Guest edited by Paul March-Russell. With contributions by Angela Acosta, Nick Hubble, Paul Kincaid, Nina Allan, Andrew M. Butler and a new regular column by Kat Kourbeti. Includes an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson by Henry Farrell, book reviews, and a tribute to Christopher Priest by Paul March-Russell.
Cover art by James Gillham.
Science Fiction and the DSTL at Coventry University
by Allen Stroud
This article was first published in Vector #297 in 2023. Since then, the work of the Creative Futures project has been published in the anthology Creative Futures: Beyond and Within (2025) by Flame Tree Press.
We’re going to change the world.
Some children think that when they are young. There is a confidence in being that young and not really understanding just how big the world is.
As we get older, we become aware of our insignificance. One human being, amidst several billion who are living on this planet right now and several billion more who have ever lived.
That recognition can lay heavily upon us. It confines our thinking as we consider what we might create, what I might create, what you might create. Making a difference, making that change, as mentioned, is further out of reach.
When we consider the future, the inhibitions of our experience, of our awareness of being a tiny part of the world that we thought we might affect, can be an insurmountable burden in and of itself.
There are people who retain their imaginative passion. Some end up in the fields of science and technology. Others continue to wonder and decide to write books. They become science fiction authors, like me.
The future of our species retains a fascination for many of us, no matter what choices we make in life. We cannot know for certain what will happen, but we can imagine. Sometimes,we dwell a little too much on the great heroes, who might become great figures of history in other narratives, or the shapers of what will happen next.
The different paths of those interested in the future are roads to the same place, the world which will exist in the years ahead. Our priorities might be different, but we all want that world to be better than the one in which we live.
When I accepted the role of principal investigator on the Creative Futures project, a collaboration between Coventry University and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), there were some concerns expressed around working with researchers from an organisation linked directly with the Ministry of Defence. A recent example cited was a comparison to the Raytheon sponsorship of the Hugo Awards at Worldcon 2021. Every individual needs to make an ethical choice for themselves in that regard, but that choice is not a simple or easy one no matter what decision is made. Being a part of any conversation allows you to contribute to it and shape it. The value of that cannot be understated.
Continue reading “Creative Futures”Kathleen Hughes interviews Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero, the authors behind Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence (Bloomsbury Academic)
KH: Tell us a little about how and why you came to write about the stories behind Artificial Intelligence – the background and aims of the project.
KV: There are already many, many books about AI, and it wasn’t our intention to add yet another book about AI to the vast collections that there are in the universe right now. Instead, what we wanted to do was add some clarity to the argument about artificial intelligence, and ask the question why or how did we get here, and what role culture has played in the collective imagination of human beings creating something like artificial intelligence.
DB: It began with us trying to demystify and explore AI. We were talking a lot about it because “AI” seemed to be completely dominating headlines and, both positively and negatively, engaging people across social media. That was the starting point. “AI” (large language models and the like) were new and creeping into discourse everywhere, and we were talking about how it would affect our professions.
At the same time, we’re both lifelong fans of science fiction and fantasy! And we love storytelling in all its forms. We are readers and cinemagoers. Despite having long careers in the tech and entertainment sectors, we both have a background in the humanities: Kelly studied Classics, and Dave studied medieval language and literature. So, we couldn’t help but see AI through that lens.
Once we started talking regularly about what seemed to be going on in the world, we realised that humanity has been rehearsing this conversation for centuries. Ideas about not just artificial minds as a theoretical concept but also what they would mean in the workplace and at home, about fears of replacement and fears of conflict and the environment, constantly arise in our culture.
I remember that when ChatGPT was released, one of the first comments I saw on Twitter was somebody joking about Skynet coming online, a reference to the Terminator films; it made me think, “This is how we understand technology – through the lens of culture, memes and movies.”
Continue reading “Myth-Made Machines”By Jesse Rowell
On its face, Brain Fruit is a simple tale of evolution through mutual symbiosis. Being a fan of symbiont sci-fi like Hal Clement’s classic 1950’s novel, Needle, and Peter Watts’s 2010 short story, “The Things,” I eagerly awaited Stephen Oram’s tale of artificial speciation in a hostile world of rock storms and extinction. Mechanical bee symbionts? Count me in. Faceless fungus droids? Even better.
Oram couches his novella in evolution with its first sentence, “The evolutionary crawl continues its upward curve…” (p.5), but the story is anything but a crawl with its cinematic scenes and wry cuts of humor, all standard characteristics of a good Oram story. “I take a dry look at the world and see the irony,”1 he tells me. In person, Oram shows soft-spoken grace with a patience for answering my questions, reminiscent of my secondary school science teacher right down to his casual t-shirt with its wrangled neckline. Meanwhile, Oram’s writing brims with quips like, “Let me fill you full of your heritage,” (p.10) and “This is a new experience, and we hate it,” (p.29).
The humor is sharp, the science is sound, so what more is there to say? Quite a bit, if we are to measure the book’s reviews in public and private forums. This is the type of book that needs to be read more than once. From contributions to zoefuturism (see issues 302 and 303 of BSFA’s Vector), to presenting dangerous ideas tinged with pathos, Brain Fruit contains multitudes.
Danger is delicious. Placing creatures in conflict within ethical predicaments is what science fiction does best. Oram tests the physical and ethical limits of his narrator, an artificial bee that connects with a fruit and insect to become a trioid with a tragically short life, much like the human organoids that haunt his imagination. Oram refers me to the brain-spinal cord models developed in recent studies as he grapples with the agency of organoids, and by extension, his fictional trioid. “How long ethically can they be kept alive? Do they have the same rights as a lab animal? At what point do they become human?”1
Continue reading “Dangerous Liaisons: A Guide to Robot Symbiosis”
What’s gone wrong with time? Once, we might tell ourselves, the lines of travel were straight, clean, and unambiguous, even if they diverged: Doc Brown might have been eccentric, but he was authoritative when he explained the idea of forking parallel universes to Marty McFly – and the cinema audience of 1989 – in Back To the Future II (Gale and Zemeckis).
In doing this, he was bringing a version of many-worlds theory (Gribbin, 2020) to popular audiences on a Hollywood scale, but also building upon prior notions of linear time travel which owed much to the Industrial Revolution, as Adam Roberts (2014) points out in a magisterial essay accompanying the British Film Institute’s season Days of Fear and Wonder. Considering the impact of Wells’ The Time Machine, Roberts notes that what
pre-Wells stories have in common is the arbitrariness of their temporal pretexts: magic, dreams, spirits. There’s no interest there in futurological speculation or historical research, and no sense that time travel could belong to the material world of science and technology […] One reason for this new focus on the machine part is that it makes dirigible something that had, hitherto, been imagined as beyond our capacity to control or steer. Dreams and magic happen to us, inflicting upon us a Scrooge-like passivity. Memory plagues us, or grants us wistful pleasure, but we can do nothing about the events that the memory recalls. A time machine, on the other hand, is something we can control. This, it turns out, is the specific dream that captures the imagination of the 20th century. (p.40)
Noting the arrival of a sophisticated time loop narrative in an episode of a My Little Pony TV show – where every attempt Twilight Sparkle makes to heed a warning from her future self seems to bring disaster closer – David Wittenberg addressed the evolution of Roberts’ dream in the 21st century, arguing that one can “reasonably surmise that the popular appreciation of time travel techniques has arrived at a certain denouement.” (2012, p.207) On the far side of that denouement in the 2020s, temporal shenanigans are both messier and more familiar than ever before.
Perhaps these narratives have arisen, not just because speculative genres, temporal theorising, and the tropes of the fantastic have so fully permeated mainstream pop culture, but also because of wider experiences which have shaken received notions of time and how we experience it. Pandemic lockdowns at the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak rendered life restricted and repetitive for many, and forced us to confront the fact that during a pandemic, its end – defined only in retrospect – is not clearly in sight (Charters and Heitman, 2021). Digital technologies’ pace of development and spread is faster than any previous innovation in human history, and yet many remain cut off, with connectivity slowing or even reversing in some parts of the world (United Nations, 2020). Climate change and its attendant uncertainties also attack previous understandings of time on multiple fronts, from aspirational long-term Net Zero visions which may also generate opposition (Valenzuela and Lezaun, 2024) to shifting warnings of how much time remains to avoid the worst impacts — as one report put it (McGrath, 2019), “Do you remember the good old days when we had ’12 years to save the planet’?”.
Continue reading “A Lover’s Quarrel with Time: Solvej Balle and the Current Crisis”The following is an edited transcript, abridged from the original conversation that closed the BSFA/SFF AGM on 14 June 2026. The event was held online on Zoom.
Paul March-Russell: I’m honoured to have Lisa Tuttle here to discuss her novella My Death, which was originally published by P.S. Publishing in 2004, reprinted by NYRB Classics, and is now available in a beautiful edition from Vintage. A number of Lisa’s other works are also being reprinted by Valancourt – A Nest of Nightmares and later this year Lost Futures, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1993. Lisa, it’s a delight to have you here. My Death is a wonderfully intricate work, so I’m going to be very careful to not give anything away. But what was it that first inspired you to write the novella?
Lisa Tuttle: It was a few things that came together. One is that I’ve always been interested in women writers, women artists, particularly women who’ve been sort of forgotten. I can’t think who it was, someone like Gail Godwin, who was recently talking about when she was at college, she always felt slightly embarrassed being particularly interested in women writers. It didn’t seem right. You were supposed to look at the great writers, and they were all men. Well, I’m from a slightly younger generation, and I think that by the time I got to college, there were women – women’s writing, women’s work, women’s history. The courses were just starting. This was back in 1970. So, I didn’t feel this wasn’t proper. It was like, no, now is the time to find out about all these forgotten women or the women who haven’t been celebrated.
I also read a lot of biographies and autobiographies by women and about women. And at one point, years ago, I thought I might write a biography, but it all seemed a bit too daunting. What suited me better was to write an imaginary biography of an imaginary writer or artist or muse. That was another subject that interested me: women playing the role of muse to a male artist or writer. I’d recently read a memoir of Robert Graves, can’t remember by whom (we’ve just moved house so my books are everywhere!). But one of the things was that the author and his wife went to live in Mallorca, and he had a letter of introduction to Graves, who was at that time living with the American poet and critic, Laura Riding, and the stories that he told about her just fascinated me. I was interested in writing about someone who’d been connected to a more famous male, but had her own talents, more than just being a muse. So, I took elements of Laura Riding’s life for my imaginary writer, and I began in a kind of semi-autobiographical fashion to write about a woman writer, who would have been around my age at the time.
The writer was widowed which I was not, and am still not, I’m very happy to say. But she had some of my own characteristics. That was a kind of a tease, in a way, because some of the things were true. I made her be from Texas, going to college in New York, and then coming over to Britain, winding up in Scotland. And the writer that she is interested in is someone she first encountered as a painted female figure, a kind of mythical person. Because that was another element. I’ve recently been going through my old notebooks, and some of the same names were in there from this story I’ve never written. It was called ‘The Fountain’, and there was a Willie Logan and a Hermione, I think, or Hermine. It was a sort of Circe story with a magical fountain and men being turned into animals. But anyway, I never wrote that, but it was something I was thinking about at the same time. And then Pete Crowther invited me to write a novella, and so suddenly I had a reason to write this, because I couldn’t really see it as a novel and it was way too complicated for a short story. And, in fact, I didn’t even know how it was going to end. When I began writing it, it was really just a character a bit like me researching someone who turns out to still be alive, so she can actually go and interview her, and then finding these rather odd connections or echoes of her life.
Continue reading “A Deeper Magic: Paul March-Russell in conversation with Lisa Tuttle”
Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What was your initial attraction to works of science fiction in translation, and what made you decide to start reviewing them?
Rachel Cordasco: I started reviewing Anglophone science fiction for John DeNardo’s SF Signal in the mid-2010s. One day, he asked if I’d like to review a work of Chinese science fiction in translation—The Three-Body Problem. I jumped at the chance and absolutely loved that book. But it was only when he then sent me Jacek Dukaj’s The Old Axolotl and Marek Huberath’s Nest of Worlds that I actually started thinking about what it meant that these texts were all translated. I had never thought about where science fiction was written, and I realized that, of course, it was written around the world. This led me to think about what other works of science fiction there were in English translation. I started a list on a personal blog, and before I knew it, I had found dozens of titles. Ten years later, I’ve catalogued thousands of short-form and long-form works of SF in translation. I’ve always loved learning other languages and I read a lot of classics in English translation when I was a teenager, so bringing together two of my favorite things—speculative fiction and translation—made so much sense. I started asking John to send me as much SFT (science fiction in translation) as he could, and then, when SF Signal shut down, I started my own site dedicated to SFT.
JPG: In the ten years since founding https://www.sfintranslation.com/ what are some of the most interesting things that you’ve learned, and some of the biggest gaps in the field that you’ve identified?
RC: One of the most surprising things I learned is that there is so much SFT out there. Early science fiction texts, especially from Western Europe in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, were being translated into English very quickly (though apparently not very accurately, in some cases, ahem ahem Jules Verne’s stories). When you start looking into the speculative novels, anthologies, and collections that were published in translation throughout the 20th century, you find that so many of these books just flew under the radar or went out of print quickly. This process of finding and cataloging as much SFT as I can is basically my way of excavating items that aren’t buried but just hidden in plain sight.
I’ve learned that Japanese science fiction developed at warp speed following the American occupation of the island following World War Two; I’ve learned that giants of American golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon wrote introductions to anthologies of Russian science fiction at the height of the Cold War; and I’ve learned that, despite the fact that so much speculative fiction has been translated into English, the Anglophone genre world has mostly (except for the 70s and 80s) ignored SFT…until recently. Hopefully, the tide is shifting once again toward SFT and more speculative fiction readers will learn about what people are writing and thinking about around the world.
Continue reading ” Jean-Paul L. Garnier interviews Rachel Cordasco”Produced in collaboration with Vector.
When we started thinking about the call for articles last year, we wanted to approach it in a Zoefuturistic manner – by giving space and creating opportunities for the issue(s) and articles to ‘become.’ As a new topic, we were very aware that this is a process of exploration and discovery, more than a call to enforce and curate what we think Zoefuturism is. It needed to be reflective and malleable.
In this article, we will look at three of these creative reflections of Zoefuturism through different lenses:
While all three pieces explore very different topics and perspectives, they are all reflections of Zoefuturism through practitioners’ creative action, and they form a Zoefuturistic response, as reactions to the introduction of Zoefuturism, playing with the ideas of our futures through relationality and constant becomings.
Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC). This creative-critical submission, in the form of a full zine, was made by the co-directorate of the LSFRC to explore questions around the relationships between humans with the other-than-human through the idea of “compost,” inspired by Zoefuturism. Follow the link to read and explore the articles and artworks, and to learn how co-authoring a zine with nature turned out.
Station to Station by Goblin Futures (https://goblin-futures.itch.io/station-to-station).
*Fishpunk is something we made up, not a pre-existing genre. In other words, Station to Station is fishpunk, and anything else people want to consider fishpunk they can, just as long as it is Approved By Fish.
**Weirdhope is a term coined by COPY/PASTE CO-OP, which they describe as a form of eco-punk that is stylistically and thematically opposed to grimdark. For more, you can check out their game ECO MOFOS!! or the webpage for the Weird Hope Engines exhibition that ran in the Bonington Gallery in 2025.
By Christopher Morrison
In the West[1] there is one story structure primarily taught to readers and practitioners alike. The Aristotelean 3-Act Structure/The Hero’s Journey. I’m well aware that’s two structures, but they are so inter-linked now as to be extensions of one another. And, most importantly, they share a core philosophical purpose. That purpose: re-enforce Heroic Individualism. The Protagonist must be the one to solve the problem. They, and only THEY. Some assistance is rendered along the way, but in the climax, it is them and them alone (usually smashing) their way to the end. And that end as a teleological conclusion forgives (or ignores) all things that came before.
Anything else is considered a “subversion of” or “breaking the rules”. But, as Matthew Salsess asks, “Who writes those rules?” (Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. New York: Catapult, 2021.) It is the dominant culture in the West. Patriarchal, white supremacist[2], heteronormative. Those values that hold up a human being… all at once illustrating the protagonist as special and the norm. The story’s purpose is to make them a static, fixed Hero.
So, if this structure serves to support the Culture of Being in the West, what structures could support a culture of Becoming from Asian Cultures not shackled to the mast of Individualism?[3] What structures could a writer creating in a Zoefuturist context rely on to illustrate Human Becoming and relieve their woes about what comes next in their story?
Taking a cue from the absolute basic root of Dr. Ames’ work and the language he is immersed in, let’s look at ShengSheng (生生) – Procreativity. This word Dr. Ames presents as a crucial part of the early Cosmology of Confucian thought[4] and gives us a perfect jumping-off point:
Repetition.
We all understand one of the crushing features of humanity is the repetition of life. Buddhism tackles this issue with the simple mantra: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” The road to human becoming must run directly through repetition just as the word and pictogram in Chinese suggests in its very form.
However, the West abhors repetition[5] (except in cases of utter personal sacrifice to the destruction of oneself[6]) and worships at the feet of novelty.
New or perish! You are only as good as your last ____!
Yet repetition itself holds true meaning-making. True becoming. But in Western storytelling it’s relegated to a “callback” or some “comment” on one form or another and not the core engine to drive story and meaning.
Let’s explore a few structures where repetition is the heart and engine of its purpose.
Spirals: first brought to my attention through the work of Jane Alison.[7] Humans are pattern recognition machines, therefore to create a literary or dramatic spiral one repeats meaning by bringing back a panoply of artistic resources. Place, character(s), theme(s), color, etc. Most powerful in the resource kit is repeating events in your story. What one may lose in novelty one gains in grounding your audience – their pattern recognition (and their simple act of becoming themselves – living life) brings the repetition to awareness and, if done well, the question – Why? Why repeat this now? Here? Or the repetition simply becomes the Breath of the narrative. Inhaling on return – exhaling on leaving – or vice versa. It is a structure that is close to life itself.
While not a Zoefuturist film, let’s look at Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, dir. In the Mood for Love. Block 2 Pictures, 2000). A love story where its lovers are not allowed to consummate their love… or even say the word to each other. They are married to others while falling in love with each other. It is primarily a Spiral of place. Hallway, stairway, alleyway. All intermediate places – not defined. Not of themselves, but conduits to other locations. Perfect locations for a relationship that isn’t formed – isn’t one or the other. The characters are also suspended; neither really married nor free; not in love, but in love. Repetitions of their own conditions. The continuous use of smoke as a repeated image in the film is powerful. Sure, it looks damn cool, but it’s neither solid nor liquid. Neither here nor there… just slowly looping around itself and evaporating. Repeating. Spiraling.
Next, we’ll look at ‘nested’ structure.
Mainly known from the 1001 Arabian Nights and the film Rashomon. Nested stories are stories-within-stories without being anthology or connected episodic in nature. Story layers. Characters may re-appear, settings may re-appear[8] but what certainly repeats is theme and/or a central question or as Henry Lien likes to point out: culture[9].
Again, here’s a structure that reflects life’s journey. We are stories-within-stories. We hold our story, our family’s story, we are minor or major characters in everyone’s stories that surround us. And other’s stories can affect us directly or indirectly if we appear in them or not. As Dr. Ames points out through Zoetological philosophy we are “…interdependent human ‘becomings’ rather than discreet human beings… [through a relational understanding].[10]”
Nested structure allows writers to sift through the depth of our humanity all in one frame. The flow of this structure is the essence of interconnected ‘becoming’. Again, like life, the more we lift the lid and interact with the depths and layers underneath the more meaning and interconnectedness we experience.
In conclusion, ‘spiral’ and ‘nested’ narrative structures are available to writers of every form and genre, but are especially powerful in a Zoetological and/or Zoefuturist context. They allow for a direct reflection into the bones of the work and to elevate stories from a single individualist journey into the wider world-view of human becomings. By leaving behind the strictures of Western storytelling obsessions we can imagine and enact a more interconnected future.
[1] Excluding Indigenous cultures.
[2] Colonial, at best.
[3] This is where I’ll ask you to forgive me. I’m a practitioner and not a scholar, perhaps others have done this work – I look forward to hearing about them if so… Henry Lien’s work comes to mind.
[4] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.
[5] To the point: In an early screenwriting class the “wisdom” of never repeating a location was handed down to me. (This was the working philosophy of a high-powered producer and their thoughts on scriptwriting.)
[6] Puritan work ethic for example. Or (especially for women) the carer role taken to its extreme… it is lauded and pitied and ridiculed all at once.
[7] Alison, J. (2019). Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (p. 143). Catapult.
[8] Or remain the same as with Rashomon.
[9] Lien, H. (2025). Spring, summer, asteroid, bird: The art of Eastern storytelling (1st ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
[10] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.
As meaning-seeking beings, we live in alternating cycles of embracing or fearing the natural world. Literature offers a good framework for observing this ancient and ongoing ‘battle’ for the human spirit between the manifestation of our reverence and stewardship of nature and our fear of something that could so easily kill us. As industrialisation moved us further away from nature, and humans started living almost completely dis-attached from the natural world, we saw a resurgence of the need to find belonging in the greater order. The last two hundred years have presented a shift in our attitudes towards our surroundings and an influx of philosophies and literature that try to reconnect humans with nature.
Environmentalism has clearly entered the focus of modern worries, but it often presents shortsighted forms that ignore the bigger picture. By focusing on the more immediate and visible concerns, environmental campaigns often prioritise narrow objectives while overlooking the negative structural downside of some of the green politics (e.g. “green colonialism). The climate crisis and the development of the Anthropocene as a theoretical background for our concerns are lacking in a holistic outlook of reality and often showcase similar dangers as our previous attitudes towards the natural world. While there is a rising concern about the land, it is through an anthropocentric point of view. As long as we keep seeing ourselves as separate to the non-human lifeworld, we will live incomplete existences, and our solutions will be forever lacking. What is needed is “a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings’” (Ooi, n.d.). And this reflection on the need for interconnectedness has recently been championed by new subgenres of science fiction.
Storytelling has always been a mirror to the soul of humanity. It focuses the collective emotions and concerns in a metaphorical and philosophical format that offers more than simple escapism. Up until now, science fiction in particular has offered the best platform where the concerns of our present and future are laid out in the format of cautionary tales of how our environmental damage leads to post-apocalyptic scenarios. There are countless examples of stories focused on ecological collapse such as The First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon that explores humanity’s eventual extinction, the dystopian future of Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky where humanity is almost extinct and earth ravaged by radiation, The Road by Cormac McCarthy that is set in a post-apocalyptic setting following a cataclysmic event, the grimdark world of the Warhammer 40K universe where after the AI wars mankind is plummeted into a dark universe of chaos and death. These are just some examples out of a very vast body of literature which express the climate anxiety our society feels.
Continue reading “Dreams of Arcadia: Zoefuturism and the Re-Enchantment of the Deep Self “
