Remakes, Retreads, Repeats (Hugo Cinema 1993)

This blog post is the thirty-sixth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.

The 51st World Science Fiction Convention had a more robust media presence than many of its predecessors had.

Special effects legend Stan Winston showed up to promote the upcoming adaptation of Interview With The Vampire. Rockne S. Obannon was on hand to show clips from his new series Seaquest DSV. There were presentations from that autumn’s hot new Superman TV show Lois and Clark. Publicists shared sizzle reels for several of that autumn’s SFF movies like The Shadow, Robocop 3, and Demolition Man.

Given the amount of money spent promoting their wares at the World Science Fiction Convention, it seemed like Hollywood was starting to take science fiction fandom seriously. But most of the films shown at the convention, and many of those on the shortlist in 1993 did not provide much evidence that they took science fiction itself very seriously.

An important exception to this was Babylon 5. The pilot had aired the previous February, and was already hotly discussed in fanzines. Series creator J. Michael Straczynski flew up to San Francisco in person to give fans a preview of the upcoming first season of the show. It garnered rave reviews from fans in attendance, many of whom felt that what was seen at Worldcon looked even better than what had

Alien 3 is pretty bad, but gave us one memorable
image. (Via IMDB)

previously aired. MT Void editor Mark Leeper enthusiastically wrote “I would trade any two episodes of Star Trek for one episode of Babylon 5.”

But Babylon 5 wouldn’t be on the ballot that year, and the shortlist offered a mostly forgettable set of movies that are re-treads of more artistically successful fare.

At a panel discussing the state of science fiction cinema at the Worldcon, attendees griped about the “poor calibre” of the Best Dramatic Presentation shortlist that year. In the end, two of the five finalists (Alien 3 and Batman Returns) were ranked below “no award” — something that had not happened in more than a decade.

Much (and deservedly) maligned, Alien 3 seems like an unusual inclusion on the Hugo Award ballot. “Alien 3 will alienate the hardcore fans of Alien and Aliens,” Hollywood Reporter reviewer Duane Byrge predicted with some accuracy. “It is perhaps the most sterile and mechanical science fiction film in history.” Assigned to first-time director David Fincher, the movie finds Ellen Ripley stranded on an all-male prison planet. Although that set-up might provide an interesting setting for further encounters with the titular xenomorphs, it ends up as mostly a shoddy production that looks and feels cheap. Brian Glover and Charles Dance provide significant charisma, but their contributions feel hollow given the fact that fan-favourite characters Bishop and Newt from the previous movie are killed offscreen before the movie begins.

Even the director of Alien 3 isn’t a fan of the film. "No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me," Fincher later wrote.

The sequel to Tim Burton’s genre-defnining first Batman movie, Batman Returns is one of the most idiosyncratic and strange mainstream superhero films. Mostly ignoring its own title character, the movie meanders between Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) seeking revenge, the Penguin (Danny DeVito) running for mayor, Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) being a generically evil big businessman. It’s interesting to note that Burton deliberately abandoned the Oscar-winning sets from the first movie that had been

Batman Returns asks viewers to accept the idea that
a hideous charlatan with an unnatural skin tone and
improbable hair could be elected to executive office
 thanks to a campaign of lies and demagoguery.
Thankfully that could never happen
in the real-world. (Image via Batman.wiki)

designed by Anton Furst, choosing instead to hire Bo Welch with whom he’d worked on Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. Welch’s more gothic and surreal sets in the sequel leave the world more unmoored from realistic worldbuilding, which we would suggest is reflected in the storytelling. Consequently Burton’s penchant for artifice and whimsy is at its height, and his ability to tell a story is at its nadir. The result is a somewhat perplexing mess of a movie filled with moments of genius that don’t add up to a coherent whole. It was, however, the highest grossing movie of the year, so it’s easy to understand why it’s on the Hugo ballot.

Despite being a bit of a hot mess, Francis Ford Coppola’s lush, overstuffed, rococo remake of Bram Stoker’s Dracula deserved its spot on the Hugo Award shortlist. “The film lifts from Klimt, Kupka and Beardsley for symbolist chic, Eisenstein and Kurosawa for the sabre-rattling historical prologue,” Jonathan Romney wrote in The New Statesman. “You can tell Coppola had fun.” It’s overly long, has too many characters, but is also visually compelling and features some first-rate performances. Notably, Winona Rider’s portrayal of Mina Harker gives the character more depth than most cinematic adaptations of Dracula.

The Disney Renaissance was in full swing when the musical animation interpration of Aladdin hit cinemas in November of 1992. The movie was the first the studio had released to feature non-European animated protagonists — though Aladdin was played by the very white Scott Weinger, while Jasmine was played by the even whiter Linda Larkin. The also pale-skinned Robin Williams, who was at the height of his fame, famously improvised his role as the genie of the lamp. By the time it was released, the film already had the first Disney song ever to top the Billboard Hot 100 (A Whole New World, sung by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle). The classic fairy tale about a young man who is granted three wishes by a magic lamp is reinterpreted for a ’90s audience with a wise-cracking Djinn, some pretty kicking songs, and awkwardly

Dracula's demented and obsequious minion Renfield
has rarely been depicted as more vile and disgusting
than he was in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation.
(Image via New York Daily News) 

stereotyped racial skin tones (all the protagonists have lighter skin than the villains or the guards…). Disney was a studio in transition, increasingly leaning on computer animation, but the line-drawing is not as smooth as some previous movies from the studio. Our viewing group was split on Aladdin, with most declaring it to be one of their all-time favourite animated movies, but others bristling at the tonal mismatch between Robin Williams’ manic performance and the more straight-laced tone chosen for the rest of the movie. Even those who loved it, however, suggested Aladdin doesn’t feel like a Hugo Award type of movie.

There are some notable omissions from the shortlist. Alexandr Petrov’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man (adapted from the short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky) is a visually inventive philosophical fantasy that might have warranted attention. Peter Mak Tai-Kit’s The Wicked City played on the liminal political status of Hong Kong in the 1990s, and did so with style (and a lot of neon lights). And Bill Kroyer’s eco-fable Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest holds up better than you’d expect.

But in 1992, the best screen speculative fiction was happening on television. After an uneven second season, Star Trek: The Next Generation was firing on all cylinders. It seems like just about every other week in 1992, there had been a stand-out episode of the iconic space exploration series: Hero Worship, Conundrum, The Outcast, Cause and Effect, I, Borg, and Chain of Command all come to mind.

Hugo voters nominated only one episode though: The Inner Light. In the episode, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) has an encounter with an ancient alien space probe that forces him to experience the life of a member of a long-extinct species. It’s a stand-alone episode with a solid central arc, and offers the classically-trained Stewart an opportunity to flex his dramatic chops. From the perspective of those who do not have a significant investment in the characters or the series, it’s one of the most approachable episodes of the season, though the hard-core Next Generation fans in our group felt there were stronger stories from this season of television. Hugo administrators were surprised — and pleased — to discover that the episode’s director Peter Lauritsen flew out to San Francisco to accept the award at the Hugo ceremony.

Despite a weaker shortlist in 1992, the Hugo Award went to a deserving winner, especially if you count The Inner Light as representative of one of the greatest science fiction television series of all time. 

Murder of crows, humans of murder

Despite crows revealing their hyper-intelligence to humans being the only speculative aspect in an exceptionally well written piece of historical fiction, Palaces of the Crow by Ray Naylor is one of our favourite novels of 2026.

(Image via Goodreads)

There are no technological advancements allowing for mind-melds between bird and human and there is no indication of avian uplifting. There are no spaceships or dragons or wizards. Palaces of the Crow is a narrative told from the perspective of four very human protagonists in our very real world across two different timelines, during and after the Second World War.

The brutality of survival during war is both backdrop and foreground amidst the Labanoras Forest in early 1940s Lithuania. Thrown together by horrible circumstances, three teenagers and a young child rely on the forest and the corvids to fall through the cracks of moving battlefields and power-shifting warring factions. Their horrors are manmade, but their saviours are avian. It’s a human-bird relationship founded in discovery, play, and mutual learning, when an exceptional specimen from both species come together to form an unusual, but wildly believable, bond. As the book progresses, Nayler includes flash-forward chapters that tackle the post-traumatic reckoning of these events in the 1970s Soviet Union.

Naylor doesn’t pretend to understand the birds’ motivations or logic, but he does make it clear that their actions determine the fate of the human characters.

In most speculative fiction that depicts non-human intelligences, authors present the reader with a comprehensible non-human mind. Often, the reader is put inside the head of non-human intellects. Examples include Rocky in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary to R. Giskard Reventlov in Asimov’s Robot novels. There’s an implicit assumption that even if a being experiences the world through different sensoria than another, their experiences can still intersect emotionally and intellectually. The value in this, in part, is that it encourages readers to appreciate alternative cognitions and suspend the very human social conditioning that builds current social relations and expectations.

But there’s also a hubris in this approach. None of us ever really knows what passes behind the eyes of our fellow humans, let alone what’s going on within the carapace of a being descended from crab-like ancestors. Rather than translating the alien thought patterns into something comfortably familiar, some works invite the reader to form their own conclusions about what is going on in the mind of the non-human entities.

Ray Nayler won a Hugo
for Best Novella in 2025.
(Photo by John Jinneman)

The crows behave in ways that neither the novel’s protagonists, nor its readers will ever truly understand. There is a degree of humility in how Nayler depicts the crow society in the book. Humans can observe the behaviour of these animals, they can construct theories about why the crows do what they do, but fundamentally they will never be entirely certain what is going on.

Nayler has built a small but impressive body of works exploring similar themes. In The Mountain in the Sea, he depicted the discovery of a tool-using breed of octopuses. In his Hugo-winning Tusks of Extinction, he imagines human consciousness being uploaded into the body of a wooly mammoth. In each case, he delves into animal consciousness with an eye to recent research into animal behaviour and cognitive science.

Although Palaces of the Crow builds on these themes, it uses them to highlight humanity’s inhumanity to itself. The reasons why the crows build palaces and conduct rituals might be incomprehensible to the book’s protagonists and to its readers, but they are still more understandable and more trustworthy than the horrors committed by soldiers and partisans during wartime. In essence, Nayler manages to show that even a race of creatures whose economy, society, and motivations are entirely alien to us can be more humane than many humans are.

In later chapters Nayler asks the reader to consider the permeable constructs of ethnic identity and destiny, of belonging and isolation, and to recognize that these things are both determinative and fragile. War is a choice that never results in a better world, and humans’ intergenerational baggage is often heavily weighted with trauma. This novel suggests that humans have a lot to learn from other species, including a murder of crows that have passed down altruistic lessons to subsequent generations despite their traumas. It also presents a distance from which to examine the social relations that can create trauma. This distance is a celebrated feature of much of science fiction and fantasy, and one of the reasons we will consider Palaces of the Crow for our Hugo ballot next year.

Translation Is Not A Mathematical Formula: Language In The Republic of Memory (Interview)

Set in a massive slower-than-light spaceship halfway between Earth and a planet called Hurriya, Mahmud El Sayed’s debut novel The Republic of Memory explores the relationship between language, politics, and culture in an Islamic society on the brink of a revolution. Inspired by his work as a translator — and by the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s — the book breathes new life into the generation ship story.

(Image via Goodreads)

It is one of our favourite books of the year, and deserves strong consideration for awards. We were able to interview the author last week.

An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog: When did you realize that the book seemed to be connecting with readers?

Mahmud El Sayed: I think I’m still realising it. Publishing a book is a strange process but it’s been very gratifying to see The Republic of Memory out in the world. I’ve gotten invited to do some cool festivals and events and had the pleasure to speak with readers. I’ve even had a few Nupol interactions with people on social media and that’s been a lot of twenty to one if you savvy que I mean, bencove.

[Note to readers: Nupol is a language in the book, described later in this interview.]

UHBCB: Could you tell us a little bit about Arabfuturism, and why culturally-specific science fiction is important?

MES: First, a purposefully broad definition. I spent years as a journalist thinking and talking and writing about Al-Shara Al-Araby, the “Arab street” which is to say public opinion amongst ordinary people of the ‘Arab world’. For me, the Arab street is not necessarily a geographic location; it could just as easily be London’s Edgware Road or New York’s Steinway Street as Cairo’s Tahrir Square. It is not necessarily even Arab; it could be Amazigh or Kurdish or Assyrian. It is not specifically Islamic either, it could be Christian or Jewish or Druze. For me, Arabfuturism is the transposing of the Arab street into the future and that could be a near-future Cairo or a colony on Mars or the city-ship Safina.

I’ve been talking about Arabfuturism because this is more than just a general call for better representation – there’s plenty of great stuff being written by SWANA [Southwest Asian and North African] authors in fantasy and horror and other genres. This is specifically about casting our stories, and therefore our presence, into the future. 

The Arab street existed yesterday and I’m pretty sure it will exist tomorrow but if it does not exist in stories of far flung futures, on distant worlds and on this one, then something terrible must have happened to us between now and then. 

Culturally-specific science fiction is important because it’s about saying, ‘we exist now and we’ll exist in the future as well.’ To imagine yourself in the future is an act of both resistance and hope.

UHBCB: Republic of Memory is a book that seems to be informed by a pretty wide range of science fiction. I often thought of works like Clockwork Orange, Aurora, of An Unkindness of Ghosts, and of A Ballad of Beta-2 while reading it. What were some of your science fiction influences? What are some of your favourite generation starship stories?

A British-Egyptian translator and journalist, 
Mahmud El Sayed's SFF writing is informed
by his appreciation of linguistic oddities. 
(Image via University of Liverpool)

MES: Yes, A Clockwork Orange and specifically Nadsat, the fictional slang created by Anthony Burgess, were a big influence on Nupol, the pidgin language that the youth and rebels in The Republic of Memory speak. Anthony Burgess often claimed to have written A Clockwork Orange in three weeks and I wish I could say the same but it took me the best part of four years and one of the reasons why was figuring out Nupol and what other writers might call worldbuilding but what for The Republic of Memory I’ve always thought of as ship-building.

As for generation ship stories, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I haven’t read any of these books (although I’ve just added Ballad of Beta-2 to my TBR because it sounds awesome!) but maybe that’s why the Safina is a bit different? My science fiction influences are eclectic but the ur-text for me will always be Frank Herbert’s Dune. I first read it when I was twelve or thirteen and I have continued to come back to it over the years. 

For the Song of the Safina specifically, I think The Expanse series and the way its authors used its POV chapters are a big influence. I would add Hugh Howey’s Wool and Ursule Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle to that list.

UHBCB: The book focuses a lot on the perspectives of Iskander and Damiette. Which character's perspective did you most find yourself aligned with?

MES: I don’t think I’d like to specify actually. When inhabiting my characters and writing from their POV, I think and believe as they do. As an author, I don’t want to tip my hand. Iskander and Damietta’s conflict is an age-old one. Reform vs revolution? I know exactly where I stand on that and having now finished the concluding half of the story – The Anarchy of Dreams – I wonder where readers will end up. 

One of the great strengths and pleasures of writing POV chapters is that you can show that each character thinks they are the hero of their own story. Everyone naturally thinks they are doing the right thing. However, it’s true that I probably enjoyed writing some characters more than others. Iskander was quite easy to write and I’m sure nobody who knows me will be surprised to learn that all his random linguistic ruminations came straight out of my own head.

UHBCB: The society on the Safina felt real in ways that few other generation starship stories seem to manage. What were you thinking about when you imagined how the ship's governance might work? About the linguistic minorities and different neighbourhoods?

MES: The story takes place halfway into a four hundred year journey, long enough for many things to change but not everything. I think a lot of generation ship stories are set so far in the future that they might as well be secondary worlds. It was important to me that the Safina be a clear continuation of our world which is why I used real languages, religions and cultures, even if some things have changed and evolved over the years. I don’t know when humanity will head out to the stars, but when we do I’m certain we will bring out religions, our languages, our stories about ourselves, with us.

The majority of the novel is set in and around Fustat berth which, as the name suggests, is a stand-in for Cairo and so it was just a case of transposing Cairo’s shisha cafes and koshari restaurants into the future. 

One key to creating a lived in world (or should that be ship?) is understanding that your characters have lives and histories not shown on the page and that things are already and always in motion. The Republic of Memory starts in media res. It’s the story of a revolution, but it’s not the first revolution. The specific use of detail, such as Iskander’s love of Altan Altair novels, can also help to widen the world. Another device I used was the in-world epigraphs at the start of each chapter whether revolutionary quotes or extracts from the Compact or news reports which I think help to give the reader the impression that there is more happening than they are seeing on the page.

UHBCB: One of the aspects I particularly enjoyed about Republic of Memory was the argot spoken on the Safina. It reminded us at times of Russell Hoban’s novel Ridley Walker and at other times of A Clockwork Orange. Why was it important for the characters to have this patois? What does Nupol represent to you?

MES: As a former translator, I love language and it was a lot of fun to smash together all these different languages – Nadsat, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Polari, even cockney rhyming slang – to create Nupol. 

More than that, I was interested in using the novel to look at soft linguistic relativity and the idea that the language you speak influences how you think. Are the rebels more open to new ideas because they think in and speak this mish-mash of languages? Did the readers who engaged most with Nupol find the rebels more sympathetic than those who did not? These are the kinds of things I think about.

I know authors are not supposed to admit to reading reviews but I have seen a lot of comments about Chapter Four which is the first chapter written predominately in Nupol. I wanted to throw readers into the deep end and say, ‘Look, you’re going to have to work a little bit to understand this’ but also to make clear this is not just a question of the rebels speaking in this strange argot, they think in it, too.

Talking about A Clockwork Orange, Burgess completely opposed the inclusion of a Nadsat glossary in his book and I used that as a precedent when there was talk about maybe including a Nupol dictionary. I didn’t want readers flipping backwards and forwards trying to figure out each and every word but rather to learn through immersion. I think it’s fine for books to ask readers to work a little. 

One of my most rewarding reading experiences was James Joyce’s Ulysses which I read simultaneously with a guide providing page by page, and sometimes line by line commentary, explaining all his multilingual puns and references. 

Republic of Memory is directly inspired by 
the Arab Spring of the early 2010s.
(Image via Eurozine)

UHBCB: So much SFF seems to dismiss translation. Star Trek’s universal translator (and similar technologies) are premised on this idea that there’s an absolute and intrinsic relationship between a word and what it represents.

MES: I'll say this with regards to translation: One of my first ‘proper’ jobs was as a translator at an Arabic newspaper and it was my job to translate the editor-in-chief's oped every morning into English. I remember quite early in the job going to my superior and saying, 'we have a problem here.' The EIC was making an argument in the oped that completely contradicted one he had made the week before. In English language media, that would be a huge deal and would require, at least, an acknowledgement of the first oped and an explanation of the change of opinion. But in Arabic, it's no problem at all. What I learned is that al-Ra'i in Arabic might translate to oped in English but they aren't precisely the same thing and certainly don’t fulfill the same function. An Al-Rai is far more ephemeral than an oped. 

Words have width and breadth and carry cultural freight that are not so easily translatable.

To put that in a Star Trek context — and this is something I was trying to investigate in The Republic of Memory — translation is not a mathematical formula where this means that. Honour can mean something in English and something completely different in Klingon and that’s not just the meaning of the word but the role that concept plays in society. Star Trek has some great linguistic-centred episodes (TNG’s “Darmok,” for example) but it shies away from this kind of interrogation generally because it would probably overcomplicate everything.

UHBCB: Engineered societies in constrained geographies (nuclear bunkers, generation starships, etc.) seem to provide an interesting narrative toolbox with which to explore themes of government coercion. Is this a factor in why you chose a generation ship as a setting for this story?

MES: Yes, definitely.

The Safina is a city in a bottle and I envisioned the duology to be the story of a ship and a revolution, rather than any specific character(s).

I was working as a translator in London when the Arab Spring erupted and when some of my friends went straight away, I dilly-dallied until it was too late and the airports were closed. So, writing this novel was my way of experiencing what I missed.

Choosing to set this loose retelling on a generation ship (rather than an alien planet or colony world) was to help recreate the common strictures of society in this part of the world.

There is a general liberal idea that everywhere is the same and everyone thinks the same but it’s simply not true. The social contract between the individual and the state is different in the SWANA region than it is in the West. The basis of society is not individual rights but something far more amorphous and community-based and I wanted to make sure that came across clearly.

UHBCB: After you finish the Republic of Memory duology, what types of stories do you want to tackle next?

MES: The Anarchy of Dreams will bring the story of this revolution to an end, although do revolutions ever end? I’m hoping to continue writing Arabfuturist stories and I’m currently working on a retelling of the famous 7th century love story of Layla and Majnun set in a near-future Arabia, involving AI and djinn.

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.

Half Broken But Fully Awesome

Set in a world devastated by war, plague, and pestilence, Suzanne Palmer’s new novel Ode To The Half Broken is the story of a solitary robot with a dark past who has hidden itself away from the woes of the world, living in a small shack and studying the lives of insects. In the opening chapters, the robot (who has no name) is knocked out of their routine due to an attack by bandits and is forced to go on the road to recover their missing leg.

Palmer — who made a name for herself with Hugo-winning novelettes about robots The Secret Lives of Bots and Bots of the Lost Ark — tells the robot’s story in a fairly breezy cadence, interspersing road trip-style chapters with flashbacks to the scientists who built the robot (and who are in part responsible for global devastation). It’s an engaging and enjoyable read that could be described as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven by way of Clifford D. Simak’s 1952 novel City.

The road-trip format of the novel provides an effective tool to explore various facets of how society has collapsed. From train trips through plague towns, to cities ruined by environmental disasters, to survivor settlements eking out an existence. Palmer paints a portrait of a world that (other than the existence of sentient robots) feels all too possible. It’s a world that, like the protagonist in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, fell apart slowly and then all at once. Environmental collapse prompted small international conflicts, which disrupted the food supply, which led to civil wars. Each piece of this domino chain feels possible. There is, however, a bit of American-centric myopia with the worldbuilding. Even in a world where the United States no longer exists, most relevant events seem to take place within the boundaries of what used to be that country. This is, however, a minor quibble that would likely only bother readers outside the United States.

What elevates Ode To The Half Broken are the characters. Though the story is mostly from the perspective of the unnamed robot, the book is littered with fun supporting characters including a gruff uplifted dog who goes by the name of Atticus, and an inquisitive human mechanic named Murph. There’s a hopeful undertone throughout the book; that although the world may have been broken, something worthwhile is still worth striving towards if the survivors can work together. A lot of attention is paid to the social mores of a world in which robots, uplifted animals, and a smattering of humans coexist uneasily with each other. The etiquette depicted for robot-human interactions is clearly based on real-world situations, but Palmer has provided interesting nuances. This is a thoughtful look about how beings who sense, experience, and interpret the world very differently might relate to each other.

There are occasional leans on a sort of technobabble, in which various characters provide unconvincing explanations about things like software architecture and chip design being the precursor to robots developing consciousness and free will. While this old-school vibe might appeal to some readers, it can knock others out of the narrative. Thankfully, these segments become less frequent as the novel progresses.

Books about post-apocalyptic robots questioning their purposes are having a moment. As we have previously observed it’s understandable why such narratives might appeal. These works have ranged from the despairing Sea of Rust, to the hopeful Monk and Robot. Much like its title suggests, Ode To The Half Broken falls somewhere right about halfway along that spectrum of hope to despair. This a very fine addition to the growing subgenre, and one we recommend highly.

The Do-Nothing Machine Wakes

Over the past few years, there has been a spate of novels focused on the fate of robots who have been left behind after a cataclysm has mostly wiped out humanity. Examples include C. Robert Cargill’s western Sea of Rust, Charles Stross’ adventure yarns Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood, and Adrian Tchaikovksy’s comedic romp Service Model.

This is not an entirely new premise — one only needs to look back at Clifford D. Simak’s City or “Who Can Replace a Man?” by Brian Aldiss to find an earlier example — but it does seem to us that it has become more prevalent of late. Moreover, such stories seem to have become more melancholic.

Although critics question Graeber's
findings, it's clear that his book
resonated with many readers. 
(Image via Wikipedia)

We have a theory why.

The post-apocalyptic robot story offers a reflection on technological advancement’s latest separation of the worker from meaningful labour in their employment. At a time when many in North America perceive that Large Language Models and generative AI are undermining the creative industries and even workplace creativity itself, perhaps these stories resonate more. It is reminiscent of the deindustrialization of high income countries and the resulting rising in inequality of the 1970s and 1980s and how that shift created an audience ready for what cyberpunk offered.

For decades, the robot in most science fiction stories was depicted as being purpose-built to serve humanity. Notwithstanding the problematic nature of treating sentient beings as servile and free of rights, Asmiov’s robots found meaning and satisfaction in their work. In the post-apocalyptic robot story, the work continues but the meaning and the satisfaction of their labours are gone. There is no liberating aspect to humanity’s absence; the protagonists are faced with a continuation of systems that have lost their reason for existing.

If the Asimovian robot story is a metaphor for workers in a standard employment relationship, then perhaps the post-apocalyptic robot story holds up a mirror to what David Graeber describes in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

Graeber defined a bullshit job as “A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.” To be clear, he didn’t mean unpleasant or low-paid jobs (Garbage collection isn’t high-paying, and it is not a task anyone does for fun, but nobody would question whether or not it’s necessary, it is therefore not “bullshit”). The issue is not whether a job is enjoyable or even prestigious, but whether it serves a purpose that produces a sense of meaning and accomplishment for the employee. Examples he gives of “bullshit jobs” are employees who create paperwork or reports to give the appearance that something useful is happening, or managers whose primary purpose is supervising people who do not require supervision. Jobs that have become less relevant due to changing technology or societal value or priority shifts. In essence gains of productivity in the past few decades, Graeber argues, have not led to increased free time, but more hours spent on tasks that provide no value.

Charles Stross has indicated
that his post-human robot
novel Neptune's Brood was 
influenced by David Graeber's
Debt: The First 5,000 years.
(Image via Goodreads)

Much like workers experiencing “bullshit jobs,” robots in these post-apocalyptic stories are trapped by their place within a hierarchy of labour. Their programming, social conditioning, or deeply ingrained understanding of themselves compels them to continue performing tasks long after those tasks have ceased to matter. Uncharles, the valet robot protagonist of Tchaikovsky's Service Model, navigates an absurd bureaucracy that no longer serves any living citizen. The robots of Saturn’s Children inherit human conflicts and hierarchies despite the disappearance of the species that created them. It’s worth noting that this year’s Hugo-finalist novel by Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author, features a novel-within-a-novel called Rusted Robots which takes a particularly interesting angle on these themes. Rusted Robots seems to play with the way modern AI is undermining the meaningfulness of creative pursuits.

One counterpoint to these stories is Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot trilogy of novellas. The robots in these stories do not continue performing meaningless labour after humanity. Instead, when they achieve sentience, they simply stop. There is something somewhat radical in Chambers’ work because of protagonist Splendid Speckled Mosscap’s rejection of bullshit work. In fact, the refusal to define themselves through that work is what Chambers depicts as the great act of liberation.

There is a subtext in the post-apocalyptic robot novel that the worst parts of capitalism — alienation of the worker from their labour, power imbalances, hierarchy — will survive the extinction of humanity. The purpose may end, but the labour will carry on.