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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The Stereotype of the Spinster Scientist

By Lynne Lumsden Green

Astounding Science Fiction, January 1955

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She blinded me with science, And hit me with technology.

Excerpt from ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ by Thomas Dolby

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The concept of a ‘Spinster Scientist’ is an artefact of Western Society during the twentieth century. Women, historically, had to fight for the right to be allowed to study and matriculate at universities, as they were effectively barred from tertiary education in the Western world until the late 19^th century. Once women scientists existed in academia, popular culture, and mainstream society, they were of perceived as being different from their male colleagues; women were considered somehow less intelligent, and less ambitious, than their brother scientists: persistent Victorian-era beliefs within the medical profession that over-educating women would make them infertile. Even Charles Darwin argued that British women were intellectually inferior to British men. These gender biases contributed to the creation of the Spinster Scientist stereotype. However, the interactions between science practice, science fiction, and feminist movements have influenced the effect of this stereotype, creating a feedback loop where the stereotype also influenced those three arenas.

Birth of a Stereotype

The Spinster Scientist evolved over the course of the twentieth century, with the following stereotypical traits: a woman scientist, unmarried because she is dedicated to her career, or because she is socially awkward or frumpy. She generally wears glasses and isn’t interested in the latest style of clothes; she dresses for safety or comfort, not to conform to fashion. Her attitude to men is straightforward, brooking no nonsense, and though she might appear meek, she will stick to her convictions. The trope is exemplified in Susan Calvin, the robopsychologist created by Isaac Asimov, who narrates the stories collected in the anthology, I, Robot. Her character was written to be confident, brilliant, with a lifelong commitment to her work. Yet, from Asimov’s description of her in I, Robot: “She was a frosty girl, plain and colourless, who protected herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and a hypertrophy of intellect.” In other words, she is a textbook example of the stereotype. In the one story where she shows a romantic interest in one of her colleagues, she is derided for wearing make-up and trying to conform to the current beauty standards. Damned when she tried to conform to gender norms, and damned when she wasn’t trying, this is a fictional example of a double standard applied to women in the professional work arena.

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Issue 302, ‘Zoefuturism’—Call for proposals

“Scavengers reign” (2023)

Vector 302 is guest-edited by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram, with Phoenix Alexander as the editor-in-chief.

Zoefuturism takes its name from the Greek word for life, zoe (ζωή, zoí). It is a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings.’ Inspired by the study of zoetology that was coined by Prof Roger Ames, and the fact that DNA in all living things are bringers of change, zoefuturism explores the reality of human nature as human ‘becomings’ (rather than ‘beings’) where constant change rooted in all nature is acknowledged as fundamental to living. Though this inspiration is from ancient East Asian philosophy, zoefuturism doesn’t belong within one culture or philosophy. It is a concept that is shared throughout innumerable teachings around the world that is ancient and new, encompassing many philosophies, knowledge systems, teachings, way of lives, and religions.

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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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Gender, Democracy, and SF/F Literary Awards

Published in Foundation 149 (winter 2024) edited by Paul March-Russell. Republished with permission.

By Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin

This article explores cultural and design dimensions of non-governmental voting systems, focusing on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) literary awards voted for by fans, with a focus on the British Science Fiction Awards. The design of such voting systems needs to juggle a range of goals, one of which is fairness with regard to gender — acknowledging that ‘fairness’ is not straightforward to define, particularly given such awards are embedded within broader gender inequalities. Our analysis suggests that men have been more likely than women to vote for works by men, and also more likely to vote in ways that amplify the influence of men’s votes under an Alternative Vote System. We suggest that SFF awards are cultural spaces which lend themselves to experimentation with new democratic forms, and briefly offer potential sources of inspiration. Just as SFF has aspired to be a space to think about the future of technology, gender, the environment, and many other issues, SFF award spaces could be spaces for thinking about the future of democracy. We also offer recommendations to SFF awards designers and communities to address gender bias (emphasising reflective practices over technical solutions), and to continue to explore how aesthetic and cultural values and identities are constructed and negotiated within SFF award spaces, and beyond.

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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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Review: Disco Elysium (2019), ZA/UM

Dr. Marta F. Suarez

Disco Elysium is a CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) developed by the Estonian game studio and publisher ZA/UM. Originally released in 2019, the game was re-released in 2021 as a “Final Cut” version with new voice acting and quests. The game’s main premise is to investigate a murder in the imagined city of Revachol playing as Harry DuBois, a detective from the Revachol Citizens’ Militia (RCM). Yet, this is just one of the mysteries that the game offers and, at certain points, this objective might take a backseat.

Disco Elysium creates a universe of nostalgia, disappointment, and decay, where the pickets have blocked the harbour with union strikes, the remnants of a not-so-distant war are ever-present in the streets, and the everyday dialogues of characters are often infused with political and philosophical talk. In this world, our playable character, Harry, is not the heroic good cop fighting to uncover the murderer. Instead, the game paints him an almost unlikeable character to whom the player might eventually warm up, particularly if he is not taken too seriously. The start of the game presents Harry in his darkest hour, slowly regaining consciousness from a night of excesses and bad decisions. The game opens with a black screen and a dialogue with the mysterious voice of “Ancient Reptilian Brain”, which tries to convince the player to do nothing, embrace the silence, and accept death. In an unusual opening scene, Disco Elysium offers the player the possibility of not playing by refusing to wake up and instead giving up to the pessimism of a futile existence, leading to a game over within the first couple of minutes of the game. In these first minutes, the dialogue options withhold more information than they give, creating disorientation instead of revealing who our character is or what is happening. This sense of confusion is heightened by the sudden involvement of more voices, such as “Limbic System” and “Encyclopedia”. These and many others are Harry’s internal voices, parts of his personality that offer advice throughout the game, both hindering and aiding the player. When Harry finally manages to wake up, the player meets him lying face-down on the floor of a trashed room, in their underwear, and visibly hungover. Further examination of the room allows the character to find most of his clothes, and also reveals that Harry suffers amnesia after a night of drinking of “world-ending proportions”, as stated by the mirror. In the world of Revachol, objects might interact as if alive and sentient. They share thoughts, they provoke, they are sad, they die. Mostly, they keep Harry company, and act as one of the voices that plague his mind. A high “Inland Empire” skill (linked to the subconscious and foreboding) allows Harry to speak to some of his clothing, not always with the best results but quite often with amusing dialogues and surprising discoveries, whereas other skills like “Shivers” allow the player to get more information from the city and the environment, among others.

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Undugu

By Eugen Bacon

Undugu—it’s a Swahili term for kindredship. It’s not far off from “ujamaa,” a premise of sharing and togetherness that was President Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s socialist experiment when the United Republic of Tanzania first gained colonial independence. Ideally, ujamaa should have worked—it’s a beautiful and generous concept. In practice, it wasn’t quite the success it was meant to be. So there are also inherent risks with “undugu”—because kindredship means inviting others into your personal space. It’s a trust relationship founded on goodwill. And this is what it means to collaborate: to trust, to respect, to have goodwill in the understanding that all participants are beneficiaries of the outputs, that we all put in effort for the best outcome(s).

Undugu—this is what I aim to achieve in my collaborations. And they’re many.

The most powerful and, hopefully, the longest lasting of them is the Sauútiverse. Back in November 2021, Wole Talabi, one of the founding members of the Sauútiverse, reached out to African writers for expressions of interest in becoming part of a collective, to create a shared world using the Syllble platform. A bout of brainstorming sessions followed, in which we determined our vision as holding the key tenets of collaboration, support, creativity and Afrocentric-based storytelling. The Sauúti Collective, as we named the founding members, comprised ten African writers and creators from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and the diaspora—Haiti. Together, we created a new world, the Sauútiverse: an Africa-inspired secondary world with humanoid and non-humanoid creatures in a five-planet, binary star system with a shared history, and the presence of sound magic.

The name Sauúti is inspired by the Swahili word “sauti” which means voice or sound.

The five main planets, each named after the words for ‘song’ in various African languages, are:

Zezépfeni—from the Amharic word “zefeni”
Wiimb-ó—from the Swahili word “wimbo”
Órino-Rin—from the Yoruba word “orin”
Ekwukwe—from the Igbo word “ukwe” meaning “song” or “anthem”
Mahwé (before its destruction)— from the Kirundi word “mawe” meaning “mother”
There is also an inhabited moon, Pinaa, from the Setswana word “pina,” meaning “song.”

*Illustrated by Akintoba Kalejaye and Stephen Embleton*

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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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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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