Eternally Displaced Persons? Territorial Bodies and The Ministry of Time

By Matt Finch

Introduction

What does travel through time and space reveal about the body?

This essay is an invitation to think about bodies moving through time in a work of contemporary literature. What is exposed about a body when it is displaced in time and space? The concept of the territorial body, developed from the pioneering work of Verónica Gago (2020), serves as a lens through which we can understand “the body of the individual person in the context of its entanglement with questions of territory, incorporating the complex multidirectional dynamics which arise between the individual body, the collective, and the various territories they inhabit” (Finch and Mahon, 2025, p.163). I also consider the temporal dimension of how “institutionally and culturally enforced rhythms, or timings, shape flesh into legible, acceptable embodiment” (Freeman, 2010, p.40). In this framing, the body is always the body in context and contexts, in turn, are changed by the bodies which populate them.

This lens is trained, here, on Kaliane Bradley’s 2024 novel The Ministry of Time. Bradley uses a science fiction conceit to bring together bodies from the territories of Britain’s past, present, and future. They populate a narrative which is at once a romance with sophisticated queer dynamics, a techno-thriller, an “odd couple” comedy of cultural misunderstanding, and a meditation on race and national identity in the era of climate crisis.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Hodder and Stoughton, 2024)

The novel also provides the perfect opportunity for us to move Gago’s concept beyond the limits of “real world” plausibility; as one of Bradley’s characters puts it, “we are interested in the actual feasibility of taking a human body through time. Our concern is if the process of time-travel has major implications for the expat or the expat’s surroundings.” (p.37). From Bradley’s science-fictional vantage points, distinct interrogations of the territorial body can be made.

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Jean-Paul Garnier interviews Tara Campbell

Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She’s the author of the eco sci-fi novel TreeVolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, was released by Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in September 2024. She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer’s Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.taracampbell.com

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also the poetry editor of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/

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JPG – CITY OF DANCING GARGOYLES has a really interesting format: it switches between epistolary and more traditional novel narratives. What made you decide to mix these formats to tell your story, and what advantages did it provide you?

TC – Well, I hadn’t actually planned on writing a novel. During COVID I was having a hard time concentrating enough just to read, let alone write, but I was inspired by a novel pre-writing technique by Michael Moorcock that centered on imagery containing deliberate paradoxes. The image he gave as an example was “In the city of screaming statues.” That image created so many questions in my mind: I had to know what the city looked like, what it sounded like, what set these statues off, were they screaming words or just sounds, did they ever stop, etc. I was excited at how many questions that one image created, so I created a writing exercise for myself based on nouns and verbs, putting together words that absolutely do not belong together, like floating wolves and sailing statues and glaring chocolates and all of these things that simply can’t be.

I wound up writing a couple dozen stories, and when I started thinking about how to bring them together in a collection, I created a chart to figure out how to group them, looking at commonalities of theme or tone or perspective or any way they would cohere. Then a writer friend suggested using an element I mentioned in one of the stories—alchemical testing—to imagine all of the stories as part of the same universe.

Once I started thinking in terms of a novel, I had to be more ruthless in how to change or cut stories for the purposes of the narrative. Some of the stories turned into setting or characters instead of self-standing works. But on the other hand, the epistolary sections let certain stories be as weird as they wanted to be in this future US that’s been that’s been altered by climate change and alchemical testing.

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Tony Conn Interviews Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente has packed a lot into the first 20 years of her career. Her genre-busting work runs the gamut from alternative history to fairytale fantasy to cosmic horror. In addition to writing 27 novels and novellas, she has multiple collections of short fiction and poetry. She is also the creator of a six-year-old human, but motherhood shows no signs of slowing her down. Space Opera, her 2018 bestseller about an interplanetary Eurovision Song Contest, was shortlisted for Best Novel at the Hugo Awards. Her new novel, Space Oddity, picks up where Space Opera left off and reflects contemporary concerns like pandemics, online misinformation, and the threat of all-out war. https://www.catherynnemvalente.com/

Tony Conn is a writer and filmmaker with an interest in all things strange. He is perhaps the world’s leading expert on the Megatron, a flying saucer-shaped restaurant that used to adorn the Cambridgeshire countryside and now features in Space Oddity. https://tonyconn.com/

TC: Could you tell us about your background and early influences?

CV: My parents met at UCLA and divorced when I was very young. I had two stepparents most of my childhood and went back and forth between Seattle and northern California. My dad was an aspiring filmmaker who went into advertising instead, which is very much a family thing on my father’s side. A lot of them intended to be artists and ended up in the family business. My mother is a retired political science professor. She was in her master’s and PhD programmes through almost every portion of my early life that I can remember. She was working for the mayor of Seattle, getting her degrees in public policy, doing advocacy work, and she’s a pretty hardcore statistician as well.

They were in their early twenties when they had me. They had no sense of what was appropriate for a child. I had no boundaries as to what I could read, or watch, or anything. I just had to be vocal about when it was too much for me, which is kind of a modern parenting idea. My mother read Plato’s Republic to me as a bedtime story, specifically The Myth of Er, which is this allegory about what happens when we die. At five, she had me read The Breasts of Tiresias by Apollinaire. It’s above the pay grade of adults, let alone a small child. My mother had no sense of that. In my mom’s house, there are stacks of books that are now end tables. Cairns of books everywhere.

Both of my birthparents are big musical theatre people, so I grew up seeing musicals all the time. I’ve always had this really low voice, since I was ten. I wanted to be a singer, but there weren’t any parts for somebody with a voice like mine. My mom also has a master’s degree in drama, so I remember when Beaumarchais was a big thing in our house. At eleven, all that anybody talked about was The Barber of Seville.

I had a lot of influences from my parents. My mom read every murder mystery. My dad is hardcore science fiction. And then, my stepmother Kim is the world’s biggest Stephen King fan. Horror was my first love, both as a reader and a writer.

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Interview with Samantha Mills

by Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Samantha Mills is a Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning author living in Southern California, USA. You can find her short fiction in Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and others, as well as the best-of anthologies The New Voices of Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2023. Her debut science fantasy novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, is out now. You can find more at www.samtasticbooks.com.

JPG – The culture in The Wings Upon Her Back is a theocracy where labor and religion are intertwined, can you tell us about using this as a worldbuilding device?

SM – When developing The Wings Upon Her Back, I wanted a claustrophobic, monocultural setting to reflect the isolation of the main character and the fraught history of her city. Everything had to revolve around the five gods that are sleeping overhead.

In the book, the division of labor is a core tenet of their religious and social framework because they are emulating the gods, who arrived with very clearly defined roles. I ended up with five sects: the workers and farmers are the biggest groups, who keep the city running; the scholars and engineers are documenting and implementing the teachings of the gods; and the warriors keep the city isolated from outside forces. The primary conflict of the book comes from the unbalancing of these factions, as the warriors take more power over the others.

One of my favorite worldbuilding techniques is to build out social expectations – what everyone is supposed to believe, what everyone is supposed to do – and then to imagine the characters who do not fit the mold. I set a limit at five sects because it automatically creates tension: you can’t actually sort the breadth of humanity or the tasks needed to keep society running into such a small number of categories!

This tension permeates the book. There are jobs, such as medicine, that rely on teachings from multiple gods, and therefore arouse some unease. And there are many individuals who don’t fit neatly into their sect. My main character, Zemolai, was born into a family of scholars, but left them to be a warrior. The hodgepodge group of rebels she falls in with later in life have all either changed sects, or are revolting against the expectations placed on workers specifically. The right to question the division of labor (and therefore, the teachings of the gods) is central to the story.

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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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Ukrainian Women in SF: A Roundtable Conversation

Interviewed by Michael Burianyk

Nataliya Dovhopol, Natalia Matolinets, Iryna Hrabovska, Daria Piskozub and Svitlana Taratorina are five young, diverse Ukrainian women writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Not only is their fiction significant but they also have a YouTube channel “Фантастичні talk(s)/Fantastic talk(s)” (@fantalks) where they discuss the history and current state of Ukrainian fantastic literature and interview foreign writers. All are fluent and articulate in English. More importantly they are expressive in their understanding of their own work and the importance of Science Fiction and Fantasy in understanding real life. Their insights into their writing reveal how it fits into contemporary Ukrainian culture and literature. Their responses are often touching and even harrowing, considering the horrific war they are experiencing.

Note for the following that both Nataliya Dovhopol and Natalia Matolinets share the same first name, spelled the same in Ukrainian, but use different English spellings.

What themes and topics do you explore in your work?

Nataliya Dovhopol I combine my interests in local history, mythology, art history and cultural studies with my degree in Theory and History of Art. I consider my novels to be historical fantasy (To Find the Amazon’s Land, The Knight of the Drevlyanian Land and the Lady Eagle) and ethnic fantasy (Wandering Circus of the Silver Lady). I also explore urban fantasy and like to experiment with genres and topics to reveal unknown pages of Ukrainian history, but always in the context of the real world. As well, suffering a lack of coming-of-age stories in my childhood, I want today’s youngsters to easily find exciting books by Ukrainian authors.

Iryna Hrabovska I’ve written in many genres, including detective stories and adventure novels. But most of all I love researching history. My debut was the steampunk duology Leoburg mostly set in a world with an alternate European history. My new trilogy (The Crystal Castle) is a sword and sorcery fantasy based on the events of the Hundred Years’ War. I am particularly proud of my mystical story The Closest to Hell, about the disappearance of miners in one of the first mines in Donbas in the early 20th century. It’s based on historical material about the small mining town of Snizhne, where I was born, and I want Ukrainians to see the Donetsk region not only as a place of war but also as a place of beauty and fantasy.

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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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Spirit, Part 1: Take One

I started Gwyneth Jones’ Spirit at the wrong time, or at least in the wrong headspace. The plot was a Lego patchwork of interlinked episodes, and it didn’t seem to have enough momentum to take me much of anywhere plot-wise, even as it spanned a barely-known universe in its events. I hadn’t read any of Jones’ other Aleutian novels, had no greater context thus far into which to slot it. I didn’t feel lost, but it wasn’t a universe to which I had any existing commitment.

It didn’t help that I knew there was a rape scene coming, somewhere in its expansive, multi-volumesque middle. With that looming, somewhere, I read more and more episodically, which did nothing to help the volume’s flow. Doom, gloom, and stuckness overwhelmed the characters and I, seeing no hope for them and fearing what I knew was coming, went adrift. I stopped reading.

Despite that unpromising beginning, I always meant to go back to it. My intentions were good. The SFX blurb promised me a take on The Count of Monte Cristo, a novel I remembered fondly and whose plot I’d happily revisit. Nearly halfway through the book, I was barely halfway through the lavishly extensive blurb on the back of the book when I failed to keep reading.

It really is quite a blurb. As Martin Lewis observed in his discussion of the novel last week, it synopsizes up to page 255 out of 472 pages. At the time, however, it was a token framework for me, a checklist of events which the plot had gotten around to, rather than any real roadmap of structure. (Which raises the question: is it still really a spoiler once it’s mentioned in the blurb?) It really was the wrong time and headspace for me to be reading the novel.

Fortunately, Martin suggested I have another go at the novel this March, complete the task I set myself last year when I undertook to write – or host writing on – the eleven best science fiction novels by women from the first decade of this millennium.

I’m glad he did. The second time around, the book was good.

Lavinia, Part 3: Science Fiction?

Enough people thought Le Guin’s Lavinia was science fiction that it was shortlisted for the BSFA best novel award, and placed in last year’s poll of the best sf novels by women of the previous decade.

But why is it science fiction? Is it science fiction because that’s what Le Guin writes, and therefore this must be too? Is it science fiction between there’s a time traveler in the story, albeit one who makes a limited number of appearances, and those through extended vision sequences? Is it science fiction because, as I have proposed elsewhere, history is a form of science, and this story plays around with historiography in a science fictional way?

Jo Walton and Niall Harrison assert that it’s fantasy, as opposed to science fiction. Others clearly saw no distinction between science fiction and fantasy for the purposes of these particular two samplers – the BSFA Award is specifically open to fantasy, after all, despite the name of the organisation. And Niall didn’t define “science fiction” for the purpose of last year’s best-of poll, so its presence there doesn’t preclude it being only fantasy.

And yet, Niall observed that some people voted for Lavinia for the best-of poll in the same email as they said they wished they could vote for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but couldn’t because that was fantasy. Clearly, some people were consciously thinking of Lavinia as being science fiction as opposed to fantasy.

Personally, I don’t believe that one categorisation precludes the other. Above all, Lavinia is historical fiction, with a focus on the practical intricacies of daily life, and the mechanics of legend. It has one minor possible moment of mythic magic, when a group of household lares are mysteriously transported from one place to another. It has a time-traveling poet on his death bed, whose transtemporal dialogues can be interpreted as science fictional time travel, or as fantastical vision.

It also has a self-aware narrator, whose story is suffused with her consciousness of contingency. Her existence depends upon her being recounted. I’d never thought of post-modern as a mythic mode, but her self-consciousness is thoroughly both in this tale, as is the literalness embodied in her final transformation. Looked at from a different angle again, she feels a keen sense of wonder at the very fact of her own existence, under the circumstances. Perhaps her historiographic analytic self-consciousness is enough of a psychological experiment to justify Lavinia being thought of science fiction.

Lavinia, Part 2: Audience

Lavinia is one of the most recent installations in a long history of what is, in effect, Aeneid-related fan fiction. It was a particularly popular topic for authors in the seventeenth and eighteen century, when the well-educated were quite likely to have read it in Latin as part of their education. The ancient Latin work spawned a slew of elaborators and continuations, best know of which is Purcell’s opera, written about Dido and Aeneas.

Indeed, one of my own extremely rare forays into fan art was when a friend at university asked me to draw a series of small images of Aeneas and his escape from Troy. The images were quite tiny and in watercolour pencil, so barely more than stick figures at that scale. Further, I hadn’t read the Aeneid yet, so relied entirely on my friend’s description of each of eight or nine scenes. That’s how I first met Ascanius and Aeneas and their household Lares, the house gods they saved from Troy, and which find their home, ultimately, with Lavinia in Le Guin’s novel. In Lavinia, Aeneas’ first point of personal commitment to the title character is in entrusting her with their care; and one of the few moments proposed as potentially-supernatural intervention occurs when the Lares move themselves back to her custody.

I’m sure other Aeneid-related works are still being produced, if not so many as in their heyday. Certainly Troy-related works have been going strong lately, if more focused on the Trojan War itself than its aftermath. Equally certain is how well known the stories of Troy are, from their related epics to the ongoing archeological investigations into the history of a city long-since defunct. It’s as inspiring as Atlantis.* Just the other day in Paris, I saw a Trojan dog in the window of some upscale mass-market clothing store, big enough for at least three people.

So the stories generally are known. But how well is the Aeneid in particular known these days among those who haven’t studied Latin? I wonder, not in terms of judging whatever count as “reading the classics”, but in term of who the target audience for Lavinia might be. And does knowing the source material even matter?

My copy of the book is printed in a nice, clear, big font, which leaves me wondering if it was marketed – as many of Le Guin’s books have been – as that relatively-recent classification, Young Adult fiction. The story does deal with a young woman coming of age. How accessible would this book be to someone with no background in Aeneid, whether or not they were a teenager? The story itself provides a summary, in effect, of the last three books of the Aeneid, plus quite a big of its contextual background, but equally the book is written in conscious dialogue with the poem and its poet, who himself appears as an influential character in the book. Lavinia herself tells the reader that her very existence is contingent on his having told of her having been.

Le Guin’s books often deal with historically-rich civilizations, burdened from and benefitting from their layers of past. Might that mean her books would intrinsically appeal to readers with a greater historical consciousness and interest? Or perhaps it is largely through partially-derivative works like this that audiences are most familiar with the Aeneid these days, if at all?

I first read Lavinia specifically because it had been nominated for the BSFA Award for best novel of 2009. Le Guin is, of course, one of the most important authors of science fiction and fantasy; but is this book even targeted at readers of those genres? (I’ll consider the degree to which it even is science fiction in my next post.)

It’s a Le Guin book, and a good and well-reviewed book, so of course it sold at least moderately well. It’s been published at least in the US, the UK, and Japan, and had both hardback and paperback editions; but who is the book’s audience?

* I was recently looking through a brochure of things to do while in Dubai. It includes a theme park devoted to how the residents of Atlantis might have lived.