with nerdy, scientific jargon about nutrition, blood, and experimentation.

This blending of film genres, and of dialogue styles, reminds me of another terrific science-fiction comedy called Attack the Block (2011) which also stars John Boyega.

The social commentary of They Cloned Tyrone is not revolutionary or amazingly fresh. We all know institutional oppression of racial minorities is not a new topic. It has been repeated by many other films before.

But They Cloned Tyrone adds a dark wittiness to this social commentary by placing the story in quintessentially Black settings of a hair salon, a fast food restaurant, and a convenience store. All familiar places but ones that are given a nefarious twist which helps this film feel more clever than expected.

I'm hoping Netflix, and all other streaming platforms out there, are ready to invest in films like this that have a pulpy grit and wonderfully three-dimensional performances. A few surprises will pop up in this film that make They Cloned Tyrone even more fun.

Maybe surprises aren't always so bad after all.

Casey T. Allen is a native of Utah who graduated from Utah State University with a Bachelor's degree in English in 2007. He has worked in many capacities throughout USU campus and enjoys his time at UPR to continually exercise his writing.

The genre’s engagement with social movements has intensified, with works addressing feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights, and environmental justice .

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Content: Queer literature worldwide has seen immense shifts that are hard to articulate. Owing to multiple factors, including resistance movements, literary works by LGBTQIA+ writers are increasingly getting published, gaining visibility, and winning accolades. While it can’t be denied that queerbaiting and profiteering have influenced the newfound inclination of publishing houses to commission a book by a queer writer or two every year, their sheer presence and publication frequency signal a huge change.

Over a decade ago, when I found a recent edition of Ruth Vanita’s and Saleem Kidwai’s pathbreaking book Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History at Amrit Book Co in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, or Akhil Katyal’s The Doubleness of Sexuality: Idioms of Same-Sex Desire in Modern India in May Day Bookstore, Shadipur, New Delhi, there was no dedicated “LGBTQIA+” shelf in bookstores. A few works by queer writers could be found in the “women’s or gender studies” or “academic books” section.

This has changed, and so have the narratives.

The shifting of tides

Though Vanita, Kidwai, and Katyal’s books were introductory texts for me, it was only when I read John Burbidge’s The Boatman: A Memoir of Same-Sex Love, that I truly felt an instant connection with the story. In a foreign land, the author was experiencing many ways to express his newfound desires. Along with the description of the 1980s’ and 1990s’ India, he captures how queerness was peppered across locations in India’s major cities.

While Burbidge’s record is urban-centred, Maya Sharma’s focus has been on unearthing stories from the un- and underprivileged parts of India, particularly Gujarat. Her book Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India broke new ground in feminist discourse. In her latest, Footprints of a Queer History: Life-Stories from Gujarat, she shares long and revealing narratives of the specific experiences of lesbians and transmen. Her works continue to remind us why it’s more important than ever to keep our ears to the ground, because unseeing and avoiding queer experiences from non-mainstream cultures severely impacts queer-feminist discourse.

The world over, the evidence of what happens when histories are forgotten is apparent. Memoirs like American artist and author David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration and Modern Nature: Journals 1989-1990 by English writer and filmmaker Derek Jarman come to mind. Their eerie resemblance with the mismanagement during the peak of the coronavirus outbreak is not only heart-breaking but also a reminder to excavate the past to re-inform the contemporary world of the undocumented and forgotten.

Olivia Laing has been doing it for a long time. But it’s the younger scholar Kit Heyam’s work Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender that attracted much attention last year. Much like in Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers, the focus of the book is not on one particular region but on an aspect, which happens to be the queerness that was lost on people of the time when heteronormative systems were challenged world over. The famous “impersonators” or traditional Islamic singers or the Hijra community in South Asia are but a few of the people Heyam cites in their book to make the point.

Queering Tribal Folktales from East and Northeast India by Kaustav Chakraborty runs along the same lines. It notes how oral stories, mainly from four cultures – Toto, Rabha, Lepcha, and Limbu – were inherently queer. The researcher, who studied the various tribal folklore and tales from the eastern and north-eastern parts of India, constructs a “counter-discourse of an indigenous queer” in this book. And in doing this, he not only shares a queer reading of the oral traditions, but also questions the obvious heteronormative understanding of these stories, which according to him was a spin-off. These tales were anything but cis-het in nature, he concludes.

Can queer futures be foretold?

This is the central argument of two books that unknowingly cover the universal. They articulate queer anxieties, traumas, joys, and experiences by studying them from a particular angle. While Adam Zmith’s Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures does it by keeping amyl nitrite at the centre, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin does so by centralising the experiences queer people have at a site that’s more often than not threatened by extinction: the gay bar.

Zmith describes the origins of amyl nitrite and captures through it how the chemical came to be associated with the formation of gay subcultures and identities back in the day, and further argues how the futures of queer and nonbinary bodies can be determined from a “forty-five second” high from sniffing poppers. Atherton Lin, on the other hand, in his exceptional account, notes the formation of a sense of “community” through the “fleeting, gently pervy interactions” and “unaccountable version of agency” in the many experiences he meticulously describes and dissects with the abandon of a theorist in his book. It is interesting how such vastly different works approach the formation of the experiences that fundamentally unite them.

Zoë Playdon’s The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: The Transgender Trial that Threatened to Upend the British Establishment is yet another investigative project. Ask yourself: What would the world be like if a major development, say, the knowledge of the production of vaccination against a virus, was concealed from the public? The hiding of Ewan Forbes’s file that noted his gender-reaffirmation surgery was one such event. Classified files were unearthed and a journey to reconstruct a purposely hidden figure underwent in the writing of this remarkable work that points to an opportunity lost – that its public knowledge may have done the job of the fourth wave of trans-feminism in the earlier waves itself.

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me (Bloomsbury, 2017) by Bill Hayes, on the other hand, is an inward-looking book. It explores the aloneness, loneliness, and grief-stricken state the author found himself to be in when he reached New York only to fall in love with one of the iconic writers, neurologist Oliver Sacks. While the latter talked little of his sexual identity and barely discussed his sexuality in his memoir On the Move: A Life (Knopf, 2015) except for how strongly his mother reacted to learning his queerness, through Hayes’s book we get a glimpse of the sort of intimacy Sacks desired in his life that came late to him. And when life appeared promising for both, Sacks was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.

But from loss, Hayes extracted wisdom. He developed an understanding of why we go on despite loss, failures, and disappointments, and documents it in the book through different artists and vantage points. A genre-defying book in every sense of the way, it is a must-read for every queer writer in my view.

While Insomniac City had photographs and diary entries along with prose, Sunil Gupta’s Wish You Were Here: Memories of a Gay Life, exposed itself to me as a collection that presented vulnerability so uniquely that it was heartbreaking to sift through the book. Before Gupta’s book, I hadn’t come across any documentation of the queer scene of the 1980s from the migrant, diasporic viewpoint. And besides that, the thriving sociality and intimacy he’s able to inject into his creative work led me towards his other works too.

Be it eclectic works like the ones listed above or soul-baring memoirs by popular figures like Onir, A Revathi, and Akkai Padmashali were inspiring, informative, and inventive, I cannot help but argue that nothing like Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi has ever been written. Born to a Nigerian father and Tamil mother, Emezi describes themselves as an Igbo spirit.

In this sense, the memoir challenges the very aspect of the memoir – the personal, for there’s no such thing there. In other words, this self, this homebody doesn’t exist. From this outrageous entry point to taking its readers through body image issues and dysphoria, becoming an overnight success to living unapologetically in a sprawling bungalow, Emezi’s book is not only genre- but world-bending. Their work is a reminder of what happens when the axis of study is twisted, inverted, or changed.

Shapeshifting in fiction

Works of fiction are not far behind when it comes to being a shapeshifter. A few examples include Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar, translated from the Marathi by Jerry Pinto, which serves as a reminder of how effectively women’s and queer people’s bodies have forever been policed. Their desires are hypersexualised, and their movements are heavily monitored, forcing them to meet societal expectations and fit in.

Barring the similarity with the 1968 Italian movie Teorema by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the story is unique in the way it lays bare the hypocrisy of a traditional Indian household. In the sense that the owners’ daughter is forbidden from interacting with the male tenant, but their boy can visit him at odd hours because queerness doesn’t naturally seep into their everyday to be vigilant about. A relationship between two men, if any, is harmless to them, but a daughter must not even think of hanging out with a man. As it happens, the tenant gets intimate with both of them. The way the book uncovers and weaves the desires into the narrative makes it unlike any other book that has been published in recent times.

One cannot not mention Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters when it comes to highlighting unique works. Peters’s book is funny, full of trans joy, fights, and nastiness, but it’s also a reminder of how several forms of oppression interact with each other and present themselves in front of a select group of people in a way that further disenfranchises them.

Then, Selby Wynn Schwartz’s Booker longlisted novel After Sappho is an immensely innovative book as well. It appears to be a collection of vignettes of the most iconic feminists of the past two centuries, but it weaves their stories in a manner that exposes the sexist publishing industry, remarks about women’s, in particular of lesbians and bisexual women’s, exclusion, and notes how a world that thrived on their labour was constructed, and in more ways than one challenges what a novel can or should be.

Laurie Hashim’s historical fiction A Paradise of Illusions was a tale waiting to be told. For a long time now the Eurocentric telling of World War II narratives has dominated the literary sphere. But in Hashim’s multicultural setting, queerness not only comes out as natural but also as an inevitable part of the lives of the very people that inhabited this diverse region in which the story is set in. The classic way in which she tells this story would remind many of Dickens and Austen.

Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s work My Father’s Garden is an interesting, non-urban depiction of same-sex love and desire. It’s stunning how powerfully and effortlessly the book propels in its first part like an adrenaline rush someone experiences in an act of intimacy. Jerry Pinto’s documentation of the same-sex desires in men’s washrooms of specific railway stations in Murder in Mahim and capturing the existential crisis a teenager faces growing up queer in Mumbai in The Education of Yuri are examples of how queer narratives from India have moved from the “same-sex couple having fun until one of them marries a cishet woman” to a nuanced understanding of everyday queerness.

Be it How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross or Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, a collection illustrated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, when it comes to poetry, I find Akhil Katyal’s imagery consumable and his liminal prose precise enough to capture a moment of intimacy, loss, aloneness, and nostalgia as if it could only be experienced through his verses. But like me, many queer people would say they live that experience many times over reading his works.

A queer-affirmative shift

It’s interesting that many works increasingly weave in a character or two who’s queer. How much of this is necessary, or is forced into the narrative, can be easily judged. In Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors by Aravind Jayan, The Anatomy of Loss by Arjun Raj Gaind, and Manjhi’s Mayhem by Tanuj Solanki this happens rather organically. Or perhaps purposely in a way that seems central to the story. And much to the disappointment of my queer friends and allies, I believe that any writer should freely write whatever they want to write about.

The only thing that must be kept in mind is what Shehan Karunatilaka noted in an interview with me for Deccan Herald – that “you do it with empathy, respect, and skill. The idea of fiction is to inhabit the minds of other beings, for both the reader and the writer. But if you do it lazily or offensively, you should be ready for the flak.” In that sense, it’d be a disservice to not include and celebrate the above books, and Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and Tomb of Sand, written by Geetanjali Shree as Ret Samadhi in Hindi and translated by Daisy Rockwell in this queer-affirmative shift. It’s noteworthy that both put South Asian narratives on the global map, created a stir by kickstarting meaningful conversations that compel the publishing industry to look towards the global south, and, of course, won major awards – the former won the Booker Prize, and the latter won the International Booker Prize and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

The many hues of queer literature

What excites me most, however, is not these awards or the visibility that queer works are attracting, but the immensely talented writers writing queer-themed books for young readers. Works like Me, My Dad and the End of the Rainbow, written by Benjamin Dean and illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat, Ritu weds Chandni, written and illustrated by Ameya Narvankar, The Many Colours of Anshu by Anshumaan Sathe, and My Paati’s Saris written by Jyoti Ranjan Gopal and illustrated by Art Twink, make me want to be a kid again and have the privilege to encounter, read, and celebrate these books. Each one is a reminder of how inherently gendered the upbringing of children is, and how wonderful and liberating experiences can be for them if their worldview is not restricted by categories and boxing of any kind.

There’s an increasing need for works like Trying to Grow by Firdaus Kanga to challenge the ableist mindset; The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, which reintroduces the questions of pornography and sleeping with your students; Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India by Danish Sheikh, which presents a done-to-death subject interestingly; Girlhood: Essays by Melissa Febos, which makes even critical assessments appear effortless and accessible; or the sci-fi novel Machinehood by SB Divya, where even bots are either nonbinary or genderfluid. It’s paramount that LGBTQIA+ writers be supported by grants and the will to invest in their stories for stipulated and standard heteronormative structures to be shaken up by exciting books.

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Content: Classic sword and sorcery stories have a special place in our hearts. To those unfamiliar with the genre, sword and sorcery tales usually follow the adventures of a solitary hero or heroine in a fantasy landscape peopled with supernatural beings — witches, wizards and monsters. If you’ve watched “The Witcher,” then you get the idea. Join us as we stroll (sword in hand!) through the history of the field and look at some notable titles that might have escaped your notice.

Lavie: I love the original “Witcher” stories by Andrzej Sapkowski, collected in English as “The Last Wish” in 2007 and translated by Danusia Stok. They were originally published in the Polish magazine Nowa Fantastyka. I got to read “The Last Wish” in proof before it even came out, but I don’t know that anyone then expected it would become as big as it did. For a time, it was nearly titled “The Hexer” but, hexer or witcher, Sapkowski’s Geralt of Rivia is a worthy successor to its earlier influences.

Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger” has similar origins. The stories were first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the late ’70s and early ’80s. These entries were collected into a book of the same title. King swaps guns for swords, but otherwise his Roland of Gilead is as classic an S & S hero as you would like. Subsequent books expanded the scope (and page count), but the heart of the Dark Tower can be found in those original tales, still bound in the yellowing pages of the magazine.

Silvia: It’s no surprise that King reconfigured S & S into a Western. This subgenre, which begins with writers such as Robert E. Howard and his Conan adventures, had already begun morphing by 1970 when Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were collected in “Swords and Deviltry.” Leiber was deeply influenced by authors who were active in the pulps in previous decades, such as H.P. Lovecraft, and if we continue this game of six degrees of separation, we arrive at C.L. Moore, who created two iconic characters: the space adventurer Northwest Smith (grandfather to Han Solo) and the warrior queen Jirel of Joiry whose stories are collected in “Black God’s Kiss” (2007).

Around the time Leiber was churning more volumes of adventures, Tanith Lee, Karl Edward Wagner and C.J. Cherryh contributed to a mini-boom of S & S. Lee had “The Birthgrave” (1975), first in a trilogy, about an amnesiac woman with strange powers who awakens inside a volcano and goes on to roam a landscape populated with magic and violence. Wagner in turn wrote many books starring the mercenary Kane, imbuing his creation with touches of horror — these novels have been collected as “Gods in Darkness” (2002) and “The Midnight Sun” (2003). Cherryh penned the Morgaine Cycle, beginning with “Gate of Ivrel” in 1976, which follows a mysterious warrior on a mission to close down portals that allow time travel and passage between worlds.

Five years later, Charles R. Saunders released his African sword and sorcery novel, “Imaro.” Saunders went on to influence a new generation of writers such as Milton J. Davis, who has created numerous “sword and soul” stories (sword and sorcery with an African influence). “Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology” (2011) serves as a good example of more recent sword and sorcery efforts. Though Saladin Ahmed may be best known for his comic book work, “Throne of the Crescent Moon,” a Middle Eastern-inspired fantasy novel, garnered him a Locus Award in 2013. Now, should we talk about that famous white-haired warrior who swung a sword long before Geralt?

Lavie: Back in the ’60s, Michael Moorcock was publishing New Worlds Magazine, and churning out S & S stories on weekends to pay the bills. The result was the stories of Elric of Melniboné, the haunted albino with the demonic sword who is destined to kill everything he loves, now undisputed classics. They were collected in “The Stealer of Souls” (1963) and “Stormbringer” (1965). When Moorcock went looking for a name for these works, Fritz Leiber came up with “Sword and Sorcery,” at last giving it a label. Also in London at the time was Samuel Delany. He tackled the genre in his own way. “Tales of Nevèrÿon” (1978) was the first of a quartet that covers slavery, gay culture and power dynamics, and radically reinterprets and questions the ideals of sword and sorcery. Even the AIDS epidemic gets woven into the story in “Flight from Nevèrÿon” (1985).

Sword and sorcery has its soul in the short-fiction magazines and, as such, has never been the most popular strand of the fantastic. But whenever it comes up it offers something fresh, individualistic — and often spectacular. How about you, dear reader: Who are the sword and sorcery protagonists that scratch your itch for devilry and adventure?

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s books include “Mexican Gothic,” “Velvet Was the Night” and “The Return of the Sorceress.” Lavie Tidhar is the author of the novels“The Violent Century,” “A Man Lies Dreaming,” “By Force Alone” and the “Gorel of Goliris” stories.

Science fiction and Fantasy

Solarpunk and other optimistic subgenres aim to inspire hope and action, contrasting with the dystopian outlook of earlier science fiction .

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Content: Westland Books invites submissions for speculative fiction anthology

NewsDrum Desk
New Update

New Delhi, Jul 31 (PTI) Publishing house Westland Books has invited submissions from budding and established writers of speculative fiction for an anthology of new writing.

The entries, to be curated by author Guatam Bhatia, are to be in the format of short stories (2,000–8,000 words) and novelettes (8,000–20,000 words). The selected works will be published in Westland's new imprint 'IF'.

"When the editors at Westland and I discussed the scope of this anthology, we thought of it as a showcase for the breadth and diversity of Indian SF. We are looking for new stories as well as new voices—from writers old and new. I'm really looking forward to reading the submissions and curious about what the anthology will look like," said Bhatia in a statement.

The winners will be awarded Rs 12,500 for each accepted short story (to a limit of 10 short stories) and Rs 25,000 for each selected novelette (to a limit of three novelettes).

"We are keen to build IF as a home for exciting new writing in the realm of speculative fiction, and this anthology is an attempt to broaden and deepen the list with fresh writing from established as well as first-time writers. We could not have asked for a sharper and more committed editor than Gautam Bhatia to curate the anthology, which we hope to publish in early 2025," said Karthika VK, publisher of Westland Books. PTI MG MAH MAH

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**Recognition and Literary Merit:** Science fiction has gained greater literary recognition, with prestigious awards like the Hugo and Nebula increasingly acknowledging diverse voices .

Authors such as Benjamín Labatut and Kim Stanley Robinson have blended fact and fiction to explore complex scientific and philosophical themes, elevating the genre’s artistic merit .

Title:

Content: 50 Years Of Suspense

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

At some time during the life of many readers of this column, and quite a while before that for the younger ones, we experienced the death of virtually all fiction magazines.

During much of the first half of the 20th century, the pulps (named for the cheap pulpwood paper on which they were printed) and the slicks (for the corollary shiny paper on which they were produced) combined to produce hundreds of magazines each month, tens of thousands of stories every year.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, John P. Marquand and many others could earn $100,000 a year – in 1930s dollars – just from magazine work. The glossies that published them (Collier’s, Scribners, Atlantic, the Saturday Evening Post, and the rest) were delivered to homes and picked up at railroad stations and newspaper stands. For the less affluent (and, often, less educated), Black Mask, Argosy, the Shadow, Weird Tales, and other pulps filled the racks with garish covers and thrilling, if overheated, prose.

Intellectuals believed the popularity of radio would knell the end of literature, but it didn’t happen. The next nail in the coffin of literacy was identified as movies, made so well and in such numbers that it was assumed they would lure those who loved the printed word away from books and magazines. It still didn’t happen.

What killed the vast majority of fiction magazines was the introduction to American mass culture of the paperback book, inexpensive (25 cents) and convenient. Generically referred to as pocket books, they could fit into a man’s suit pocket or a woman’s, well, pocketbook.

It is into this abyss that Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine decided to leap. The first issue bravely poked its head into the air in December 1956 and, against odds longer than Nathan Lane winning the swimsuit competition in the next Miss America pageant, continues to be published to the present day.

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, a huge anthology compiled by the current editor of the magazine, Linda Landrican, has just been published. “Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense” (Pegasus, 542 pages, $16.95) collects 34 of the best tales from the digest-size periodical.

The editor (as well as readers of the magazine, who were polled for their favorite stories),was evenhanded in making selections that would represent the history of the magazine. Hard- and softboiled, noir and whimsical, suspense, crime, and detection are all represented.

Lawrence Block, a frequent contributor, is represented with a splendid Matt Scudder story, “A Candle for the Bag Lady,” which is laced with compassion and insight. In it, a woman who lived on the street leaves a legacy of $1,200 to the baffled former cop. A lawyer hands him the check, and he heads off, as he does most days, to get drunk.

“I made a point of stretching my drinks,” Scudder says,

mixing my bourbon with coffee, making a cup last a while … but that never really works. If you’re going to get drunk you’ll manage it somehow. The obstacles I placed in my path just kept me up later. By two-thirty I’d done what I had set out to do.I’d made my load and went home to sleep it off. I woke … with less of a hangover than I’d earned.

The story ran in 1977, and Scudder continues as a favorite of current mystery readers, as witnessed by last year’s luminescent “All the Flowers Are Dying.”

Even earlier, in 1965, Edward D. Hoch, the most prolific and consistently high-level short story writer of the past half-century, produced one of his famous (and often anthologized) stories for AHMM, “The Long Way Down,” on which an episode of the TV series “McMillan and Wife” was based. In it, a man evidently defenestrates from the 21st floor of a New York office building. When colleagues race down the elevators to the street below, all is normal. He has simply disappeared during the steep drop somewhere between the pavement and the office with its shattered window.

The Sara Paretsky story about V.I. Warshawski ran in AHMM soon after the publication of her first novel, and the story is a good one. Happily, there is also a first-rate story by Evan Hunter and another under his Ed McBain pseudonym. The superb Donald E. Westlake is here, too, and so is a fine tale by the underappreciated Loren D. Estleman.

Inevitably, with this many stories, some – how does one say it? – may not gleam quite as brightly as sunlight on new-fallen snow.

The temptation, impossible to resist for most editors, is to use work by bigname authors, and the excellent Ms. Landrican has succumbed to the siren call. The first story is by the occasionally brilliant Jim Thompson, who, as evidenced by “The Frightening Frammis,” also can be painfully terrible. Here, there are more coincidences than in a full season of “Murder She Wrote,” using language that was becoming dated faster than the ink was drying.

A woman describes her husband as “a double-distilled jerk … scared to death that someone might make a play for me.” This is from 1957, not 1927, sounding like dialogue from one of the lesser pulps.

Being ever curmudgeonly, I also had a moment of frustration with the introduction, in which a story from the first issue of AHMM, “A Bottle of Wine,” is mentioned because it was immediately selected for the classic TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” I thought I’d better read this story first because that’s pretty cool. It’s not in the book. Don’t show the gun in the first act if you’re not going to use it in the second.

Look. Forget those last few paragraphs. They make it seem that I’m looking for something to complain about, which I’m not. It’s a wonderful collection, and ridiculously inexpensive for all those delightful stories.

You could go out and buy a Hitchcock DVD for the same price as this book. Less than two hours versus several satisfying evenings. It should be an easier decision than whether to order the celery tonic or the Puligny-Montrachet.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.

OTTO PENZLER

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Title:

Content: April is now known for Earth Day and green lifestyles. Author Patrick Fleming of Kirkwood thinks it’s time for a good “cli-fi” read, but as a psychotherapist he also counsels for hope in a time of climate crisis.

Fleming, a familiar figure in Kirkwood after 25 years of counseling at his office on Clay Avenue, is doing presentations on his novel, “Gaia’s Revenge.” He laces his talks with advice on coping with climate crisis.

“Medical research shows startling rates of pessimism over wildfires, floods and mega-storms,” said Fleming. “A recent survey by The Lancet found 75% of people are frightened for the future and 56% agree with the statement: ‘Humanity is doomed.’

“Young people are especially discouraged,” added Fleming. “Almost 40% report being hesitant about the idea of bearing children because of threats to the future presented by a warming planet.”

Fleming’s upbeat response is a psychological counselor’s talk entitled, “Keep Your Brain Cool, Your Heart Warm, and Set Your Soul on Fire.” He offers a seven-point program for staying positive.

Among his advisements is to take a deep breath and be grateful for the present moment. Stay informed about global warming, but avoid “doom-scrolling” on the internet and over exposure to bad climate news.

Fleming also advises keeping “your brain cool” by looking for significant signs of hope — and finding ways to do something. Act pro-planet and vote pro-planet. Avoid the temptation to withdraw into helplessness.

A man with plenty of acronym credentials for work in counseling, Fleming has been a hospital chaplain, hospice counselor and a psychotherapist for more than 30 years.

He grew up in Kirkwood and attended St. Peters Elementary School. He studied for the priesthood at Kenrick Seminary in Shrewsbury, but his career destination took a secular turn to counseling.

Climate Fiction Irony

The irony is inescapable: Here is a man who counsels keeping your cool in a climate crisis, but who ends up joining the growing number of authors who write about climate disaster.

“It’s become a very popular genre of writing. There is even a national ‘cli-fi’ writers group,” said Fleming. “Many of the writers offer solutions to our crisis. I’m impressed by ‘The Ministry of the Future.’ It’s by cli-fi’s Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s kind of nerdy, but the book offers solutions.”

Fleming’s own book has plenty of destructive wind, incessant rain, violent earthquakes and tsunami-like flooding. Some of the weather mayhem is set in St. Louis, where floodwaters climb up the Gateway Arch.

Four unlikely heroes — a Catholic nun, a Hindu priestess, a Protestant minister and a marine biologist — receive a shocking vision for heading off the global apocalypse. They join forces to stave off climate disaster.

“The term ‘Gaia’ in the title of my book comes from scientist James Lovelock’s idea that the earth is an alive, functioning system in itself,” said Fleming. “There are two sides of Gaia, or Mother Nature, in my work.

“There is a destructive side, and she will hurt us if we continue to abuse her,” added Fleming. “There is a life-giving, life-restoring side, if we choose to live in harmony with her.”

Fleming said he was inspired to write the book after a bout with cancer several years ago when he was weak after surgery and spent a lot of time in recuperation monitoring climate events.

“Right here in St. Louis, I was personally affected by the floods in 2015 and 2016,” recalled Fleming. “I could not get to my chemotherapy treatment because all of the highways were closed with flooding.”

Therapy Books for Survivors

Fleming and his wife, Suzanne Lauber-Fleming, have co-authored several books for survivors of abuse and trauma, including “Soul Light for the Dark Night” in 2019 and “Shattered Soul: Five Pathways to Heal the Spirit after Abuse and Trauma” in 2011.

In addition, the writing couple has led numerous workshops and trainings nationally and internationally for survivors and professionals working on post-traumatic syndrome issues.

In addition to his healing work with survivors, Patrick Fleming has worked for 18 years with Catholic priests and brothers, and other clergy who are perpetrators of clerical sexual abuse.

He has also worked as a consultant to a variety of religious and mental health groups who work with survivors, addicts and perpetrators. He was appointed to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors based in Vatican City, Rome.

“I’ve always had a mission — for more than 30 years it was to heal people who have been abused or abusive,” said Fleming. “I guess now my mission is to help the planet and those upset by our predicament. I am an optimist. We now have the smarts and the technology that is green and renewable that can save us. The only question is: Do we have the political will to make it happen?”

**Conclusion:** The evolution of science fiction from the era of H.G.

**Conclusion:** The evolution of science fiction from the era of H.G.

Wells to the present is marked by a shift from technologically focused, often male-dominated narratives to a vibrant, inclusive, and socially engaged genre.

Wells to the present is marked by a shift from technologically focused, often male-dominated narratives to a vibrant, inclusive, and socially engaged genre.

Wells to the present is marked by a shift from technologically focused, often male-dominated narratives to a vibrant, inclusive, and socially engaged genre.

Influenced by technological innovation, political and

Influenced by technological innovation, political and