Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (2026) is marketed as a feminist film, going to great lengths to comment on violence against women, harassment, and gender inequality in the workplace. Two women occupy important narrative positions in the film, and both experience setbacks on account of their gender—Dr Cornelia Euphronious uses only her first initial and not her full name when publishing her academic papers, leading Frankenstein’s monster to assume they were written by a man, and Myrna Malloy is not taken seriously by her colleagues as a competent detective. The main antagonist is a man who cuts out the tongues of the women he murders and keeps them in a jar—a rather unsubtle point about the silencing of women.
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‘Love is an intervention,’ Jeanette Winterson writes three times in the face of environmental collapse in The Stone Gods; ‘[n]ot romance, not sentimentality, but a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dictate what will be.’But is it an intervention that works?
In the novel, Billie/Billy and Spike/Spikkers (for simplicity, Billie and Spike when referred to as a couple in this article) are reincarnated across three space-times, repeatedly forming a queer, sometimes transhuman, bond until they are separated by death against the backdrop of ecological disaster. The Stone Gods has been frequently analysed as, if not outrightly a text about the Anthropocene, one that critiques the destructive behaviour of humanity as a species at a planetary scale. Winterson’s ‘love’ is broadly interpreted as a symbol of hope and change not only in ecocritical debates about the possibility of historical change but also in discussions of concepts such as techno-escapism, queer transhumanism, or sustainability. Few of these analyses, however, have looked into what the novel actually says about human agency in the face of total environmental destruction. Specifically, can people intervene meaningfully in the trajectory toward ecological collapse?
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.