The Last Trumpet Shall Sound

In 2023, the Campo Grande Treefrog went extinct.

There’s a very real chance that
in the not-too-distant future,
the elephant will trumpet its last.
(Image via Goodreads)

Its loud and distinctive croaking now exists only in recordings. It was one of hundreds of animals that disappeared from the planet last year as human-driven climate change, pollution, and other forms of habitat destruction ravaged ecosystems.

Javan rhinos, orangutans, sea turtles, saolas, pangolins, and elephants are all dying out. Make no mistake: this is a crisis that will have profound downstream consequences for humanity.

Ray Nayler focused his best-selling novel The Mountain In The Sea on this extinction crisis, depicting the extirpation of sea life from the oceans and its impact on humans. But despite the grim subject, the book offers an undercurrent of hope. His new novella The Tusks of Extinction acts as a darker, angrier, possibly necessary counterpoint to the earlier work.

“The Mountain in the Sea had its roots in the ecological preservation work I engaged in in Vietnam. That work was preventative and positive, working with youth and with environmental activists to protect the Con Dao Archipelago,” Nayler explained by email in early January. “The Tusks of Extinction has its roots in my experiences in Vietnam dealing with the illegal ivory trade and the trade in rhino horn. That work exposed me to the grimmest realities of human greed, ignorance, and exploitation. The enormity of the slaughter of elephants and rhinos for the sake of useless trinkets and the stupidest pseudo-medicinal ideas.”

The result is an uncomfortable read that will resonate with many and deserves serious consideration in every award category for which it is eligible. It’s science fiction deeply rooted in truth … and the current truth hurts.

As the book begins, scientists are recreating mammoths as a last ditch effort to keep the elephantidae family in existence. Siberia provides isolated stretches of open country, improving the odds for the wild megafauna. Since elephants — and their mammoth cousins — depend on generational knowledge to survive in the wild, the project is forced to recruit the recorded consciousness of a long-dead elephant conservation activist and researcher.

The novella follows three narrators who offer differing perspectives on an attempt to reintroduce the wooly mammoth into the wild: murdered elephant researcher Dr. Damira Khismatullina, uploaded into a mammoth matriarch; young apprentice poacher Syvatoslav; and ultra-rich big-game hunter’s spouse Vladimir.

About 100 African elephants are killed every day
to fuel the illegal trade in ivory. The villain — as is
often the case — is rapacious unchecked capitalism.
(Image via Science.org)

The protagonists are tragic figures; Svyatoslav is the son of a callous and violent hunter who cares for little other than money. Although he feels revulsion at the senseless slaughter, economic hardship and cultural pressure force him to participate. Vladimir is in a relationship with someone who thinks his apex capitalist money can buy love, and Damira has seen her life’s work destroyed by rapacious capitalism.

While humanity’s role in mass extinction is the main theme of the novella, an important sub theme is the relationship between senses, memory, and self identity. After her resurrection in the mammoth, Damira’s experience of the world is radically different, as is her relationship with memory. Assumptions about mind-body dualism are baked into the SF trope of uploading consciousness, and it’s refreshing to see these assumptions challenged.

“In a large part, The Tusks of Extinction is an exploration of the embodiment of mind, and also of the physical reality — the enormity — of our embodiment in the world,” Nayler says. “The mental changes Damira undergoes as a mammoth are a rebuttal of the idea of mind as separate from body and the sensory apparatus. The Tusks of Extinction is an expression of my anti-Cartesian view of the world. We exist in a physical body which exists in an ecosystem. The idea that we are floating intellects which can do as we will is one of the most damaging in human history: our lives are contingent, at all times, on physical reality and our place in it. The realization of that demands a corresponding ethics.”

The rationale behind the fictional project is expertly mapped out; research has shown that wooly mammoths enabled arctic ecosystems to store more CO2 than they otherwise would have. Having the mammoths back in the environment would disperse seeds, and increase resilience to climate change. Nayler gets the details right, and this helps make his larger arguments more believable and compelling.

Grounded in his experiences, Nayler offers insights about the social and economic conditions that lead to poaching. Svyatoslav, for example, is written with compassion and in a way that reflects on the endurance of those who lack the power to change a system that does not value their lives.

Hitting bookstore shelves during a decade when a significant portion of the SFF community seems to be seeking out comfort reads and hopepunk, The Tusks of Extinction may not appeal to all genre readers. But sometimes, sorrow is warranted and sometimes, there’s value in righteous anger.

It’s worth being angry about the potential loss of 44,000 species. As Nayler puts it: “We are intellectual animals with grand capacities, capable of living ethically and morally. It's time we used our brains to act in ways that prove we deserve to be on this planet, and that the human experiment is not doomed to be a destructive failure.”

We hope this novella finds the readership it deserves, and helps motivate some readers to take action.

A Canticle For Hopepunk

From early days in the genre, novels were often built out of previously-published short stories. The result was called “A fix-up.” Stories that had been popular in pulp magazines sometimes helped convince publishers that there was an appetite for a more expansive and expensive book-length version.

Vast sweeps of history can show
the ramifications of policy decisions.
(Image via Goodreads)

These fix-ups also came with their own synergy between form and function. Interlinked stories working on similar themes turned out to be a form of science fiction that was well-suited for galaxy-spanning tales and large sweeps of future history. Many of the books traditionally considered to be classics of the genre fit this mold, such as Foundation, City, and The Martian Chronicles.

With the rise of cheap paperback novels in the 1960s, and the decline of pulp magazines, the great science fiction tradition of fix-ups has been in significant decline. Which is why it’s refreshing to read Annalee Newitz’ latest novel. Although not technically a fix-up, The Terraformers uses a style and structure that is reminiscent of many of these works.

In fact, the novel could be read as a response — a mirror image even — of Walter Miller Jr.’s Hugo-winner A Canticle For Leibowitz. But while Miller is focused on history’s cycles of creation and destruction, Newitz’ book explores tensions between freedom and corporate serfdom.

Like Miller’s fix-up novel, Terraformers is split into three sections that are set in similar locations but separated in time by centuries.

Each book’s first section focuses on an individual in a sparsely-populated world making the discovery of an underground facility filled with hidden knowledge. It’s this section of Terraformers that provides the book’s two most memorable and compelling characters; an ecological systems analyst named Destry and Whistle, the intelligent flying moose she rides.

In both novels, the second section involves two institutions in conflict over the control of technology. While Miller had secular scientists and the church battling over access to knowledge, Newitz shows democratic egalitarian governance struggling against hierarchical capitalists over transportation technology.

We are on #TeamWhistle.
(Photo by Olav Rokne)

Though both novels end with a revolution, Newitz’s work is less fatalistic. Terraformers seems to suggest that although there will always be those who seek to dominate others through wealth, through hierarchy, and through coercion, the majority of people will work towards community and good governance. 

The classic fix-up novels that focused on a sweep of history shared many similar flaws; compelling characters are given short shrift, transitions between historical eras can be jarring, and some portions drag. In mirroring the strengths of these works, The Terraformers is also burdened with many of the same problems.

Large-scale sweep-of-history stories might make it difficult to put the focus on individual characters, but they do provide the opportunity to relay the long-term consequences of policy decisions. In the hands of politically astute writers like Newitz and Miller, this medium can provide insightful commentary on human nature.

There is also something of Clifford D. Simak’s fix-up novel City in the DNA of The Terraformers, as uplifted animals debate the merits and the legacy of humanity. Newitz introduces us to talking wolves, cats, and earthworms, whose views on the conduct of homo sapiens is not always glowing. This occasionally gives the book a fable-like quality that some readers appreciated, but others found a wee bit twee.

With their third novel, Newitz offers readers a good example of a classic science fictional form that has been much neglected over the past few decades. As with the best fix-ups, it is more than the sum of its parts.

A Unanimous Gold Mine Of Subtext

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Sun Ra and Samuel R. Delany had tried to make The Matrix, the answer is something like Neptune Frost.

Burudian rapper Kaya Free (AKA Bertrand
Ninteretse) gives a compelling nuanced performance
as Matalusa in Neptune Frost. 
(Image via the Facebook Page of Saul Williams) 

A collaboration between alternative hip-hop artist and provocateur Saul Williams and Rwandan artist and playwright Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost is structured in alternating segments between a story following a coltan miner named Matalusa whose brother is killed while mining coltan in an open pit mine, and an intersex runaway named Neptune who flees from an attempted sexual assault. Neither of them fits into the systems at play in the communities they call home, and through this, the viewer is challenged to find parallels between the oppression of gender conformity and the oppression of standard capitalist employment relationships.

The ability of each of these narrative threads to engender empathy hangs on superb performances in these two roles; Matalusa as played by Kaya Free and Neptune who is played alternatingly by Cherylel Isheja and Elvis Ngabo.

Finding each other when they join a revolutionary anti-capitalist hackers collective, Matalusa and Neptune discover that their relationship warps the fabric of reality and may provide the key to freeing society from the grip of a rapacious mining company and an authoritarian regime.

But a simple plot summary does not begin to convey what makes the movie so unusual and compelling. The central characters’ journeys through this imagined future Rwanda and Burundi shimmers between differing states of existence; musical understandings of the world and cinematic explorations. It’s … a lot to work through.

Additionally, given that it’s a multilingual movie whose dialogue is in parts spoken in Kirundi, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, French, and English, and given that some of the subtext depends on puns in the various languages, it is the sort of cinema that takes some generosity, imagination, and effort to parse.

Although the movie can be opaque and obtuse at times, what is clear is the criticism of capitalism, of colonialism, and of exploitation. This is a movie about an anarchist, anticolonial rejection of heterodox narrative conventions.

This carries through to the exuberant and kaleidoscopic visuals that are elevated by found-item and repurposed set construction. This world is built of broken, discarded, and recycled computers and technology, evoking a punk aesthetic; handmade yet high tech.

Creators Saul Williams and 
Anisia Uzeyman. 
(Image via Facebook)

Although it opened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, it’s eligibility for the Hugo Awards was extended at the 2022 WSFS business meeting, so it can be nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 2023. And it deserves your attention. 

Although the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation has a long history of celebrating works that are already successful, several nominations in other categories show that Hugo voters are interested in works that represent cultural perspectives other than North American.

In an era when mainstream science fiction movies have embraced safe and comforting fare, experiencing cinema that dares to offer non-traditional narrative structures is refreshing.

Currently available for purchase on various streaming services (YouTube, Apple+, GooglePlay), this challenging, multilayered, perplexing, beautiful beat poem of a movie is probably the most interesting piece of science fiction cinema to have arrived from Africa since the 2009 release of Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi.

To quote Neptune Frost itself: this is a Unanimous Gold Mine.

Monstrously Wealthy

It is impossible to be monstrously wealthy without being truly monstrous.

For tyrants they are both,
even flat against their oath
To grant us they are loathe
 free meat and drink and cloth
Stand up now diggers all.
(Image via Goodreads.) 

This is the core theme of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest novella Ogres, a fast-paced and clever little book about a world where the titular 10-foot-tall monsters extract rent from proletarian humans.

Told in the second-person, the story follows Torquell, the son of a rural village headsman, whose life gets turned upside down after he makes the mistake of having an altercation with the son of the Ogre noble who oversees his village, and is forced to flee into the wider world. Through Torquell’s eyes, readers are taken on a tour of this society, seeing factory towns, exploited military regiments, and Ogre high society.

Nuanced, iterative worldbuilding reveals a complex set of social relations, despite an initially obvious – and blunt – metaphor about inequality.

Ogres may be one of the most overtly leftist pieces of mainstream SFF published in the past 50 years; it is clearly informed by Enclosure Acts-era British rent seeking, by Dickensian living conditions, by The Sound Of His Horn, and by Marxist theory. This is not Marxist in the pop-culture understanding of the word, but informed by the academic intellectual framework.

This theoretical underpinning is evident in the ways societal structures reinforce the Ogres’ control, and maintain economic disparity. The use of religion as a tool for maintaining the compliance of economically disadvantaged people is particularly striking. Likewise, the way that “economic” is used as a pejorative by the Ogres highlights the philosophical stance of the book, as well as how the Ogres think about humans.

By the end, it is clear that what makes the Ogres monstrous isn’t their enormous size or their strength, but rather their wealth. Those who attain such heights of power and privilege are monstrous, no matter what their shape or size.

At times, the second-person point-of-view narration can come across as a bit precious. It is certainly not the standard perspective for most fiction, and this may present an impediment for some readers. But once the story gets going, this quirk of prose style becomes less and less obtrusive, and by the book’s conclusion it is evident why the second-person voice was necessary.

Tchaikovsky's Ogres
may be his most 
political work yet, and
is among his best.
(Image via Pan MacMillan)

While this isn’t the easily accessible prose that Tchaikovsky’s fans have come to expect, it is just as rich as his other works. For example, the book is filled with some excellent turns of phrase such as a line in which someone is described as “used to weighing others by the amount of world they displace.”

At the risk of offering a relatively mild spoiler, the second-person perspective pays off in the last 10 pages in a note-perfect and unexpected recontextualization of the entire narrative. Portions of the denouement that seemed improbable or overly convenient were put in sharp focus — and improved — by this conclusion. It was the sort of ending that may prompt re-reads of the work for those who want to find all the little clues throughout. If we had our way, it would be included in a creative writing curriculum.

Over the course of several of his most recent novellas (Elder Race, Expert Champion, Ogres), Tchaikovsky has explored various iterations of Clark’s Law. In Ogres, he goes one further and shows that while sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, sufficiently advanced inequality is indistinguishable from grimdark fiction.

Science fiction and fantasy are at their best when something real is reflected through unreal worlds. The monstrous nature of Ogres is effective because it is so real.

The Closing Of The Lunar Frontier

Hot Take (noun): a deliberately provocative heterodox opinion 

article that seems intended to attract detractors and invite debate.

The most important year in the history of science fiction is 1973, because that’s when science fiction ended.

All fiction is political, and science fiction was the literature of technological triumphalism as a political idea. Like the Western pulps that it largely supplanted, it was primarily an American phenomenon from its inception as a defined genre in the late 1920s. And, like all literature, it was steeped in assumptions about societal and economic progress. The 1970s witnessed determinative changes in these assumptions, shifting the genre’s trajectory beyond recognition.

(Image via MyComicShop.com)

First, a bit of context. While individual stories that we would now class as science fiction existed prior to the 1920s, the genre became codified and defined through the early pulp era. This meant that genre traditions, tropes, and conventions were formed at a time when more new technologies were entering common use in the Western world than at any time before or since (automobiles, telecommunication, washing machines, etc.).

During the five decades of science fiction’s ascendancy as a defined genre, income inequality in the US was on the decline; between 1929 and 1941, the share of total GDP taken as income by the top one per cent of America’s richest people declined from about 20 per cent to 15 per cent. By 1952, that had declined to just eight per cent of the total GDP going to the top one per cent. Combined with the simultaneous doubling of per-worker productivity, this meant a radical improvement in the lives of working Americans.

Three parallel trends of technological, social, and economic progress made it a fecund era for imagining pollyannaish interplanetary monocultural futures clad in chrome and plastic. In just a 30-year span, Jack Williamson went from traveling by covered wagon to traveling by airplane, so one could understand why he might assume that in an additional 100 years people would be going to the stars.

And this is why the year 1973 is so important: it’s the year that shattered the fundamental assumptions that guided science fiction over the previous five decades. This happened in several important ways.

After Apollo 17 left the moon on December 17, 1972, vonbraunian dreams of a rocket-powered conquest of space began to look naïve. Though clearly technology continued to advance, this progress was less and less about raw power, and more about subtlety and efficiency. As the space race ended, the idea of a final frontier was relegated to increasingly fantastical fiction.

It was the same year in which inequality in the US began to increase after almost 50 years of decline. Since then, inequality has gone from eight per cent of income going to the top one per cent in 1973 to almost 30 per cent going to the top one per cent today.

Likewise, the unionization rate among American workers began its steep decline in 1973, from 26.7 per cent of workers belonging to a union to just 13 per cent in 2011.

In 1893, then 33-year-old historian Frederick Jackson Turner addressed the American Historical

They left, much as they had
come: In peace, for all mankind.
(Image via NASA.gov)

Association and presented his theory on the closing of the American frontier: "The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history." Part of his thesis was that this closure had a profound impact on the national imagination of the United States, and it’s difficult to disagree with this assessment.

Likewise, it seems clear that the closing of the lunar frontier had a drastic impact on the imagination of the citizens of science fiction fandom.

When coupled with the fact that 1973 was a turning point in Western economies, the result is even more drastic.

When people imagine the future, they usually imagine one in which they have a part. So the exclusion of the working class from economic progress effectively limited the imaginations of many.

Many of these economic shifts have been attributed after the fact to the 1973 oil crash that marked the end of the era of cheap oil, and ushered in an era of greater control of prices by oil producers. It is possibly the most important economic shift that America has faced since the 1929 stock market crash.

It has often been observed that the secret weapon of science fiction authors is economics; in essence, that insights from economics are crucial to building believable fictional models of the future. So it should be no surprise that these shifts in long-term economic trends had an impact on the types of technologies that science fiction predicts.

Space adventure stories fundamentally shifted from being a near-future genre to being closer to fantasy. It became more and more difficult to suggest that futures depicted in works like A Fall Of Moondust, Farmer in the Sky, or The Caves Of Steel were based on any serious extrapolation of current trends. Also, declining economic fortunes became more of a focus of the genre. Although the term wouldn’t be coined for several more years, we could argue that cyberpunk’s birth was 1973 when John Brunner began writing The Shockwave Rider, and when James Tiptree Jr. published The Girl Who Was Plugged In.

The time it takes to write, edit, and publish a novel means that the distinction between pre- and post-1973 speculative fiction is fuzzy — but evident once you start looking for it.

We would argue that (without privileging one or the other) this shift from technological-triumphalist

In this interpretation of history,
Ursula K. Le Guin could be the
progenitor of  modern
speculative fiction.
(Image via NYTimes.com)

new-frontiers speculative fiction to economic anxiety-driven social speculation is a significant enough change of focus that they are distinct genres. Science fiction as it had been understood ended, and something else took its place. We might argue that post-1973, the genre split into speculative fiction (cyberpunk, mundane SF, cli-fi) and science fantasy (space opera, time travel).

This new chapter in the history of speculative fiction has been increasingly diverse, less in thrall to destructive hegemonic ideas peddled by an influential early editor of a major magazine, and certainly less centered on the United States. As a result, the intellectual descendants of science fiction have been able to connect with the larger culture in ways that their predecessors were never able to. It is hard to imagine the ascendancy of pop cultural phenomenons like Star Wars and Guardians Of The Galaxy in a genre that was still tied to positivist (and occasionally objectivist) outlooks.

Arguably, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic is as significant an economic event as the Great Depression and the 1973 Energy Crisis. Perhaps it will be the event that moves speculative fiction into the next era.

The Best Laid Plans Of Paratime Mice

Over the course of six volumes and almost a million words, Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series has careened rapidly from one genre to the next. The series has at times been a portal fantasy, a crime drama, a nuclear thriller, a steampunk subterfuge, and finally an alien invasion tale. The series has been many things, but predictable is not one of them.

Wrapping up the Empire Games
trilogy,  Charles Stross has delivered
his most satisfying novel in about
eight years. 
(Image via Goodreads)

The series wrapped up this month — possibly for good — with the release of Invisible Sun, a much-delayed but ultimately satisfactory conclusion. This is a book that many longtime fans will welcome, and serves as a good argument for why new readers should give the series a go.

Invisible Sun kicks off with a simmering feud between alternate versions of America, connected by paratime travel (between timelines). In one America, a steam-punk democratic revolution is struggling with a succession crisis, while in the other America (one more similar to our own), the post-9/11 War on Terror has metastasized into a relentless surveillance state. While part of the story involves a covert extradition mission from the surveillance state world, another part of the story involves back-channel diplomacy to avoid nuclear war. Simultaneously, both worlds have to confront a threat posed by a far-advanced and ancient evil race from a third timeline.

It’s a lot to juggle, and our main criticism of the book would be that at times, some of these plotlines receive short shrift. That being said, we appreciate a narrative structure that is stronger than many of the previous Merchant Princes books. Specifically, Invisible Sun doesn’t derail its readers.

Because often, these books do go off the rails with unforeseen problems cropping up for the protagonists. One could even describe the series as an exercise in subverting expectations. It seems as if two or three times per book, the point-of-view protagonist (Miriam Beckstein in books 1-3, and Rita Douglas in books 4-6) concocts seemingly well-thought-out plans … only for things to go sidewise.

As a reader, having your expectations subverted is often a lot of fun, and Stross is an expert at doing so in a way that feels natural and believable. At its best, this series offers surprises that once revealed seem like the natural consequences of the setting and of choices made by the protagonists.

And this lack of predictability has been both the strength, and the pitfall of these books. Unlike the
Laundry Files — Stross’ other long-running and Hugo-shortlisted series — The Merchant Princes never gets overly familiar or in a rut.

It's difficult to think of another
series that could start somewhere
like Nine Princes in Amber, and 
end in The Sum Of All Fears.
(Image via Goodreads)

But after five books, the trick of subverting expectations can grow wearying. There’s only so many rugs that can be pulled out from under the reader before the trick becomes stale. The directness of Invisible Sun, the more streamlined nature of the denouement, and the lack of shocking revelations and surprises is … actually quite welcome.

We would note that the final 20 pages of the final book does feel somewhat rushed. All the denouement, all the resolution, are jammed into as few words as possible. It feels almost as if after writing a million words in the series, the author just wanted to be over and done with it. And maybe so do we.

The entire book club read the first book in the series, with somewhat mixed reactions, but as of yet, only two of us have read the complete series. Those who made it past the first book were enthusiastic about the unpredictability of Stross’ imagination. Re-reading the entire series back-to-back, it becomes clear just how much Stross has evolved as a wordsmith and as a crafter of narrative structures.

The Merchant Princes is a series that accomplishes a lot in six books; offering a reassessment of classic portal fantasies, delving into development economics, examining the tension between safety and privacy, and exploring ideas about how democracies come into existence and wither over time. At its best, there was no better contemporary long-running science fiction series. And by offering it a definitive conclusion, Stross has provided an opportunity to assess it in fullness.

We hope to see it on the Hugo Award ballot for best series, and if it does will likely rank it highly.

The Humanity Of Machinehood

Several short works by S.B. Divya have been among our favourites in the past five years or so.

Image via Simon
& Schuster

“Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse,” “Loss of Signal,” and the Nebula-shortlisted novella “Runtime,” demonstrate that she is a writer who delivers interesting ideas wrapped in approachable and stylish prose. We therefore had high hopes for her debut novel Machinehood — and were not disappointed.

The novel is clever, brimming with engaging ideas, and provides important commentary on current political trends. Set a century down the line, Machinehood delves into the erosion of human rights, the perils of capital-driven pharmaceutical development, and the evolving understandings of privacy.

Machinehood centres on Welga, a security contractor who ends up investigating a series of terrorist attacks thought to be orchestrated by the world’s first truly sentient artificial intelligence. Although the story initially feels like an adventure novel, it’s soon apparent that the story centers on Welga’s quest to create stability, the precariousness of her work situation, and her sister-in-law’s medical investigation into seizures that Welga begins experiencing.

Divya uses these narrative threads to explore how capitalist-driven competition can lead to negative outcomes for society. In particular, the use of performance-enhancing drugs has been normalized in this future, leading to workers whose employment is contingent on their willingness to punish their bodies and nervous systems beyond their natural limits. While this is a bleak (and unfortunately believable) aspect to the world Divya has crafted, it is not entirely dystopian.

While the novel depicts various forms of body modification having detrimental effects, and the gig economy making working relationships more tenuous, other advances such as automatic kitchens, the ease of global travel, and medical printers have created higher standards of living in other ways. This is a nuanced future that avoids monocausal explanations for society’s changes.

Escape Pod co-host
S.B. Divya's engineering
background is evident.
Image via Analog

One of the recurring themes explored in the book — and one of the reasons it should be considered for the Prometheus Award — is the relationship between government services, the private sector, and do-it-yourself culture. As an example, those wanting to go to space do so through the participation of voluntary hobbyist rocket-ship clubs, while health care is allocated through a system of micro-auctions. Pharmaceuticals are often printed at home with some government oversight, but pill designs come from both giant corporations and from hobbyists. None of these details are delivered by way of polemic, but rather flow naturally within the story.

In such a setting, the most powerful actors seem to be religions, in part because of the unassailable sway they have over their followers. Without giving too much away, there are philosophical aspects to a religion of Neo-Budhism that provide incredible motivations to some of the religion’s adherents. Religion thus is shown to be a tool to navigate and instigate change.

One of the greatest strengths of the novel is that as it progresses, the conflict becomes less and less black-and-white. The antagonist is compelling in large part because it’s easy to see their side of the issues, even though their tactics aren’t acceptable. Has the terrorism perpetrated by the Machinehood improved the lives of humanity? Divya has the courage to leave that question unanswered.

Every few years, it starts to seem like science fiction is running out of ideas. Thankfully, authors like Divya remind us that the future has an almost infinite array of possibilities. Machinehood is the type of novel that gives us faith in science fiction as a genre.

The Vanished Birds soars

Rich with anthropological detail and criticism of market-driven ideologies, Simon Jimenez’ debut novel is a puzzle that rewards those with the patience to figure out how all the pieces fit together.

(image via Goodreads)

The novel’s sections appear at first to be distinct from each other. Readers begin by learning about a child growing up in an early agrarian society visited by space ships about every dozen years. Next they’re swept into the story of a merchant vessel from an advanced mercantile civilization reliant on exploiting planets like the one in the first chapter. Finally, the novel becomes an adventure about the rescue of a lost crew member.

Throughout the novel, flashbacks to a near contemporaneous earth are used to convey backstory through the eyes of Fumiko, an early architect of interstellar civilization who skips forward through time by going in and out of suspended animation.

Although various parts of the novel appealed to various book club members differently, there was a consensus that Jimenez’ writing is excellent. Some of us were drawn in by the first chapter while others were worried it was setting up a more wunderkind YA narrative. Using a subsistence farmer’s point of view in the first chapter served to create context for the subsequent stories.

There was even sharper disagreement about the flashbacks. Some club members felt it was essential exposition about the failure of modern capitalism and the colonization of space, while others described the flashbacks as extraneous.

The final section of the novel, in which the plot hits a fairly frenetic pace, left some readers scratching their heads. The change in tone from a contemplative — almost meditative — novel, to an action-adventure is somewhat jarring. 

(Image via Backpage)

Space opera is a subgenre that has all-too-often fallen into the trap of focusing on technology, rather than imagining alternative ways that humans can organize themselves. One of the most appealing aspects of The Vanished Birds is that Jimenez weaves social commentary and structural critiques into the cultural setting. He’s skillful enough not to slap readers in the face with this, but rather offers enough detail that those who scratch beneath the surface will be rewarded.

Jimenez seems deeply versed in the history of the genre; at times paying homage to Ursula K. le Guin, and at others referencing Alfred Bester. In fact, the book could be read as a direct response to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, as one of the main characters in The Vanished Birds can jaunt like the earlier novel’s protagonist Gully Foyle — and at a whim can travel across vast distances almost instantaneously. Jimenez’ seems to be suggesting that a citizen’s ability to leave would be the ultimate subversion of corporate power. 

The Vanished Birds is a puzzling novel, and one whose pieces occasionally fit together oddly. But it is also  a smart and thoughtful book that will deeply appeal to readers looking for cultural criticism in their outer-space adventures. 

The Movement of Goods In Science Fiction

Space-based science fiction places a lot of attention on the transportation of goods.

The interplanetary transport Pachyderm
from the movie Space Truckers is just
one of many, many examples of how
interstellar civilization is depicted as
being similar to our globalized economy.
(Image via highdefdigest.com)

Whether it’s a Lissepian captain hauling self-sealing stem bolts from Deep Space 9 or the crew of Firefly delivering cattle to the colony of Jiangyin, we are often presented with depictions of how goods are moved from one location to another.

This focus is probably a reflection of the modern neoliberal consensus that globalized trade is a good and necessary thing, and is a trend in science fiction that is worth questioning.

The large-scale movement of goods only makes sense if there is a strong economic incentive; if it is cheaper to build something in one location rather than another, if the skills to build something are only available in one location, or if the resources are only available in one location. When you see the depiction of merchant space ships travelling on regular runs between two locations, it implies that there are entire planets where it is cheaper to build something, and markets looking to buy those things.

Is inter-jurisdictional trade really that scalable? Between real-world nations, whose populations are measured in millions, there might be a specialized need that cannot be filled by the manufacturing base of a smaller nation. But with planets that are often depicted as having populations that number in the billions, it’s hard to imagine a need so specialized that they don’t have the capacity for local manufacturing.

With the exception of newly established colonies, interplanetary trade often seems to happen without the existence of one of the required antecedent factors. If the writer’s intent is to mirror our globalized economy, either for worldbuilding or plot effect, it would be helpful to see the justifications mirrored as well.

Planet-to-planet trade modelled after our globalized economy is a recurring theme in almost every fictional interplanetary community; the Democratic Organization Of Planets in Futurama, the Galactic Empire in Foundation, the Imperium of Dune, the Interstellar Alliance in Babylon 5, the Minmatar Republic in EVE … the list goes on. In science fiction with less advanced technology (no instantaneous transport, no universal replicators) rarity of resources such as dilithium or unobtanium sometimes serves as justification, but this doesn’t explain the overall “globalization” of the economies we see in SFF.

In short, even the flow of Spice can’t entirely explain a complex interstellar trading economy.

In Dune, the need for Spice still can't
explain why they have a trading economy.
 Bene Gesserit sisterhood may not be
exactly as depicted here.
(Image via spicegirls.fandom.com)

As an example, lets look at Star Trek and Deanna Troi’s home planet of Betazed. If Betazed needs self-sealing stem bolts, they could either have a local manufacturing operation, or they could have them shipped to the planet.

While Starfleet ships may travel at higher warp speeds, freight transports are rarely depicted as going faster than warp five. Depending on the Star Trek resource book you look at, this is approximately 200 times the speed of light, or a bit more than a week to travel each way between Earth and Alpha Centauri. The travel time for such a freighter to get from Earth to Vulcan would be more than a month. Even if Betazed is trading with their nearest star system, the cost of transport is going to be significant, to cover ship depreciation, crew salaries, fuel costs, etc. This would demand a high-profit, highly differentiated product — one that is never mentioned.

Conversely, local manufacturing should in fact be economically feasible. In 2372 (when the trading of self-sealing stem bolts is depicted in Deep Space 9), Betazed has a population of more than 5.6 billion people. Even if the self-sealing stem bolts can’t be made by the universal replicator, one would assume that the factory in which the bolts are made could be set up relatively inexpensively, since much of the facility could be replicated. This leaves labour costs as the remaining barrier to production.

We've never heard any Ferengi rules
that prohibit keeping indentured workers
in conditions of absolute destitution.
(Image via memory-alpha.fandom.com)

Globalization works in our present-day economy because capitalism maintains pools of labour in destitute conditions, and is thus able to offer goods at cheaper rates to those in walled-off prosperity zones. By extension, the existence of large-scale systems of transportation for manufactured goods in a science fictional setting implies the existence of planets with populations that are mired in subsistence poverty or slavery.

This relationship between interstellar trade and slavery is occasionally made explicit, though the criticism of such systems is varied. Star Wars has included several depictions of slavery, and the close relationship between that slavery and interestellar trade. Notably, the recent movie Star Wars: Solo. But in Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, slavery on Tatooine is depicted as something tolerable to the upper-class ‘good’ characters Qui-Gon Jin and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Cult classic SF TV series Firefly grapples with these issues more successfully in the episode Jaynestown, where we are introduced to disenfranchised indentured workers who mine resources on a slave planet. Likewise Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit includes a planet with a slave culture, though a direct link between interstellar trade and slavery is not made explicit. Other reputable characters avoid the planet and express distaste for the practice, but there must be a large enough market accepting or unaware of slavery for the planet to exist. One wonders how many of the goods on Port Coriol have been produced by slaves.

Despite the fact that these systems would be untenable without a large underclass, science fiction spends a lot of time in walled-off prosperity zones. Earth in the United Federation of Planets is a sparkling gem, where there is no want that cannot be satisfied. People might work but only insofar as they want to. Once labour goes from meaningful to menial, they can simply stop and experience no hardship. Compare this to Arvada III where Beverly Crusher developed a passion for medicine as a child when her grandmother was forced to use roots and herbs to treat a medical crisis. The trade that occurs between these planets seems to benefit Earth a great deal while leaving Arvada III wanting. And in such a power imbalance, it’s no wonder that Earth is able to secure advantageous terms of trade. The threat of withholding trade includes the implicit threat of destruction. But the unfairness of this trading relationship is never made explicit, or commented on.

The plethora of cargo transports seen in science fiction is driven in part by a narrative need; transportation by default means characters move around, and this allows readers to explore a broader fictional universe. If you need a young man to go from a desert planet to a lush green planet to meet with a princess, it’s convenient if there is a YT-1300 Corellian freighter on which to book a ride. Blue collar work that is fixed to a specific location — such as most manufacturing or resource extraction jobs — rarely meets the needs of science fiction storytelling.

But that being said, the predominant depiction of transportation as opposed to manufacturing within space opera has implications for the futures we collectively imagine. Because all forms of economic activity have impacts on society, the primacy of transportation within space opera needs to be examined and challenged. 

Imagining the future of organized labour (part two of three)

This is the second of a three-part blog post about the historical invisibility of organized labour in science fiction, as well as recent works that address this absence. In the first part, we examined prose works published up to 1980, in this blog post we examine prose works from 1980 up to the present. A third blog post examines  science fiction television and cinema that depicts labour unions.

In December of last year, Wired magazine invited eight prominent science fiction authors to tackle an

As workplaces are changing, how workers
organize to assert rights will change also.
(Image via Bloomberg.)

interesting question: “What is the future of work?”

While many of the resulting stories explore important challenges that are likely to shape our work lives, and are well worth reading, it is interesting that none of the authors even touched on how workers organize themselves to assert their rights. There is not one mention of “unions,” nor of “solidarity” or “collective bargaining.”

But while unions and the struggle for labour rights are still significantly underrepresented within the genre, the past three decades have seen the blossoming of a small but significant school of labour-aware science fiction that is worthy of discussion.

We have been compiling a list of labour representation in science fiction, and it is obvious to us that there is a growing interest in projecting a future of organized labour. As examples, we would encourage you to read some recent works by Cory Doctorow, Alex Wells, Allen Steele, Madeline Ashby, Adam Rakunas, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Ken MacLeod.

Depictions of labour unions that appear in science fiction published over the past two decades show a significantly greater understanding of how unions operate than is evident in stories from previous decades.

We would suggest that labour awareness within science fiction is in no small part generational. The authors who wrote science fiction during the first ascendency of the genre in the 1940s and 1950s had come of age in an era of strong union power, when New Deal policies were creating an expanding middle class and mass prosperity.

During those years, it was easy to assume that broadly shared prosperity would continue into the

The University of Trantor's faculty
association almost certainly provided
good health and dental benefits.
(image via Goodreads)

future; most of the characters in the high-tech Galactic Empire of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation are middle-class, and it is only once barbarism returns to the galaxy that wealth inequality appears to rise.

But children growing up in the 1970s would learn a different set of assumptions. During those years, for America’s middle class, the future seemed to be atrophying. America was embroiled in an ugly war. The moon landings were over, income inequality had begun to increase, and the labour union movement was being systematically undermined.

This precariousness of the existence of the middle class would be reflected in the despair of cyberpunk, as well as in the activism of the Scottish socialist wave of science fiction.

As the people who read science fiction in the 1970s began writing their own science fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, labour’s reappraisal in science fiction starts to appear.

Allen Steele’s 1989 debut novel Orbital Decay is notable as being one of the earliest works in this (labour-aware) era of science fiction. It offers a depiction of construction labourers building an orbital station under hazardous conditions. While Steele’s work doesn’t delve into the political framework that has enabled this union to exist, or under what legal jurisdiction space construction might fall, his novel does explore how union protection can help ensure safer workplaces by giving workers the right to refuse unsafe work.

Slightly later, the 1996 novel Night Sky Mine by Melissa Scott is a cyberpunk work that subverts the sub-genre by showing that corporate power is not inescapable, and featuring a labour union that helps ensure fairer wages.

If stories like these were a significant departure from almost any science fiction featuring labour unions in the 1950s or 1960s, then it might also be noted that the labour movement of the 1990s and 2000s was one that had been radically transformed.

In the wake of several setbacks for labour unions — the destruction of the PATCO union in 1981, the

The air traffic controllers' strike of 1981,
and the subsequent disbanding of the
union is one of the most significant
moments in labour history. 

creation of NAFTA, the UK miners strike in 1984-85 — it became more difficult to imagine the labour movement as menacing.

At the same time, numerous labour unions were tackling internal governance and structural issues that had marginalized segments of their membership. Many labour unions found common cause with equity-seeking groups such as the women’s movement, anti-Apartheid activists, and the gay rights movement.

It is easier to write positive portrayals of labour unions when labour movements are doing more good for more people.

Cory Doctorow has been one of the leading lights of the genre’s reappraisal of the role of employment in society and the relationship between workers and employers. Tackling such subjects as employment precarity, labour mobility, and income inequality, Doctorow’s work consistently shows a strong understanding of the labour union world.

Of particular note is his 2010 novel For The Win which depicts a unionization drive amongst workers

Union organizing in the
future is a subject that
provides narrative tension.
(Image via Goodreads)

who are paid to gather resources in a World Of Warcraft-style online game. This depiction shows the necessity of worker organization in the face of capital overreach, and is informed by knowledge of the systemic flaws in traditional labour organizing.

Madeline Ashby’s novel Company Town may be better-known outside of the science fiction community than within, as it was a Canada Reads selection in 2017. Telling the story of a character who works as a labour union staff member is rare, and it provides an opportunity for Ashby to examine aspects of the labour movement that are almost never talked about — like the quotidien work of helping ensure the safety of individual members and providing employment services. Because the protagonist works for a union of sex workers, her story helps illustrate an important purpose for labour organizing in the first place: protection of the most vulnerable workers.

Such protections show up repeatedly in recent works that focus on unionization drives. Alex Wells’ 2017 debut novel Hunger Makes the Wolf and its sequel focus on mining workers on a remote world. Their attempt to tackle the corporation’s exploitative practices through union organizing builds on a depiction of management’s divide-and-conquer tactics and deftly illustrates the difficulty of dealing with corporate loyalist employees. Although the goal of empowering workers is portrayed as being difficult, Wells makes it clear that working as a collective is worthwhile and achievable.

Former Republican congressional candidate and author Lou Antonelli devoted a significant section of his 2016 novel Another Girl, Another Planet to the depiction of an labour board appeal on a Martian colony. At issue in the hearing are scope-of-work issues between a highly skilled and technically competent unionized workforce, and an employer who has used robot labour in violation of the union contract. It is shown that the union is not only in the right on legal grounds, but that there were important safety-related reasons for the scope-of-work clauses in the contract.

This depiction is particularly noteworthy because of Antonelli’s nuanced understanding of the work done by labour union representatives. Scope-of-work negotiations and labour board hearings are not as high-profile as organizing drives or work stoppages such as strikes, but they are a vital part of how union representation can promote workers’ rights.

When asked on Twitter about this subplot, Antonelli explained the positive depiction of the union, “even on a space colony, there will be practical labor issues to be addressed. A space colony isn't built by magic.”

Science fiction’s ability to imagine new social orders is one of the genre’s great strengths. But as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once noted, it sometimes seems easier for authors to imagine the end of the world, than it does for them to imagine alternatives to unfettered neoliberal capitalism.

Žižek’s observation may still hold some truth. But the genre is experiencing a wave of labour-aware science fiction authors that are challenging dominant ideas surrounding the nature of employment and the relationship between capital and worker. This gives us hope for the future of employment.