Essays — Speculative Insight

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

So says the opening blurb that accompanies every piece of media related to Warhammer 40,000, encapsulating the core of what makes this media giant distinct. Across tabletop games, video games, and tie-in novelizations the universe seeks to portray a universal truth of the setting—there is little relief to be found in this far off age. Only conflict. However, whether the darkness is entirely grim can vary from author to author, creating a tonal conflict that may make readers uncertain whether the universe should be taken with grave seriousness or be perceived as tongue in cheek. This essay is doing a deep dive into two of the setting’s most notable heroes and the disparity between their depictions in the context of this grim future - Ibram Gaunt from the Gaunt’s Ghosts series by Dan Abnett and Ciaphas Cain from the Ciaphas Cain novels by Sandy Mitchell. I’ll look at how these contrasting approaches have created a fuller universe, as well as how they have vaulted the faction of the Imperium of Man directly into the spotlight of the series as a whole.

Apr 5
Apr 5 What Lies and Threats

Abby Roberts

J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist, not a scholar of myth. He admitted as much in “On Fairy-Stories,” an essay originally given as a lecture in 1939. Nonetheless, “On Fairy-Stories” shows Tolkien was knowledgeable about myth scholarship of his and preceding generations and had drawn his own conclusions on the origins and functions of myth. For Tolkien, myth was the process by which human beings comprehend and describe the world around them: “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”

Tolkien had begun writing The Lord of the Rings at about the time he delivered “On Fairy-Stories.” His ideas about the cognitive role of myth play out in the novel.

Mar 1
Mar 1 Celibacy & the Single Wizzard

“When it comes to wine, women and song, wizards are allowed to get down and croon as much as they like.” (Sourcery)

Wizards don’t have sex. Except of course where sex = biological gender because wizards are male in almost all instances and will argue any exceptions out of existence.

The celibacy of wizards is an odd quirk of Discworld magic which regularly returns as a running joke. However, most people (including the wizards themselves) are hazy on the ‘why’ behind the sex ban. Is ‘No Sex Please, We’re Wizards’ a rule of the universe, a rule of Unseen University, or more of a guideline?

We’re offered several answers over the course of the series, contradicting one another, and awash with flagrant heteronormativity. Marriage, sex and procreation in the Discworld are inevitable and interchangeable consequences, it seems, of men and women being allowed to come into contact with each other.

Feb 1
Feb 1 The SEA Is Whose?

Ng Yi-Sheng

Fantasy, Science fiction

For years now, I’ve been a passionate champion for Southeast Asian speculative fiction—just check out my Strange Horizons essay, “A Spicepunk Manifesto”,i in which I praise its creation as a decolonial act. At the same time, I’ve struggled with an imbalance at the heart of this genre, obvious to insiders but otherwise almost invisible.

Simply put, the best-known authors of Southeast Asian SFF aren’t racially representative of the region. We’re ethnically Chinese. I’m talking about celebrated names like Zen Cho and Cassandra Khaw from Malaysia; Pim Wangtechawat and SP Somtow from Thailand; Jes and Cin Wibowo from Indonesia; Isabel Yap and Rin Chupeco from the Philippines; Neon Yang and Wen-yi Lee from Singapore; the editors of the landmark anthology The SEA Is Ours, Joyce Chng and Jaymee Goh…

Jan 4
Jan 4 Families of the Future

Nina Niskanen

In this essay I want to explore family in science fiction through the lenses of Octavia Butler, Charlie Jane Anders, Starhawk, John Scalzi, and Martha Wells. Be forewarned that there are spoilers for the following books: the Xenogenesis series by Octavia Butler, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, The Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi (specifically, Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Sagan Diary, The Last Colony, and Zoe’s tale), and the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. These books all have a very different view as to what family means and also, in some ways, a really similar one.

Dec 7
Dec 7 On Chinese author Hai Ya's Hugo Award-winning novelette “The Space-Time Painter”

Christine Yunn-Yu Sun

Chinese author Hai Ya received the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for his story “The Space-Time Painter” (Shikong huashi). It is the title story in the ninth volume of the “Galaxy's Edge” series (Yinhe bianyuan) published by Beijing's New Star Press (Xinxing chubanshe) in April 2022. According to the publisher, “Galaxy's Edge” is “a series of science fiction stories specially designed for young sci-fi fans and their fast-paced urban lifestyle”, “produced as small-format books designed for ease of reading and carrying”, and “gathering outstanding sci-fi works from China and overseas to integrate distant universe and brilliant starlight into every reader's life”.

As of the writing of this essay, there is no evidence that an official translation has been published for English readers to peruse “The Space-Time Painter” as a novelette. This reviewer has produced an English translation of the story. While the translation cannot be published here, it lends assistance to this review, which aims to (a) analyse the story's historical and cultural significance and (b) assess the story as a literary work.

Nov 2
Nov 2 Brutes, Villains & Bureaucrats

They sneer, they stab, they laugh maniacally… and sometimes they stare through you as if you’re worthless. Terry Pratchett is great at many things, but crafting horrifying villains is one of his superpowers. While he has certainly introduced many memorable female villains to the Disc — the Duchess of Lancre, Lily Weatherwax and the Queen of the Faeries for example — and many iconic antagonists that are entirely (or mostly) ungendered such as the Auditors, the Gonne, and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, there is something deeply and deliciously sinister about his male villains. What do many of them have in common? Competence, ruthlessness and a talent for admin.

Rub your hands together in glee, it’s time for an octagonal listicle!

Oct 5
Oct 5 The Redemption Arc

Amy Salley

Science fiction, Fantasy

There you are, mid-book. The good guy is face-to-face with the bad guy. The good guy knows that the bad guy, deep down inside, isn’t evil, that there is a chance to bring the good guy back to the light. The bad guy scoffs! Indeed no! The good guy’s virtue is a weakness! But in a private moment, the bad guy has second thoughts. You are riveted. Will the bad guy come around? If he does, will he deserve forgiveness? Yes, you think. He will.

On that satisfying note, you put your book down. You blink in the light of the real world. You scroll your apps. There’s another accusation of wrongdoing against an author. In fact, the author wrote the book you just put down. The accusation is just one example of behavior that has been going on for years, one of SFF’s worst-kept secrets. No one on the convention circuit ever called him on it and now the simmering collective discomfort has boiled over.

Sep 7
Sep 7 Critical Choices: Time Travel and Identity

Rjurik Davidson

Regrets, who doesn’t have them? Who hasn’t made mistakes? Relationships, jobs, passions, living locations. Sometimes we took too long to end them or change them. Sometimes we jumped too early. Sometimes we never jumped at all and are now trapped in some hellish half-life. ...

These questions are of special interest to psychologists and philosophers, who reflect on life’s choices, on its possibilities and constraints. Each in their own way try to construct an adequate model of free will and determinism, of agency and structure, of identity and personal change – of who we are, of what makes us, of what we can do and what we can’t, and why this is so.

Science fiction has its own privileged sub-genre for examining these questions, one particularly suited to thought experiments about personal timelines, decisions and their consequences, of who we are and how we became that person and not someone else, another version of ourselves – the time travel story.

Aug 3
Aug 3 The Solarpunk Garden: Moving Beyond Eden

Phoebe Wagner

The garden seems to be the solarpunk story in the U.S., in part due to the prominence of garden stories in early solarpunk like the wonderful Glass and Gardens anthologies (World Weaver Press) or the guerilla gardener in Phoebe Shalloway’s fun indie game Solarpunkification. It should be noted that solarpunk is a global genre, but at the same time, “western” storytelling tropes have dominated anglophone literature. And that’s really what I think the garden might be: a comfortable, western motif or plot. In my solarpunk writing, I work to shift each story away from different aspects of “western” storytelling in order to not repeat the ideology that pushed us toward climate change.

The garden is deep in our imaginings, which makes it worth questioning. In this essay, I will explore the garden and question why stories featuring gardens flourish while other, much needed, stories depicting alternate ways we can separate from capitalism seem less prominent.

Jul 6
Jul 6 Men Who Respect Witches III: Male Supporting Characters in Witches Abroad

Far more than in Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters, the men of Witches Abroad exist to serve (either literally, providing skills or assistance, or figuratively, pushing forward the narrative) the female characters, and witches in particular. There are still so many speculative fiction stories in the world where women exist as shadows, love interests and vulnerable plot tokens in comparison to the more active male roles; fantasy has come a long way over the decades, but it was a big deal in 1991 to find a story that so thoroughly turned these tables.[1]

I’ve divided the male characters of Witches Abroad into four handy categories: men who listen, men who assist, men who aren’t men, and men who aren’t there.

Jun 1
Jun 1 Space is dead.

Andrew Dana Hudson

The truth is that for over half a century since the moon landing, we’ve made little progress on the interplanetary manifest destiny I grew up believing in. Today manned spaceflight has no cultural or political momentum to speak of. China and America talk about returning to the moon in the next decade or so, but who knows if it’ll happen. To date less than 700 people have ever been to space. Orbit is filling up with junk.

None of this is to discount the real and meaningful work that NASA and others have done over these past few decades. The unmanned craft they have sent all across the solar system have been great scientific and technological achievements. I have friends who work on such probes, and they are marvels of ingenuity.

However, a big part of futures thinking is projecting current trends and trajectories into the future, and right now—despite 75 years of rocket ships, space stations, moon bases, and Mars domes being the dominant signifier of futurity—our present trends and trajectories point only down, back to our ever-warming Earth.

May 3
May 3 The Underlying Foundation of Magic

Celia Lake

I write about Albion, the magical community of Great Britain, currently between the 1880s and 1950. (Ireland is doing its own thing, magically.) There’s a tremendous amount of change in that time, in terms of medical advances, technology, communication options, and how people live their lives. At the same time, I don’t actually want to change history. Inserting magic into the landscape means thinking about what will and won’t be affected.

When I started writing, I knew I wanted to write about a magical community with a range of magical options. Just like with most other skills, I wanted what someone could do magically to depend on a combination of factors. For magic in my writing, that's a combination of talent (how easy it is for them to learn something), strength (how much they can accomplish with their magic), and knowledge (what they have learned about how to use magic). Someone with less strength but enough knowledge can still be incredibly effective, and someone with raw strength but no training has some definite limits.

Apr 6
Apr 6 The Diversity Paradox

Liz Barr

On 6 September 1966, the general television-watching public got its first look at a little show called Star Trek. It had already been previewed at the World Science Fiction Convention, where it was greeted with enthusiasm by an audience ready to embrace a science fiction television series which took itself—and the genre—seriously. Lost in Space was for kids; Doctor Who… was also for kids, and in any case, wouldn’t reach an American audience for another decade or so. Star Trek was sophisticated and intelligent, and so was its audience.

Just ask them. Frederick Pohl, editor of Galaxy Magazine, predicted a swift cancellation, citing low ratings and suggesting that “Star Trek made the mistake of appealing to a comparatively literate group.”

Mar 2
Mar 2 Men Who Respect Witches I: Male Validation of Women’s Magic in Equal Rites

…one of my favourite tropes is the male sidekick paired with a female protagonist. (Bonus points when there’s no romance involved!) In the 1980s, no matter what popular culture you were consuming, it was incredibly rare to find stories where men assisted the narrative of powerful women… and honestly it still feels a little subversive when I stumble across it these days. In the early Witch books, this dynamic is particularly notable because these stories are grounded in a recurring theme of appreciating tradition and old-fashioned values: the Witches are constantly looking back to how things have always been done, while also being sneakily progressive – and making sure no one expects them to follow any unnecessary social restrictions that are otherwise fine for everyone else.

Feb 3
Feb 3 Ceremony, Subjugation, Sacrifice, and Camellia sinensis

Kemi Ashing-Giwa

In speculative fiction, tea has appeared as an important cultural fixture most often in fantasy, but a number of science fiction stories have featured the drink. This includes C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books, Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe tales (particularly the tellingly named The Tea Master and the Detective) and Becky Chambers’ recent Monk & Robot series.

The book that first comes to my mind, however, is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, first in her ongoing Imperial Radch series. In the domineering empire of the Radch, tea and its attendant rituals are luxuries for humans—nonhumans bound in service to the empire, like the “corpse soldier” main character, Breq, must make do with water. (Or fish sauce.) Beyond tea, I have always been interested in exploring social and political domination, and Leckie’s thoughtful, culturally vivid first novel has been a major influence on my work, especially my own debut novel.

Jan 6
Jan 6 What Is Fantasy Anyway?

Cheryl Morgan