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Critical Choices

Time Travel and Identity

Rjurik davidson

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

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

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

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

The Solarpunk Garden

Moving Beyond Eden

phoebe wagner

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

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

Men Who Respect Witches III:

Male Supporting Characters in Witches Abroad

Tansy Rayner Roberts

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

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

Space is Dead.

Why do we keep writing about it?

Andrew Dana Hudson

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

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

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

The Underlying Foundation of Magic

celia Lake

I write about Albion, the magical community of Great Britain, currently between the 1880s and 1950. (Ireland is doing its own thing, magically.) There’s a tremendous amount of change in that time, in terms of medical advances, technology, communication options, and how people live their lives. At the same time, I don’t actually want to change history. Inserting magic into the landscape means thinking about what will and won’t be affected.

When I started writing, I knew I wanted to write about a magical community with a range of magical options. Just like with most other skills, I wanted what someone could do magically to depend on a combination of factors. For magic in my writing, that's a combination of talent (how easy it is for them to learn something), strength (how much they can accomplish with their magic), and knowledge (what they have learned about how to use magic). Someone with less strength but enough knowledge can still be incredibly effective, and someone with raw strength but no training has some definite limits. 

The Diversity Paradox

Star Trek, Star Trek fandom, and the limits of fandom as progressivism

Liz Barr

On 6 September 1966, the general television-watching public got its first look at a little show called Star Trek. It had already been previewed at the World Science Fiction Convention, where it was greeted with enthusiasm by an audience ready to embrace a science fiction television series which took itself—and the genre—seriously. Lost in Space was for kids; Doctor Who… was also for kids, and in any case, wouldn’t reach an American audience for another decade or so. Star Trek was sophisticated and intelligent, and so was its audience.

Just ask them. Frederick Pohl, editor of Galaxy Magazine, predicted a swift cancellation, citing low ratings and suggesting that “Star Trek made the mistake of appealing to a comparatively literate group…”

Men Who Respect Witches

tansy rayner roberts

One of my favourite tropes is the male sidekick paired with a female protagonist. (Bonus points when there’s no romance involved!) In the 1980s, no matter what popular culture you were consuming, it was incredibly rare to find stories where men assisted the narrative of powerful women… and honestly it still feels a little subversive when I stumble across it these days. In Terry Pratchett’s early Witch books, this dynamic is particularly notable because these stories are grounded in a recurring theme of appreciating tradition and old-fashioned values: the Witches are constantly looking back to how things have always been done, while also being sneakily progressive – and making sure no one expects them to follow any unnecessary social restrictions that are otherwise fine for everyone else.

Ceremony, Subjugation, Sacrifice, and Camellia sinensis

kemi ashing-giwa

In speculative fiction, tea has appeared as an important cultural fixture most often in fantasy, but a number of science fiction stories have featured the drink. This includes C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books, Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe tales (particularly the tellingly named The Tea Master and the Detective) and Becky Chambers’ recent Monk & Robot series. 

The book that first comes to my mind, however, is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, first in her ongoing Imperial Radch series. In the domineering empire of the Radch, tea and its attendant rituals are luxuries for humans—nonhumans bound in service to the empire, like the “corpse soldier” main character, Breq, must make do with water. (Or fish sauce.) Beyond tea, I have always been interested in exploring social and political domination, and Leckie’s thoughtful, culturally vivid first novel has been a major influence on my work, especially my own debut novel. 

What is Fantasy Anyway?

Cheryl morgan

This article is not about defining genre boundaries. Huge amounts of ink and electrons have been spent over such debates already. And there are good reasons for such discussions. But they have problems. The first is that most good writers, given a definition of what they should be writing, will immediately look for ways to subvert those expectations. As Gary K Wolfe theorized in his book, Evaporating Genres, genres are continually evolving and leaking into each other. Also, genre boundaries are often used as an excuse for gatekeeping. I am fairly sure that there will be some crusty old supporters of the British Library who are shocked! Shocked, I tell you! That such a venerable and respectable institution should lower itself to running an exhibition about “mere fantasy”. 

My contention here is not about genre boundaries; it is about exploding them. …

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The Curse of Culture and Context

Lee Murray

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

Magic and Objects of Enchantment in Flemish Folklore and Fairytales

Signe Maene

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

The Space that Ships are Built For

Nina Niskanen

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

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

Men Who Respect Witches II:

King vs Witch in Wyrd Sisters

Tansy Rayner Roberts

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

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

Rendered Harmless

Strategies to Tame the Lady Knight

joyce chng

The image of the lady knight is an enduring and recurring romantic motif often found in fantasy literature. From The Cave of the Golden Rose to Game of Thrones the lady knight has seized our imagination as a heroine, a female warrior filled with fighting prowess. Respected and feared by their peers, they stride confidently. They are often beautiful, gorgeous to behold, and they instill a sense of admiration because they are powerful knights, surpassing even their masculine counterparts.

However, the lady knight of the late medieval and Renaissance epics was the subject of contention. Her body became the battlefield where mostly male writers and poets debated her validity as a warrior. And even more when these writers were confronted with a real-life lady knight in the form of Joan of Arc, the anxiety to portray the lady knight as powerful but still within the confines of patriarchy led to various tactics and strategies, where they rendered her harmless. In some ways, they relied on the existing foundation of Greek and pseudo-Greek stories about the Amazons. In others, they drew on Biblical sources and hagiographies. And yet, like a seam of mica in layers of granite, a theme emerged: the female warrior soon bore long hair, fair skin and well-proportioned features. The lady knight became feminised, sexualised and an object of masculine fantasy.

Economic Predation and the End of Capitalism

Octavia Cade

What happens if we imagine a society without these predators? A post-capitalist community where the ability to economically exploit others is limited, or entirely absent.… What does this society look like? Is it even possible?  

It’s not like people haven’t already given it a go. The history of utopian thought is littered with representations of the ideal society. Some of these, from today’s perspective, are less immune to economic exploitation than they’d like to think. Community reliance on unpaid labour, for instance, is often related to gender in ways that are not always adequately critiqued (or even addressed at all) in many literary utopias. Arguably, this is because at the time of writing, expected social roles may not have been widely perceived as being exploitative in the first place. 

The Modern Place of Fairy Tales

Amelia Brown

The point of this article is to look at why fairy tales are still relevant to modern society. Why might such stories have a place when the focus of such a society tends to be on critical analysis and corporate gains, leaving little time for tales about the good fairy rewarding the young woman for being kind? The question becomes: how much does society value virtue? How much does a person value being noble and kind? How much does a person want to think about her own character? In the answers to these questions lies the answer to the fairy tale’s modern place. Because if any person values introspection of this sort, then fairy tales have an awful lot of relevance. To get to that conclusion, the first step toward a more thorough understanding of a fairy tale’s modern place is to define a fairy tale.

Nice Safe Emotions

Joanne Anderton

Sympathy for the Heartless Killing Machine

‘I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or make decisions for me. That’s why I left you, Dr. Mensah, my favourite human’ (All Systems Red 149)

This is the ending of All Systems Red and every time I read it I start to cry. Yes, even right now. Not only because of the sweet contradiction of a self-titled ‘heartless killing machine’ explaining itself to Mensah, its ‘favourite human’, and hoping she’ll understand. Not only because Murderbot has been treated terribly by humans up until this point — and yet, where Mensah is concerned, it has chosen to care. But because even though Mensah gives Murderbot the opportunity to have what we assume everyone wants — a home, a family, a way to be humanised after an existence of being treated like a thing — this is not what it chooses.

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