Positive Visions of the Future: A review of Saving Utopia by Joe P. L. Davidson

Reviewed by Chisom Umeh

Is there a better time to talk about a less-warring, more prosperous, empathetic, and humane world than the present moment, where the militaries of powerful countries have taken up arms against each other, dropping bombs on civilians and tearing down cultural heritage that took decades to build?

Sadly, living in such a moment rarely engenders the appetite for dreams and imaginings of a better future. Rather, it makes us envision periods where the worst that could happen to humanity has happened: nuclear bombs have detonated, floods have sunk major cities, or an asteroid has lodged itself in the Earth’s crust. We see the presidents of powerful countries threatening or actually invading less powerful ones and that prompts us to take up pens and weave the most authoritarian panopticons we can imagine. We watch anti-science rhetoric spread in the media about climate change and we’re tempted to paint pictures of doomed, environmentally degraded futures.

The current happenings rarely inspire utopian stories in us. Instead, they often steer us toward the catastrophic.

In Joe P. L. Davidson’s Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (The MIT Press), we learn that this way of thinking hasn’t always been the case. There has never been a time when there wasn’t some form of global turmoil. However, many writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were inclined to look beyond the specific troubles that plagued their era and envisioned possible futures where the problems had been solved. This period saw a blossoming of utopian fiction, coloring the literature of the time with visions of better and hopeful lives. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi (1983), and many more, are amongst the books Davidson touches on, in showing how writers of the past treated the situations around them.

Davidson shows us in this book that, even amidst the current horrors and seeming pessimism about the future, utopian stories can still be told and told well. He helps us see that, amidst the seeming dearth of utopian fiction, some writers are still standing up for the genre and putting in the work.

I particularly loved how the modern texts like Claire G Colman’s Enclave (2022), River Solomon’s The Deep (2019), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), were juxtaposed with older books like Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890). This juxtaposition helps readers understand how utopian thinkers of the past viewed the concept, how they related it to their particular society and preoccupations, and how recent writers have engaged with the subject, noting the differences between both modes of approach.

While the older writers wrote utopian futures only as they could envision them, fashioning worlds imbued with whatever politics they liked, more recent authors take a different approach when crafting utopian stories. In Kathleen Hughes’ PhD thesis, Imagining the Future of Work (2024), she mentions that in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, “The past and the present, just as much as the future, are presented by Morris as temporary and transient.” But the more contemporary writers, according to Davidson, employ a method that he has come to call “postdystopian utopia.” This is a mode of writing utopias that doesn’t overlook the horrors of the present or the past, to weave into existence future worlds of abundance and peace. It acknowledges existing injustices and, rather than dismissing them in favor of an imaginary time, incorporates them into the story and uses them to make a point:

“What I call postdystopian utopia,” Davidson writes, “is a precarious balance between liberation and horror, in which the possibility of better worlds becomes apparent only by acknowledging worse worlds. The postdystopian utopia addresses the bad feelings that prevail in contemporary culture.”

The concept of postdystopian utopia is Davidson’s idea of how the genre of utopian fiction can be jump-started and reintroduced into global discourse meaningfully, as exemplified by recent books like Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), and Claire North’s Notes From A Burning Age (2021). It is not hungry to leap to a time when every problem of the day has been magically resolved. Rather, it approaches genre with the hope of “confronting and overcoming the skepticisms about the possibility of alternative worlds.”

A close reading of Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave (2022) in the book shows us exactly what a postdystopian utopia may look like in writing. Christine, the protagonist in the novel, is exiled from a community called Safetown where she has lived all her life and has been made to believe is the only safe place left in the world. True to her conviction, the outside world is indeed a hellscape. But, by chance, she gets a ticket to a train that takes her to a part of the country that has become a utopia in all practical sense. She is shocked beyond belief that such a place exists and yet she had lived in Safetown all the while with its segregation, discrimination, and 24-hour surveillance. Davidson uses this story to show us what a postdystopian utopian narrative is like, and how this category is distinct from both classic utopias or dystopias. In the novel, dystopian worlds are touched upon within the pages of utopia. Dystopian societies aren’t done away with, but are made to exist side by side with the utopian ones, though the latter is the more dominant force, persisting amidst other negative societies.

In Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Davidson shows the same genre convention in how a seemingly utopian underwater society exists even though the world above is anything but perfect. “They are undisturbed by the outside world; their watery society is protected from the forces of white supremacy on the land. In fact, such is the happiness of the wajinru that they can almost forget the Middle Passage.”

Davidson succeeds at drawing parallels between the past and alternate futures, connecting one with the other through discussing nostalgia, apocalypse, and trauma. With a scholarly lens and strong research, the book, through the concept of postdystopian utopia, advocates for a way of approaching utopian fiction that could once again breathe life into the genre and, perhaps, give it its day in the sun once again. He shines a light on texts that have used this method in different ways, and shows that it is quite effective in our present time.

At the end of this book, I came away somewhat hopeful for new forms of utopian fiction. Before now, I had rarely encountered it in recent books amidst (relative to utopian fiction) the large numbers of dystopian works in the markets like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2008) and its many spawns, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021), and many more. I simply thought it was something people just didn’t engage with anymore. But Davidson’s clear-eyed writing in Saving Utopia has shown me that sometimes, we only need to change our sitting positions to see what has always been there in a new light.

Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

Zoefuturism in the Online World: Cultivating our own Digital Gardens

By Suzie Gray

As digital spaces increasingly mediate the way in which we interact with ourselves and each other, I argue that this dynamic flow of human becoming within digital spaces crystallises as events or spectacles. Attention quickly shifts from one topic or individual to the next; quickly observed, reacted to, and circulated. Content creators are encouraged to perform in a way that perpetuates this cycle with appeals to emotion and rapidly following trends. This is by design, enabled by practices of the online attention economy.

In this article, I’d like to highlight an alternative way of engaging in online spaces as a Zoefuturist practice: the act of creating and maintaining Digital Gardens. These online environments are sites that eschew homogeneity of design or corporate branding, showcasing the personal touches of their creators. Visitors are allowed to carve their own paths (within reason) through these lightly curated spaces that share knowledge and information.

Digital gardening is an act rather than a platform. Examples of these include repositories made on Obsidian, Quartz 4, and sites made on Neocities. The latter can be seen as a nod to website creators on Geocities during the early 2000s; as some might call a different time before the monetisation of online platforms. So how did we get here?

Continue reading →

Kathleen Hughes reviews Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi

Reviewed by Kathleen Hughes

It came as no surprise to me to learn that Wole Talabi is an engineer by profession. Convergence Problems (2024), Talabi’s anthology of short stories, is filled with vivid tales of industrial failure, mechanical faults, and systemic entropy. In the future worlds depicted by Talabi – often set in Nigeria, where he is from – prosperity and investment have come and gone (‘Embers’), citizen dissidents are sentenced to death (‘An Arc of Electric Skin’), and dangerous interplanetary mining landscapes become the setting for just-in-time rescue missions (‘Blowout’). What struck me most about the collection as a whole is its recurring focus on the human side of systems and states: the legacy of industrial injury across generations, the bitterness of unfulfilled potential, and the pressure to succeed, conform, or escape. Talabi’s strength lies in his ability to highlight the profound human impact within hard-science themes such as environmental collapse, mining, or the oil industry.

The longer stories stood out for me, such as ‘Saturday’s Song’ and ‘Ganger,’ both beautifully crafted, though in very different styles. ‘Saturday’s Song’ is the haunting sequel to an earlier short piece (‘Wednesday’s Story’) and tells the tale of Saura and Mobola, who fall in love at a financial management conference in Abuja, whose relationship ends in tragedy after Saura’s mother seeks the intervention of Shigidi, the Yoruba deity (Orisha) of nightmares. This Orisha also appears in Talabi’s 2023 novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and Talabi’s use of Yoruba figures, here, is typical of his ability to weave traditional beliefs between harder science themes found through the collection. Told through the accounts of personified days of the week, the story is multi-layered, spanning the lives of humans and deities and the strange interactions among them and the anthropomorphised calendar. ‘Ganger’ is particularly striking and timely, portraying a segregated society overseen by a megalomaniac tech CEO who, after whisking the wealthy to safety in the wake of a climate catastrophe, creates an indentured class out of pity or necessity, whose lives are micromanaged and whose every action is pre-empted. As Adelaide, the central character, becomes trapped inside a robot built to manage her subservient class after a calamitous attempt to rebel, the reader is left wondering whether she has actually attained a peculiar type of freedom.

Continue reading →

First of the Countless: A Review of Cheryl S. Ntumy’s They Made Us Blood and Fury

Reviewed by Nkereuwem Albert

They Made Us Blood and Fury is a nightmare brought to life, dripping with characters that will drive a dagger into your very being. An epic fantasy novel that does not shirk from its gritty bits and moral ambiguity, Ntumy’s world is relentless and well put together, with layers within layers to consider.

One of the things I enjoy most in fantasy is worldbuilding that never feels like too much information; it is a difficult thing to execute, but in this novel, we’re given all we need to engage with the world without it ever feeling superfluous or inadequate, a line walked beautifully. Anyi is a beacon of glory to the Countless Clans, led by a council of elders and queens that provide lifeblood, a magical substance that can be moulded into anything, from medicine to weapons. Anyi has so much lifeblood that they give it away to the neighbouring kingdoms and cities, from Ka to Bediaku, Gbota and Xose. From believable history, to enthralling magic, to commerce and social structure, the world presented feels full and ready for a great story to be told within.

As the novel opens, we are thrown into an Anyi on the edge. The queen is dying and none of her heirs, the Divewe, can produce it. Reservoirs run dry and gods stay silent, leaving the Anyi with too little of the substance they once gave away in excess. Across the continent, in the empire of Ka, we meet Aseye, an Anyi native working with lifeblood in the imperial armoury. Setting her sights on starting her own practice, her life is complicated by the death of the Anyi queen and the secrets it unearths. There’s also the issue of Kwame–beautiful Kwame–an imperial courtier with a hidden heritage and conflicting loyalties.

Ntumy’s magic system is especially cool and inventive, with seers and blood-as-power done in ways that I’ve never seen. A culture where magic is embedded in the history, geography and economics of the world, we see the impact of lifeblood excesses and shortages play out both in the present and contextually. Spirit possessions and gods’ whisperings come at a terrible price. The creatures that manifest across the novel are beautiful, visceral and terrifying!

For all its detailed worldbuilding, They Made Us Blood and Fury is also an education in heart-rending character development. Aseye and Kwame are very compelling protagonists. Aseye’s past is shrouded in mystery that unravels with massive implications for the countless clans, and with Kwame, a character with conflicting loyalties and motivations that are unclear, we have an intriguing pair, written with raw intensity and unyielding prose that is very compelling to read.

The supporting cast—spread out across the Countless Clans—deliver, filling out the necessary points in this story beautifully and disturbingly as the novel progresses. In They Made Us Blood and Fury, you sense the threads that link the cast, but Ntumy still delivers excellent character arcs, in both positive and antagonistic directions. Fafa, Fia Kofi, and Mamiga are an excellent investigation into the choices we make to sustain life as we know it, even when we know better. The Divewe’s choices are driven by their need to survive and their thirst for the power they were destined for, now a destiny denied. The Kahene and the politics of his empire ask the necessary questions about imperialism and its swallowing of cultures and people alike. In the sandlands and the spaces between, the nomads offer Aseye philosophy that is antithetical to what is the norm in the countless clans, and the entirety of the supporting cast feel real and fleshed out, to the betterment of the novel.

All these elements come together to make a world in which the truth is always lurking, and this novel captures that eerie feeling perfectly. With a story told in journeys through the Countless Clans, there were many moments that shocked me and broke my heart, and pivots that grabbed my attention and made me perk up and hope, all ending with a flawless landing that leaves me wanting more of the Countless. Cheryl S. Ntumy delivers a very inventive fantasy novel on so many fronts, and I know this is not the end, so I will wait impatiently for the next book.

A very British genealogy of zoefuturism

By Christine Aicardi

Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).

But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.

Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.

From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).

Continue reading →

A review of Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix). This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection. This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way. Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text.

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.

Continue reading →

Revisiting Collaborative Imagination through a Zoefuturistic Lens

By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn

Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

At the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, we’ve edited and published more than a dozen collections of speculative fiction, along with various and sundry series and one-off narrative projects, since our founding in 2012. Although the first we’ve heard of zoetology or zoefuturism is in connection with this special issue ofVector, we’ve found it to be a helpful lens for reframing some of the stories we’ve had the good luck to work on, and for considering what has made some of these projects tick. It turns out that, perhaps, we’ve often been encouraging writers to approach the intersection of science, technology, and society in ways that could be described as zoefuturistic. This aesthetic’s focus on relationality, on complexity and emergence, and on the entanglement of the processes that give rise to life and living have helped us see the provocations and challenges we’ve issued to authors in new ways. Through the lens of zoefuturism, the project of inviting people to imagine hopeful futures—and practicing this relationship of hope to the future ourselves—is really an exercise in cultivating a different matrix of relationships that give our actions new meaning and consequence.

Roger Ames’s account of zoetology presents a contrast with what he defines as a “substance ontology” that dominates the Western philosophical tradition—it’s evident in Plato and much of Aristotle, with earlier roots in works like Parmenides’s The Way of Truth. In this ontology, existence is a matter of “being per se” (Ames 2023, 87) and reality is composed of discrete entities that embody immutable essences. If things have unique or particular attributes, those are layered onto the essential identity of an entity as “properties that are borne” (Ames 2023, 87). Ames describes this in terms of an “ontological intuition” that any individual thing—a household object, animal (human or otherwise), feature of the landscape, or celestial body—comprises “a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that” (Ames 2023, 88).

Drawing on the Book of Changes—but also unearthing strands in Western philosophy, from Dewey to Whitehead, and using a linguistic construction from Ancient Greek—Ames describes zoetology as a “process worldview” that captures the Chinese “shengshenglun” (蛺蛺紶), or “art of living” (Ames 2023, 90). This approach to life and the cosmos trades the Western tradition’s “beings” for “becomings,” insisting that “everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (Ames 2023, 90). In a zoetological view, flux is a constant, and we exist enmeshed in “unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies” (Ames 2023, 90). We’re always being constituted and reconstituted by these ever-shifting relationships—with other people, with our natural and built environments, with social forces—and our thoughts and actions are reciprocally contributing to the perpetual reconstitution of those environments and systems. Zoetology also represents an anticipatory view, in the spirit of Dewey’s perspective on imagination or reflexivity in second-order cybernetics: we are all continuously changing and reaching towards the present moment and the future.

Continue reading →

Nick Hubble in Zoefuturism

The Resistance/ Vector 302

As Heraclitus pointed out, you can’t step in the same river twice. The current is continually flowing, responding to the seasons and the weather, swirling into ever changing fractal patterns. While this is literally true, the power of the adage is metaphorical. We live with this constant change. Some people like it. Some people don’t like it. But it’s more complicated than that. For most of the history of the human race – up to the end of the Palaeolithic and into the Neolithic – people lived fluid, seasonally nomadic lives in tune and rhythm with natural change. Just to be clear, I’m not romanticising that lifestyle. To paraphrase George Orwell, I’m a selfish and lazy intellectual who expects their oat milk and New Statesman to be delivered to the doorstep. However, the larger point that I’m trying to make is that we can choose to live fluidly in relation to change or we can choose to live against change, by metaphorically damming the river. Most of recorded history is dominated by the latter approach, which broadly takes the form of imposing solid-state, hierarchical social structures in place of fluid cultures.

Here, I’m defining culture not in the narrower sociological sense as being the way of life of a particular society, but in the broader anthropological sense of the holistic manner in which humans interact with each other and the wider natural world. When sociologists talk about social reality, they are talking about the norms and behaviours resulting from a particular social structure. In the world today, the dominant social structure is that of nation states, bound together through a system of global capital. The core organisational features of the nation state are rigid class hierarchy and a hard binary divide between two genders. These features are so central to the ‘social reality’ of a nation state like the UK that many confuse them with inescapable human nature and biology. However, if culture is seen as broader and independent of social structure, then it challenges the norms that constitute social reality. The clash between these two opposed value systems underpins the culture wars that have increasingly raged across the Anglosphere and beyond.

While it is difficult to think outside the parameters of the social structures we inhabit, science fiction does offer imaginative possibilities for freeing ourselves from such constraints. For example, in devising ‘the Culture’, Iain M. Banks suggested that a future technologically advanced civilisation could choose to align itself with a fluid sense of life and change outside state structures rather than attempting to socially engineer a perfect society within those structures in the manner of Soviet Communism. In 2025, however, we are not choosing between solid-state socialism and some sort of futuristic anarcho-communism. Instead, the choice being offered – at least, as it’s often portrayed in the mainstream media – appears to be between, on the one hand, varying models of authoritarian ‘respect’ for traditional values and, on the other hand, ideas of autonomy and social justice, which are now often described by their political opponents as the ‘woke’ progressivism of a metropolitan liberal elite. Demoralised, as most of us are, by the seemingly endless ebb and flow of the struggle between these two apparently opposing worldviews, it’s difficult to imagine any meaningful future let alone the prospect of a utopian culture. It’s far easier to picture a not-too-distant future in which two women are huddling outdoors at night by a bonfire while wolves howl around them.

Continue reading →

Aldiss’s Error: Aliens, Science Fiction, and the Problems of Genre

By James C. Bassett

Brian Aldiss, map of ‘Helliconia.’ https://brianaldiss.co.uk/writing/novels/novels-h-l/helliconia/

I recently came across a most curious and unsettling pair of essays by Brian Aldiss that I am still trying to process, because they seem to strike against the very heart of science fiction literature, and even much of Aldiss’s own writing. “As far as we know, we are alone in a universe,” Aldiss points out in the second of these essays on the subject of aliens (Aldiss 1999, 340), and he is absolutely right. As far as we know.¹ But although the jury is still out on the Big Question, in this essay Aldiss seems fervidly convinced that extraterrestrial sentience simply does not exist. When Aldiss argues “the case for mankind’s solitary state here [the universe], for which the evidence is plentiful” (Aldiss 1999, 334). He appears to accept an absence of evidence as evidence of absence, an extrapolative leap which defies logic and scientific method.

“There is no scientific evidence that [alien sentience exists], any more than there was ever any evidence for the long-held belief in spontaneous generation”² (Aldiss 1999, 335), an unfair comparison, because spontaneous generation (the theory that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter—for example, that flies grow from rotting meat or that frogs grow from mud) was disproved by scientific evidence against it, a state of affairs that has not been reached regarding the existence or non-existence of sentient extraterrestrial life.

Still, anyone who believes in aliens absent any definite proof is misleading themselves, according to Aldiss. Such belief “represents a continuation of that venerable credulity” (Aldiss 1999, 340) that cursed our race with gods and monsters. Yet absent any definite proof that aliens do not and have never existed, Aldiss seems to be just as guilty of relying on a type of faith — just as “credulous” — in forming his conclusions.

Whatever the reasons for it, or the reasoning behind it, this personal disbelief in the existence of aliens is of little consequence to anyone but Aldiss himself. Of far greater import, however, and far more troubling to the science fiction genre, is an earlier essay in which Aldiss presents an overview of the development of the role and portrayal of sentient alien life in SF literature from its long pre-Campbellian days to the present, and an examination of the causes and effects of the debased and increasingly “monsterish” concept of aliens and what is alien (Aldiss 1996).

Continue reading →

Zoefuturism: Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram, in conversation

Yen Ooi: When I first came across Professor Roger Ames’s lecture on Zoetology, I felt a surge of relief alongside excitement, as finally, there was language to explain my “rationality” – the foundational thought-structure that I had grown up with. This applied easily onto science fiction, since it is literature that is grounded in “rational science,” allowing me to understand and explore why “rationality” in speculative fiction can differ so much from culture to culture, subgenre to subgenre.

As I discovered Zoetology alongside a depth of other theories (like convergence culture, participation revolution, techno-Orientalism, tabula plena, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, polymedia, and more), and amidst all the distressing news in the world today (of wars, the climate crisis, the AI bubble, etc.), while my life kept “becoming” (through motherhood, researching and practising Zen, and lots of writing!), everything came together to become Zoefuturism in an organic discovery. Zoefuturism isn’t a new idea inasmuch as zoetology is what Ames calls “a new name for an old way of thinking.”

Stephen Oram: Talking with Yen over coffee about her theories behind Zoefuturism, the phrase she coined, was more than an insight into a new way of approaching science fiction, it chimed beautifully with some of my own thinking.

My cultural background is not one of eastern religions or philosophy, quite the opposite. However, since my teenage years I’ve been sceptical of absolutes, developing a keenness for seeing life as directional. By that I mean keeping an eye on whether things are going in the right direction towards a “notion” rather than setting absolute goals or end-points. More recently, I’ve been actively attempting to hold knowledge and ideology lightly, passionately but with the understanding that both will change and develop. This focus on change is reflected in a lot of my writing.

Continue reading →