Torque Control 301

By Phoenix Alexander

The organism is relentless

Calorie demanding, perpetually in need of hydration, oxygen, and a cocktail of other vitamins and minerals, requiring 4-8 hours sleep a night to repair itself from the ravages of the day, day after day. A lifetime’s worth of consumption.

This unkind—some might say anti humanist—characterization is famously articulated by the nefarious Agent Smith in The Matrix, where he attempts to psychologically break a human rebel leader, Morpheus, by telling him:

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. (The Wachowskis, 1999)

The accusation, while effective for cinema, is not quite true. Smith implies that this “consumption” is a species-specific act, and not one located within a complex and interrelated ecosystem of both human and non-human life. If anything, plants should be the focus of his anger: they are the enablers of this “surviving,” this “spreading,” being masterful spreaders and survivors themselves. More radically: even drawing the lines between species may be a spurious rhetorical move. “A leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive,” Zoë Schlanger reminds us in her recent book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Schlanger, 2024). “All the rest of us are secondary users, recycling the stuff the plant has made… Think about it: every animal organ was built with sugar from plants” (Schlanger, 2024, pp. 27-28). Her (admittedly simplified) description is useful in exculpating the human organism specifically from the charge of excessive consumption. It is not our fault; we are enabled, built literally by component organisms and their byproducts, both visible and invisible.

Nevertheless, the human body and its source/s of sustenance tends to take on the nature of a problem to be solved in many science fictional narratives. From the replicators of Star Trek to the hideous ‘pigoons’ of Margaret Atwood’s Mad Addam series to the equally hideous ‘sligs’ of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe to the more mundane efforts of potato-growing in Andy Weir’s The Martian, authors and film-makers offer the gamut of appealing to radically unethical means of keeping the human organism alive in conditions that, even without the lack of food, threaten to kill it. (I am reminded here of the opening crawl to the movie Gravity: “Life in space is impossible”) (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013).

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Wave IX: a compressed essay-review by Carter Kaplan

By Carter Kaplan

Wave IX

J.G. Ballard’s story “Studio 5, The Stars” appeared in Science Fantasy magazine in 1961. The story is set in “Vermilion Sands”, a desert art colony suggesting the post-war “hothouse” desert compounds created in the American Southwest by painters like Max Ernst and Georgia O’Keefe. In Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, art, artists, poetry and landscape blend in remarkable ways, and the possibility of elements of virtual reality appear to be an operative dynamic, though this possibility remains unexplained, or anyway is deliberately obscured to enhance the futuristic feel of the community, and as well represent the confusion that should properly attend a world that is in contact with computers, simulation, and muddled human perceptions. The setting is thus an opportune field for blending a broad—indeed unlimited—range of aesthetic figures and themes. The plot follows the adventures of Paul Ransom, editor of the poetry magazine Wave IX. He is beset by submissions of bad writing (fragments in the form of computer tapes are often floating through the sky above Vermilion Sands). The poetry is produced by computers styled as Verse Transcribers or VT’s. The stale submissions form a point of departure for exploring the subject of poor writing, and how the production of poor writing is driven by complacency, intellectual laziness, cliché, formulae, cultural homogenization, stale involvement, theoretical strictures, official channelings, academic repetition, market forces, fossilized traditions, and so on.

Jean-Paul L. Garnier, the editor of Wave IX the book before us, presented Ballard’s story to the contributors and asked for submissions. There were very little instructions; contributors were simply encouraged to follow their inspiration. A variety of graphic images, poems and fictions were submitted. Here is a review of these pieces, followed by suggestions for further exploration and discussion. I am a contributor to the project, as described below.

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Dev Agarwal reviews ‘Pavane: a Critical Companion’ by Paul Kincaid

ISSN 2662-8562 ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic) Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon ISBN 978-3-031-71566-2 ISBN 978-3-031-71567-9 (eBook)

A review by Dev Agarwal

With his latest work, Paul Kincaid looks critically and in-depth at Keith Roberts’s novel, Pavane.

Keith Roberts (20 September 1935 – 5 October 2000) was a science fiction writer and illustrator. His work on Pavane appeared first as a series of novellas from 1966 and then as a collected book in 1968.

Kincaid notes that Roberts’ work is often admired by his fellow writers but neglected more widely as science fiction. In part, this could be due to reactions to the artist rather than his art itself. While his work is respected by those already familiar with it, Roberts’s personality probably damaged his wider lasting recognition. Kincaid observes that Roberts may have been “incapable of friendship, someone who distrusted everyone on principle, and fell out with everyone who became close to him.”

We must go back a generation to find writers discussing Roberts’ work. Both AJ Budrys and Kingsley Amis lavished praise on Roberts. Trillion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove also cites him positively, but Roberts is otherwise “almost entirely absent from other surveys of the genre.”

This deficit of attention has only grown in the years since Roberts’ death, which makes Kincaid’s literary appreciation particularly relevant. Kincaid speculates that Pavane may suffer in genre terms from being neither fish nor fowl. It does not sit easily “in the technological territory of science fiction,” yet it is also not modern fantasy. Pavane is a particularly British work, a book made up of a cycle of stories, and one imbued by religion, sense of place, and the mythical past of the English countryside.

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Solarpunk and Guild Socialism

A lo-fi, low-key critique of solarpunk

By Jo Lindsay Walton

Joyce Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’ (2024) is a solarpunk short story in which nothing much happens. The lack of incident is probably deliberate: a gentle rejection of the idea that all narratives need conflict. Put your characters in horrible situations and watch them struggle to survive: this is standard creative writing advice. It may be more steeped in capitalist ideology than we care to admit.

By contrast, the closest Ch’ng’s story gets to real jeopardy is a flock of birds smacking into a solar panel. The solar panel is easily repaired. The bird strike could even be taken as a positive sign. It implies a lot of birds. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which helped to kick off (or revive) the environmental movement in the 1960s, takes its title from imagining the loss of birdsong.

Ida loved birds. Their songs would wake her up every morning. There were no more cases of poaching (or so the newspapers said). Native birds were returning. Numbers were climbing up once more, helped by careful husbandry and re-introduction of species.

Solarpunk is an eclectic genre. It typically envisions hopeful futures, where humans live in harmony with nature, and often with one-another as well. Solarpunk communities are often multi-species communities. The term solarpunk seems to have originated in an anonymous 2008 blog post, ‘From Steampunk to Solarpunk,’ imagining the widespread return of wind-powered sea freight. This contemplative excitement about technology, old or new—or both old and new—has continued to characterise solarpunk.

Crucially, solarpunk prefers to tackle technical problems and ecological crises in ways that serve social justice. Hannah Steinkopf-Frank writes, “imagining Solarpunk purely as a pleasant aesthetic undermines its inherently radical implications. At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today.”^[1] The genre may not have a consistent set of politics, but it often resonates with degrowth and postgrowth perspectives, as well as pluriversal politics — that is, mobilising local, traditional, and Indigenous worldviews in ways that may diverge from mainstream sustainable development discourse.

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Amirah Muhammad reviews ‘Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction’

Edited by Eugen Bacon, Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (2024) is an anthology of award-winning African speculative fiction writers, including Suyi Okingbowa, Cheryl S. Ntumy, and Dilman Dila.

The anthology pushes us to question the genre labels we take for granted – namely, Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and futurism – alongside introducing us to new terms, fusing specificity with inclusivity. Key to the anthology is the concept of the ‘gaze’: of looking in order to name, and the tension between fixity and fluidity that comes from it. With a blend of fiction and nonfiction, Bloomsbury describes the anthology as offering “excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.”

Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism and Afro-centred Futurisms

There are many names for speculative fiction by African writers. The anthology is chiefly concerned with differentiating Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and introduces Afro-centred Futurisms. ‘Afrofuturism’ often refers to Black speculative fiction, although the anthology reminds us of its origins in the United States of America through Mark Dery’s coinage. ‘Africanfuturism’ is Nnedi Okorafor’s invention to describe speculative fiction invested in African histories, presents and futures. ‘Afro-centred Futurisms,’ as Suyi Okungbowa defines it, is a plural term with an “active consciousness and open-armed framework — the privileging of the Afrodescendant self, an investment in timelessness, and an embrace of the spirituality-to-science spectrum” (18).

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Leaving Omelas

By Christopher Kanski

Chris Kanski, “a reluctant yuppie who dances often and writes sporadically”, encounters Omelas for the first time.

In amateur philosophy, thought experiments try to get to the core of questions, usually ethical ones, by stripping them of context; the trolley problem that’s taught in high schools has faceless victims and no perpetrator and you, the imagined agent at the lever, have no context for your being there. I think they’re useless. I think every thought experiment I’ve ever encountered makes an assumption that stripped context isn’t a context itself. What you would do in the imagined, ‘pure’ scenario is relegated to that scenario; whatever conclusions about ethical choices you come to become largely null and void when presented with the countless variables that real-life context provides.

None of us, ever, will find ourselves in a context where we make an ethical decision based purely on rational thought with a total lack of feeling. But when I was young and coddled by private school and a loving, secure home life, I didn’t have much use for deep feeling and, spurned at the time by both girls and boys, I felt my intelligence grew far beyond my years if I chased exactly that kind of unburdened rational thought. Which is why if I’d stumbled across Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, as a young teen, I’d probably have trained my critical thinking skills a little, and if my musings about that trolley problem didn’t impress my peers I would’ve dropped the pretences and told them that I’d read a story that had sex and drugs in it, and that would be that.

That isn’t how I first experienced the story: I heard its synopsis over a breakfast table and then, weeks later as I was shopping with a friend and she asked me if I eat pork, I saw the Omelasian child in front of me, whimpering and bleeding and moaning – a feeling of guilt that I’ve been nurturing for years was given imagery. I knew then in the supermarket, even before reading the story, that I’d write about it and give expression to the pain of complicity that affects me daily, to tide me over until the pain boils up again and demands repeated expression with new words or through a new medium.

In “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, the city of Omelas is a utopia; throughout the story Le Guin breaks the fourth wall to explicitly point out the fiction of it and encourages us as readers to flex and bend certain aspects of the utopia to our own preferences. She tuned in to our base, perpetually unfulfillable desires of comradeship, sex, highs, and joys and it’s intoxicating, when reading, to be asked to participate in constructing Omelas with exactly the building blocks most of us strongly desire. It makes the twist that much sharper: our utopia which has made our hearts swell and sparked our carnal desires, Le Guin tells us, is only made possible because of a single child’s suffering. Le Guin isn’t the sole architect here either, the choice of where the child’s tiny cell is held in the city is the reader’s choice. What’s cemented is that for the utopia to exist, the child must exist with open sores untreated and exposed to its own shit forever. The sacrificial child is vividly, disgustingly described in its perpetual state of suffering and we’re horrified not only by its pain but by ourselves, as at this point in the story we’re invested in the fantasy of our utopia that we helped build, our heads are still fuzzy with ideas of art, sex, feasts, and dance; we’re already wondering soon after the first glance into the cell if we’d let the child suffer for our perpetual comfort, ecstasy, and happiness.

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Mary Branscombe reviews All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions that Disrupt

Explore where technology might take us and what that might mean for how we live with this anthology that brings together experts and writers.

It’s easy to view fiction as merely entertainment and escapism (both important in their own right), but stories – especially science and speculative fiction (SFF) – are also wonderful tools for exploring and learning, imagining possibilities and seeing how they might work. It is serious play and playful thinking.

It’s almost a tenet of SFF that technology is secondary to the story. While SFF writers tend to explore ideas and the stories those ideas generate, their technology may be plausible but there’s no requirement for it to be. There are, however, countless movies and TV shows where an interesting premise is undermined by technology that absolutely doesn’t work. Futurists and researchers explore possibilities and trends, making predictions that are intended as realistic extrapolations of real or expected technology, with none of the Hollywood handwaving and convenient MacGuffins, but while fictional case studies illustrating predictions are so common that you’ll find them in IKEA’s latest research about homes and living, they rarely have the kind of characters, plot and drama that makes for compelling fiction.

What if you could combine the two, with experts and authors collaborating to write about possible futures in ways that are not just plausible but creative, with equally strong stories and technical chops? Like Cybersalon’s previous anthology, 22 Ideas About the Future, All Tomorrow’s Futures is predicated on (mostly) plausible technology and the impacts such technological developments might have on justice, energy, digital money, health and education.

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Issue 300, ‘Community’— Call for proposals

Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky

Science fiction, for all it encompasses strange new worlds and fantastical creatures, is a literary genre that is built and sustained by human communities. Writers, artists, and creators have imagined new social formations, technologies, economic, ecological, and sociopolitical systems for centuries; indeed, science fiction may be the most nakedly political of all literary genres, as thought-provoking as it is beguiling. Who is present in narratives of futurity? What kinds of technologies enable—or stymie—human connection? How can inter-species communities develop and flourish?

Pre-internet, fanzines and conventions were the spaces where editors, authors, and fans met, shaping the genre in new and exciting ways. Praise and critique and conflict and collaboration were equally already common before social media. Some landmark dates include: the first WorldCon (1939), the first British science fiction convention, Eastercon (1937), the Maleyevka seminars, Nihon SF Taikai (from 1962), and many others, around the globe.

In 2024, the ideologies of ‘community’ are under pressure and scrutiny. Violent geopolitical events shadowplay on smartphone screens, small enough to fit in the palm of our hands, fulfilling the most dystopian dreams of the genre; we venture to fight and commiserate and celebrate with people from all over the world, instantly. Where wealthy industrialists were (and are) once praised as saviors of humanity with the glittering promise of their space programs, now SF tends to show how the relentless logics of capitalism undermine any notions of transcendence. The challenge of space travel was supposed to unite us. What would the pioneers of SF make of the now-straining politics around the International Space Station, scheduled for dismantling by 2030?

In light of these challenges, the Vector team—for the journal’s milestone 300^th issue—invites contributions that reify the notion of ‘community’ as it manifests in speculative cultures. What tools can SF offer us to construct better tomorrows, together? How can we innovate new ways of collaborating, such as the world-building projects of Syllble? What does ‘community’ look like in fiction, non-fiction, conventions, awards, conferences, collaborations, online spaces, and other literary and paraliterary formations?

Suggested questions / topics

history of fandom/conventions
the practice of writing: zines, magazines, letters
science fiction publishing: editors and collaborators on the printed page
utopias and dystopias
terraforming
defining personhood
future societies
sex and sexuality
navigating conflict
political divides, past and present
interspecies alliances
the posthuman
the future of communication
translating SF

Please submit your proposal by June 15th, 2024 to vector.submissions@gmail.com, including:

a 150-500 word proposal, including estimated length;
something about yourself, either a 50-100 word bio or a CV.

Articles should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words. Please let us know your estimated word count. We seek articles that are carefully grounded in scholarly research, while also being clear, engaging, and suitable for a broad audience (including non-academics). Articles will be due by July 31st, 2024.

Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats.

Review of The International Black Speculative Writing Festival 2024

Reviewed by Amirah Muhammad

Founded by Dr Kadija George Sesay, the International Black Speculative Writing Symposium and Festival was a three-day in-person event at Goldsmiths, University of London, held in February 2024, alongside a single-day online event for global audiences. The festival offered workshops for writers, readings and performances, speakers’ panels, interviews, and group discussions. The festival’s many partners included Comma Press, Spread The Word, New Writing South, Writing East Midlands, TLC, Writing Our Legacy, Peepal Tree Press and Yaram Arts. The event was supported by Arts Council England, Professor Deidre Osborne and the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. The festival’s authorised bookseller was This is Book Love. The BSFA had a stall featuring its publications, showcasing African writers from the Luna Press and launching Kampala Yénkya – an applied African speculative culture project on imagining climate futures by Dilman Dila and Vector editors.

As the first of its kind, the festival promised all the thrills of a new experience, alongside the anticipation of a skilfully curated event. Across its online and in-person events, titans of Black Speculative Fiction abounded, including Sheree Renée Thomas, Professor Reynaldo Anderson, Dr. Karen Lord, Dr. Courttia Newland, and Leone Ross. I spent three days at Goldsmiths absorbing new fiction in all its forms, building new personal and intellectual connections, and exploring new ways of thinking about Black Speculative Fiction.

Professor Reynaldo Anderson

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Harry Slater reviews The Other Shore by Hoa Pham

The Other Shore by Hoa Pham (Goldsmiths Press, 2023)

Review by Harry Slater

The Other Shore, by Hoa Pham, winner of the Viva La Novella prize, deals with some of the biggest questions there are. It’s about life and death and legacy, about power and control, colonisation and oppression, ancestry and the price we pay for the future we want. And it’s all told from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese girl, Kim Nguyen. That makes for some interesting stylistic choices; the prose can sometimes feel stilted, lacking in the emotional clout that an older voice might add. At the same time, though, there’s a visceral naivety at play here, the realisations of the state of the world are ever more compelling because they’re wounds delivered fresh, for the first time. In one way, then, The Other Shore is a coming-of-age story, and at the same time a brutal indictment of human cruelty, an examination of the structures of power that bind Vietnam, and the world, and how they’ve come to be. After a brush with death, Kim discovers that she can read people’s minds by touching them, a gift bestowed upon her by the goddess Quan Âm. More than that, she now has contact with the titular Other Shore, the place where the dead go after passing on. At first her father uses her newfound powers to earn money from his business associates, but it isn’t long before the government comes knocking. Kim is taken to a mass grave by Bác Phuc, another apparent psychic working for the communists. There she’s tasked with reconnecting buried soldiers with their families, giving their restless spirits the chance to finally find some solace. But there’s a catch – if she discovers southern Vietnamese remains, they’re tossed to the side, left to their haunted afterlife. This forms one of the core moral quandaries of the book; Kim knows she should be helping everyone to find peace, but the powers-that-be simply won’t stand for it. This burgeoning sense of responsibility, of behaving in ways that shake off the ideas of the past, leads her to Khôi, a second-generation Vietnamese American working as an interpreter for a US MIA mission. There’s an idealism to him, and a freedom, that Kim finds alluring. Interspersed with this trauma is a strange love triangle between Kim, Bác Phuc and Khôi that doesn’t quite ring true, feeling more like an extended metaphor for the possibilities that are opening and closing in Kim’s life. The Other Shore deals with complex cultural issues with a deft hand, showing Kim’s innocence slipping away as she starts to confront decades-old actions that have shaped the life she lives today. At times it can be quite clunky, though, and there are decisions and story beats that seem to come too quick, sometimes occurring in the space of a paragraph. Kim’s relationship with her dead grandmother is the beating heart of the story, tying together the past, present and future with a kindness and a spirituality that the modern world Kim inhabits appears to have left behind. There are heartbreaking moments, and the confusion, excitement and terror of adolescence is captured within the staccato rhythms of the piece. While The Other Shore might lack fluidity and fluency, it poses its questions with a steady hand and doesn’t flinch away from showing us Kim’s strife in harrowing, gut-wrenching close-ups. There’s no easy ending here, no final resolution, and that’s fitting for a book that confronts such fundamental and difficult topics. This is a book layered with the spiritual and the political, a meditation not just on life and death, but on our attitudes towards them. It’s hard going sometimes, in several different ways, but The Other Shore leaves you with deep questions about what it means to be human, and for that alone it’s worth checking out.