Bin it to Win it

This summer, a man claiming to be a 5,900-year-old alien warlord from the planet Sigma IX will contest a byelection in the British seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea on August 13.

The performance is among the most ludicrous works of science fiction of 2026, and could end up being the one with the most real-world impact. It should be recognized by the Hugo Awards.

When one BINdividual citizen stands up for what
he believes in, it can be BINspiring.
(Image via CountBinface.com)

The warlord candidate Jonathan David Harvey has been contesting elections in the United Kingdom for about a decade. Dressed in a silver-and-black spacesuit costume with a garbage can helmet, he goes by the name “Count Binface,” and due to a quirk of British electoral law is allowed to appear on the ballot as such.

In public appearances, and on his campaign website, Harvey disappears into the character of Binface. In the guise of the alien, he claims to have travelled to Earth from another galaxy where he leads a race called the Recyclons. In terms of policy, he proposes to nationalize model railways, and to build “at least one affordable house,” a joke which counterpoints the inadequacy of housing policies from the major political parties.

A veteran of such television writing rooms as Time Trumpet and The Thick of It, Harvey is quick with his verbal repartee. In interviews on BBC, Sky News, The Sun, and other outlets, Harvey flummoxes reporters who aren’t prepared or don’t take him seriously enough. Harvey’s commitment to the Binface persona is almost sublime. Every bit of the character is more bonkers than the next, from the slightly nasal voice to the costume that evokes a funhouse mirror reflection of various clichéd outer-space villains from SFF (everything from Count Zarth Arn to the Cylons). There’s something Dadaist in the way Binface rejects the standard presentation of political candidacy in favor of something based in nonsense, chaos, and the absurd.

Harvey’s performance as the Binface persona has been a good joke for almost a decade. What elevates it in 2026 to something worthy of awards is the context of this summer’s Clacton-on-Sea byelection. This is not a normal political moment. Binface may be the only one standing in the way of an easy re-election for alt-right demagogue Nigel Farage.

For those unfamiliar with the situation, Farage resigned as the Member of Parliament for Clacton-on-Sea while also announcing that he was immediately running again in the resulting byelection. It’s a political ploy, obviously intended as a distraction from Farage’s ongoing financial scandals. 

Leader of the Reform Party Nigel Farage is a
horrid toad-faced muppet whose racist
policies will make the United Kingdom poorer.
(Image via Reuters)

Every single opposing political party declined to participate in the byelection shenanigans. Consequently, there will be no candidate for the centrist Labour Party, no candidate for the even more centrist Liberal Democrats, no candidate for the slightly unhinged Conservatives, no candidate for the completely unhinged Restore Britain Party. Not even a candidate for the “hypnotherapy can make your breast size grow” Green Party.

That means Binface is the only candidate for voters who do not like Farage’s anti-immigrant rants, his dodgy financial dealings, his history of homophobic comments, or his Nazi salutes.

Although it’s still a long-shot, polling shows there’s a chance Binface might win. He is, pretty clearly, the better candidate.

The Hugo Awards have never shied away from recognizing non-standard works of science fiction, or science fiction-adjacent projects — especially when those works align with the political values of WSFS membership. In 1970, news coverage of Apollo 11 won an award for Best Dramatic Presentation. In 1993, a set of United States Postal Service stamps won a Hugo Award for best artwork. In 2020, an acceptance speech denouncing fascism within the genre won an award for Related Work. Count Binface’s campaign in the Clacton-on-Sea byelection would fit firmly into this tradition.

As the iconic left-wing magazine The New Statesman (a magazine founded by H.G. Wells) puts it: Britain must now unite behind Count Binface. This is a science fictional battle against fascism that the Hugo Awards should celebrate. It just might be the most important work of science fiction in the political arena this year.

The Country is a Foreign Past (Nationhood through the Lens of Alternate History)

National identity is the result of a personal and unstable alchemical mixing of history, myth, social conditioning, and imagined landscape. This is not some fixed point, but rather a disputed, illusory, and ever mutable interpretation of one’s relationship with the country they live in.

Some people have a devotion to their country that can only be described as religious, as their beliefs seem immune to evidence-based critique. Others treat their national identity with a dismissiveness that implies tertiary importance.

Alternate history narratives can offer a useful platform from which to interrogate national identity, to play with the facts that created the myths. Rewriting pivotal events can expose how the events that shape national narratives are contingent, rather than the inevitabilities that are sometimes re-storied by proud nationalists.

Historian Robert Sobel's only
work of fiction earned him
a special Sidewise Award
(image via Goodreads)

This is perhaps why so much alternate history focuses on nations with particularly strong senses of historical mythology and of national destiny. The idea that George Washington might have been a mediocre general who got lucky — as suggested by Robert Sobel in his classic novel For Want of a Nail — might seem heretical to many Americans. In contrast, depicting foundational Canadian figure Sir John Alexander Macdonald as an inept and racist drunk would be greeted by most Canadians with a shrug.

The American myth is deeply ingrained, inculcated in generations of students, and often unquestioned by a majority of its disciples — which may explain why so many of the country’s political biopics (Sunrise at Campobello, Young Washington, Reagan, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, etc.) are hagiographies. In Canada, fervent patriotism is more likely to be met with bemusement.

The historicity of a national identity is dubious at best. There’s little truth to stories about about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Queen Victoria saying ‘we are not amused,’ or Kim Jong Il composing three operas on his third birthday… but in each of their respective countries those stories are treated as fact and valued by major portions of the population.

Alternate history has often been criticized for repeated focus on specific historical events such as the American Civil War, the American Revolution, the Space Race. It’s not lost on us that these are events that contribute significantly to the myths of countries that have a very strong senses of national consciousness.

In particular, the Second World War has a special place in English-language alternate history because the war was so important to the national identities of its victorious nations. Some of the best such alternate histories undermine the Manichean story that is spun about the conflict. Presenting a plausible counterfactual can provide a useful estrangement from patriotism fables that depict the victorious nations as incorruptibly heroic. As an example, Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory series challenges the 
assumption that the American experiment could never lead to genocidal death camps, and implicitly argues that it was always extremely possible. This is a discomforting thought, one that is viscerally rejected by proponents of a mythologized “patriotic” version of American history. 

Alternate history about the Second World War has
often been criticized as being fiction for Nazi fetishists.
The best such fiction doesn’t ask “what if the Nazis won,”
but rather asks a far more discomforting question:
“what if fascism was always present in
some part of my own national myth.” 
(Image via AlternateHistory.com)

By the same token, Jo Walton’s alternate history novel Farthing upends British national myths about the country’s implacability and unwillingness to collaborate with fascism. While the “patriotic” myth is that there was a fundamental difference between the English national character and that of the French, Walton offers a compelling case that the country might easily have had its own Vichy regime led by its own quislings. Similarly, Keith Roberts’ 1972 short story “Weihnachtsabend” carefully subverts Britain’s myth of inevitable resistance by imagining the country’s elite pro-nazi cadre taking control of the country.

It should not be lost on anyone that when Sinclair Lewis wrote what is possibly the first alternate history depicting a Nazi victory in the United States, he titled the book It Can’t Happen Here. The work, in which a politician named Buzz Windrip topples American democracy, directly challenges the complacency of patriotism.

James Alistair Henry's Pagans turns this lens on Britain’s oldest national myths. By imagining an England where the Norman Conquest never happened (although that's not the point of divergence from our history), Henry dismantles comforting stories of inevitable Britishness, revealing identity as an unstable negotiation between competing cultures, religions, and languages rather than a single, triumphant historical destiny. It is easy to see reflections on the decade of post-Brexit malaise in the book’s subversion of narratives that the country would be inherently prosperous and unified. There are uncomfortable parallels between the violent Saxon supremacists depicted in Pagans, and much of the recent politics of Great Britain.

Alternate history is extremely popular in Canada, and probably sells better per capita here than it does across the border in the South. But much of our best-known and top-selling authors publish works about points of divergence pertaining to United States history. Former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote two compelling spy novels set in an alternate history of the NASA space program, while Hugo-winning Canadian novelist Robert J. Sawyer’s contributions to the alternate history genre tackle the Manhattan project. Canadian novelist Shannon Selin’s underrated Napoleon in America plays with the history of both the United States and France -- countries that seem to have a stronger sense of national identity than their home country. There is likely a direct relationship between divergent tension and marketability.

For many decades, there have been those in 
the United Kingdom who believed that their
country could never be gullible enough to be
swindled by a fascist conman. Believing such
comforting lies might make a nation more vulnerable.
(Image via Times.co.uk)

There is, of course, an enormous value in the cognitive estrangement that counterfactuals can provide when they’re well researched and meticulously constructed. The underlying subtext is that events are contingent, chaotic, that nothing is inevitable. This is an idea in direct opposition to a fascistic idea of a national destiny.

By contrasting fictional histories with documented experience, alternate history encourages readers to question patriotic certainties and recognize national identity as a dynamic, constructed process rather than a fixed inheritance. It also forces them to consider that the privileged position of some nations might not have occurred due to divine guidance, but rather the happenstance of historical accident. Such critical reflection is rarely a bad thing, even — or perhaps especially — on national holidays.