Retaining Humanity

Retaining Humanity – a review of “Extracting Humanity and Other Stories” by Stephen Oram – review by Allen Ashley

“Extracting Humanity and Other Stories” by London-based SF writer Stephen Oram was officially launched at an in-person event at Burley Fisher independent bookshop, Dalston on Thursday 3 August 2023. Attendees included Geoff Ryman, along with some of the scientists Oram has worked with over the years in his roles with the “Virtual Futures” and “Cybersalon” projects – notably Christine Aicardi and Luke Robert Mason, who took part in an interview with the author during the second part of the evening. I mention these details because they speak to where Stephen Oram has placed himself over the past few years as a facilitator of closer links between SF authors and practising scientists as well as carving out a distinct near-future take on current trends, resulting in what I would term as the gradual creation of the “Oramverse”. Many of us authors strive to have a recognisable style and a recognisable palette of concerns; I would say that with this current collection and his two well-received previous offerings – “Eating Robots and Other Stories” (Silverwood Books, 2017) and “Bio-hacked & Begging and Other Stories” (Silverwood Books, 2019) – Stephen has succeeded in that aim.

There are twenty stories in this collection, some flash length, others more developed. Only one is set off-Earth – “Far Side Whispers”, an inventive evocation of civilisation on Luna. The remaining nineteen all present a vision of the UK a few or several years from now, integrating technological advances and societal change as drivers of the plot. It’s an old adage that the SF written about the future is actually a comment on our world today; with Stephen Oram’s work, this intention is often foregrounded. If you’re worried about how AI algorithms have the capacity to negatively affect you, and you probably should be, opener “Poisoning Prejudice” shows how the individual can fight back. The next story, “Haptic Father”, is one that Stephen read at the launch and is a standout, a compelling Oedipal tragedy. Other notable moments include my personal favourite “Adtatter Love” based on a totally plausible concept of people earning money by riding the tube trains all day sporting an electronically embedded advertisement on their forehead. Am I giving too much away if I say that Stephen Oram manages something of an uplift at the end? Closing the collection, title story “Extracting Humanity” is a moving piece that, with its protestors Madeleine and Sara, reminded me somewhat of the sacrifices made by the indomitable Greenham Common women of the 1980s.

Elsewhere along the way, you will find the author raising pertinent questions about what it means to be human / alive / real in “Chimy and Chris” (which was published in “The Best of British Science Fiction 2020”); “Keeping Family”, a bitter, short piece which focuses on the future of pregnancy and birth and yes the process is as sterile and heartless as we might fear; as well as “Standard Deviations”, which is another story pointing out the dangers of AI control, specifically predicting a person’s “unknown risk of future mental health issues” and, by extension, limiting that person’s life choices and liberty. A sort of minor “Minority Report” if you will.

Reading the whole collection again, one can see regular themes emerging – “Be Aware, The Hand That Feeds” starts with a common Stephen Oram trope, that the lead character has to somehow make their daily wage and put a meal in their stomach. Oram is telling us that life is likely to get ever more precarious and hand to mouth for the working class. The gig economy is a recurrent concern – “Adtatter Love”, “William Dreams” – and economics itself rears its head on several occasions. “In Trust We Trust” is a clever examination of what Oram calls near-future “Currency commonality” – an expansion of the current range of Sterling, PayPal / Google Pay, Bitcoin, etc into a myriad of potential mini-streams of finance. This being the Oramverse, of course, our hero’s credit is “Refused”. There is wit, too: “Bits ‘N’ Bacon” has the lines: “Each pre-packaged piece of food would have contained nanobots that registered its passage through the human, providing the health company with certainty on who was eating what.” Beware, folks, our only value in the near-future is as repositories of harvestable data.

As with most collections, there are a couple of pieces that don’t quite live up to the rest. This may be a consequence of four of the stories having emerged fairly quickly or to very tight guidelines from scientist-author link-ups and being previously published in “22 Ideas About the Future” (Cybersalon Press, 2022). And although Stephen is a great writer (and a great friend), I would have to say that the opening line of “John Doyle Remains” – “I had a girlfriend who ate my scabs” – feels like a misstep.

Overall, this is a great collection of short speculation on the near-future of urban society. I lie awake at night sometimes wondering if these are predictions as well as warnings. Read carefully, be prepared to fall brain-first into the Stephen Oram world.

– Allen

Support indie publishers and buy direct:

“Extracting Humanity and Other Stories” by Stephen Oram (Orchid’s Lantern, UK, 2023). 207pp, paperback, £9.99.

You can watch Luke Robert Mason interviewing Stephen Oram and Christine Aicardi on You Tube:

About the reviewer: Allen Ashley is a British Fantasy Aawrd winner and is the founder of the advanced science fiction and fantasy group Clockhouse London Writers. His latest book is the atom punk chapbook “Journey to the Centre of the Onion” (Eibonvale Press, UK, 2023).

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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Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

Reviewed by Rebecca Hankins

Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna Brown. Duke University Press, 2021. Paperback 212 pg. $24.95. ISBN: 978-1478010548

Brown’s Black Utopias is one of the most scholarly and comprehensive works exploring Black Utopian futures. Very apt for a Covid-19 pandemic period that has seen the initial overwhelming loss of Black and Brown lives. In light of this mass death, Brown’s study asks — and through this work, answers — “What might Black futures mean, and how might we challenge our imaginations to create futures that are not only different to what we know and what we expect, but even allows us to evolve beyond our physical existence? Packed into these pages is a narrative that encompasses Afro-futurism, death, theology, spirituality, music, philosophers, science fiction, fantasy, and gender, stories that had to be absorbed, analyzed, and contemplated before beginning the review. There were layers after layers of new ideas packed into a narrative that also centered the stories of Black women’s religious and cultural beings in which they constantly sought a physical and metaphysical utopia within an Afro-futurist and Afro-centric framework.

Cultural critic Mark Dery is credited with coining the term Afro-futurism as “techno cultural aesthetic that blends science fictional imagery, technology, philosophy, and the imagery, languages, and cultures of Africa and the worldwide African diaspora.” Scholar Yusuf Nuruddin also notes that Afrofuturism “includes black science fiction or Afrocentric science fiction, more broadly defined as African American signification about culture, technology and things to come” (or, in the case of alternative histories, “things that might have come” from a reconfigured past). Brown’s adds to our understanding of Afro-futurism that undergirds her work: Brown defines Afro-futurism as “a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures […] most notable for resisting disciplinary boundaries” (p17). Moreover, combined with this Afro-centric, interdisciplinary attitude toward futures and counter-futures, the genre of Afro-futurism centers works of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction created by African Americans, Africans and the African diaspora. Afro-centricity embodies works that are often critical writings that focus on race, the institution of slavery, class, gender, oppression, inequality, and sexuality, all woven throughout Brown’s book.

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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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Into The Spider-Verse and (Side)Setting the Scene for Social Change

By Christy Dena

This piece contains mild spoilers and mild mind scrambling if you haven’t seen the 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Margaret Thatcher had something to say about Miles Morales, so too did narrative theorist Seymour Chatman, as well as those fighting the idea of a “half-black, half-Hispanic” Spider-Man (Rose, 2018). It wouldn’t be a stretch of my tingly senses to say these folks share the belief that there is no alternative, there is a single, right, way. Thankfully, the opening sequence of the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (screenplay by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, story by Phil Lord), sets the scene for social change with some cool emancipatory narrative devices.

It’s the kind of interventionist work that needs to be done because audiences have been trained to approach their story experiences, and much of life, with closed thinking. As part of his work on The Psychology of Closed Mindedness, social psychologist Arie Kruglanski explains that ‘the need for closure is the desire to have certainty, to have a definite answer to a question and avoid ambiguity’ (Kruglanski, 2021). A consequence of this is we can ‘jump to conclusions about others, and to form impressions based on limited and incomplete evidence’ (Kruglanski, 2004, 2). That character is the killer! Capitalism is the answer!

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found it hard to imagine alternatives, and encouraged everyone else to find it hard. Thatcher is associated with the slogan ‘There is No Alternative’ — which refers to the neoliberal logic she popularised. In a speech, Thatcher not only said ‘there’s no real alternative,’ but also said ‘What’s the alternative? To go on as we were before?’ (Thatcher, 1980). As if the future is a long, single, inevitable, line of progression and the only choice is to stick with what isn’t working or proceed in the only available direction. Do nothing and crumble, or do the only change available.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher connected the belief that there is no alternative to capitalism with dystopian films and novels that don’t imagine ‘different ways of living’ (Fisher, 2009, 2). Instead of representing or prefiguring different ways of living together, many works of fiction depict the destruction of the world by unbridled capitalism. Even our fiction jumps to conclusions.

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Uncontrollable beast: The Cabinet by Un-su Kim reviewed

By Peter Zupanc

Isn’t capitalist system, which humans invented 200 years ago, growing into an uncontrollable beast that will devour human society?

Clock of Babel runs the whole world to the same rhythm of time.^1]
The Cabinet

The Cabinet starts with a description of the cabinet. Inside, there are files of amazing people. A man who is turning into a tree, a woman who is growing a lizard instead of a tongue, and many more. This is not regarded as much of a mystery, and we never learn what is the mechanism of their transformation. The fantastic simply exists, not to be questioned, though for sure, in other respects this is our world. The protagonist could have come straight from the pages of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. When he is not describing the fantastic files, he is ranting about his predicament: “As long as you don’t ask yourself what you are doing, you can keep doing it until the end of life” or “the only thing that capitalism ever produced is anxiety”. Reading The Cabinet from the perspective of Bullshit Jobs seems appropriate in more senses than one. The Cabinet is a multipronged critique of capitalism disguised as a fantasy novel.

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A Journey to the Narrative Design in Everything Everywhere All At Once

By Christy Dena and Yen Ooi

This article contains moderate spoilers, so please do watch the film before reading!

Yen: Everything Everywhere All At Once is a 2022 film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. I watched it on a quiet weekday morning at a lush cinema with only two other people in the room. I laughed out loud and cried real tears, many times throughout. It’s a habit of mine to stay to the end of film credits to appreciate the number of people (who made it and those who didn’t) it took to make the film, and this time, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay in the cinema to try and hold on to my feelings a little longer.

The film was bumpy in places for me, but it felt like quality entertainment that was nutritional for my soul. I couldn’t articulate why that was the case, so I reached out to an East and Southeast Asian writers network that I belonged to in the UK, Bubble Tea Writers, and crowdsourced some thoughts:

“I loved how funny and wacky it was, whilst having a super simple mother-daughter relationship at its heart. It made me think of my mum…” Martin Ngwong

“In many ways the film was something that I’d both never seen before and yet it was uncannily familiar.” Arianne Maki

“I’ve seen it twice and loved it!! Thought it was a really original film that didn’t feel predictable.” Nozomi Tolworthy

Everything continued to nibble away at my thoughts, so much so that I couldn’t help but mention it to Christy. I knew that she would be able to help me analyse how the narrative structure plays into the success of the film and why I’m so taken by it. I was also curious as to how she (who’s not from an Asian diasporic background) would experience the film. A couple of weeks later, I received an email from Christy titled: Seen Everything! We quickly got together to chat and afterwards, it was clear that we both had a lot of thoughts about the film, and we wanted to share them. We continued our conversation on a shared document, and this is the result.

To start the journey, I find myself licking the ‘y’ key on my keyboard to jump into Christy’s world!

Multiverses & Multiplicity

Christy: Yen! Hey, I was listening to the Script Apart podcast, and the Daniels say It’s a Wonderful Life is a multiverse film.^[1] One way it does this is through exploring an alternative universe, in which the protagonist was never born. I would add another way it is a multiverse: the movement of the protagonist from their assumption things will inevitably end up bad, to shifting perspective and chasing a different path. There is the verse of closed thinking, and the verse of ‘optional thinking’… or optional thinking creates another verse!

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22 Ideas About the Future

Reviewed by James Woudhuysen

22 Ideas about the future, edited by Benjamin Greenaway and Stephen Oram (Cybersalon Press: 2022)

On Sky Arts, over some months, they’ve been playing Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This was a schlocky but nevertheless highly entertaining series of spooky psychodramas, each just 25 minutes long, interrupted by its sponsors, Bristol Myers. Running from 1955 till at least 1957, the films featured stars such as Ralph Meeker, Charles Bronson, Thelma Ritter and the unimpeachable Claude Rains. Hitchcock would appear comically – from inside a space helmet, or at the centre of an enormous spider’s web – in a short spoof before the plot; also, in a splenetic, dour diatribe at the back end.

Perhaps numbered after the 22 in the year 2022, this collection of very short sci-fi stories has the same scary, translucent tone to it as those old Hitchcock shorts. While Hitch directed other directors to capture the southern, sinister and sardonic brightness he later gave us with Psycho, editors Benjamin Greenaway and Stephen Oram have wrung something similar from their contributors here. These are forecasts of the future in fictional form. Not all are successful, but some are fun.

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First-Class Flights: The Class Politics of Labour and Flight in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Elfin Stories

By Tam J Moules

Kingdoms of Elfin, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1977 short story collection, is one of her oddest and most fantastical works, the culmination of “a progressive shifting away from realism toward the explicitly anti mimetic modes of allegory and fable” (Castle, 1993), a departure which “seemed calculated to irritate and confuse a great many readers.” (Harman, 2015, p. 312) The tales were written over a period of several years, originally published separately in the New Yorker, before being published as a collection about a year before Townsend Warner’s death in 1978. They are loosely satires of class systems and aristocracy, as Harman describes: “She used Elfindom as a mirror to society, although all the satire in her elfin stories is very casually arrived at; she seems too uninterested in human dealings to aim at them with any care” (Harman, 2015, p. 313). Elfin (or fairy, the terms are often used interchangeably by both author and critics) society is portrayed as deeply decayed and corrupt, with a rigid class structure and archaic rituals dependent primarily on the whims of the powerful, disintegrating under the weight of their own isolationism and greed, and in opposition to the mortals of the tales, who are “almost universally working class”. (Priest, 2010)

There are two main layers to the class division in these stories. The most prominent is the division within Elfin society, between “flying servants [and] strolling gentry” (p.93). The division between Elfin and human society is also stratified along class lines, with the aforementioned working class mortals forming the main part of the human characters. The intersections between both of these stratifications will serve as the basis for my exploration of Warner’s treatment of class.

Claire Harman, in her 1989 biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, describes the Elfins as “anarchic [and] amoral”. Harman is likely using ‘anarchic’ in the colloquial sense, to mean ‘chaotic’, however, in contrast to the literal sense of the word, we see that Elfin society is deeply hierarchical, and the power of flight, through the possession and usage of wings, is frequently employed as a symbol of the delineation of those hierarchies. It’s a physical power, an inherited characteristic, a visual marker to differentiate between Elfins and those they consider to be their human inferiors. It serves as a marker of the differences between Elfins and humans, a demonstration of Elfin superiority that is tied in with human religious symbolism. It also serves as a class marker within Elfin society, between the working classes who must rely on flight for labour and transport, and the upper classes who consider it beneath their dignity. We are told quite flatly of the theoretically simple social position of flight: Elfins “fly or don’t fly according to their station in life”, and the aristocrats “marked their social standing by scorning to use their wings” (p. 66). The stories frequently concern themselves with instances in which these social rules are transgressed.

I am resisting the impulse here to taxonomise every symbolic function of the power of flight in these stories, to fit them all into some universal system, since this runs counter to the playfully and deliberately contradictory nature of these stories. Partly this is due to their being written over a long period of time, changing style and tone to suit the needs of particular stories, and partly it is an artefact of the stories’ function as social satires. Though some critics have discussed her “attempt to construct a typology of fairies” (Simons in Davies & Malcolm eds. 2006), I would disagree that she makes any such attempt. It is possible to read a typology into the book, but I’d argue that this requires flattening a lot of the apparent contradictions. Flight is forbidden, except when it’s not. Contact with humans is forbidden, except when it’s not. Religion is irrelevant to them, except when it’s not. She sets out a theoretical typology, then throughout the collection she explores the complications and violations and contradictions of this typology. It might be more accurate to say that the book is a typology of contradictions, and in laying out the Elfin contradictions we are led to consider the human ones.

In writing about Warner’s treatment of animals in her fiction, Mary Sanders Pollock discusses Warner’s project to “suggest ways that Marxist thinking might permeate and complicate the boundaries […] between the “human” and the other lively beings” (2015), which I would suggest applies equally to her treatment of the Elfins as it does to her treatment of animals. We see a convergence of these two concepts in the tale ‘The Mortal Milk’, which concerns “the Royal Pack of Werewolves” (p. 68) in the Court of Brocéliande as they sicken and die. They are described as both men and beasts, as both unnatural and mortal, as a liminal state between sapient and animal, and their treatment mirrors the treatment of the human children raised in Elfin. Permeability is a recurrent symbol in these stories, be it the permeable geographical boundaries between the two worlds, the permeable species boundaries between humans and Elfins, or the resisted permeability of class boundaries.

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