Month: October 2025

Policing perception: weird fiction, Tony Benn, and the warped borders of the real

by Philip A. Suggars

There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeves’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet as they ever did. The sky is the same old blue.

After a while you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little, and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.

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Cultivated Meat: Science Fact and Fiction

By James Henstock

 Cultivated (lab-grown) meat has emerged from science fiction into a genuine commercial product. The promise of sustainable, animal-free meat has captured the interest of governments concerned with national food security in a time of rapid and unpredictable climate change. Supported by a rapidly developing $3Bn industry, cultivated meat is now available for limited public consumption.

However, public opinion on cultivated meat is strongly polarised. Since most people haven’t yet tried cultivated meat, preconceptions have instead been formed by its depictions in science fiction which may be either inspiringly utopian or more commonly, starkly dystopian. Real culture-grown products are being introduced to a consumer base with expectations based on imagined realities. 

In this article I will introduce some of the technology that underpins the production of cultivated meat, and how its origins in the biopharmaceutical industry present both opportunities and challenges for manufacturing appetising food. How far does the reality of cultivated meat match the science fiction representation? Can scientists and storytellers work together towards a shared utopian vision of this Future Food?

A new era: the Post-burger 

On Monday 5th August 2013, Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post unveiled the world’s first cultivated beef burger at a press conference in London, thus launching a new era in food. The burger was cooked and eaten, and whilst being described as ‘close to meat, but not as juicy’ and costing around $325,000 nevertheless inspired a boom in investment that saw the creation of over a hundred start-ups and university spin outs, plus a handful of very well-capitalized companies in the USA, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands (Mead, 2013; Gregory-Manning & Post, 2024). Since 2013 it is widely estimated that over $3.1 billion has been invested into cultivated meat enterprises, with a peak in 2021 (GFI, 2023). New consumer markets are opening up following regulatory approvals in Singapore, China, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Israel and the UK as governments recognise the value of a diversified ‘Alternative Proteins’ ecosystem in enhancing food security in response to growing population challenges and climate change. 

Yet the concept of ‘synthetic’ meat has been in the public consciousness for generations. Since first being articulated in fiction in 1897 (as a gift from the Martians in Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz), social and technological revolutions have triggered particular bursts of literary creativity in the 1930s, 1950’s and 1960s, corresponding to increasingly mechanised intensive farming practices and the overall boom of technological progress in the 20th century, not least of which was in biomedicine and laboratory cell culture. In a 1931 essay on the future of science, Winston Churchill wrote:

‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished. That gloomy Utopia of tabloid meals need never be invaded. The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.’ 

Churchill’s predictions and the early optimism of fin de siècle authors in humankind’s salvation through science are admittedly taking some time to realise, yet the technology required to bring cultivated meat to fruition is being developed at pace. 

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Energy Economies in Science Fiction

By Jo Lindsay Walton

‘Embers’: Stranded Assets

Wole Talabi’s short story ‘Embers’ (2024) explores the potential consequences of energy transition for a rural community in Nigeria, focusing on one oil worker who cannot let go of dreams of petrochemical prosperity. 

Kawashida fuel cells were invented by a team of scientists at the ShinChi Technology Company of Japan […] By using a proprietary genetic modification technique to rewire the metabolism of a heterotrophic bacterial strain, making it autotrophic, and then further splicing the synthetic microbe with a cocktail of high cell density, rapid reproduction genes, Dr. Haruko Kawashida and her team created a living, breathing, renewable supply of energy for the planet. The synthetic autotroph used concentrated sunlight to efficiently consume carbon dioxide and exchange electrons, creating a steady stream of electricity.1

How convenient! And as if its abundant, net carbon-negative energy weren’t enough, Kawashida cell technology also revolutionizes wastewater treatment. It’s a near-perfect deus ex machina for the climate crisis. 

But not everyone is happy. When Kawashida decimates the oil industry, Uduak is abruptly cut off from his sponsored scholarship. Cast adrift, Uduak becomes a kind of inverted solarpunk protagonist—he uses grit and ingenuity not to jury-rig funky green utopiatech, but rather to attempt to revive the village’s derelict oil refinery. Even though clean energy is widely available, Uduak argues that the village’s real needs remain unmet, and he remains hostile to the post-carbon vision laid out by his idealistic rival, Affiong.

The story comes to a grisly and tragic conclusion—murder, arson, suicide. Without excusing Uduak’s rather OTT response, we can see that there is a clear lack of compassion to support him transition to the era of a stabilised climate. One wonders if Uduak might also have a point: will the village as a whole be left behind by government, industry and civil society? Just as Uduak was left behind by the village?

Uduak becomes what is sometimes called a ‘stranded asset,’ something once valuable, whose value has vanished because of a probably permanent shift in its circumstances. The story’s core tension—between his thwarted social mobility and the new sustainable technology—reflects the current dilemma of green transition for petro-states like Nigeria. 

It also implies broader questions about energy transitions. Within science fiction, transformation of the energy system often forms the hard-to-imagine bridge between the dystopian present and the ambiguously utopian future. There are the dilithium crystals and warp cores in Star Trek, there is the Grid in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. But the questions which arise are not just about what energy will power the future. They are also about how societies will allocate and manage such energy.  Could energy itself somehow be the foundation of a just and equitable economy? If the flow of energy were to directly underpin the flow of money, could this support systems that are more cooperative, collective, and liberated, and less exploitative? Systems that are not just energy-based, but also just based pure and simple?

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