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.

The Bleak Prospect of Survival of the Richest

It’s unsurprising that Children of Time remains Adrian Tchaikovsky's best-known science fiction novel. It has sweeping ideas, a unique perspective on the future, and a well of empathy. It’s a Clarke Award-winning space opera about a dying earth, hyperevolved jumping spiders, and cross-species communication. It’s an impressive feat of worldbuilding -- and of exploring alternate cognitions.

Children of Strife, the fourth
of Adrian Tchaikovsky's
Children of Time books.
(Image via goodreads)

The novel has two strong follow ups: Children of Ruin in 2019 and Children of Memory in 2022. Subsequently, the series was honoured at the 81st World Science Fiction Convention with a Hugo Award for Best Series. Unfortunately, due to the numerous much-publicized issues with that year’s Hugo Awards, many in the SFF community — including Tchaikovsky himself — consider any award from that year to be tarnished.

The Hugo Award for Best Series cannot be awarded twice to the same series. Having won in 2023, Children of Time is not eligible in 2027, which is a shame because the recently-published Children of Strife makes the best case yet for why these novels deserve recognition as a series that is greater than the sum of its parts.,

Set over the course of millennia, the first book follows terraforming scientist Avrana Kern, the civilization of spiders that evolves on the world she’s working to create, and a band of refugee humans fleeing a collapsing Earth millennia after Kern’s project started.

Each of the sequels centres on a crew of Humans and Spiders visiting long-lost terraforming projects. With Children of Ruin, we were introduced to sentient octopuses, and Children of Memory brought us the delightful Gethy and Gothly, a pair of Ravens who share one cooperative consciousness.

What connects the books in this series isn’t tied to a shared set of characters — or some grand galactic plot arc — but rather an intellectual playfulness and positivity in imagining how a variety of sophonts might understand the world around them.

This latest book, however, mirrors the original Children of Time more closely than the other two; and in doing so offers a dark reflection on the ideas that Tchaikovsky was exploring. Children of Strife depicts a terraforming project led not by the government-funded Avrana Kern, but by her rival Gerey Hartmand — an Elon Musk-type figure who self-finances his own, self-selected experiments.

While Kern’s World evolves species who learn to cooperate, the arch-capitalist Hartmand and his four allies are focused on a reductive survival-of-the-fittest approach to their project, with a hierarchical governance model. To describe the world that Hartmand creates as “flawed” might be an understatement. When Earth collapses some millennia later, one of the ships of refugees is sent to Hartmand’s World.

Hartmand’s cadre of flunkies: Sui Dorcheson, Ken Pill, Redina Kott, and Milner, all seem to embody different aspects of real-world tech-bro disconnection from reality. The god-complex of Hartmand, the pharmaceutical haze of Pill, the nihilism of Kott. Over the course of the book, they each represent different ways in which reductive understandings of evolution can lead to terrible outcomes.

The pugilistic nature of the Mantis Shrimp
(aka Stomatopod) makes for an interesting
protagonist in Children of Strife.
(Image by Roy Caldwell via UC Berkley)

These corporatist terraformers embody a grim reflection of the idealistic experiment begun by Avrana Kern in Children of Time. Kern’s project sought to guide evolution toward intelligence, motivated by a flawed but sincere vision of uplifting life. The terraformers in Children of Strife, by contrast, pursue profit and control, reshaping worlds with little regard for ecological balance or emergent societies. Where Kern hoped to steward a new civilization, the corporatists reduce planets to personal playgrounds. There’s some unsubtle subtext about how our modern plutocrat class dreams of being worshiped as gods while people are sacrificed for their entertainment.

As with every previous book in the series, Tchaikovsky explores the ethology and cognition of a real-world species. For Children of Strife, this is Kato, an obstreperous space captain descended from stomatopods (sometimes referred to as “mantis shrimp”). As always, this is an interesting aspect of the book, although Kato is more difficult and more inhuman in perspective than many of the previous protagonists in the series.

Children of Time remains a modern classic of space opera; a best-selling book replete with engaging ideas that continue to resonate with audiences a decade after its publication. Children of Strife elevates the series by having something new to say about the failures of reductionist adaptationism as a view of evolution — and how that is reflected in failures of societies governed by capitalist competition and hierarchy.

It is now easier to see these books as a series, rather than one great book with enjoyable-enough sequels. If it were eligible for the Hugo for Best Series in 2027, we would vote for it. Children of Time books will forever live in a liminal space of having sort-of won the Hugo for Best Series, but never bear the words “Hugo-winning series” on their covers.

Children of Strife is the best — and most ambitious — sequel yet to Children of Time, in part because Tchaikovsky has the courage to subvert the optimism and hope underpinning the first novel.

Death of the Algorithm

Over the past decade, Nnedi Okorafor has earned a reputation for challenging and culturally nuanced works of science fiction. Along the way, she’s been shortlisted for five Hugo Awards and won two, earned two Lodestars, and taken home a Nebula trophy. With Death of the Author, she has penned her most ambitious work yet.

Cover of Death of the Author
(Image via Goodreads)

The book explores the enduring power of stories that provide threads of hope across generations. By weaving interlocking narratives and switching back and forth between protagonist, Nigerian American academic author Zelu Onyenezi-Oyedele, and a humanoid robot (a Hume) named Ankara, the reader is offered an evolving, existential meditation about survival. In Okorafor’s vision, even sentient robots will carry these stories forward long after humanity is gone, dancing in the narrative footsteps of the humans who created them.

As the novel opens, Zelu is precariously employed and struggling when she finds success in her first attempt at writing science fiction. “Rusted Robots”, a text that is inspired by personal crises — about robots and bodiless AI — catapults Zelu to the heights of fame (with all the usual trappings, including the degradation of privacy, copyright and moral rights infringement, celebrity attention, and the exacerbation of a long-simmering identity crisis).

The “novel-within-a-novel” structure is often difficult to pull off, especially when the book is framed as a best-seller or a classic of the genre. But Okorafor accomplishes this well, offering a metatextual novel that is compelling and convincing as a bestseller.

Readers will recognize parallels between Zelu’s experiences and the robots in her fictional world. This parallel construction does not hamper the novel in any way. If anything, it keeps readers seeking for more cross-references. After all, patterns help create meaning, which is at the heart of the storytelling (and human) experience.

Within the robot narrative, Okorafor embeds pointed references to current political, social, and personal challenges and these keep the pages quickly turning. Robot factions, for instance, remain consumed by internal conflict even as their planet faces imminent collapse. The blind adherence to a mantra that will cause this collapse, experienced by robots who have literally touched the sun, echoes the arrogance of climate denialists (and worse) in real world countries where wealth is greatest but controlled by a small number of capital holders, whose influence is amplified by vocal factions unwilling to confront the consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, this cultural criticism is somewhat undermined by the novel’s inclusion of a benevolent billionaire (“discount Elon Musk”) Jack Preston, who behaves in ways that seem unlike any real-world billionaire.

Throughout the twin narratives, there is tension between Zelu’s sense of self and independence, and the role that her family sees her playing and seems most comfortable with. For readers whose tastes hew to more fantastical narratives, this more mainstream (literary) storyline may not appeal, and others might find some of the characters aggravating in their entitlement and condescension to others.

Nnedi Okorafor holds up her Hugo-winning 
novella Binti. Her new work is a more
complex and metatextual work.
(Image via ArizonaRepublic)

The twin narratives collide in the concluding pages of the novel. This twist — which nobody in our book club expected — was one of the most satisfying elements of the novel, and for most readers recontextualized the preceding chapters. Fundamentally, this drove home the point: it matters who is telling the story; contrary to the title of the book, the authorial voice is important. It matters whether or not a book was written by an algorithm trained on large data sets ... or by a sapient being providing intention, accountability, emotion, and depth.

While the power of story might be a well-used trope, Okorafor explores it with verve and insight. It will be at the top or near the top of most of our Hugo ballots.

A Fantasy Of Suburbia (Hugo Cinema 1991)

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

All Hugo Award winners receive the same “rocketship” trophy, regardless of category. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the cultural norm of ranking some Hugo categories as more prestigious than others has extended to the presentation of the actual trophy.

Paul Verhoeven was shortlisted for the Hugo Award
three times for classic movies that critique capitalism,
but he never took home the trophy.
(Image via IMDB)

At the Chicago Worldcon in 1991 — as had happened at several previous conventions — the chrome rocket portions of the trophies arrived at the convention with minor imperfections. After a careful examination, the one with the fewest scratches and dents was used for the Best Novel trophy, while the second-best went to the Best Novella trophy.

In some previous years, Best Dramatic Presentation had received the worst trophy. But in 1991, it received the ninth-best trophy, with the most damaged ones assigned to Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist. This could be taken as a measure of the increasing prestige of the Best Dramatic Hugo.

More than 800 people voted in the category, as there were strong feelings expressed about the top two contenders. Paul Verhoven’s Total Recall had been the standard-bearer for fans of hard-edged classic science fiction, while Tim Burton’s gothic fable Edward Scissorhands was beloved by the more whimsical factions of fandom. The winner was decided by just six votes — a margin of less than 0.7 per cent. The shortlist was rounded out by the top-grossing movie of the year, Ghost, a well-liked sequel to the Hugo-winning Back To The Future, and The Witches, the last theatrically-released movie from iconic puppeteer Jim Henson.

In File 770, Mike Glyer noted that, “The Dramatic Presentation category clearly generated the most ardent feelings… on the other hand, the category was also far and away the highest in number of “No award” votes cast.”

There are some notable omissions from the shortlist. The time-loop movie 12:01 P.M. — adapted from a story by Richard A. Lupoff — earned a spot on the Academy Award shortlist for best live-action short film. Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch remains a cult classic and is filled with charm. And the big-screen debut of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles earned rave reviews and became the highest-grossing independent film of all time. It is also worth noting that one of the most well-remembered Star Trek episodes “Yesterday’s Enterprise” did not make the final ballot.

The weakest link on the shortlist is Disney’s The Witches, which eked on to the ballot with just 27 nominating votes, and earned less than 10 per cent of the first-place votes on the final ballot. Based on a story by Roald Dahl (who died shortly after the movie was released), The Witches follows a Norwegian child and his grandmother as they uncover a plot by an international cabal of witches. It’s a wildly uneven affair, with extraordinary puppet effects used when the child is turned into a mouse, and an excellent performance from Rowan Atkinson, but the pacing is off base and the whole thing is filled with drawn out, boring sequences featuring Anjelica Huston mugging for the camera. The gender depiction is painful for modern audiences. In addition to being extremely condescending, there are mean-spirited generalizations throughout, such as the dictum that every woman without children or who wears comfortable shoes is villainous. It’s a leaden movie that probably didn’t deserve recognition at the Hugos.

The final Back To The Future film returns to many of the same tropes that had been explored in the first two movies, this time sending Marty McFly (Canadian Michael J. Fox) to the 1880s. There’s the tried-and-true plot of having engineering challenges to overcome in pursuit of returning home, the requisite romance arc, and the time constraint that must be overcome. Variety magazine praised the film for its exuberance, for giving Christopher Lloyd a chance to take centre stage, and for letting the series go out on a high note. It’s all very entertaining, and a tight script, but the story doesn’t stand on its own, and it’s difficult to argue that it was worthy of Hugo Award recognition.

The iconic pottery scene from Ghost
is one of the most memorable moments
in all of 1990s cinema. 
(Image via Youtube)

Ghost, a romantic supernatural drama starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore was the top-grossing movie of the year and earned five Academy Award nominations — including best supporting actress for Whoopi Goldberg. It remains entertaining and charming, though many of us had forgotten just how silly the movie is. The movie stars Patrick Swayze as Sam, the ghost of an ethical investment banker who must protect his former girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore) when she is pursued by Sam’s former colleagues. Despite relatively solid special effects, we found the idea of a Wall Street investment banker who is ethical to be largely unbelievable.

Although the broader public flocked to see Ghost, the leading two vote earners at that year’s Hugo Awards were Total Recall and Edward Scissorhands.

The second of Paul Verhoeven’s trilogy of Hugo-shortlisted science fiction movies about capitalism, Total Recall was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” On a Worldcon panel a couple of years after the movie’s release, Daniel Kimmel complained that the movie strayed too far from the original story. The film was released at the peak of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action star era, with the Austrian bodybuilder taking on the role of Douglas Quaid, a blue-collar worker whose reality becomes unglued during a memory-implant holiday. Made with directorial panache and clever use of Mexico City’s brutalist architecture as a backdrop, it’s a surprisingly good action movie with interesting commentary on colonialism, power, and the construction of self. Total Recall quickly caught the attention of academics, including Donald E. Palumbo, who wrote about the film’s use of ambiguity, deception, and illusion in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Despite the prevalence of bare breasts in the movie, the female characters have agency. “Total Recall reveals surprising intelligence and humor beneath the muscle. It has a sharp, witty script. The plot is sinewed with ingenious twists,” wrote Brian Johnson in MacLeans magazine. For most members of our cinema club, it was the best screen science fiction of the year.

Tim Burton’s oddball Frankenstein knock-off Edward Scissorhands was praised by fans for the director’s rococo directorial style and lead actor Johnny Depp’s soulful performance, but the mainstream reaction at the time was more negative. In the Hollywood Reporter, Duane Byrge compared the movie to a Saturday Night Live skit gone wrong, and wrote “Seemingly trying to hack out a sort of Capraesque fable from its crudely welded parts, Scissorhands never imparts any sort of glowing, humanistic message.”

It is not lost on us that Edward's only value to most
members of normative society is as a worker or servant.
His ability to tend to yards, groom dogs, or cut hair
is the only value that middle-class citizens find in him.
(Image via IMDB)

The movie follows an artificial human constructed by an inventor who didn’t have time to finish his creation, leaving the title character with eponymous scissors for hands. Given the name “Edward,” he’s taken in by a suburban family and impresses their neighbours with tricks until his presence threatens existing relationships, after which his oddity becomes a focal point for social exile. Australian fan Alan Stewart praised the movie’s “rich commentary on suburbia,” and others suggested it was a parable about how fans are excluded from mundane society.

Although several members of our group did not care for Edward Scissorhands, at least one found the movie meaningful as a metaphor for neurodivergence. The protagonist of the movie has difficulty expressing himself verbally and emotionally. He often says very little, and people misinterpret his intentions, which can be interpreted as a reflection on how many neurodivergent people struggle with typical communication styles, are misunderstood despite good intentions, and may express care in nontraditional ways.

One aspect of the film that most of us felt has aged poorly is its approach to gender representation. In Burton’s depiction of society, every woman is a gossiping shrew, and every man is emotionally stunted. For some, this made the movie unpalatable, though others defended it as representing the social estrangement felt by some people with autism.

Contemporaneous discussions of the Hugo Award race for Best Dramatic Presentation put in stark relief the tension within fandom between those who prefer whimsical speculative fiction and those who yearn for high adventure with spaceships and jetpacks. It was a year where the standard-bearers for each side of the debate were very clear, and the vote was extraordinarily close.

Much as had occurred when the vote was taken in 1991, the tension between these two visions of speculative fiction continued to inspire strong disagreements.

Open Discussion — What's worth considering for the ballot in 2027?

The following list will be updated over the next few months as we read, watch, and listen to Hugo-eligible works for 2027. These are not necessarily what we plan to nominate, but rather works that at we enjoyed and believe to be worth consideration. We appreciate any additional suggestions in the comments.

Updated on May 26, 2026

Novel
The Subtle Art of Folding Space - John Chu

Sublimation - Isabel J. Kim

Ode to the Half-Broken - Suzanne Palmer

Green City Wars - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Palaces of the Crow - Ray Nayler

Novella

Obstetrix - Naomi Kritzer

Short Story

The River Speaks My Name by Ocoxōchitl la Coyota

Linka's Out by Rich Larson

Best Poem

The Person Who Reminds the Other Person to Cast a Spell by Bogi Takács

The Truth About Wolves by Marissa Lingen

Semiprozine

Strange Horizons

Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 

"Matinee" (Wonder Man S01E01) - Written by Andrew Guest

"The Hedge Knight" (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms S01E01) - Written by Ira Parker based on the work of George R.R. Martin

Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) ,

Small Prophets (BBC)

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die - written by Matthew Robinson and directed by Gore Verbinski

I Love Boosters - written and directed by Boots Riley

Best Editor - Long Form

Jenni Hill (Orbit Books UK)

Best Editor - Short Form

Scott H. Andrews

Emily Hockaday
Shingai Njeri Kagunda & Eleanor R. Wood

Fan Writer

Jacqueline Nyathi

Arturo Serrano
Brian Collins

Alasdair Stuart

Jason Sanford
Roseanna Pendlebury

Joachim Boaz

Runalong Womble

Alex Brown
Trish Matson

Fanzine

Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog

Journey Planet

Ancillary Review Of Books

Science Fiction Ruminations

Fancast

Hugos There

If This Goes On, Don't Panic

Skiffy and Fanty

Meal of Thorns

Fear of a Melmac Planet

In his Hugo-winning 1998 personal history of science fiction The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Thomas M. Disch wrote “America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend to believe."

This observation rings troublingly true when it comes to immigrants and immigration. Science fiction has a long history of offering tales of lonely, lost aliens who build a new life for themselves on Earth and serve as thinly-veiled metaphors for foreign nationals who arrive at US borders.

Indeed, the lies some Americans tell about immigrants to their country can be seen writ large in their science fiction.

The sitcom Aliens in the Family featured an early
cameo by future star James Van Der Beek, who
ends up eaten by the family pet.
(Image via muppetwiki) 

There have been literally hundreds of published or performed stories about aliens lost on Earth, most of which serve as a parable about immigration in some way. Everything from The Cat From Outer Space, to the sitcom Aliens In The Family offers uncomfortable subtext about those uprooting themselves in search of a better life.

The trope has its origins in the late 1800s, with Thomas Blot’s The Man From Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion, an odd little work that offers anecdotes about the strange customs of a highly advanced civilization. But the alien travellers of early utopian novels were generally used as a didactic tool to tell the reader what the “ideal” human society might look like. Just as importantly, these alien visitors were not planning to stay on Earth, and thus were portrayed as nonthreatening, long-term, to the country’s citizens.

Although not technically an alien, Valentine Michael Smith, the protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 Hugo winner Stranger in a Strange Land, was raised in a culture with different norms than those of contemporaneous Americans. Although some of the gender representation in the novel is highly questionable, the depiction of immigration is far more progressive than one might expect. Smith arrives on Earth, is relatively quick to understand local customs, and then offers valuable insights gained from his bi-cultural experiences.

Published just two years later, Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell To Earth also presents a parable about the threat of immigration, but interestingly the warning is about the danger to the immigrant. The novel portrays alien Thomas Jerome Newton as losing his culture, losing his way, and being utterly assimilated into a culture that consumes him. Likewise, Zenna Henderson’s “The People” stories, which feature a group of extra-terrestrial refugees living in an Anabaptist commune in Pennsylvania puts the focus on the difficulties these refugees face in their interactions with their Anglo-Saxon neighbors.

Every sitcom alien has a favourite
weird food. My Favourite Martian
ate gold.
(Image via moriareviews.com)

In more mainstream media, however, there are more troubling works. My Favourite Martian, which ran from 1963-1966, features a stranded extraterrestrial living in Los Angeles. The visitor, named Tim, leans into tropes that would become familiar in such sitcoms; weird foreign food, strange customs, and lack of understanding of normative US cultural practices of the era. Moreover, the series often features the extraterrestrial character only proving his worth through magical powers; leaning into the idea that a newcomer must go above and beyond to justify their presence and prove their harmlessness, or risk erasure.

Since the late 1970s, these stories have taken on a darker tone that aligns with right-wing narratives about migrants.

Depicting a lone alien stuck in Boulder, Colorado, the television series Mork and Mindy was one of the highest-rated comedies of the late 1970s. Featuring the late Robin Williams as the titular alien Mork from the planet Ork, much of the humour was derived from a sense of cultural dislocation. Although the series is gentler in its implicit xenophobia, it still depicts Mork the migrant as having less work ethic than his US counterparts, an inability to work well with authority figures, and difficulty understanding everyday life. It’s worth noting that Mork’s obsession with eggs may have been inspired by increased levels of migration from Mexico and Japan — those being the two countries on Earth whose citizens eat the most eggs per capita.

Another example of this type of narrative is The Brother from Another Planet, John Sayles’ 1984 cult classic about a Black-presenting alien fleeing from his erstwhile enslavers. Although the titular Brother is more of a refugee metaphor than an economic migrant like many of the others discussed here, the alien is presented as bringing value to the American community in which he finds refuge. Portrayed with empathy by Joe Morton, the alien Brother does not speak the language of his adoptive home, but the movie uses fewer problematic tropes than many contemporary works.

In the 1980s, prompted in part by the success of Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, there was a wave of stories about lost aliens on Earth. Given that it was a decade in which right-wing politicians weaponized economic uncertainty, job competition, and cultural change to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment, it is no surprise that many of these narratives display some degree of xenophobia.

(Image via alftv.com)

The television series ALF (an abbreviation of “Alien Life Form”) ran on NBC for four seasons from 1986 to 1990, with an additional television movie airing in 1996. Featuring an alien named Gordon Shumway from a planet named Melmac whose spacecraft crashes in California, the series focuses on the cultural clashes between Shumway and the family he ends up living with. Shumway becomes a safe proxy for otherness, allowing the show to make coded racist jokes without confronting prejudice directly. The alien is often depicted as lacking privacy boundaries, having a weird odour, and not always sharing American values — comedy that echoed the anti-immigrant talking points of xenophobic politicians like Jesse Helms. Notably, the alien’s culinary preference for eating peoples’ pets has a direct analogue in recent right-wing smear campaigns against immigrants in the Midwest United States. Much of the series’ framing normalizes exclusion while softening its impact through sitcom conventions.

It is worth noting however, that ALF does engage with the anxiety that many undocumented migrants face around law enforcement. A running theme within the series is that of a shadowy and malevolent government agency tasked with rounding up aliens and confining them in undisclosed locations under harsh conditions without benefit of due process. This fictional agency may have predated the real-world ICE, but it still resonates today.

As a story about an illegal migrant to the United States, the currently-airing series Resident Alien’s premise is steeped in xenophobia. The alien in question, Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) is sent to Earth to destroy all human life. Although the protagonist eventually rejects his original mission, this set-up still mirrors the reprehensible claims made by pundits that all or most immigrants hide harmful intentions. This is a propaganda-based narrative that clearly continues to resonate in too many countries. Fans of the show will defend the character of Vanderspeigle, noting that he ends up trying to assimilate to the broader American culture, but the fact that he is the only non-aggressive member of his species brings to mind the old racist trope of calling someone “one of the good ones.” Interestingly, Resident Alien creator Chris Sheridan is himself an immigrant, having been born in the Philippines before moving to the United States as a child.

Much has been made in critical analysis of science fiction of the relationship between the word Robot, derived as it is from the Czech word robota — literally forced labour. But the etymology of the word “Alien” is equally revelatory about the subtext inherent in our science fiction. The word came to English from Latin (by way of French), based on the possessive form of the word alius, literally meaning “other.” It seems fitting, then, that the majority of such stories connote the othering of migrants.

Science fiction does not just echo cultural attitudes toward migration, it helps to construct and normalize them, wrapping suspicion and exclusion in the comforting guise of entertainment. If, as Disch suggests, the genre is uniquely suited to telling the lies Americans prefer to believe, then serious questions should be asked about what the genre suggests about those who come to this planet in search of a better life. We might also question why stories about successful and mutually beneficial migration, celebrating diversity and inclusion, seem less likely to be published and performed.