Essays — Speculative Insight

It was sometime around 2012 that I first got tapped on the shoulder by the ghost of this young girl born into a sort of forest utopia. Catastrophe falls on her people—in the form of the downstream effects of toxic agriculture—and she has to fight her way back to the source to fix the problem.

This felt like familiar ground to me. I’m a fantasy writer; I’ve venerated the Hero’s Journey ever since I first read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in my early 20s. I can spot a Hero’s Journey a mile away on a foggy day. I knew where this was going.

Seventy years ago, the literature professor Joseph Campbell’s personal charisma and power as a teacher broke the idea of a heroic quest monomyth free from academia and turned it loose onto the world.

Nov 1
Nov 1 Almost a Witch

Freyja Stokes

Mrs Palm is an interesting Discworld character, as is the historical context her story references. Discworld’s foremost witch, Granny Weatherwax, describes Mrs Palm as ‘almost a witch.’ These two characters provide a Discworld lens through which we can explore related real-world history and how that is applicable now: “[i]n Discworld, stories and lies come together to create something necessary and meaningful. […] It is a training ground upon which to learn that beliefs have power, regardless of whether or not they are, conventionally speaking, true (Fellows 2014, p.216).”

The real-world history and stories about “witches” directly inform the portrayal of Discworld’s witches. Discworld’s sex work and sex workers are similarly informed by real-world history and narratives.

Oct 4
Oct 4 Lives under empire

Eric de Roulet

Amid the dizzying flurry of political news and global affairs developments in 2025, it might be difficult to imagine why we would need more fiction about imperialism, dictatorships, and the manufacturing of consent for forever-wars. After all, doesn’t our own world abound with examples of powerful countries exploiting and extracting from weaker ones, of autocrats (or aspiring ones) extending their tentacles into every aspect of public and private life, of empires lurching from one war to another in attempt to justify their continued existence, and of supposed authority figures and thought leaders falling in line?

Yet this is exactly what we see in the setting that unifies the stories in One Message Remains, a collection of short fiction by Premee Mohamed.

Sep 6
Sep 6 Towards a Taxonomy of Historical Science Fiction

Brenda Clough

… is there such a thing as historical science fiction? There must be science fiction set in the past. We don’t hear a lot about it – it’s not a major marketing category dominating the best-seller lists, like historical romance or historical fantasy. But a little digging turns up enough titles to show it really is a separate genre. So, let’s think about historical science fiction some more.

Aug 2
Aug 2 Glass Geographies

Ben Lockwood

The first time I read Ivy Grimes's Glass Stories (2024), I didn't find much in the way of geographic themes in the pieces. In fact, in one of the first notes I took I wrote that these stories seem to "float" in space and time, not fully located anywhere or anytime we might recognize as our own. But this is only on the surface, and upon revisiting the pieces I found that Grimes is doing much more with the places and spaces her characters inhabit than I initially realized. So, the purpose of this essay is to examine the ways these geographic themes manifest in Grimes’s work.

Jul 5
Jul 5 Upwardly Mobile and Hating it

While the city of Ankh-Morpork is certainly on the grubby side, it rarely descends into anything approximating noir, except when we are looking through the eyes of Sam Vimes, captain and later Lord Commander of the City Watch.

In the first three City Watch novels, which work as individual police procedural mysteries as well as a fantasy trilogy exploring the idea that monarchy is indistinguishable from villainy,[1] our protagonist appears on the page as the epitome of every crumpled drunk detective who ever brooded his way through a pulp fiction magazine, or the monochrome opening credits of a grimdark TV show.

The difference between Vimes and every other crumpled drunk detective, however, is that the usual noir hero with one foot in the gutter and an endless array of world-weary sarcastic quips is usually immune to narrative change.

Jun 7
Jun 7 The Dublin Portal… Or The Dublin Intrusion?

Val Nolan

Science fiction, Fantasy

Styled as the kind of ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ that’s ‘indistinguishable from magic’ which Science Fiction and Fantasy has rehearsed for decades,[1] the Dublin/New York Portal—an interactive public video installation—represents a sincere artistic effort to flatten the curvature of spacetime by bringing together cities geographically distant and temporally out of synch, while, in the process, encouraging people to ‘rethink the meaning of unity’.[2] A freestanding 3.4 meter circular screen livestreaming images across the world, this ‘technology art sculpture’[3] is one of several envisioned by Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys (with the object itself designed by engineers at the Creativity and Innovation Centre at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University).[4] The Dublin Portal on the city’s North Earl Street was established with the collaboration of Dublin City Council in May 2024. Its corresponding screen was initially placed on the Flatiron South Public Plaza at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street in New York City …

May 3
May 3 In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future There Are Only Warriors

Kyle Tam

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