Zoefuturism in creative practice: responses

Introduction by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram

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:

Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community Co-Directorate
Station to Station by Goblin Futures
“Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism” by Christopher Morrison

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).

A fishpunk game: 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.

Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism

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.

A fishpunk game: Station to Station

By Goblin Futures.

Station to Station is a fishpunk¹ game of building a better world. It is a hybrid card/tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) in the vein of works such as Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman’s The Deep Forest, a favourite of ours. While fishpunk is its truest descriptor, categories like solarpunk and weirdhope² shed some light on its nature.

“Sometimes when you lose, you win” (Sun Ra, Space Is the Place)

“Whatever you win, you’ve lost” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

We designed Station to Station in response to the themes of The Lost Bay discord server’s Build a Better World TTRPG jam and Vector’s Zoefuturism call. Our mechanical starting points were that the game would require tarot cards as physical components, include dynamic use of oracles to bridge rules and storytelling, and its endgame would give meaning to anything players ‘lost’ as they played. Our worlding starting point was that the game would take place in an archipelago, a landscape type that has fascinated us since childhoods spent reading Ursula K. Le Guin and messing around with computer game map editors. As places where land and sea flow across each other, archipelagos are sites of life and relationality, where attempts at imposing rigid boundaries will always fail. Our next realisation was that the game would revolve around travel aboard sentient bio-trains that are huge and ancient, and may only be travelled on if they willingly agree. In our playthroughs, both in testing and following release, we have noticed that players are drawn to explore the nature of their kinship with their group’s train, with these strange entities playing prominent roles in storytelling as agents unto themselves.

The game builds on our longstanding interest in oracular game design. The use of aleatory resolution methods such as dice, cards, or coins in games echoes divinatory practices; tarot historically was used for gameplay before it became a cartomantic tool. Equally, the use of tables of outcomes as storytelling procedures in TTRPGs resonates with manuals for fortune-telling, with indie game designers such as Perplexing Ruins and Alfred Valley foregrounding oracle tables in their work. Station to Station pushes things just a little further, whereby its Coral Oracle blends variance with player choice, at times creating productive tensions between storytelling and mechanically optimal gameplay. A second oracle, The Lost and Found Oracle, gives life to the sacrifices made along the way to building a better world. The game’s rooting in oracularity grounds players in a sense that they are influencing and responding to an ongoing stream of strange encounters, losses, and becomings.

“Heaven and earth aren’t humane” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

Underlying the game’s use of oracles and incorporation of tarot are a set of Attitudes – confrontation, manipulation, scarcity, abundance – that pertain equally to the game’s world and its player characters. These Attitudes are not rendered in terms of anthropocentric moralising, which seeks to divide the world into forced binaries, but as neutral approaches that become specific and grounded through context. Story prompts cover a range of possibilities of flourishing and struggle, and repeatedly centre on symbiosis, life, and transformation. This carries over to the endgame, with playthroughs culminating at heterotopian destinations whose communities have their own unresolved contradictions. Player characters will both adjust to these tensions and help change them, with the distinction between group and destination ultimately melting away. As this happens, some of what was lost along the way will come back, be healed, or come to be seen in a more hopeful light. And for groups who do not get to the endgame, all is not lost. The sea gives and takes, and you can always play again.

“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.” (Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)

We hope you enjoy Station to Station! Stay fishpunk.

– GOBLIN FUTURES

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. ↩︎

The Afterlives of Greek Drama in Science Fiction Theatre

The Afterlives of Greek Drama in Science Fiction Theatre: A Review on the Occasion of the 10-Year Anniversary of TALOS V

By Yichun Zhang

You are not just watching the fifth Talos Science Fiction Theatre Festival—you are in it. One moment you are a sailor aboard Odysseus’s ship, another you are playing an interactive survival game in a retrofuturistic city. Next, diaries are read alongside ancient Greek monstresses in the midst of a cabaret. With its immersive method, Talos V brings together Greek mythology, speculative futures, and urgent contemporary politics. The festival reaches into many dimensions to present an international group of works that are as evocative as they are unpredictable.

Organised by Artistic Director Christos Callow Jr (of the Greek theatre company Cyborphic & University of Derby) and Associate Producer Colleen Bowes (Central School of Speech & Drama), Talos V took place from 11–13 December 2025 at The Bread & Roses Theatre.

A total of five productions were selected for the 2025 festival: Odysseus, Not Your Hero, Assigned Earth at Birth, Babel Beast, The Failure of the Century (WIP), and Occasionally Gleeful Worms in Hell: PALESTINE BENEFIT EDITION. Each piece creatively incorporates sci-fi elements or engages with speculative ideas. To varying degrees, each piece also reflects on, deconstructs, or subverts established traditions, from ancient Greek myth, to patriarchal cultural structures, to the notion of the classic or Western canon itself.

*The Failure of the Century,* a play by Nick Mamatas

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Chisom Umeh in Conversation with Adedapo Adeniyi

Adedapo Adeniyi (also goes by Dapo The Abstract) is a Nigerian artist working in literature, film and photography, music (DJ) as well as art curation and counterculture archiving. He expresses his art through abstract avant-garde sensibilities. His debut novel, Wanderer, is available in stores. You can read an excerpt of his novel below, courtesy of the author.

Wanderer (excerpt) Download

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.

Chisom, holding a copy of the *Wanderer*. Image: African Imaginary

Chisom: Hey Dapo.

Nice to have you do the interview.

I finished reading your novel Wanderer a couple of days ago, and I must say, the journey feels like one long dream. It’s a steady flow of alternating sentences and logic that sometimes contradict each other and yet, strangely enough, feels complete and cohesive. Can you tell me how you were able to keep the story you were trying to tell in focus, even while spinning such a wild tale?

Dapo: Thank you, Chisom. I’m excited to have this interview with you.

I want to start by saying the story mostly wrote itself; I was just a conduit. Most of this book was written in an automatist, stream-of-consciousness style. They were retellings of dreams, memories, and reality, and I wanted them to appear that way. I never lost sight of the story because I welcomed getting lost as I was writing it to find myself.

Chisom: Oh, that’s pretty interesting. To me, the novel reads like Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard crossed with Vajra Chandrasekera’s luminous prose. It definitely felt like older hands were guiding yours on the page. Were there literary influences you were channeling when writing the book?

Dapo: Yeah, I mean, I try to stay away from direct influences while I’m writing, and I didn’t read The Palmwine Drinkard until after I wrote Wanderer. I took influences more from films and cinematic sensibilities than literary, but in that regard, Borges, Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception, and my editor and friend, Manuel Marrero. I think these are the ones I can remember right now, plus I don’t want to go overboard. But these people and their works across surrealism, psychedelia, paranoid fiction, sci-fi, metafiction, and so on influenced me in many ways and were formative for how I approached writing and this book.

Chisom: It’s interesting that you mentioned Surrealist Manifesto, psychedelia, and paranoid fiction, because in an essay in Medium titled Abstractism Manifesto, you talked about how ‘abstractism’ is a term that subsumes all of these concepts and more. I like the way you explained it in the essay and how it relates to your work. But could you do a quick description of the term (abstractism) so we could understand it in relation to your work?

Dapo: Absolutely! So when I wrote the Abstractism Manifesto in early 2023, I defined it as being an amalgamation of solipsism, surrealism, psychedelia, subjective reality, and the physics of psychosis. I believe abstractism brings these concepts together to take reality and the world around us from a state of form to an abstract sensory state of formlessness, and that’s what I try to do with my work — the dissolution of some absolute real into an abstract cosmic real.

Chisom: In your experience as a filmmaker, what is the major difference between visual storytelling and written one? Do you prefer one medium over the other?

Dapo: I mean, writing is definitely cheaper. Making films is more expensive and taxing. I also think it’ll kill me faster so that might be why right now it excites me more than writing does. But, frankly, the major difference is the painting. With words, I’m guiding the readers’ imagination. At the end of the day, everyone will come out of it with different images. But with film, I have to literally represent those images on the screen. I’m doing the painting for the audience, they just have to watch and engage.

Chisom: Besides making movies, I know that you do some DJ work on the side. You had a collaboration with NTS, which is really great. How did that happen?

Dapo: Let me put it in context: I work with this new-age collective called Freewater, which was founded by my friends. I serve as its curator and co-director. Freewater secured a residency with NTS Radio, and since I also DJ, they featured one of my mixes as part of the collective. We’re having an underground, new wave music festival/concert on the 11^th of December (I think the interview will be out after it?), and NTS is our major partner.

Chisom: That’s incredible, actually. So, does your music influence your writing in any way? Some writers like to curate playlists for particular writing projects. Something they listen to just to put themselves in the mood. Are you that kind of writer?

Dapo: Music definitely plays a huge part in my process. When I was writing Wanderer, all I listened to was shoegaze. I found a shoegaze playlist that had over a hundred songs and it was all I listened to while I slept and dreamt and while I wrote as well. I’ve been DJing for almost 2 years now, and it’s made me understand music as well as how different people interact with it. There are sensibilities of transience I borrowed from writing and translated to how I DJ.

Chisom: I kept wondering about the shoegaze reference when I was reading the book. Something told me there was more to it than just being an element in the story, and I’m glad you just confirmed that. Which brings me to your process with writing your stories and how you edit them. Do you edit while writing or after?

Dapo: Oh yeah, shoegaze has a very dreamlike, haze-inducing feeling and I wanted the book to feel like that. I do very minimal editing while writing. I finished the entire thing then read it over a couple of times before sending it to my editor, and we had this period of sending drafts back and forth and conversations on the subject matter.

But enough about me, I want to hear what type of music you listen to and how editing works for you. I mean, you just won the Nommo, haha.

Chisom: Oh, lol.

Well, I’m very mundane with my music. I don’t have any playlists or do any sort of curation. In fact, when I’m writing, I wouldn’t want to hear any music at all as it easily interferes with my thought processes and breaks my stream-of-consciousness, AKA “flow”. But when I do listen to music, outside writing, it’s very Davido and Asake and Victony, and whatever Dlala Thukzin just released. For edits, I can’t move forward with writing if I feel like there’s something wrong with a previous sentence. So I tinker with that till it feels fine to me. So we’re maybe kind of opposites on this.

Dapo: Correct me if I’m wrong but you seem like a very calculated writer. You’re delicate about detail, you’re careful. I think it’s beautiful. I wish I could be that type of writer. Like I said before (this may sound a little pretentious but I fully believe it), I don’t really do any writing, these things write themselves and use me as a conduit. I don’t know where they come from or where they are going or why; they come raw and I write in real time. My flow can be erratic most times.

Chisom: I like to think I have an eye for detail, but, trust me, I’m not really that meticulous. I know writers who would draw up elaborate plots that cover the first scene to the last, and fill up a board with sticky notes. Me? I mostly just sit down and write a story as it comes into my head. I think both our approaches are valid, so long as the outcome is something folks can read and enjoy. When I’m done writing and send the work out, that’s where my effort ends. But I’ve seen you go through hell and high water to publicize your book. And it has really paid off. Maybe that’s something you’d teach me someday?

Nardwuar holding a copy of Dapo’s first novel, Wanderer

Dapo: You’re amazing, so we’re kin.

Thank you, I think it’s been a learning curve. A lot of how this book has been handled is experimental, constantly trying to see how to reinvent whatever a rollout is supposed to be. Some days before the book came out I’d post videos of just my legs as I was walking around. Wandering, if you will. I made cards and handed out googly eyes. I’ve had readings and talks. I even had an abstractism lecture and played a psychedelic techno set. I keep thinking of ways to present a work of literature outside of just the confines of literature, especially as a multimedia artist. I look forward to reinterpreting the book and presenting it in so many other formats: photograph, sound, installation, you name it.

Chisom: Say I wanted to try my hand at writing abstractism, are you holding one of those lectures anytime soon?

Dapo: Hopefully sometime early next year. I’m working on writing another edition of the manifesto that’s more professional, but I think that through reading the manifesto that’s up right now, as well as Wanderer and some of my short stories, anyone could get the gist of what abstractism is.

What’s next for you now Chisom? In the world of African Speculative Fiction.

Chisom: For me, I’m also trying to piece together a collection of short stories that hopefully might be my debut in the book-publishing space. I want most of the stories in the collection to be centered around two themes, so that means I’m writing mostly new stories.

Anyway, it’s really been wonderful having this chat with you. I’m looking forward to reading more of your stuff in the future.

Dapo: Sending you love and the best of wishes Chisom, excited to see your collection. I’ll send you mine as it comes along. You’re a refreshing voice in the scene here.

‘The Utmost Sail’ by Karel Janovický: A Neglected Czech SF Opera

By Cyril Simsa

My late father, the Czech composer and broadcaster, Karel Janovický – born Bohuš František Šimsa in Pilsen in 1930, but better known under the pseudonym he adopted in the 1950s to protect his parents, whom he had left behind in Communist Czechoslovakia, when he skipped the border during the Cold War – died in January 2024. He left behind a four-storey Victorian terrace in North London, crammed with music, books, and papers, including 250 or so classical compositions and a not inconsiderable personal archive.

It was in his papers that I found a booklet with the libretto of his one-act opera, The Utmost Sail, which he wrote in 1958 to an English-language text by another Czech émigré, Karel Brušák (1913-2004). The booklet is mimeographed, fanzine-style, so it is not a professional publication; but to anyone familiar with the history of fanzines or sf fandom, the format will be immediately recognisable, and I assume this is something that he or Brušák must have had printed for the benefit of future producers and performers at around the same time they were finishing the work itself.

Karel Janovický, Ludwigsburg refugee camp, Germany, ca. 1950

I had been long aware that my father had written an opera, and back in my teenage years, when I was at the height of my initial involvement with science fiction, he had even told me it was set on a spaceship. However, in the way children have of ignoring their parents, I had never actually seen a copy or read the text. And while I have still not seen a performance, the libretto can stand on its own as an interesting example of mid-20th Century European sf theatre.

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Costume as Community History

By Ibtisam Ahmed

Science fiction narratives all engage in an element of world-building, even if the descriptions are minimal. By their very nature, the settings are fictitious and, more often than not, have elements that are fantastically different to reality. They are imaginary potentials, the possibilities of what-could-be. As such, every single aspect of these stories is crucial to creating a fuller picture. One element that can be overlooked in the analysis of the genre is costume (especially in texts that are only in the written form), but it is still a vital part of the wider world-building. In this essay, I consider the impact of costume in creating and holding community history in two science fictional texts – the short story ‘The Last Dawn of Targadrides,’ and the X-Men comic book arcs focusing on the Hellfire Gala.

Both examples are fictional counterparts to real-world analogues, but heightened to focus on marginalised community identity. As a scholar and performer whose artistic work engages with my own multiple marginalised identities (queer, Bangladeshi, migrant), these narratives provide instances of meaningful empowerment and even liberation. As such, just as these fictions build on real-world histories, my own work is influenced by and builds on these fictions. This is something I will reflect on at the end of this essay, but it is important to start by exploring each of the examples individually.

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Destroying ‘Centuries of Evil Work’: Female-Authored Dystopian Science Fiction in Spain

By Angela Acosta

The Speculative and Surrealist Origins of Spanish Modernism

Ángeles Santos’s painting, Un mundo [A World] (1929), is a large surrealist composition one may easily miss if one is too eager to reach Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum. In 1929, at the age of seventeen, Santos presented Un mundo at the Ninth Autumn Salon of Madrid where prominent Spanish intellectuals like Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Vicente Huidobro, and Federico García Lorca noticed her work. The three-by-three metre painting projects a surrealist world not unlike literary utopias of the early twentieth century. A world in the shape of a cube hangs suspended by angels in the sky. Female figures clad in dark dresses race down a staircase, reaching towards stars that serve as anchors for this small world. The image is equally precarious as it is carefully crafted. Santos painted the self-sufficient world with the same dark, muted palette as the cloudy blue sky. There, one can see into buildings as miniature humans go to work, play sports, and ride the steam train that snakes its way across each side of the cube. What lives do these people lead? What references to modern Spain can be found in this painting and similar works of literature? How might we recognize the contributions of women within this milieu?

“Un mundo” by Ángeles Santos (1929) photographed by eckelon is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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Beastly Modernisms reviewed by Paul March-Russell

Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture, eds. Saskia McCracken and Alex Goody (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

Reviewed by Paul March-Russell

At face value, this collection of essays may not seem to be of immediate interest to the sf reader. It is primarily concerned with the development of Animal Studies – a sub-discipline that has already been significantly explored in relation to sf in the work of Sherryl Vint, Joan Gordon, and others – with reference to literary modernism, a diverse movement already noted for its challenge to traditional notions of identity and individual autonomy. The potential, though, for creative overlaps between modernism, sf and Animal Studies is already indicated by the fact that one of the co-editors, Alex Goody, was a keynote speaker at the 2019 Corroding the Now conference at Birkbeck College, London. Seen through a science-fictional lens, the encounter between human and non-human animals, the slippages between them, and their mutual affinities and kinships immediately invoke the First Contacts and uncanny relations between humans and aliens which are the stuff of genre sf. As the introduction’s reference to Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Eckersley’s chapter on Leonora Carrington make clear, imagined bestiaries are common to both Animal Studies and speculative fiction.

Without seeking to be a guide, the introduction nonetheless touches upon many of the key moments in the evolution of Animal Theory: from Peter Singer’s pioneering Animal Liberation (1975) and Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg manifesto’ (1985) to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming animal’ (1982) and Jacques Derrida’s pivotal essay ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ (2002). The introduction also registers many of the other posthuman thinkers whose ideas have contributed both to Animal Studies and this volume in particular; from Giorgio Agamben and Rosi Braidotti to Michel Foucault and Cary Wolfe. The editors however, beginning their account with an exchange between Djuna Barnes and James Joyce (two modernists in exile, both of whom would flit between the centres and margins of the modernist canon), emphasise the affinities between Animal Studies, the revaluation of women’s writing and the decolonising of the curriculum. All such practices foreground and deconstruct the historic imposition of borders, the arbitrary gatekeeping that has characterised academic protocols and the maintenance of cultural shibboleths. To that end, the editors also note the collapsing boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, an elision that not only permits the entry of sf into the conversation, but which would also have appealed to such modernists as Barnes (boxing fan and purveyor of crime fiction) and Joyce (publican’s son, cineaste, and Anita Loos devotee).

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An emotional affair with a particular orchid

Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation. Edited by Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins and Jerry Määttä. University of Wales Press, 2020.

Reviewed by Rhona Eve Clews

Before we dive into the myriad wonders of the first-ever collected volume on plants in SF, let me signpost by saying this article is not intended as a straightforward book review, more a subjective-entangled way into an intense and highly transformative text. As an Artist, Ecologist, Healer and dyspraxic my approach might be perceived as that of a fuzzy set, so named by Brian Attlebury, that is ‘affiliated with other texts that might seem to belong to other…terrains’ and tending to spy unexpected connections and join unexpected dots. I draw attention to this method as the unconventional, multidisciplinary approaches might be the essence of what this book points to, namely an urgent need for ‘cross-species intimacy, or inter-kingdom intimacy’. My hope is that bridging the separate islands on which different academics tend to reside will foster such closeness.

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Beyond Gender Collective: Abolish the Family!

Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis

Review by Beyond Gender

“Abolish the family? You might as well abolish gravity.” (1)

It is with these words, spoken by an imagined, horrified reader, that Sophie Lewis begins their new book. From the outset, the magnitude of the task ahead for family abolitionists is clear. To abolish the family is to attempt something frightening, something unthinkable, something which requires one to challenge the fundamental rules which bind our world together. It is, then, no surprise that again and again Lewis reaches for science fiction (SF) to articulate this vision of a world beyond the family. For an SF creator, to abolish a so-called law of nature is not a ridiculous proposition which can be used to embarrass utopians into giving up on their belief that “things could be different” (4, emphasis in original). It is rather a serious undertaking which involves an investigation of those forces which hold life as we know it together, the willingness to experiment with those same forces, and the determination to remake the world, however alien what comes next might be. This is the spirit in which we, the Beyond Gender research collective, approach Lewis’ book. We are a group of SF fans, researchers and creators who are committed to tapping into the radical potential of SF to undo the supposed naturalness of such myths as the binary model of gender, cis- and heteronormativity and, now, the family.

“Abolish the family? You might as well abolish gravity.”

“Okay then, might as well.”

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