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.

A Year Of Solid Bangers (Hugo Cinema 1992)

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

It was the 50th World Science Fiction Convention, and to celebrate this milestone, the Hugo rocket was electroplated gold for the first and only time. In Hall A of the Orange County Convention Centre, air conditioning struggled to keep up with the muggy humidity outside.

A member of the production team
for Terminator 2 was on hand
in Orlando to accept the award.
Despite our best efforts, we have
not been able to identify him.
(Image via Fanac.org)

Overall, the 1992 Worldcon was an enormous success. The Hugo Awards, however, were a somewhat chaotic affair. The ceremony was marked by a slide presentation that omitted some (but not all) of the best artist finalists, some finalists who were remembered had their names mispronounced, and an entire category was almost forgotten altogether. Oh, and the fanzine Hugo was initially presented to the wrong finalist following a mix-up.

To quote Evelyn Leeper’s contemporaneous account, “What a fuck-up!”

None of the Hugo Award shenanigans, however, overshadow the fact that the Best Dramatic Presentation category had provided WSFS members with a list of solid bangers to choose from. It’s rare that we say this but the short list that year did a very good job of representing the breadth and scope of North American SFF cinema.

There isn’t even a real weak link on the shortlist.

The movie that came last in the final WSFS vote was the supernatural dark comedy The Addams Family, a visually lush adaptation of the 1960s television series of the same name … that was itself adapted from the one-panel comics of Charles Addams. The plot is slight, being primarily an excuse to string a series of quick jokes together. But thanks to the incredible charisma of Raul Julia, the sly charm of Angelica Houston, and an outstanding performance from a young Christina Ricci, it’s 99 minutes of breezy fun. Although Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were less than charitable in their assessment of the movie, Sight and Sound’s review suggested “The film works as a celebration of unconventional togetherness thanks mainly to a collection of casting coups.” While none of us would have voted for it to win the Hugo, we all felt it was worthy of being on the ballot.

Based on a comic book series by Dave Stevens and directed by Joe Johnson (who would later direct Captain America), The Rocketeer was a box-office disappointment in 1991 but developed a cult following in the years that followed. The film centres around aviation stunt man Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell), who discovers a prototype jetpack and then has to use it to fight off Nazis that have infiltrated Hollywood in the 1930s. It’s a stylish piece of work made with evident love for the source material. The old-school filmmaking and general-audiences sensibilities of the production only help accentuate the era-appropriateness of this love-letter to classic Hollywood movies — there’s even a reference to Rondo Hatton in the movie! Most of our viewing group enjoyed the movie and were happy to see it on the ballot. Although Timothy Dalton is endlessly entertaining as a villainous actor in league with the Nazis, much of the rest of the cast is fairly tepid, particularly leading man Billy Campbell. In a mixed review in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan mocked Campbell as the bland leading the bland, but allowed that ”this film is so dogged, so insistent, so relentlessly earnest in its one-dimensionality that no option but partial surrender to such charms as it has seems possible.”

Every Hugo-finalist movie had a
contemporaneous video game adaptation.
There was Belle’s Quest on the Sega Genesis,
The Rocketeer on the NES, The Addams Family
on the Game Boy, Star Trek 25th Anniversary
on the PC, and a half dozen Terminator 2
games on various consoles.

For at least two members of our cinema club, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country remains the high-water mark for the entire cinematic franchise. It was the last movie featuring the entire original Star Trek cast, and they went out on a high note. Written and directed by Nicholas Meyer (who’d previously directed one of the other great Star Trek movies The Wrath of Khan) Undiscovered Country engaged with real-world politics and commented on the collapse of the Soviet Union by way of analogous events that transpired in the Klingon Empire. All seven original series cast members — William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Deforest Kelly, Walter Konig, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, and James Doohan — are given solid character moments. Moreover, it’s one of the few Star Trek movies that doesn’t just posit that a utopian future is possible, but highlights the emotional labour involved in the soul searching and growth that humanity needs to work through in order to get there. Some of our crew wished it could have won a Hugo Award, but knew that in the context of what else was on the ballot in 1992, it just couldn’t.

Even the seemingly odd one out earned its place on the short list. The Disney renaissance was picking up speed in 1991, with their iconic production of Beauty and the Beast becoming the first animated movie to gross more than $100 million at the box office. Praised for its blend of traditional animation and computer graphics, it was also the first full-length animated contender for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and still holds the record for the most Oscar nominations for an animated movie. On top of all of this, the characters are engaging, the songs remain memorable, and the female protagonist has a little bit more agency than most other princess movies of this era. This film may be part of the princess-heteronormativity bootcamp, but it’s fairly innocuous in comparison with other films of this period.

It would be difficult to question the wisdom of Hugo voters in recognizing James Cameron’s Terminator 2. The movie sits comfortably high up on lists of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, given its cineplex-dominating, half-billion gross at the box office, given its multiple Academy Award wins, and given its groundbreaking digital effects. Moreover, on rewatching it, it’s surprising how modern the movie feels, even after more than three decades. More surprising in retrospect is that despite content that seems tame by the standards of 2026, organizations such as National Coalition Against Television Violence held pickets outside cinemas because they considered Terminator 2 too violent.

The design work and animation put
into the Beast character is impressive.
(Image via IMDB.com)

The plot is straightforward: there’s an evil robot (Robert Patrick) who’s trying to kill John Connor (Edward Furlong) and a good robot (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who’s trying to save him. Through 120 minutes, they fight and have chase scenes. But despite the simplicity of the plot, the writers don’t get lazy — none of the characters behave like idiots for the sake of increasing the tension. It’s taught, but internally consistent.

Although the digital effects for the liquid metal Terminator were the headline grabbers, a lot of low-tech old-school effects are used on the movie so seamlessly that they almost go without notice. Although he’s now mostly known as a director, James Cameron launched his career on the special effects side of the low-budget Roger Corman movie factory so he knew how to make a dollar stretch.

There are also a few works off the Hugo list that were distributed internationally and among independent cinema that merit discussion, such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s post-apocalyptic dark comedy Delicatessen, and the odd webstreamed movie Discovery of Television Among the Bees. But even these would have been unlikely to have made our shortlist in 1992.

James Cameron is one of the most Hugo-award-shortlisted directors, and Terminator 2 is arguably his masterpiece. In 1992, the Hugo Awards could not have done better on either the shortlist or the winner.