I am partial to lists. So, I constantly have to fight against the compulsion of creating the Best of posts, as I explain here. I am trying to be more analytical and informative, rather than simply imposing my own taste on my readers.

But lists introduce a semblance of order in the chaos of our existence. Sure, lists are always partial, inconclusive, and subjective. But so what? They are still fun. And so, for this Halloween, I offer you my own proudly idiosyncratic list of the Best Horror Novels Ever Written!

1. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

The 19th century Gothic was obsessed with doubles and doppelgangers. In the period of rapid cultural and political change, with Romanticism and individualism upending stable notions of identity, the Gothic novel invented a new vocabulary of monsters to represent emerging fears and desires. Hogg’s novel combines the notion of an evil double with a particular theological concept: the Calvinist idea of the Elect and of the justification by grace. We are accustomed to see Catholic theology as inspiration for horror (remember The Exorcist?), but Hogg’s novel shows that Protestantism has its own spectacular demons. And in addition, the novel is a perfect example of narrative ambiguity, or Todorov’s fantastic, which I discussed here. As you finish it, the most obvious response is to ask “What the f*** just happened here?”

2. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

This is another Gothic novel, much longer than Hogg’s tight paranoid tale but equally concerned with religious issues, primarily the concept of damnation. For some reason, people today are reluctant to discuss theology, dumping all religions together into a bin called “faith”, as if being a Muslim, a Protestant, a Catholic or a Jew were just different flavors of yoga. May I remind my fellow freethinkers that people killed and died for their beliefs for millennia, convinced that their religion was the only true path to the divine? You may disagree, but the story of Melmoth, told in the traditional Gothic fashion by multiple unreliable narrators, may remind you how much is at stake in religious debates.

3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Correct, no Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Too many other lists will put it on top. But instead I offer you this masterpiece of philosophical depth and quiet horror. Oscar Wilde used to the the patron saint of gay liberation but somehow has fallen out of favor: not queer enough? Regardless, his only novel is as beautifully written as it is disquieting in its probing of the eternal question: does mortality make us human? And if you are still pining for Stoker: he married Wilde’s former girlfriend, Florence Balcombe, so they are practically relatives and can represent each other (Wilde eventually married Constance Holland who became mother of his two sons).

4. William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (1908)

No Lovecraft either! I love cosmic horror, but its progenitor was not the creator of Cthulhu and other tentacled monsters whose main claim to menace is un-pronounceability. William Hope Hodgson, the author of The Night Land (1912) and many short stories, was a genius, and The House on the Borderland, more readable than The Night Land, is a brooding visionary tale of dark gods and swine-like monsters ( I wrote about The Night Land here).

5. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of the Hill House (1959)

Probably no need to discuss this novel at length as most horror afficionados are familiar with it. Two points to make: first, the multiple movie adaptations have nothing to do with the delicate and insidious paranoia of the original; and second, Eleanor is one of the spookiest characters in fiction despite (or because of) being a soft-spoken, old-maidish proper lady.

6. Ramsay Campbell, The Parasite (1980)

Campbell is one of the greatest modern horror writers. Stephen King is not half as good. I hesitated between Parasite and Incarnate, another great novel. Both have Campbell’s trademark slow pace, dreamlike imagery, and gathering sense of wrongness, but Parasite has a shocking plot twist which you are not going to foresee and I am not going to disclose.

7. Adam Nevill, No One Gets Out Alive (2014)

This is one of those novels in which the supernatural element acts as a metaphor for a very real and very concrete fear: in this case, the fear of homelessness and poverty. A young woman who has to go back to what she knows is a haunted house because she has nowhere else to go is such a memorable character that all the monsters, human and nonhuman alike, play a second fiddle to her.

8. Alison Littlewood, The Hidden People (2016)

Fairy tales are the best inspiration for horror (see my own novel Nightwood). Soaked in the blood of history, fairy tales and ancient superstitions bring back into our pampered present the grim reality of the past. Littlewood’s novel does one better: not only is it a tale of changelings, but it is also a Victorian pastiche. Its perfectly pitched unreliable narrator spins a story that, like Melmoth, leaves us questioning our own reality and the moral and epistemological beliefs we often take for granted.

9. Koji Suzuki, Ring (1991)

Yes, that Ring, the inspiration for the 2002 American remake of the Japanese Ringu series. If you know the movies, forget about them. The novel is far scarier than its cinematic adaptations. In addition, as we find out if we read the sequels, the premise is not at all what you think it is. No ancient curses here but rather a vertiginous SF concept that manages to be both fascinating and genuinely frightening.

10. Yrsa Sigurdadottir, I Remember You (2012)

I wanted to have a Nordic Noir novel on this list, just because it is my favorite genre. As you may know, Nordic Noir is supposed to be about crime, but as I argued elsewhere, it is actually a form of fantasy. Yrsa, a well-known author of Icelandic mysteries, crosses into the frankly supernatural territory in this creepy tale of fog, cold, a mistreated child, and a haunted island. If you haven’t been to Iceland, I guarantee reading the descriptions of the landscape will make you want to go.

Happy Halloween!

The famous 1982 essay by Fredric Jameson “Progress Versus Utopia; or Can We Imagine the Future?” argues that SF is incapable of representing the future because it has lost sight of the utopian dimension of history.

Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come. It is this present moment-unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises is untotalizable and hence unimaginable, and also because it is occluded by the density of our private fantasies as well as of the proliferating stereotypes of a media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence-that upon our return from the imaginary constructs of SF is offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered. 1

Jameson was a neo-Marxist, and his entire critical oeuvre can be read as one long lamentation for slow collapse of the ideology that not only promised a utopia but acted as a general guide to the shape of history. It is important to understand why Marxism was so attractive to a wide range of intellectuals and writers throughout the last century, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Bertolt Brecht. Marxism is more than a political blueprint. It is a complete explanatory system, which cuts through the chaos and unpredictability of everyday life to expose the supposed underlying structure of class struggle. Marxism is omnivorous in its reach. It is a political economy, a moral system, a guide to everyday living, an explanation of the past, and a prophesy of the future. It is a religion in exactly the same way as Christianity or Islam. This is why one of the foundational books in the history of Marxist disillusionment is called The God that Failed.

And fail it did. The communist future is as dead as the steam-driven airships of Victorian SF. Marxist explanations of economic development are falsified by every new swerve of global markets. Marxist ethics is buried in the mass grave of the 100 million killed by socialist regimes. There is a reason why the modern equivalent of the Marxist intellectual titans of the last century is Hasan Piker, a brain-dead Twitch influencer.

But Jameson’s point still stands: we cannot imagine the future. And the reason is not that we have not studied Das Kapital enough but rather that the future is unimaginable by definition. There is no underlying narrative of history that would infallibly lead from today to tomorrow. History is stochastic and random, predicated on sudden random events that Nicholas Taleb called “black swans”. And this is why we read SF not in order to get ready for the future but rather, to understand the present.

So, in this essay I want to take an unorthodox look at one writer and two books that, ostensibly, have little to do with realistic prophesies of the future, in order to show how different ideas of history (what I called “timeshapes”) influence speculative fiction. The writer is the Australian Garth Nix, best known for his excellent fantasy series The Old Kingdom which I am planning to write about at length. And the two books are his 1997 Shade’s Children and his current novel Massif (2026).

The first one is a masterpiece; the second one is disappointing. And this is not because Nix has lost his touch. Rather, it is because in Shade’s Children he embraces history as contingent and unpredictable. In Massif, he tries extrapolation - a direct projection of the current politics and culture into the future. The result is a mess.

So, this essay is less about Nix as a writer and more about reading contemporary culture through the lens of SF, which is what this Substack has been doing for the last two years. Thank you for sticking with me!

And here is the appropriate place to insert Spoilers alert! I am going to summarize the plots and to give away surprises, so if you are planning to read these novels, keep it in mind.

Singularity Gladiators

In Shade’s Children, a bunch of kids are trying to survive in a hallucinatory world in which no human lives beyond their fourteenth birthday. Or rather, they do not live as humans. After this Sad Birthday, they are remade into posthuman monsters who are set to fight each other on behalf of mysterious Overlords.

If you love biopunk as I do, you cannot not thrill to the descriptions of these creatures: Trackers, Myrmidons, Ferrets, the latter being as long as a railway car but as narrow as a teen, “something between a snake and a stretched-out rat” with human hands (34). The main characters are teens, fighting to survive against the monsters who used to be their creche-mates. They are led by Shade who is an AI based on a human original.

The interesting thing is the origin of this situation. SF, as opposed to fantasy which takes place in a self-contained Secondary World, has to connect its fictional universes to the present. The most common way of doing it is by extrapolation: the present trends are projected into the future. Classic SF often created “future histories”, using their own present as the starting point (Stapledon, Heinlein, Simak).

But Shade’s Children is different because it is predicated on a sudden catastrophic rupture. Shade explains:

“Almost fifteen years ago, something happened or was made to happen. For an instant everything stopped… In that instant every person over the age of fourteen vanished. Destroyed…translated into another reality…translocated…I don’t know. And then the Overlords came and herded the survivors into the Dorms…” (60).

It is easy to assume this is yet another alien invasion, but it is not. As we find out at the end, the Overlords are entirely human. They shifted humanity into another branch of the multiverse, breaking history in one apocalyptic moment, and creating a monstrous alternative to the present. What for? Nothing but their own amusement. Like jaded Romans, they enjoy gladiatorial games. Unlike Romans, they have the power to create their own gladiators in whatever shape they want.

I wrote about the multiverse here. Briefly, the point of the multiverse is that it is the opposite of the linear Marxist notion of history with its benighted beginning and its inevitable millenarian ending. In multiverse, every road can be taken; every cause can have infinite effects; every swerve and lurch of history can be actualized. Whatever can happen will happen. The multiverse is a flock of black swans pecking at our most cherished ideas about progress and the arc of history bending toward justice, prosperity, or anything else.

At the end of the novel, the surviving characters are transported into what seems to be a continuation of our own history, lounging on the beach with no Ferrets around. But the monstrous aesthetics of the posthuman alternative still poses a question that we today are trying to answer. We have the power to remake humanity. Should we? And who are “we” ?

There is much noise today about the Silicon Valley and the power of the “techbros” like Elon Musk. There are suspicions that tech companies are trying to bring about the Singularity, or that AI is a sinister plot by “oligarchs” and Jews to destroy humanity. This conspiracy theory is Marxism in reverse. Nobody has the power to bend history to their ends, not even Musk with his flying cars. Yes, the Silicon Valley has a lot of power but like every other powerful institutions, it is a concatenation of opposing interests, stupid mistakes, overlooked opportunities, random events, and warring ideologies. The Overlords in Shade’s Children have no grand plan. They just want to see monsters fight, and like Roman emperors, they can afford to indulge their whims. But then an opposition arises - and Rome falls, Myrmidons are dispersed, and we are back on the beach - until the next black swan swoops in. No apocalypse is final; and no utopia will survive for long.

Flying Mountains and Nonbinary Soldiers

Massif is a flawed novel. Shade’s Children has tight action, sympathetic characters, and a stunning setting. Massif has a very elaborate premise that pulls the reader in but is never adequately developed or explained. Instead, most of the novel is consumed with inconsequential chatter by its characters that neither adds anything to the mystery of Massifs nor makes the characters themselves interesting or engaging. But I suspect the reason is greater than artistic failure. Nix tries to represent a “realistic” future - and such a thing is impossible.

Briefly, Massifs are alien spaceships disguised as mountain ranges that allow humans to hitch a ride to the stars but with a whole bunch of strange restrictions. Modern technology does not work on Massifs or on Basic interplanetary spaceships that are provided to humans, so people are reduced to using ancient typewriters and bronze tools. Each Massif has an alien avatar that may communicate with its human passengers but often does not. Each system a Massif visits has a planet suitable for colonization.

Such an interesting premise makes you expect an equally interesting conclusion, but alas, this is not the case. The solution to the mystery is perfunctory and incoherent. It seems that Massifs require sentients as “seeds” for their procreation, and so lure humans into space to make them into such seeds. It might have been an interesting idea if it were developed at any length. But it is not. Instead, the novel is preoccupied with the interstellar war between United Earth Government (UEG) and Mars and Beyond Prosperity Sphere (MBPS).

The two powers are clearly projections/extrapolations. MBPS is capitalist; UEG is sort of socialist. The former has private ownership of the means of production; the latter does not. UEG is ecologically conscious, gender equal (most top brass are women), and economically equitable. There is even a nonbinary character, using the pronoun “they”, though we know nothing else about them and do not necessarily want to know.

The problem with this extrapolated future is not simply that it is boring, or that the author does not explore the clash of the two systems beyond superficialities. Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) does it at length, delving into the inner contradictions of both socialism and capitalism. Nix does not seem interested in this, but neither is he really interested in Massifs that remain on the periphery of the action, teasing us with the promise of a mind-blowing revelation that never comes. The real problem is that it is assumed that interaction with such nonhuman entities as Massifs will change nothing in history. It is as if a meteor slammed into the Cretaceous Earth, and the dinosaurs did not even bother to look up.

In Shade’s Children, posthumanity is a metaphor for the unpredictability of history, and the multiverse, the novel’s timeshape, is a playground for human freedom to reinvent ourselves and to shape our future. In Massif, posthumanity never comes. Alien Massifs are simply glorified troop transporters; socialism and capitalism are fighting the same battle that was fought and won decades ago; and history trudges forward toward its woke conclusion.

…No, we cannot imagine the future. And we should not try.

Works Cited

Nix, Garth. Shade’s Children. HarperTrophy, 1997.

In Stephen Donaldson’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the battle against evil is won by a white-gold wedding ring. We all have our talismans; and here are mine.

At my wedding to my first husband, his parents came from Izmir with traditional gifts. One of them was a gold medallion bearing an unfamiliar profile. I asked my ex who it was. “Ataturk,” he said.

My ex, whose family name I still bear for the sake of our sons and of good memories, was a pure Sephardic Jew whose family had lived in Turkey for 500 years since the exile from Spain in 1492. His first language was Ladino, the Spanish dialect spoken by the descendants of these exiles. He used to play guitar and to sing plaintive Ladino ballads, which sounded exotic and beguiling to me. Ladino is not the same as modern Spanish, retaining archaic features of the Jewish Spain lost in time. My ex had to learn modern Spanish as a different language.

I was dubious about a medal with the portrait of some unknown to me Turkish politician. But I did agree to put on another gift: a gold pendant with a blue eyeball rendered in enamel. It looked nice but it did not know what it meant. “It is nazar boncuğu, an amulet against the evil eye,” my ex said. “But you don’t really need it. Your eyes are blue.”

I was still curious about the Ataturk medallion, but there were two good reasons why I did not query my future parents-in-law about it. The first one was that I could not. We shared no language in common. Educated and prosperous, like most members of the Turkish Sephardic community, they spoke fluent French in addition to Turkish and Ladino. They sent their son to a Catholic school, so he could learn more languages, and he did, ending up with both English and French. But his parents did not know English or Hebrew beyond some liturgical expressions. As to Russian and Ukrainian, my two mother tongues, they might just as well have been some obscure African dialects for all the knowledge they possessed of them.

And hence is the second reason why I did not engage in political discussions with my in-laws. I was an Ashkenazi Jew, and a somewhat dubious one at that, as my father was Ukrainian. And Sephardic Jews did not hold Ashkenazim in high regard.

You may have heard about the supposed discrimination against the “Jews of color”, or Mizrahim, in Israel.1 First, let us get rid of the racist assumptions embraced by the contemporary left which managed to outdo the ugliness of Nazi rhetoric by creating the even uglier label of BIPOC. Nobody is “of color”. Race has no biological significance. And there is little phenotypic difference between Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim, just as there is little phenotypic difference between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. There are dark-skinned Jews and lily-white Arabs. My Sephardic husband was blond, and so was I. Neither of us stood out in the Israeli or Turkish crowd. The Mediterranean displays the tapestry of its ancient history in the faces of its inhabitants. Greeks, Jews, Phoenicians, Romans, Turks, Arabs - they all lived on the shores of Our Sea, Mare Nostrum, and their bloodlines are as complex and entangled as the record of war, conquest, and triumph in the cradle of Western civilization.

But the suspicion with which Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews regarded each other was real. After the massive immigration from the Arab countries, the Ashkenazi establishment was paternalistic and condescending toward the newcomers. The tensions between the two communities have subsided in Israel by now, but they were simmering for a long time. My ex expected that his parents would disown him for marrying an Ashkenazi girl, which they did not.

But in addition to this inter-Jewish quarrel, there was a larger historical canvass for our unlikely marriage. Turkey and Ukraine hated each other for a long time. The Ottoman Empire conducted periodic raids on the Ukrainian territory and intermittently ruled parts of it. Ukrainian girls were abducted into sex slavery. The Zaporizhian Cossacks retaliated with force.

And this brings me back to the medallion of Ataturk and the role of history in interpersonal relations. I had only a very vague idea who Ataturk was, but I realized that my future in-laws held him in high regard. I asked why. My ex explained that Ataturk had passed secular laws that protected Jews. These laws included prohibition on wearing religious clothing in public. His heirs tightened these laws to ban hijab from universities and government offices. There were hijab-wearing women in Israel. I saw none when I first went to Turkey.

Two years later, after our first son was born, we drove to Haifa and passed a memorial to the Armenian genocide erected on the side of the road. I remarked on it.

“It never happened,” my husband said. I objected that it did. We had a monumental fight. I am not sure how many marriages showed their first cracks due to the Armenian genocide in 1915 but ours belonged to this select group.

Of course, it did happen, and it was horrible. More than a million Armenian and Greek Christians were shot, starved and died on forced marches as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart. Hitler was inspired by this example. He is reported to have said that nobody remembered the Armenian genocide twenty years later and nobody would remember the Final Solution. He was wrong on the second count. But the state of Israel, built on the memory of the Holocaust, did not officially acknowledge its predecessor until very recently; two months ago, in fact.

Like my husband, Israel forgave Turkey a multitude of sins for the sake of its treatment of Jews. It is hard to remember today with the Islamist Erdogan threatening to erase Israel from the map, but before his rise to power, Turkey was the vacationing Israelis’ second home. In the tourist towns of Antalya and Alanya, there were restaurants with Hebrew menus. And Turkish Jews, proud of their Spanish roots, were grateful to the Muslim country that took them in and treated them better than Christian Europe. In Kyiv, there is a monument to Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a Ukrainian national hero who slaughtered at least 600,000 Jews in the worst pogrom before the Holocaust. Ataturk unleashed his wrath on Armenians and left Jews alone.

My ex wanted to preserve his Turkish citizenship (Israel recognizes dual citizenship with other countries). This required him to serve several months in the Turkish Army. I was apprehensive, but he assured me that he would be OK, and he was. At the time, Muslim soldiers in a Muslim army had no problem with a Jewish officer. If anything, there was a class issue: he was too well-educated and his family was well off.

As for me and our infant son, we were left with his family in their summer house in the vacation town of .Çeşme. I was surrounded by voluble and gregarious people whose language I did not understand and whose food I found weird (I have changed my opinion since then; nothing is as good as Turkish food). The only English book I had was Volume 1 of Stephen Donaldson’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever called Lord Foul’s Bane. I wrote about it here; it is worth reading even if you are not in my situation. By the end of my stay, I basically knew it by heart.

It is all different now. After Erdogan’s Islamist party came to power, he repealed Ataturk’s secular laws, gave up on rapprochement with the West, and tried to muscle his way into the position of the regional power occupied by Iran. After October 7, the relations between Turkey and Israel are at their lowest nadir. Erdogan has adopted the bullying tone of Khamenei. The Turkish Jewish community has all but disappeared.

What are we to make of the undercurrents of history that had brought my ex-husband and I together? At the end, we divorced for the same reason most couples that marry too young divorce: boredom. Our sons don’t speak Ladino or Ukrainian. The dream of a harmonious Jewish-Muslim Mediterranean is gone. History is a story, but you can never predict its plot. It is as G.K. Chesterton once said, as if pieces of different genre narratives are glued together with no rhyme of reason. Donaldson’s fantasy saga (now running into ten volumes) ends with the triumph of good over evil. Not only does history not end; but you cannot even tell hero from villain, Thomas Covenant from Lord Foul. Is Ataturk, the founder of a modern secular nation-state and perpetrator of genocide, to be celebrated or condemned? At the end, I am glad I never wore a medallion with his portrait. If any wedding gift can bring bad luck, I suspect it would have.

But I did wear the evil-eye amulet, which I later learned is called mati in Greek. It is found in every country in the Mediterranean, sold in every souk, worn by tourists and natives alike. And it is a symbol of a very different kind from portraits of tyrants and politicians.

Turkey and Israel (and for that matter, Spain of my sons’ Ladino ancestors) share the deep roots of the Mediterranean, Our Sea of Romans, hē hēmétera thálassa of Ancient Greeks. The food, the smells, the colors are unlike anything else in the world. You can cross multiple national boundaries, hear multiple tongues, move from cathedrals to mosques to synagogues, and you will still be in the same region whose essence transcends not just contemporary politics but history itself.

The Mediterranean is a superimposition of endless irreconcilable histories. Israel and Palestine; Turkey and Greece; East and West; they all have their narratives which cannot be brought together in a single “truth”. But the Mediterranean retains the mysterious repose of its ancient roots. In Donaldson’s novels, the fantasy realm besieged by Lord Foul is called the Land, and its power exceeds the puny magic of its human occupiers. The Mediterranean is the Land. It is a dream of the past and a vision of the future. Paul Valery, the famous French poet, was fascinated by the “idea of a ‘Mediterranean civilization’”, shared among the peoples who have inhabited its shores for the millennia of its history. Will this idea be ever anything more than a poetic conceit? Or will it, once again, drown in blood?

…Two years ago I went to Greece with my second husband. At an open-air market which smelled, sounded and haggled just like the market in Izmir or in the Old City of Jerusalem, I bought a handful of evil-eye talismans from a vendor. I was still wearing the one given to me by my Turkish parents-in-law so long ago. The vendor smiled and said: “You have blue eyes. The evil eye has no power over you.”

I have a fantasy novel in which the evil eye talisman plays a significant role. Check it out here!

Fantasy is all about worldbuilding: the creation of what Tolkien called Secondary Worlds in which one can find meaning, escape and consolation. He elaborated this idea in his famous essay “On Fairy Stories” (1947)

Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity, it is artistic in desire and purpose.

The notion of Secondary, or fictional, worlds has become one of the foundational insights of both theory and practice of fantasy. Critics (myself included) have come up with elaborate classification schemes of different subgenres of fantasy based on the type of the Secondary World they create. Swords and armor? Epic fantasy. Demons and monsters? Dark fantasy. Gods and godlings? Mythological fantasy. Corsets and steam engines? Gaslamp. Dark streets and fae assassins? Urban fantasy. Anything as long there is a tedious romance plot at the center? Romantasy.

Worldbuilding has become one of the main topics taught not just in literature courses but also as a practical skill to film-makers and game designers. To create an immersive fictional world with its own rules and consistent inner logic is one of the main requirements of a successful fantasy franchise. Such worlds do not stay pinned to the pages of their original text. Instead, they spread across different media, spawning whole fictional universes via sequels, prequels, adaptations and remakes, fandom and imitations. Examples include but not limited to the Tolkien Universe, the Marvel Universe, the Harry Potter Universe, and many others.

Fictional worlds of fantasy have to satisfy three requirements.

1. They have to be different from the world we live in (sometimes referred to as “consensus reality”).

2. They have to create the illusion of completeness via maps, glossaries, addendums and so on. No Secondary World can be as “full of a number of things” as the real world but it can pretend to be.

3. They have to engage in the game of make-believe with the reader. Fantasy is an adult version of the childish game of “let’s pretend”. In order to offer what Tolkien called “consolation” and ‘escape”, it has to simulate reality. It cannot give away the secret of its fictionality. Of course, we all know that hobbits, and wizards, and White Walkers do not exist. But for the duration of the reading, or watching, or playing, we can forget about their non-existence and enter into their universe as if it were our own. This is what Tolkien meant when he talked about “the satisfaction of their senses”. But what happens if fantasy breaks this rule of pseudo-reality? What happens when a fantasy franchise openly questions its own ontological status?

Narrative Ambiguity and “the Fantastic”

In 1973, Tzvetan Todorov, a French-Bulgarian critic, published his famous study Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. In it, he proposed a new definition of fantasy, which was revolutionary, exciting - and wrong.

According to Todorov, the fantastic is defined by the hesitation between a natural and supernatural or magical explanation of the events described:

…there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions~ either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination .....:.. and laws of the world then -remain what they are; or else the event has ideed taken place, it is an integral part of reality - but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.

“But,” one instantly objects, “what about Tolkien!” Nobody in Middle Earth has any hesitation about the existence of Sauron, or orcs, or High Elves. Indeed - and that means that LOTR is not fantastic in Todorov’s sense but rather what he calls “marvelous”, which seems to comprise 90 percent of speculative fiction.

So, does Todorov define anything? Yes, he actually does. Consider Henry James’ Turn of the Screw (1898). The governess who is the first person narrator may be seeing ghosts and trying to protect the children in her care from their malignant influence. Or she might be insane and actually kills one of the children. Both options are possible. You can find textual evidence for either. And the final effect of the text is to make you question not so much the governess as ourselves. How do we know what we think we know? How can we explain people whose picture of reality differs so drastically from our own: people who communicate with aliens or believe that Jews rule the world? Why do we embrace fiction as true, while knowing it is not?

But examples of Todorov’s fantastic can be counted - if not quite on fingers of one hand but close. Some more contemporary examples include Allison Littlewood’s The Hidden People (2016) and Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key (2019).

In many cases, there is a final solution: the ghosts are real, after all. But even when the epistemological ambiguity is sustained till the end, most such texts are either horror or slipstream. Nobody has ever written a Secondary World fantasy with the structure of Todorov’s fantastic. Nobody but one man.

In the Land of Unbelief

Stephen Donaldson’s trilogy The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever came out in 1977-1978 and took the fantasy world by storm. The reviews were rapturous. The Second Chronicles trilogy came out between 1980 and 1983, and the follow-up four-book series between 2004 and 2013 (the full list is at the end of this essay).

Thomas Covenant is a successful writer who is diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, aka leprosy. His life in ruins, his marriage over, he locks himself up in his farm, tormented with the thoughts of being “unclean”, a leper, an outcast. And then he is hot by a car and is transported into the Land, a realm of beauty and wonder threatened by an evil entity called Lord Foul the Despiser. Covenant’s wedding band is made of white gold, and in the Land, it becomes a potent talisman, a source of wild magic. Covenant joins forces with various characters including a friendly Giant, virtuous Lords entrusted with keeping the Land healthy and prosperous, and magic horses, and eventually triumphs over Lord Foul. A pretty standard portal fantasy, you might say.

Except for one thing. Covenant never quite believes that the Land is real. He initially refuses to do anything to beat Foul and his minions because he is convinced the Land is a hallucination, created by his unconscious mind to externalize his disease. And he never sheds his unbelief. Even in the last confrontation with the Despiser, he still persists in suspending his full acceptance of the Land’s reality.

Initially, he is paralyzed by this either-or dilemma:

“It’s one or the other, he panted fiercely. Not both. Either I’m a leper or I’m not. Either Joan divorced me or she never existed. There is no middle ground” (Lord Foul’s Bane, 90).

This is Todorov’s fantastic: either-or, supernatural or madness, delusion or reality. And Covenant is caught in this epistemological dilemma:

“Behind him was the impossibility of believing the Land true. And before him was the impossibility of believing it false” (Lord Foul’s Bane, 279).

But gradually, Covenant learns to accept that is is possible to embrace both impossibilities; to be suspended in the heart of the paradox; to act in the realm of “as if”. The Land is both truth and pretense; both a tangible place and a dream; both real and unreal. And in the heart of this paradox, he finds his power, defeating the Despiser but not destroying him because his own disease whose projection Lord Foul may be, is incurable. It is his unbelief that makes him a hero:

“And his Unbelief enabled him…The people of the Land would have failed in the face of despite because they were convinced of it. Covenant was not. He was not overwhelmed; he did not believe he had to fail. Lord Foul was only an externalized part of himself - not an immortal, not a god. Triumph was possible” (Power that Preserves, 462).

Covenant’s unbelief is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “willing suspension of disbelief”. When we enter a Secondary World of fantasy, we know that this world is not only unreal but impossible. And yet, for the duration of reading or watching, we pretend that it matters as much, or more, than our everyday reality. Coleridge described this attitude as procuring of the “shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” .

Covenant is our reflection: an image of fantasy’s reader who has to suspend their disbelief in Giants, magic and monsters in order to learn the lessons of courage, ponder moral choices, or simply enjoy the game of the impossible. Only by rejecting either/or and accepting both and neither can we embrace “poetic faith”. Donaldson did not write yet another fantasy series. He wrote a meta-fantasy: a story that is about itself and its readers. By giving up the pretense that his Secondary World is real, he exposed the psychological roots of our enjoyment of fantasy as a genre.

Fictionality means understanding that fiction is neither true nor false but both. Small children gradually acquire this understanding, enjoying the games of “what if”, while accepting that no superhero will ever drop by for a chat or that Little Mermaid is not actually dead because she has never lived.

Or at least, children are supposed to learn this lesson before entering adulthood. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of readers today have somehow skipped this stage in their development. And what is even worse, these readers now impose a new censorship on the rest of us.

Trigger Warnings

In Book 1 of the first trilogy, Covenant rapes the young girl named Lena who comes to his rescue. He is wracked by guilt; and the results of this rape reverberate throughout the trilogy, not least in the disaster High Lord Elena, Lena’s daughter by Covenant, wreaks upon the Land. Even when the books were first published in a more enlightened time, some readers were shocked that a hero could do such a thing. Of course, the obvious answer is that Covenant is not a human being. He is a fictional character, one element in the Secondary World of the novels. You may like or dislike him but you cannot arrest him for sexual assault. Fictionality requires trying to understand why this particular element was necessary (the answer is that it is an analogy of the Despiser’s rape of the Land and thus it enhances the parallel between the Land and Covenant’s psyche).

I was looking for some contemporary reviews of Donaldson when I happened upon this one. Prominently displayed at the beginning was Content Warning: Sexual Assault.

I have already written about trigger warnings as a new form of censorship here. But think what a trigger warning actually implies. It tells the reader that they are incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality; that whatever traumas they may have experienced in their own lives is automatically assumed to be the same as words on the page; and that they must be protected from their own imagination as if they were little children. It denies the very notion of fictionality or the capacity of adults to embrace the paradox of the fantastic.

And this gets worse. Censors and scolds are now policing literature, ferreting out “unacceptable” content. Unacceptable can be anything that contradicts the woke views of what literature is “supposed” to be. Insufficiently developed female characters: ban! Racism: ban! And of course, rape. Despite the rape scene being as anodyne as possible for the subject matter, I actually found social media posts accusing Donaldson of “rape fetish”!

The problem is not with individual readers. Nobody has to read anything they don’t like. I would rather have a root canal than read romances. The problem is that literature is being stripped off its magic in favor of a narrow-minded puritanical ideology. “Willing suspension of disbelief” becomes preaching to the choir. “Satisfaction of the senses” becomes having your prejudices confirmed. And the eye of the paradox, Todorov’s fantastic, is flattened into the mean-spirited belief that reality is what the woke consensus declared what reality should be.

None of this means that Donaldson is a great writer. He has the annoying stylistic habit of comparing tangible objects to abstract entities. He can be wordy and repetitive. But he is worth reading simply because Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is who we all are when we enter the Secondary Worlds of fantasy. His suspension between reality and dream is the mirror of our own “poetic faith”.

The Complete List of Thomas Covenant novels

Lord Foul’s Bane (1977)

The Illearth War (1978; Gilden-Fire—first published 1981)

The Power that Preserves (1979)

The Wounded Land (1980)

The One Tree (1982)

White Gold Wielder (1983)

The Runes of the Earth (2004)

Fatal Revenant (2007)

Against All Things Ending (2010)

The Last Dark (2013)

Book of the Month

Stephen Donaldson, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever (1977-2013)

This fantasy series was a bombshell when it came out with the first instalment, Lord Foul’s Bane (1977). It continued for nine more volumes, getting better, as Donaldson’s idiosyncratic style in which objects were routinely compared to abstract entities (a big no-no in writing courses) became more mainstream. The interesting thing about this series, which I am going to write about at length, is narrative ambiguity. The main character, Thomas Covenant who is suffering from Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy, is transported into the magical realm known as the Land where he is called upon to fight an evil entity called the Despiser. But is the Land real or a delusion created by his illness? This highly unusual (for epic fantasy) device generates all sorts of interesting epistemological questions. But the series is also infamous for a different reason, which sheds light on the unfortunate intrusion of trauma culture, emotional fragility, and censoriousness into literature. Again, more about it soon.

Narrative in a nutshell

Related to the discussion above: a literary character is not a living human being! It is sad that this even needs to be said but the plague of trigger warnings has trained readers to relate to characters as if they were their next-door neighbors, going into paroxysms of offence when a fictional character does something they personally disapprove of. Thomas Covenant commits a crime. But he is neither Stephen Donaldson nor a guilty man who you could drag into the nearest police station. He is one element in the imaginary whole of a fantasy text, which also contains supernatural entities, cursed landscapes, and magical horses. Unless you believe that all these things intrude on your everyday life, you have no reason to be upset by anything a character does or demand that the offending books be pulled off library shelves. More on the concept of character here.

What I am Reading Now

Robert Harris Agrippa (2026)

Harris, an excellent writer of alternate history (Fatherland) and historical whodunits (Pompeii), here channels the actual Roman politician and warrior, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the right-hand man of Augustus Caesar. The result is as absorbing as any mystery, and the first-person narration is beautifully done. You can almost hear the authentic voice of that tough Roman who would have looked with justifiable disdain at our hypocritical attempts to make realpolitik into an arena of moral posturing. I am not normally a fun of historical fiction, but this is very much worth reading.

Podcast Recommendation

A great resource for writers is Words to Write By hosted by two practicing writers, Kim Smuga-Otto and Renee Nelson. The two hosts discuss various aspects of the writer’s craft, delving deep into such issues as genre, plot construction, the hero’s (and heroine’s) journey, scenes, point of view and so on. They read craft books together, helping beginning and seasoned writers to make sense of the bewildering amount of often contradictory advice out there.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/words-to-write-by/id1591158071

My New Publications

This month passed by in a whirlwind but I did manage to have some new publications. My story “Daymare” is included in the excellent collection of dark sci-fi Sinister Systems by published by the Denver Horror Collective. The story is set in my X-web universe and marries Cambodian folklore and an alien ecosphere.

https://shorturl.at/nVxDb

My story “Willow” is out in Wichelen, Vol. 1 by Dead Fox Publishing. This is a dark fantasy about gardening, filial devotion, and witchcraft.

https://geni.us/wichelen1

I signed two contracts: one for my novella “The Empty Planet”, also set in the X-web Universe, and one for the short story “Dragons of Sand and Stone” for an anthology to be published by . The latter is coming out in November; “The Empty Planet” is out early next year.

Awards

A Tale of Three Cities is on the Short List of Ozma Awards for fantasy by Chanticleer! It already got the Third Place in dark Fantasy in Bookfest Competition, so I am pretty happy about it.

Ashland and Oregon Wineries

We spent ten days in the pretty Oregon town of Ashland, attending the famed Shakespeare festival. The plays we saw were staged to please the audience rather than to hammer in a woke point, which was often the case in previous years, so we really enjoyed them. I wrote about the woke distortions of Shakespeare here.

But instead of writing more about my theatrical experience, which merits a separate essay, I will recommend some excellent Oregon wineries near Ashland. There is nothing better than having a wine tasting after watching Titus Andronicus or even Henry IV!

Bella Fiore Winery

Eliana Wines

Probably the most entertaining political news of the week came in the form of the panel at Socialism 2026. As described by

At the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago this week, a panel called “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State” featured writers Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Da’Shaun Harrison and artist Artie Vierkant discussing the intersection of socialist politics, disability, and physical fitness. This panel, as you might expect given its title “Health Fascism,” produced some spectacular clips.

“We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” Adler-Bolton told attendees. “Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism.” The left, she argued, should not try to “beat fascists at their own game” by becoming “fitter, more eugenic.”

“In fact, the more dysgenic the better, I think,” she said.

The Argument

When fitness becomes fascism

Welcome to The Weekly Scroll…

Read more

2 months ago · 132 likes · 26 comments · Jeremiah Johnson

Obviously, most rational people just added this to the ever-growing list of “crazy things leftists say”. But let us be contrarian. Is it possible that there is more to this claim than meets the eye? What if changing our bodies is indeed part of an ideological agenda? And how does this agenda differ on the right and the left?

Bodies of Steel, Minds of Fire

Creating the New Man was a central goal of both communism and Nazism. We often talk about these ideologies in the reductive terms of “authoritarianism” or even more reductively, as “hatred”. But in fact, both were utopian movements, meant not just to restructure society but to change human nature. The hatred of the Enemy - the capitalist, the Jew - was secondary to the love for the collective that embodied the hope for the future. Both Nazis and communists exhorted members of the community to “put collective need ahead of individual greed” ((Koonz 6). Remember this when you wonder how leftists today can call for “compassion” while justifying political violence. Compassion in a utopian ideology is not universal but is limited to a specific group. The rest are not seen as fully human but as Old Men, obstacles on the way to the glorious birth of the New Man, the utopian subject who alone can redeem history.

The dream of creating a new and improved humanity was not limited to totalitarian regimes; it pervaded modern progressivism, especially after the universal acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution (see my discussion of this here). Eugenics, the theory and practice of human biological improvement, was incredibly popular in the first half of the last century, both on the right and on the left. Indeed, left-wing eugenics overshadowed its right-wing counterpart. Its supporters included H. G. Wells, a socialist and a utopian SF writer; Irving Fisher, an American public health advocate; John Maynard Keynes, and many many others. Eugenics societies proliferated in the US, UK, but also Sweden, Russia, India and Japan. Every major university in Europe had a department of eugenics. In 1912, more than 700 people attended the first International Eugenics Congress in London whose sponsoring vice-presidents included Winston Churchill and Alexander Graham Bell (Kevles 61).

But only the Third Reich and the USSR took the discourse of eugenics not just seriously but literally. Both regimes embarked on the project of creating a New Man, but in very different ways.

The Sculptor of Germany

Nazism was a bio-ideology, at the heart of which was the creation of a superior humanity. As Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, memorably said: “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology” (Lifton 31). The genocide of the Jews (and the killing of sick children and adults in the infamous Aktion T-4) was the necessary first step toward the forging of the New Man. The next step was to implement positive eugenicist measures. These measures included support for, and encouragement of, large families as long as they were certified to be of pure Aryan blood; sterilization of the congenitally sick; and kidnapping of Polish, Eastern European, and Ukrainian children if they fit the desired anthropological profile. The history of the Lebensborn organization that perpetrated these kidnapping, while also providing care for unmarried mothers pregnant by SS officers, is one of the most surreal stories of WW2.

The end result of these measures was supposed to be the utopian subject, the New Aryan Man. We know what je was supposed to look like because his images adorned every public space in the Third Reich, produced by the regime artists such as the sculptors Arno Breker and Josef Thorak. With bulging muscles, pseudo-classical profile, and a gaze firmly set on infinity, he was the archetypal Man of Steel, of whom the American Superman was just a pale imitation.

And who was supposed to shape the raw mass of sick, degenerate, corrupt humanity into the Man of Steel? The Fuhrer, of course:

The Real Men (and Some Women)

While the Nazis tried (unsuccessfully) to breed Men of Steel, the USSR was ruled by one. Stalin, the nom-de-guerre of Iosif Dzhugashvili, literally means “man of steel”.

Communism was as invested in the creation a new humanity as Nazism but it went about it in a different way: nurture rather than nature; education rather than heredity. It is important to remember that neither the Nazis nor the communists knew anything about genetics. Even if eugenicists had their way, the results would not have been as spectacular as they hoped for. Smart parents can have stupid children; beautiful mothers can give birth to ugly daughters.

As opposed to the Darwinian bio-ideology of Nazism, the roots of Marxism lie in Rousseau’s philosophy that stressed the essential goodness of human nature when liberated from the constraints of exploitation and inequality. Rousseau wrote books abut education (he also dumped his own illegitimate kids in orphanages but that’s the gap between theory and practice). So, the USSR rejected hereditarianism and embraced scientifically invalid Lamarckism. Under Stalin, the quack biologist Trofim Lysenko achieved a deified status, promising to “educate” both crops and humans into perfection. Of course, the only education actually delivered was to the scientists sent to the Gulags for persisting in belief in science.

The Soviet New Man was aesthetically different from his Nazi counterpart. He was less physically sculpted but more ideologically self-aware; invested in striving rather than in the serene perfection of his biological superiority. He was also a she, in the sense that while Nazi aesthetics sharply differentiated between male (the warrior) and female (the mother), Soviet aesthetics tried to bring the sexes together in the singular space of utopian effort. The famous sculpture The Workman and the Collective Farm Woman (the literal but awkward translation of the Russian title) by Vera Mukhina epitomizes this difference.

Alas, the Soviet New Man is now as dead as his Nazi counterpart, though it took longer for him to hobble into the grave. Nazi and Soviet monumental sculptures are warehoused in undisclosed locations, as if powers-that-be were afraid of their still-potent ideological allure. Eugenics is now a four-letter word to curse your political opponents - or the jeans you cannot wear - with.

But as the panel at Socialism 2026 attests, the idea of bio-politics is very much alive. The notion that your ideological commitments should be literally inscribed in your flesh has been revived. But it is a very different flesh from the rippled muscles of men and women of steel. Instead, what is valorized is the opposite - flab, sag, overweight, the ugliness of an unhealthy body. Instead of striving for the eugenicist ideal, we now believe that “the more dysgenic, the better”.

What happened?

The New Utopia

The Holocaust happened, of course. When the world saw the actual application of eugenics in the shape of corpse-filled ditches, the revulsion was immediate. Eugenics of any kind was denounced in the West and downplayed in the East. The idea of utopian supermen survived in SF and in superheroes juggernaut. But these New Men were different from their totalitarian brethren. Consider More Than Human (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon. The superman of this novel is Homo Gestalt, a telepathic entity composed of three separate “dysgenic” people, one of whom, in the blissfully pre-PC language of the time is called “an idiot”.

At the same time, utopia itself underwent some significant changes. No longer was it a straight linear trajectory leading to the end of history. Now the language of utopian longings embraced the themes of postmodernism: subversion, multiplicity, fluidity, diversity. Rosi Braidotti in her influential book The Posthuman (2013) denounces the Enlightenment ideal of humanism and describes a new world of non-hierarchical, non-Western, non- anthropocentric bliss:

“At the start of all, there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’…a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values. Together they uphold a specific view of what is ‘human’ about humanity. Moreover, they assert with unshakeable certainty the almost boundless capacity for humans to pursue their individual and collective perfectibility… [as opposed to this, we need to imagine] a posthuman utopia of generosity and reciprocal altruism and radical relationality. (Braidotti 12; 25-27)

In such a world, everything that is opposed to the Men of Steel is embraced as a new utopian ideal. Not just fat but ill health of all kinds is proudly flaunted as a mark of ideological fidelity. Much has been written about illness as identity and about the astonishing fact that mental illness and disability are now viewed as something to be proud of. But in fact, this is just a reverse of the eugenicist platform. If the classical idea of ‘Man’ is now a hallmark of white supremacy and capitalism, everything that opposes it is good by definition, even if it results in such jaw-dropping statements as proclaiming weight-loss drugs to be an equivalent of genocide. This makes perfect sense ideologically, if not rationally or morally. If our utopia requires us to be fluid, imperfect, multiple, flawed, disabled, non-white and anti-capitalist, any attempt to bring our bodies in line with the classic ideal by curing diseases, remedying disabilities, and making us fit is a capitalist and fascist plot and therefore genocidal by definition (of course, the history of the communist New Man is conveniently forgotten).

But the problem for this new utopian anti-eugenics is that it goes against human nature. The dirty secret of old eugenics is that it was indeed founded on the Darwinian concept of fitness. Sexual selection has shaped our species. And no amount of postmodern theorizing will change the fact that people will always choose beautiful mates if they can. The fat acceptance movement has generated a flood of slop on social media and imposed ugly dummies on Target shoppers but has made no dent in people’s dating habits. Beauty is still power, as is intelligence. And both are genetically determined to a large degree.

SF has occasionally satirized the dysgenic utopian dream. In Cyril Cornbluth The Marching Morons (1951), humanity’s collective IQ plummets rapidly (which may, in fact, be the case). And who can forget the rotund humans with their little scooters in Wall-e?

But the real argument against fat socialism is simply that it is impossible. Utopia will never come. History will never end. And evolution will never create a perfect body, be it the Man of Steel or the Woman of Flab.

Works Cited

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013)

Kevles, Daniel. In the Name of Eugenics (Haravard UP, 1998)

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience (Harvard UP, 2003)

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors (Basic Books, 1986)

Here is the promised Part 2 of the essay on Alien Mimics where I want talk about the intriguing possibility that we are already surrounded by alien minds in human bodies.

In Part 1, I already referenced Capgras Syndrome, in which a person believes that a family member or a friend has been replaced by an identical double. It is a psychiatric disorder, often co-morbid with schizophrenia or dementia. It is intractable and resistant to treatment:

They believe the doppelganger looks and acts exactly like the original person but that they are an imposter nonetheless, and no amount of arguing or reasoning can convince them otherwise.

But like any psychiatric illness, Capgras Syndrome is an exaggeration or extreme form of the normal human condition. How often do we say “It’s not really him/her?” A seemingly ideal couple spiral into an ugly divorce? “It’s not really them”. The wife is having an emotional affair with a guy in Slovenia she has never met? “It’s not really her.” A teenaged son wrecked the car while high on pills? “It’s not really him.” We all have mental images of the people we know, and when their reality deviates from this image, we feel cheated. It is as if we are suddenly confronted with the fact that other minds are opaque and unknowable. The only mind we have access to is our own. How do we know that other people even have minds?

David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, is famous for his championing of the idea of philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie is an entity that behaves exactly like a human being but has no qualia or conscious experiences. In other words, it is not self-aware but behaves as if it were.

This is no longer just a thought experiment. AIs show precisely what a philosophical zombie is. Are AIs self-aware? In my previous essay, I claimed they were not; now I am open to the possibility that they are or will be in the future. But here I do not want to plunge into this particular rabbit hole except to point out that we have the same problem with other people as we have with AIs, and only familiarity prevents us from suspecting that we are surrounded by automata, fake humans, or non-sentient simulacra.

When your Claude or Gemini uses the first-person pronoun, it automatically triggers attribution of personhood in your mind. This is why first-person narration pulls the reader in. We treat literary characters like actual people, forgetting they are only words on the page. Some writers use this automatic response to make you identify with an evil or insane character: consider Brett Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). This is why empathy is both dangerous and misleading….but this is a topic for another essay.

A predecessor to the SF trope of mimics is the Romantic convention of doubles and doppelgangers. In the 19th-century Gothic, doubles often function as the focus of the same anxiety about identity as the contemporary body snatchers. What do you do with a creature that looks like you, speaks like you, but is not you? What happens when this creature takes over your life? E.T.A. Hoffmann’s great Romantic novel The Devil’s Elixirs (1815) features a man hounded by his evil double, produced by imbibing a cursed potion. In James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the protagonist commits a series of murders under the influence of a doppelganger who reinforces his Calvinistic religious beliefs, telling him he is one of the Elect. Otto Rank’s book The Double (1914) analyzes the implications of this convention through the lens of psychoanalysis, focusing on the impenetrability of others’ minds and on the narcissism of being locked in one’s own.

The uncertainty about other people’s interiority or humanity is reflected in multiple ways in SF. It is not just alien mimics but a whole array of replicants, imitations, artificial doppelgangers, and philosophical zombies who force us to ask ourselves:

Am I Alone?

Solipsism is a philosophical doctrine that takes suspicion of other minds to its logical conclusion. Only your mind exists; the rest of the physical universe, including all the other people, may be a hallucination. Or even if the external world does exist, it can never be known. SF has some stunning explorations of this idea.

Fritz Leiber, You Are All Alone (1950; 1972)

In this forgotten masterpiece of SF, the protagonist suddenly wakes up to the realization that he is surrounded by mindless waxwork figures going through the predetermined notions:

“What is the whole world were like a waxwork museum? In motion, of course, like clockworks, but utterly mindless, purposeless, mechanical” (15).

Very few people in this machine are awake, either by accident or as part of a conspiracy. Are you one of them?

If you think it is like Matrix, no, it is actually better. Highly recommended if you can get hold of a copy.

Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942).

Paranoia can be inspiration for great art, and this is the case here. I will not disclose the ending except to say that no Elders of Zion, reptilian overlords, or tech bros can hold a candle to the ontological conspiracy in this novella. In my opinion, this is the best Heinlein ever wrote.

But solipsism is not the only way to be suspicious of other people’s reality. Even if you decide that your family and friends do have actual physical existence, independent of your thoughts, you may suspect that they do not have your best interests in mind. In fact, you may suspect they are impostors actively plotting against you. And thus, you say:

I Wish I Were Alone

Jack Finney, The Invasion of Body Snatchers (1953)

Do not believe the conventional interpretation of this novel as a Cold War allegory. It is much subtler than that. At the end, the protagonist is asked by one of the pod people why he is afraid of being copied if the copy is the same as the original. This precedes Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by 30 years and is much more fun. Read it instead.

John Christopher, The Possessors (1965)

An isolated Alpine chalet is invaded by incorporeal aliens who take over the bodies of the guests and staff. This is a combination of an Agatha Christie mystery with a pervasive and chilling sense of claustrophobia and paranoia. Christopher, the author of the Tripod Trilogy, is ready for rediscovery, and this is one of his best novels.

Jerry Jay Carroll, Inhuman Beings (1998)

Except for a noir element, this novel does not go beyond the Body Snatchers paradigm, but I include it here just to put an end to the idea that mimics are creatures of the Cold War.

The problem with existential paranoia is that it is hard to keep within bounds. Once you begin to suspect others, what stops you from suspecting yourself? If mimics can take over your nearest and dearest, you may be next in line. Or maybe you have already been supplanted and don’t know it. A perfect simulacrum is indistinguishable from the original. And so, you look in the mirror and cry:

Am I an Alien?

John Campbell, Who Goes There? (1938)

The granddaddy of them all and the inspiration for Carpenter’s cult movie The Thing (1982), this is a must-read precisely because Campbell’s flat narrative voice with no focalization never allows you to know for certain who has, or has not, been taken over.

Scott Sigler, Infected Trilogy (2006-2014)

Sigler’s trilogy moves away from the purely psychological and metaphysical chills of Leiber and Christopher into the realm of body horror, much as Carpenter did in his movie. The talking triangles infesting your body make it easy to differentiate infected from non-infected, but also provide you with company when you feel lonely. Multiple points of view try to show what a transition from human to alien would feel like.

So we leave metaphysics behind and move on to the anxieties concerning our corporeal identities. It is not only that we are alienated from others; we are also alienated from our own bodies which can betray us at any time by developing cancer, heart disease or stroke. We are strangers in the world; we are also strangers to ourselves. And here as well, SF provides a helpful vocabulary of aliens and monsters to articulate our anxieties about our bodies.

In Space, Everyone Can Hear You Think

Darcy Coates, Parasite (2016)

An isolated and deserted space station. A message written in blood “They take our skins” (47). Need I say more? Not a masterpiece but a competent and engaging read.

Greig Beck, Europa and Europa-2 (2025)

Beck, an Australian writer, seems to be trying to rewrite the entire SF corpus, from Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to Doyle and Campbell. One has to applaud his industry, if not his style. However, on the positive side, he has a powerful biological imagination for which I am willing to forgive a multitude of grammatical sins. On Europa, two different spaceship crews meet colonial alien mimics…the rest is what you expect. On the positive side, Beck does not mangle Russian names and does not use patronymics for family names, which is something.

And if you only want to read one book…

Short Things, John Gregory Betancourt, ed (2019).

Betancourt worked with the Campbell estate to put together this collection inspired by “Who Goes There?” While uneven, this includes stories by well-known writers, such as Paul di Filippo and Kevin Anderson, and covers the entire spectrum of themes, from existential dread to body horror,

Book of the month

Samuel Best, The Galena Trilogy (2022)

A competent colony novel. It is not the best in this genre (for the best, see here), but the worldbuilding is solid, the characters are relatable, and some of the planetary landscapes are vividly rendered. Its main flaw is the multiple points of view which interfere with the narrative flow. And this brings us to the next category:

Narrative in a nutshell

There are three main kinds of the point of view in fiction: 1. first person; 2. third person limited; 3. third person omniscient. The difference between 2 and 3 is that in 2, everything is described through the eyes of a single character (called focalizer). Today, 1 and 2 are most commonly used. 1 is the best for domestic thrillers; 2 for space opera and fantasy. I personally prefer 1 for short stories, and 2 for novels.

What I am reading now

Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy (2019)

We hear about “suicidal empathy” nowadays. But what about murderous empathy? This important book opens with a startling statement: “Sometimes we commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy”. Considering that the “be kind” crowd has now fully embraced political violence, Breithaupt’s book is both timely and important. Watch my Susbtack for more.

What I am watching now

I finally saw Backrooms, which I found visually stunning but narratively flat. While the idea of architecture as monster is interesting and well developed through the movie’s setting, the acting was poor and the plot incoherent. So, now I am going back to Dark City to remind myself how it should be done.

More about impossible spaces in SF and horror is coming!

What I am writing now

I am working on a new novel set in my X-web universe. Several stories and novellas set in this universe have already been published. What is X-web? See the end of this newsletter for a bonus flash story that explains the concept.

My new publications

“Checkpoint” Farthest Star Press, August 2026.

“Little Fish” . Ocean of the Dead: Black Abyss, edited by Chad Anctil. Wicked Shadow Press, August 2026

“Daymare”. Sinister Systems. A Sci-fi Horror anthology. Denver Horror Collective, (coming soon!)

“Sleepwalkers”. Nyctalocos: A Collection of Night Terrors. Chthonic Matter Themed Anthologies, ed. By C.M. Muller (August 2026)

Reviews

Another 5-star review of A Tale of Three Cities

I really enjoyed this book. At first, I thought it would be a high-fantasy novel but it turned out to be something quite different. The pacing was excellent and allowed me to fully appreciate the lore and world-building.

I couldn't stop reading. This book is a unique blend of absurdity, fantasy, and science fiction, woven together into one masterpiece.

The story takes place sometime in the future, after humanity destroys itself through war. The souls of the dead remain and somehow become attached to animals, causing them to develop human traits as they struggle to understand who they are.

I would highly recommend A Tale of Three Cities to anyone looking for something fresh and original.

https://www.soonabook.com/my-books-readers.php?id=1789

X-web Universe

“You cannot step into the same river twice…” (Heraclitus).

What if you could travel to the furthest reaches on the Galaxy in an instant, but only once, each trip unique and unrepeatable? What if you could establish a colony that would be forever lost in the immensity of space? Who would create such a system? And why?

The story below was published in A Sci-Fi Shorts Anthology, Vol. 1 (Edited by J. A. Taylor and Ron Castor, August 2021. This is an early venture into the X-web Universe, By now, several stories and novellas related to X-web have been published, and a big novel called Antlions is coming out from Crystal Lake Publishing early next year

The Builders

Elana Gomel

The city was deserted. Tall narrow windowless buildings like slivers of granite crowded the winding streets. No people; no vehicles. Just gray houses under the gray sky like a dusty lampshade.

Olivia directed the drone close to one of them. The miniature flier swooped in, hovering in the murky air of Gliese 581b. The substance of the wall did not look like concrete or stone. It was pitted and rough, with the texture of elephant skin.

Rajiv came in and stood at her back while she studied the display, trying on focus on what she was doing rather than on his presence. Her feelings for her partner were…complicated.

“Empty,” he said dismissively. “We need to move on.”

Olivia knew that he was right. Once the abandoned X-web of wormholes linking various habitable planets had been discovered, the race to map and claim them was on. Nobody knew who had built X-web, but it required no complicated equipment to navigate. People had poured through the web in campers and rigged-up LMVs. The competition to find a planet with either useful biologicals or ripe for colonization was fierce. Olivia and Rajiv had sunk their combined funds into this venture and urgently needed a return on their investment. A dead planet offered none.

“I want to check it out,” she said and stepped outside.

The air smelled dusty; the patchy grass was yellow and sere. She walked to the boundary of the city. It was as straight as a ruler: one step and she was on the pavement.

Except it was not a real pavement. It was made of the same material at the walls of the buildings that crowded around her. The material gave underfoot and seamlessly merged with the walls. It was as if the entire city was a single piece.

Olivia touched the blank wall. Nothing happened. She knocked; there was no hollow sound. They had no time and no equipment for an investigation.

She exhaled. So that was that. Another mystery that would never be solved. The universe was full of those but the prospectors and the companies that backed them were not interested in scientific exploration. There was no money in it.

She walked back; her shoulder slumped. Rajiv’s condescending smile greeting her at the entrance.

“Can we plot for the next target now?”

Crawling through the web like ants through a computer. Don’t you want to know who built it? She wanted to scream at him. Aren’t you even curious?

She shrugged in defeat and turned to the dashboard when she glimpsed her hand. In the middle of the palm was a rough patch of elephantine-gray skin.

“What the…?”

Rajiv did not react. He was spellbound, staring at the screen over her head. She looked.

A group of featureless gray buildings were sliding toward their LMV on the footpads of their foundation, dipping and swaying like a herd of enormous giraffe ghosts.

The Builders had awakened.

I go to slay

My children with all speed, and then, away

From hence; not wait yet longer till they stand

Beneath another and an angrier hand

To die. Yea, howsoe’er I shield them, die

They must. And, seeing that they must, ‘tis I

Shall slay them, I their mother….

Euripides, Medea (431 BC; trans. Gilbert Murray )

Nothing measures the distance between the past and the present more than the juxtaposition of the mythical figure of Medea who killed her children and the trial of Lindsay Clancy accused of filicide. But this distance is not what you think: a progress from barbarism to enlightenment. Rather, it is the story of a gradual loss of female power. And in this essay I will trace this loss through cultural dreams and nightmares, from myths of ancient goddesses to contemporary horror.

Reason and/of insanity?

The strangest aspect of the defense of Clancy’s murder of her three children is the intense emotional investment many women apparently have in her case.

So yes, the women of America are angry. Yes they feel under attack, because on this argument every mother in America is on trial.

Every mother? I do not feel attacked by people who call for Clancy to be severely punished. In fact, I am one of these people. As a woman and a mother, I cannot accept the revolting idea that giving birth robs you of your rational thinking and decision-making. Motherhood is empowering. How can it be regarded as a pinnacle of victimhood?

The worst aspect of the women sobbing on TikTok about the poor mistreated triple murderer is how they are robbing Clancy of her agency. Everybody is responsible: Clancy’s husband, her doctors, America as a whole. Everybody but herself. So, what does it tell us about the current view of motherhood, propagated, unfortunately, by women, some of whom even call themselves feminists?

I do not want to get into the weeds of Clancy’s legal case and the insanity defense. In a forthcoming essay in my other Stack I will dig deeper into the whole issue of mental illness and its changing cultural meaning, using Foucault (yes, you are welcome to object but only after you read it). Here, however, I want to talk about the stereotypes -or maybe archetypes - that Clancy’s case stirs up from the sediments of our collective unconscious. And where better to start than with a horror movie?

Trolls and Forest Maidens

The 2026 Finnish movie Nightborn directed by Hanna Bergholm and starring Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grin depicts a Finnish-British couple Saga and Jon who settle in Saga’s dilapidated family home surrounded by ominous misshapen trees. Saga promptly gets pregnant and gives birth to a strapping baby boy whom the father wants to call Christian but she insists on calling Kuura, a pagan name. Most of the rest of the movie is the unsparing chronicle of Saga’s struggles with motherhood, which I am sure Clancy fangirls would identify with (but wait till the end!). The birth is traumatic (and shown in startling detail); Saga is injured and gains unsightly weight; Kuura cries all the time and refuses to eat. It is pretty clear from the beginning that the child is a troll offspring, a changeling, something not quite human. So, you brace yourself for the denouement familiar from many instances of infanticide and filicide, in which mothers, psychotic or pretending to be so, claimed the baby was a tormenting impostor.

But no. Instead of killing Kuura, Saga, with the help of the walking trees, dispatches her hapless husband, weans her son on his blood, and is ready to join the company of trolls crowding her house. Perhaps, it is intimated, she is a half-troll herself. And the baby, whose face we had not seen until the very end of the movie, is not an ugly demon as in Rosemary’s Baby but a cute smiling creature. So what if instead of milk he drinks blood? His mother has a choice: remain part of humanity or join her son in the realm of archaic monsters. What makes her a good mother is that she chooses the latter.

Nightborn consciously evokes the ancient folkloric and mythical roots of motherhood. The most striking scene in it is when Saga and Kuura sleep together in an underground cavern among tree-roots, their faces smeared with blood.

Joseph Campbell in The Hero with A Thousand Faces (1949) and in his monumental work World Mythology describes the archetype of the Devouring Mother. She is the beginning and the end; the blood of birth and the darkness of death; she gives life and takes life. She is the primordial chaos from which everything springs and to which everything returns.

“She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb.”

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

When a child is born, their death is born with them.

Chthonic goddesses of many different religions reflect this archetype. Tiamat, the goddess of chaos; Hekate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft and darkness; Hel, the Nordic ruler of the underworld; Cybele, the Mother Goddess of the Mediterranean whose male acolytes castrated themselves. Celtic mythology has the Morrigan, the goddess of battle and doom, and Scandinavia has the Huldra, the terrible forest maidens with hollow backs who lure travelers to their deaths. The enigmatic prehistoric culture of Malta worshipped a fertility goddess whose images, with exaggerated breasts and genitalia, are still seen all over the island (and one of them lives on my desk).

So, Saga and her son are not an exception but a rule in the dark world of ancient beliefs. This is the world in which the father right (represented by sky gods, such as Zeus) fiercely fought the mother right (represented by chthonic goddesses) and won. To be clear, matriarchal societies are a rare exception, if they even existed at all. But the worship of maternal power represented by fertility goddesses was all but universal until the advent of monotheistic religions put God the Father at the center of the spiritual universe. 1

But the victory is always contested because, after all, only a woman can give birth; and this is the one female power that men, no matter how oppressive of women in patriarchal monotheistic societies, could not take away. Instead, motherhood was elevated to a sort of secular sainthood, while all of its dark aspects were diligently hidden away. But as Freud and Jung taught us, the more you repress something, the more it is likely to come back as a monster. Hence legions of evil mothers reappearing in the nightmares of Western culture.

Medea the Witch

The Greek myth of Medea is told in many versions, the most famous of them being the play by Euripides (431 BC). Medea is a powerful sorceress who helps Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. They marry and have children; but after ten years, Jason abandons and banishes her and marries King Creon’s daughter Creusa. In vengeance, Medea poisons Creusa and kills her own children.

Medea, as opposed to Clancy, does not claim madness as the reason for her actions. In fact, she sounds unnervingly rational, cold, and calculating. She is wronged; and she takes her revenge. Her children’s lives are hers to give or take away.

Jason.

My sons, mine own!

Medea.

Not thine, but mine .

Medea believes that the children of Jason’s new wife will supplant her own sons, who might then be murdered - which is not an unreasonable suspicion. No insanity defense here; only fury at having her power and position taken away.

This thing was not to be,

That thou shouldst live a merry life, my bed

Forgotten and my heart uncomforted,

Thou nor thy princess: nor the king that planned

Thy marriage drive Medea from his land,

And suffer not. Call me what thing thou please,

Tigress or Skylla from the Tuscan seas:

My claws have gripped thine heart, and all things shine.

In the last scene, Medea does something that must strike every contemporary reader as bizarre: she offers purification rites to wash away the stain of the murder. And yet the view of violence as a ritual impurity rather than simply a moral transgression is deeply embedded in ancient culture. We will never understand Oedipus or Oresteia if we overlook this aspect of Greek religion and society.

We have to be careful not to impose our own morality onto the past. Presentism, the inability to understand the past in its own terms, is a plague of our age, resulting in moral and intellectual blindness. Ancient Greece tolerated exposure of unwanted or defective newborns. And while the murder of older children was certainly seen as a crime, Medea’s invocation of the mother right brings back the older generation of chthonic goddesses who avenge the wrongs done to women.

In Oresteia by Aeschylus, Furies, the goddesses of vengeance, pursue Orestes who killed his mother in revenge for her murder of his father Agamemnon. In the famous confrontation between the Furies and Athena, the latter claims that the father right supersedes motherhood since only the father is the real parent, while the mother only provides the raw material for life. But the debate itself indicates that at least in the sphere of archetypes, the matter is far from settled. Medea appeals to the ancient system of beliefs in which the female capacity of giving life endows the mother with the right to take life. It is a horrible power; but it is a power nevertheless.

From goddess to victim

At the end of Medea, Jason lies prostrate on the ground. Clancy’s defenders want us to see her prostrate and sobbing, and lash out at anybody who remembers the actual victims - the children. Now it is the murderer who has to be seen as completely powerless, completely robbed of reason, a pathetic plaything of doctors, the law system, and “patriarchy”. And so she joins a legion of bad mothers in recent horror fiction who are always somehow absolved of responsibility for their actions.

In Little Darlings (2019) by Melanie Golding, for example, a mother almost drowns her twins, convinced they are changelings (see my essay about this trope here). But are they? It seems they may be; or perhaps, the mother is suffering from delusions, intent to threatening the impostors, so they real children are returned. The novel is written in such a way that the ambiguity is sustained until the end, but the mother is absolved of all blame regardless. It is not her; it is them, whether “them” is the voices in her head or the demonic creatures in her nursery.

There is a subgenre of maternal horror, written almost exclusively by female writers, in which mothers are accused of harming their babies, only to be vindicated at the end. Sometimes the real culprit is the father (Carol Goodman’s The Other Mother 2017). Sometimes is is “the other woman”. Sometimes it is postpartum depression. But it is never the suffering first-person narrator whose postpartum struggles are documented through pages of turgid prose and who comes close to killing her children, only to be saved by a deus ex machina of a plot twist. Even as the protagonist of The Other Mother is jumping from the window with her baby strapped to her chest, we are supposed to believe that she is doing it out of love.

Even when maternal anger and hate are acknowledged, they are displaced onto something else: a supernatural presence beckoning out of the shadows of the past. Sometimes this presence is conflated with postpartum psychosis; sometimes it is the protagonist’s own “bad” mother. In Katrina Monroe’s Graveyard of Lost Children (2023), the protagonist is haunted by “women in the well” who force her to be a flawed mother (not a killer, just not a very patient caregiver). She “was all of them - her mother, her grandmother…She was the darkness in their heads and the sting in their slaps” (343). Intergenerational trauma is another alibi for mistreating your children. At least, this novel has what passes for a happy ending in the pathetic world of feminine victimhood: the protagonist is going into therapy.

Pop culture is to our collective subconscious what symptoms are to a troubled individual: clues as to what is going on in the hidden depth. And what is going on is clearly a shift from mothers as all-powerful goddesses to mothers as helpless victims. The devouring goddesses of ancient mythologies are embodiments of nature. And nature does not care for any of her myriad children. “Red in tooth and claw”, Mother Nature declares like Medea: “I bring to life, I bring to death” (Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam).

But we cannot stomach either the ancient myth of mother right or the modern idea that women have the same agency and thus the same responsibility for their actions as men. Both fathers and mothers murder their children for a variety of reasons: power, anger, sadism. But only mothers are given the presumption of innocence. Not in the legal but in the ontological sense: women cannot be victimizers because we are assumed to be eternal victims. Paradoxically, so-called “feminists” shouting “we are all Clancy” are giving away the last vestiges of the ancient power of chthonic goddesses, still clinging to our mythologies of motherhood. They would rather be possessed by demons than acknowledge that women can murder for the same reason as men: because they can.

Imagine that one day you wake up to discover that your nearest and dearest have been supplanted by perfect copies of themselves. The copies are physically indistinguishable from the originals but they are profoundly alien, harboring unfathomable and hostile minds.

This is what is known as Capgras syndrome: the belief that your family and friends are actually impostors. This is a real and pretty serious mental illness. But this is also one of the most popular tropes of alien invasion in SF, epitomized by such classics of the genre as Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951), Jack Finney’s The Invasion of Body Snatchers (1954), John Christopher’s The Possessors (1965), and many other novels and movies (see the list in the second part of this essay). There are two main varieties of this trope: infestation, in which alien minds take over human bodies; and mimicry, in which aliens physically imitate human beings. Regardless of the variety, in both cases we deal with a fictional equivalent of Capgras syndrome: alien minds in (seemingly) human bodies.

Why would SF persistently journey into the inner world of psychotics and dress it up in the accoutrements of a cosmic menace? What is so seductive to the readers and writers of SF about the fractured imaginary of the mentally ill? Or maybe alien mimics are not about psychosis at all - at least, not of the individual variety.

The Commies Are Coming!

The most common interpretation of alien mimics is that they are a product of McCarthyism, during which Cold-War paranoia generated allegories of Communist takeover. In his book Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980), H. Bruce Franklin describes Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters as a transient piece of political propaganda:

“The Puppet Masters (1951) has much the same message as the 1951 movie I Was a Communist for the FBI. It is a Cold War allegory, which, like the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers adapted from the 1954 Jack Finney novel, warns of the insidious Communist menace, projected in the form of alien invaders taking over the bodies and mind of Americans” (Franklin 1980; 98).

But this does not fit the historical timeline. The Cold War has been won long ago; and yet alien mimics are as popular as ever. Jerry Jay Carroll’s Inhuman Beings was published in 1998. The bestsellers by Scott Sigler, Infected (2006) and Contagious (2008) are The Puppet Masters on steroids. And then you have Greig Beck’s Europa (2025) and Europa 2 (2926), Darcy Coates’ Parasite (2016) and many more.

Moreover, alien mimics are not limited to American SF. Examples from elsewhere include the Japanese novel Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena (1995) and the Soviet bestseller Dom skitaltzev (House of Wanderers) by Alexander Mirer (1978), of which more later.

But perhaps Franklin is right, though not in the way he means it. Ideological conversion is a real phenomenon. McCarthy did not invent scores of intellectuals who embraced the ideology that sent millions into the Gulag. Sudden and radical embrace of a new worldview that completely reconfigures a person’s identity is well-known. Many Jews after October 7 felt that their friends have been supplanted by Body Snatchers as they suddenly took to wearing keffiyehs and chanting “Free Palestine”. Many liberals undoubtedly felt the same way about their Trump-voting family members. So, perhaps alien mimics can be a political allegory but this allegory is not reducible to Cold-War paranoia.

But there is also a psychological aspect to it as well, which cannot be ignored. Capgras syndrome is only the extreme expression of the uneasy feeling shared by many normal people that there is something strange and inhuman lurking in the depth of our minds. We fear alien mimics because we fear ourselves.

Identity on ice

Although Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters remains a paradigm for alien mimicry, the first influential deployment of this trope in SF preceded it by almost 15 years. In 1938 John Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding, published a novella “Who Goes There?” that later became the basis for the 1951 film The Thing from Another World and the 1982 John Carpenter’s remake The Thing. In Campbell’s novella, the crew of an Antarctic research station digs up and thaws out the corpse of a malevolent alien being whose spaceship had crashed on the ice shield twenty thousand years previously. The being has the ability to consume and perfectly imitate its victims. The station’s crew becomes divided into true human beings and alien simulacra. The latter are eventually unmasked and the novella ends with an orgy of horrific violence against the impostors.

The nature of the alien is hotly debated by the members of the expedition, once they become aware of the infestation. Blair the biologist who is responsible for its release, insists that the alien is merely different from humans rather than essentially malevolent: “Just because its nature is different, you haven’t any right to say it’s necessary evil” (306). Tough guys Norris and McReady contradict him, convinced that because the alien, in its natural form, looks evil, it is evil.

But appearance cannot be a clue to the nature of a mimic because it literally looks like everybody else. And gradually, the ,members of the crew become consumed by paranoia predicated on the absence of visual clues: “is that man next to me an inhuman monster?” (343; emphasis in the original).

The “monsters” are perfect copies of the human originals, capable of deceiving even the comrades with whom they have lived in close proximity for many months. In fact, it is possible that the simulacra themselves may not know who they are. If so, what is the significance of a difference that makes no difference?

McReady cynically describes the entire expedition as consisting of “monsters, madmen and murderers”, with no clear dividing lines among them (340). So, are there aliens at the station at all? Perhaps, as Dr. Copper suggests, “we are all monsters” (330).

.In the movie The Thing John Carpenter uses body horror to create the visual clues of monstrosity: alien mimics are unmasked when they revert back to the ugliness of their original form. The same device is used in Greig Beck’s Europa where mimics fall apart into a pile of slithering wormlike creatures. But not all SF novels use this formula. In John Christopher’s The Possessors, for example, the difference is purely mental. The body is the same; only the mind is alien. But isn’t it true that all minds are alien to some extent? We do not have access to anybody else’s interiority but our own. How often do we hear from deceived spouses, disappointed parents, and shocked friends: “This is not the person I know!” Lindsay Clancy’s husband declared that he was not married to a monster. But Clancy killed her three children. So, did she become a monster? When, how and why?

The irreducible opacity of others’ minds animates stories of alien mimicry. The real horror of alien infestation lies in the fact that it changes nothing. The three men who escape the wreck of the station in “Who Goes There?”, having slaughtered their erstwhile comrades, may be human or alien but they are certainly “madmen, monsters and murderers”.

The central question that Campbell’s novella poses is the question of difference: what makes an alien, alien? And its answer echoes Lyotard’s observation that humanity is always- already inhabited by the inhuman; always-already different from itself. In Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, one of the “pod people”, trying to talk the protagonist into surrender, tells him: “You’ll feel nothing at all. Sleep, and you’ll wake up feeling exactly the same as you do now…You’ll be the same. What the hell are you fighting?” (Finney 179; emphasis in the original). A simulacrum that is as good as the original IS the original.

Puppets on a string

Nowhere is the opacity of another’s mind as evident as in the process of ideological conversion. We have had enough experience of this in the last years. A friend who suddenly starts spouting Hamas propaganda. Spouses who divorce because of political disagreements. Women who break off relationships because the boyfriend is MAGA. SF often contains elements of political allegory, and Franklin is not wrong when he points out these elements in Heinlein’s novel. But he is wrong to attribute them exclusively to the political paranoia of McCarthyism.

The Puppet Masters describes the invasion of Earth by mind-controlling “slugs” from Titan who almost take over the United States. It explicitly invites a political reading by its uncompromising anticommunism. Our protagonist Sam, an intrepid secret agent, remarks that the “parasites might feel right at home behind the Curtain” (148).

But as opposed to Campbell’s novella, Heinlein gives us access to the mind of a human being infested by an alien slug. And in doing so, he offers an explanation of why so many otherwise intelligent people fell under the spell of communism in the 1950s and perhaps in our own time as well.

“Who Goes There?” is narrated by an omniscient narrator with no focalization. We know what the characters do but not what they think or feel. But Puppet Masters has a first-person narrator, Sam. In the course of the novel, Sam, along with all the other major characters, has been possessed by a slug. And though the slug possession is ostensibly reversible, it leaves an indelible imprint on the host. When Sam is released from the slug, he still feels the taint of the “master” in his soul. He is “spoiled”: “being ridden by a master does something to you” (149).

Sam is possessed twice: the first time unwittingly when he is infected by the slug from another victim and the second time when the Old Man, the head of the Agency and incidentally, Sam’s father, needs to interrogate an alien invader and Sam volunteers. There is no narrative or typographical break in the text to indicate his transformation. In the first case, the reader is not even immediately aware that something has happened and neither is Sam. In his capacity of a retrospective narrator, he grapples with the recollections of the period of his life when he worked for the slugs and muses on the limitations of human language to convey a non-human subjectivity: “Language grows, so they say, to describe experience of the race using it. Experience first – language second. How can I tell how I felt?” (65).

The only way, it seems, is by appropriating the language of mystical experience. Sam-with-slug basks in the sense of well-being and purposefulness that come with the awareness of divine protection: “…although I did not know what I was about to do, I was always aware of what I was doing and sure that each act was the necessary, purposeful act at that moment” (65). Though he is horrified by the prospect of being slug-ridden again, once it happens the sense of well-being reasserts itself: “I had neither worries nor fears. I was oddly contented to be back with my master, to be free of troubles and tensions. My business was to serve and the future would take care of itself” (99). And when the tough-as-nails Old Man who, in service of his patriotic duty was willing to sacrifice his only son, is possessed by a slug, he experiences a similar epiphany of love: “I had no idea that a man could feel such a sense of peace and contentment and well-being. This is the happiest I’ve been in years, the happiest since…your mother died. But never mind that; this is better” (332).

Remember the “warmth of collectivism”? This is the happiness that the alien slugs offer: submergence in something greater than oneself; relinquishing of both individualism and responsibility; the relief of belonging. The infallibility of the Party and the surrender of the self to the collective is one of the main tenets of communism; and Heinlein would have been aware of the Soviet show trials in which people voluntarily confessed to impossible crimes because the Party demanded it from them.

There is an interesting linguistic moment in the novel. Sam struggles with his pronouns. In describing his experience with the slug, Sam is slipping from the first-person singular to the first-person plural and occasionally even to the third-person inanimate, as he compares his relationship with his master to the relationship between a man and a phone: “I, like it, was a communication instrument, nothing more” (71). But on the other hand, in the second episode of possession, he identifies with the master completely, using the first-person singular to describe both of them. Ultimately, he decides that the pronoun confusion does not matter since his transformed subjectivity transcends the limitations of a human language: “An instruction came at once – or, I made a decision, for the words mean the same” (99-100).

We think of pronouns in relation to transgender identification, which was not a cultural issue at the time. However, Sam’s struggles are not unrelated to this issue. The slugs seem to have no biological sex, but their commonality is gendered feminine: fluid, collectivist, and “warm”. Just give up your individual self, and you can become part of what Donna Haraway described as “partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves” (157). Heinlein rejects gender stereotypes in relation to individuals (Sam’s girlfriend Mary is just as badass as him). But his allegory of ideological conversion as submission to a collective super-organism represents the latter as unmistakably feminine.

The Soviet (Un)human

Alexander Mirer’s Dom skitaltsev (The House of Wanderers) has never been translated into English but it was wildly popular at its initial publication and remains popular today, recently reissued in a new edition. The novel consists of two parts: Glavnyi polden (The Main Afternoon, 1969) and Dom skitaltsev (1976). The two parts were published together in 1992 under the common title The House of Wanderers.

The action of The Main Afternoon takes place in a provincial Soviet town Turgovino whose inhabitants are gradually taken over by alien invaders. The novel is narrated in the first person by a boy named Alyosha Sokolov who discovers the invasion and organizes a group of teens and adults to resist.

In the second part, a counter-invasion takes place: the Earth has discovered the Wanderers’ plans and with the help of alien “dissidents”, sends two teens, Masha and Syova, to take over alien bodies in order to find out the secret of a device capable of identifying the mind in any given body.^[i] It turns out that the aliens (called balogs) have had the technology of mind-implantation for a long time, and their civilization is single-mindedly focused on colonizing other planets to ensure steady supply of bodies for their potentially immortal citizens. Masha and Syova successfully infiltrate two high-ranking aliens, obtain the device and stop the invasion of the Earth.

If Heinlein’s slugs are the Communists, who are the balogs? American McCarthyism was a child’s play compared to the all-pervasive political paranoia of the USSR. However, there is a distinction between the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. In the latter, the mania for unmasking traitors is often cautiously questioned, though never completely abjured.

Mirer’s novel is written many years after Stalin’s death and after the Twentieth Party Congress (1956) where the “excesses” of the Terror were half-heartedly acknowledged. On the one hand, the conspiratorial rhetoric is still alive and well. When Alyosha notices the strange behavior of the possessed in his town, his mind immediately jumps to spies and traitors. Talking to his friend Styopa about the strange behavior of ordinary people possessed by aliens, Alyosha suggests that “they are spies” and that we “have to inform on them”(Mirer). But Styopa is skeptical, and Alyosha himself begins to have doubts fairly quickly: “how did an ordinary driver suddenly become a spy?” When he comes to his adored teacher and shooting coach Sur with his suspicions, Sur points out that the KGB is strong enough to deal with saboteurs: “a spy who shoots a gun even once is a dead man”.

In The House of Wanderers, there is no “warmth of collectivism”, no ecstatic submergence in the hive-mind. Sharing your body with an alien (or sharing an alien body in the second part) is described as an internal division that is sometimes painful and never pleasurable. It is done out of duty or as a means of survival, with both identities retaining their sense of self. But this self is purely social and external, not internal and personal as in Puppet Masters.

In the USSR identity is created by the performance of a social role. In the ultimate ironic twist, Judith Butler’s claim that identity is performative which became the theoretical basis for transgender ideology, applies to Soviet culture much more than it does to the West. In the post-Stalin era, you did not have to be a true believer. You only had to behave like one.

Mirer’s novel shows how identity is created by performance rather than essence. Describing human-possessed aliens and alien-possessed humans, the novel splits identity into a series of local and contingent acts. When Sur shoots his best friend who has been possessed by an alien, Alyosha tries to designate the victim as “evil” and a “traitor”, thus deserving of death. Sur is outraged, telling the boy that “if Pavel…is a traitor, so am I”. Since Sur eventually becomes possessed as well, this double irony undercuts the distinction between faithfulness and treason as inner essences, reducing them to simple acts. And when Sur-as-alien is asked by another possessed why he had given away his weapons to a child, he says: “it was Gabrielian [his family name], not I”.

The House of Wanderers, unlike most Western novels of alien possession, provides a simple answer to the question of the mimics’ motivation. While in Campbell, Heinlein or Christopher, the reason for the invasion is either obscure or unimportant, in Mirer they are provided with an economic rationale that is straight out of Marx. When the invasion is unmasked, two scientists debate the question of its intent. What are the aliens after? One suggests that they are motivated by “the instinct for conquest”. The other scoffs:

“Huh? You are a Marxist, you studied political economy. Instincts, passions – that’s second-hand Schopenhauer. Instinct is for migrating birds. A developed civilization needs something more serious. Overpopulation, overpopulation…Here is a hypothesis: they have the overpopulation of ghosts.”

The aliens’ motives are the pragmatic calculus of profit and loss with bodies as the currency. Since minds can be kept indefinitely as portable recordings, bodies in which they can be implanted become both the most important natural resource and the unit of exchange. Indeed, when Syova in the second part is introduced to the balogs’ civilization, its economic structure is laid bare: competition for bodies is the equivalent of capital accumulation in the Marxist model of history. The corporeal capitalism of the balogs is not a moral choice but rather the result of the ineluctable logic of supply and demand which drives them on their endless Path of conquest.

Hermeneutics of paranoia

How do you identify a man possessed by an alien?

In The Puppet Masters, it seems a relatively easy task. The aliens actually have a material form, albeit a disgustingly slug-like one. They take over human minds by attaching themselves to their bodies. To unmask an infested human, all you have to do is to strip them naked (indeed, in the novel roaming bands of vigilantes do just that to suspicious passers-by).

The House of Wanderers, on the other hand, depicts alien possession as exclusively a mental phenomenon. There is no corporeal sign by which the presence of an alien mind in a human body can be identified. The balogs use small devices called “mediators” to implant, and to extract, minds at will.

This seems rather counter-intuitive: isn’t materialism the official philosophy of the USSR? Yes and no; while the text distances itself from any suspicion of the supernatural by insisting that the aliens transfer their mental “matrices” rather than spirits or souls; and while a technological fix for detecting an alien presence becomes available in the second part, the aliens remain as elusive as ghosts. When Alyosha asks Sur how aliens look in their real form, the latter answers that they have no real form. When he inquires why they speak Russian among themselves, the response is that they have no language of their own. Bodiless and nameless, the aliens become an empty signifier of otherness. The only way in which they define themselves is by their “Path”: a limitless pilgrimage to take over new planets that has no beginning or end. Sur tells Alyosha that he can pick up any star in the sky at random and see it as the starting point of the Path.

If no direct detection of an alien infestation is possible, a different kind of hermeneutics comes into play. The aliens declare their presence by minute and seemingly unimportant details that generate an unspecified sense of wrongness. Alyosha’s first inkling of the invasion comes from such minor events as a man toying with his guitar and a new stump appearing in the forest.

The mainstay of conspiracy theory is what Carlo Ginzburg called “diagnosis through clues”, in which “tiny details provide the key to a deeper reality, inaccessible by other methods” (Ginzburg 11). Another name for it is “hermeneutics of suspicion” “that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths”. It is the same hermeneutics of suspicion that motivates endless Reddit threads dedicated to the Epstein files, AIPAC, UAP etc.

This style of interpretation is on full display in Mirer’s novel, still echoing with the unforgotten paranoia of Stalinism which had created a society singularly susceptible to the epistemology of suspicion. But hermeneutics of suspicion is equally widespread in the West, though it often thrives in the dark corners of the internet and in radical movements on the left and the right, slowly seeping into mainstream culture. In Part 2, I will discuss in detail how it operates in more recent American SF.

Our Bodies, Their Minds

The alien mimic in Campbell are the unconscious. In Heinlein, they are communists. In Mirer, they are capitalists. But regardless of how we interpret the allegory of alien possession and/or mimicry, we come back to the same point. The collective Capgras syndrome of suspicion, paranoia, and uncertainty, in which even our own minds seem to be infested with alien ideas that are undermining the coherence of the already-fragile self, is incurable, In fact, it seems to be getting worse. And with ideological conversion coming back as the same cultural flashpoint it had been in the McCarthy era, old stories acquire renewed urgency and relevance. Like an alien infestation, monsters and metaphors of the Cold War keep coming back. And like an alien infestation, they can never be completely exterminated.

Ultimately, the pod people cannot be defeated. The aliens are, and have always been, ourselves

^[i] The reason why children are deployed as soldiers in the war against aliens is that children’s and teens’ minds are impervious to alien infestation.

Works Cited

Campbell, John. The Best of John Campbell. New York: Del Rey Books, 1976

Finney, Jack. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. New York: Dell Publishing, 1978

Franklin, H. Bruce. Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Haraway, Donna. " Cyborg Manifesto." n.d. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/.

Heinlein, Robert A. The Puppet Masters. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990

Mirer, Alexander. Dom skitaltzev (House of Wanderers). Moscow: ACT, 2021.

Dear Subscribers! This is an unscheduled post. I decided to share with you my recently published essay about the speculative fiction response to October 7. At the end, I also provide a link to the entire issue of the AJS Perspectives discussing the issue of Jewish Futures. More original essays are coming soon!

As with other historical catastrophes that befell the Jewish people, October 7 has engendered two opposite responses by writers and literary scholars. On the one hand, some demand scrupulous documentary-style realism, a modification of Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum about the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz.^[1] On the other hand, many feel that the horror of the event requires its representation through symbolism and metaphor. This debate fits into the protracted conversation within Israeli literature as to whether realism or fantasy can best do justice to the Israeli experience. While there has been a significant shift toward speculative fiction (SF) in the last twenty years, October 7 has resurrected the sense of precarity that characterized the first years of the state and that inspired the first wave of Israeli realist writers, such as A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz.

Having been born from a literary utopia – Altneuland (1902) by Theodor Herzl – the project of Zionism seems to be naturally congruent with SF. But in practice, in the first decades of the state, the opposite was the case. Israeli literature was singularly deficient in the Hebrew analogues of science fiction, fantasy and supernatural horror, while psychological realism reigned supreme (Gomel and Gurevich 2013). This, in my view, is the result of the unique cultural and social ambience of that period when a succession of almost-miraculous events, from the Six-Days War to the mass immigration from the Middle Eastern countries, generated the sense of both euphoria and foreboding. Living through the miracle of the Jewish state’s rebirth, the Israeli public was hungry for the ordinary and the commonplace. The great writers of that period Amos Oz, David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, and others tried not so much to represent the already-existing reality, as was the case with Western realism, but to create it. They generated a sense of stability through representing “ordinary” Israeli families and individuals in their typical settings, despite the fact that there was nothing ordinary or even representative in the first chaotic years of the state. Realism became the Israeli fantasy.

The situation changed in the 1990s and especially in the 2000nds. The flowering of Israeli speculative fiction in that period was unprecedented. First, there was an explosion of print and online magazines dedicated to the genre, such as Holomot be-Espania (Dreams in Spain). Then there was the annual SF and fantasy cons Utopia and Olamot that are still going strong, attracting hundreds of eager fans from all over the country. And finally, a new generation of writers, such as Keren Landsaman, Sarah Blau, Gail Hareven, Etgar Keret and many others, rejected the “thick” texture of everyday reality that constituted the bedrock of the previous generation of writers who tried to reassure their audiences that despite wars and terrorism, Israel could still be a “normal” country, in which people care about relationships, families, and money. Instead, the emerging Israeli SF reflected the twin demons of foreboding and boredom that seemed to plague Israel. On the one hand, the First and Second Intifadas generated anxiety about the future. We survived this; but can we survive what is coming down the pipeline next? On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, until October 7 Israel often felt stuck in the mud of the “situation” – the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict that seemed to drag on and on without offering any resolution. Thus, the dominant genre of Israeli SF literature at the time was neither utopia nor dystopia but “limbotopia”: being caught in limbo of the eternal present (Gomel and Shemtov 2018).

October 7 changed everything, rewriting both Israeli reality and the culture’s sense of history. On the one hand, it resurrected the sense of precarity that plagued the first years of the state. But as opposed to the 1973 war, which was also characterized by the initial military and intelligence failure, the atrocities of October 7, hostage-taking, and widespread sexual violence exceeded the “normal” parameters of war or terrorism, creating a phantasmagoria of horror. The subsequent war in Gaza, the twelve-day war with Iran, and the explosion of antisemitism across the globe further shook the already shaken Israeli and Jewish narratives.

We do not yet know how SF will finally respond to this pivotal moment in Jewish and global history. It took at least thirty years for Holocaust SF to appear, defying Adorno’s prohibition on fictionalizing the atrocity (Kerman and Browning 2014). In Israel itself, the trauma seems to manifest as return to the documentary-style realistic representation. The two TV series dedicated to the event, Red Alert and October 7, are quasi-documentaries based on real events and thinly disguised real people. According to the Israeli National Library, 170 books have been published after October 7 relating to this event. Approx. 80 of those are nonfiction investigations, reports, and military reviews; about 30 are personal testimonies, 14 are poetry collection, and only 9 are prose fiction, none of which are SF.^[2] There are reputedly Israeli and Jewish SF creators working on October 7 fictions, including myself, but so far nothing has been published. This is why I want to end this essay with a brief discussion of a Jewish SF novel, which, though started before October 7, seems to reflect with unerring accuracy the dizzying feeling of history veering off course and falling into the black hole of unpredictability and chaos.

Benjamin Resnick’s Next Stop (2024) is both sublime and horrifying in its prescience. Israel is literally swallowed by a black hole overnight; and the resulting wave of antisemitism drives American Jews into ghettoes. Following a young Jewish couple Ethan and Ella in NYC, the novel slowly evolves into a dreamlike - or rather, nightmare-like - vision of the world in which Jews are mocked, persecuted, and pushed out of sight. Eventually, in the NYC ghetto, Jews are beginning to board subway trains that are taking them – elsewhere. But as Ella and Ethan with their son Michael are trying to board, their tickets are lost and they have to let their young son take the train alone, like the Jewish children on Kindertransport, many of whom never saw their families again.

The image of a black hole, which is at the heart of the novel, is particularly apposite for representing sudden and wrenching historical cataclysms. A black hole is the term for a “tear” in the fabric of spacetime, in which ordinary laws of physics no longer apply. But in relation to narrative representation, a black hole serves as a metaphor for an event so traumatic and unexpected that it overwhelms the capacity of the historical imagination. British writer Helen Dunmore describes it as a narrative singularity: “Some events are so overwhelming that time, rather than carrying them away, brings them back again and again to the same place” (241). The collective PTSD of a cataclysm, such as October 7, generates the sense of narrative paralysis:

“It’s an undoing. It’s where things come apart and fall silent. There is nothing to say. It’s a wound, ancient and endless” (Resnick 167).

As the novel progresses, the familiar story of persecution, silencing, invisibility and displacement is playing out in NYC, all the more horrifying because it unfolds gradually and piecemeal. As opposed to the sudden and catastrophic disappearance of Israel, the Jewish community is NYC are slowly driven into “the Pale” where their continuing incarceration is papered over with the bureaucratic newspeak about “preventing further anomalies” which spring up in response to the “movement of Jews” (133). The two distinct timelines play out in the magic realism of Resnick’s novel: the sudden cataclysm of Israel’s disappearance and the continuous deterioration of the Jewish time in the diaspora, symbolized first by the squeeze of restrictions and then by the schedule of subway trains. But those trains, with their open-ended drive toward an unknown destination, also symbolize Jewish survival and resilience. The novel ends abruptly, in medial res, but on a strangely hopeful note: Michael riding the train into nowhere, sees the subway screens change into “promises of the next station, the new station. And he was not afraid” (287).

So, what will the SF response to October 7 be? Will it be cast into the modality of a sudden catastrophic change, a black hole of trauma, or of the continuity of Jewish survival? Will it emphasize hope or despair? Will it expand into the future vista of science fiction, seek escape in the alternative worlds of fantasy, or regress into the obsessive recycling of the tropes of horror?

Only time and history will tell.

AJS_Perspectives-Summer-2026-web.pdf

^[1] In his 1949 essay 1949 essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” (Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft).

^[2] https://www.ynet.co.il/entertainment/article/r1wy9o800

I once published a list of five best SF novels of alien encounter to be found here. This short essay is a sort of addendum to it. I wanted to post a list of five worst novels about aliens but then I realized that 1. It would be mean-spirited, and I am only mean-spirited on special occasions. 2. The list, to be comprehensive, would have to include at least 500 titles. So, instead I will just list the worst tropes of alien contact, each illustrated by one novel.

Let me just add that some of the novels I list are not necessarily bad. They may be entertaining or well-written. But they fail to deliver what SF is for: cognitive defamiliarization, or to in simpler words, they fail to make you think and to see the familiar world in a new and unfamiliar way.

1. Aliens are just like us, only better.

It hardly needs to be said that aliens cannot be like us. Without descending into the endless philosophical debates about the nature of consciousness and the definition of intelligence, it is clear that creatures that evolved in a very different environment would be very different from us not just physically but mentally as well. We cannot communicate even with semi-intelligent species on our planet, such as corvids and cetaceans. The notion that a cosmic squid can just drop by and start chatting about the weather is preposterous. But it also undermines the main artistic goal of SF: creating the sense of wonder and defamiliarizing the commonplace. I cannot tell you how many times I have been disappointed by picking up a novel by a writer I like and finding humans in alien costumes.

Example: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Footfall (1985).

The novel is a snappy war thriller, but its aliens are disappointing. The biology of the Fithp is based on elephants; their inner world, however, is indistinguishable from ours, which is demonstrated by the extensive inner focalization through alien characters. The chapters in which tusked and trunked creatures agonize about their broken relationships or bad bosses read like an animal fable. The Fithp are about as different from us as Babar the Elephant.

2. Aliens are just like us, only worse.

Alien invasions are my guilty pleasure. You can find my two essays on this topic here and here. But why would aliens even bother to invade? What does Earth have that intelligent creatures would cross interstellar distances to exterminate or enslave an ordinary mammalian species? Some writers, such as Peter Watts in Blindsight (2006) or Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood’s End (1953), come up with mind-blowing explanations. But other simply decide that since human history is a series of invasions and empires, aliens would do the same (forgetting that Alexander the Great and the East India Company had sound political and economic reasons for what they did). Coming up with convincing alien cultures is time-consuming. So, let’s just have some bad aliens who invade because they can.

Example: Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959).

The novel has been unjustly accused of fascism. Heinlein was no fascist, and Paul Verhoeven’s movie based on it (1997) is an exquisite parody of fascist aesthetics. But the Bugs in Starship Troopers are indeed the prototype of all malevolent aliens, battling humanity simply because the plot requires it.

3. Aliens are gods.

To me, the most annoying character in Star Trek: Next Generation is Q: a smart aleck with unlimited divine power. Would a god really muck about with the crew of Enterprise if he could create and destroy worlds at will? Many pagan gods are, in fact, trickster or deliberately cruel and malevolent. But even Loki and Hades have an aura of the sublime clinging to them. The anthropomorphic gods of ancient mythologies are still wrapped up in mystery and awe. But as aliens supplanted angels and demons in our imagination, they have become the Hallmark vision of the divine: showing up in the halo of light and dispensing cosmic wisdom you can find in any self-help book. Without descending into the rabbit hole of UFO cults or beating the dead horse of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we can find this deplorable reduction of godhood to pop-spirituality in many SF novels.

Example: Carl Sagan, Contact (1985)

I loved Sagan as a popularizer of science, but this novel is an embarrassment. If your mystical vision of communing with a godlike intelligence boils down to reconciliation with your Daddy, maybe consult a therapist.

4. Aliens are helpless childlike creatures in need of our assistance.

I am not sure why anybody would want to mother an alien child, but somehow, the idea has taken root in many otherwise good writers’ minds. I largely blame Spielberg’s ET, of course; but this is one silly trope that refuses to die. Perhaps as an antidote to hive minds, giant spiders and the rest of the evil-alien menagerie, some writers want us to treat aliens like stray cats or, in the case of my next example, cosmic chickens.

Example: Stephen Baxter, Creation Node (2023).

Baxter is a very good writer, and some of his aliens, especially in the Xeeleee series, are quite memorable. But in this standalone novel, the birdlike female alien abandoned on the mysterious Planet Nine and nicknamed Feathers, is mothered by a crew consisting exclusively of women. Feathers does nothing except singing and laying eggs, so wouldn’t it be easier to get a coop? Incidentally, while I very much appreciate women as protagonists in SF, I have to confess that having entire space crews consisting of women only is not only implausible but boring. Moreover, it tends to confirm some of the worst stereotypes of women as kind, nurturing, etc. If it were me, I would probably abandon Feathers to her own devices and go on to explore Planet Nine.

5. Aliens are noble savages, resisting Earth invaders

I have written about the fraught intersection of postcolonialism and SF

But let me just add that Noble Savages have never existed on Earth, so finding them in space is highly unlikely. The problem with postcolonialism is that it adopts Rousseau’s discredited philosophy in which civilization (capitalism for his modern descendants) is responsible for all the evil in the world. Postcolonial thinkers conveniently forget that indigenous cultures were every bit as bloody, cruel, warlike, unequal, and morally compromised as the West. They were not as powerful and technologically developed, however, which resulted in their conquest or cultural assimilation.

There are some thoughtful SF novels which explore what happens when humans confront an alien culture that is less developed than ours. Michael Bishop’s Transfiguration is an excellent example of anthropological SF, which presents an encounter with a deeply dysfunctional and degraded indigenous alien culture. But when SF turns into an allegory of postcolonial guilt, it becomes propaganda.

Example: Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (1972)

Written at the height of the opposition to the war in Vietnam, this novel is disappointing in two ways. Read as straightforward SF, it suffers from the same issue as Footfall - humanizing the aliens in ways that make them not alien at all. Read as a political allegory, it distorts what the Vietnam war was all about. The Viet Kong were not noble savages, living in harmony with nature, but a modern ideological and political movement that proceeded to jail and massacre its opponents immediately after gaining victory in the war. No political insight is gained from dressing them up as cuddly green aliens.

Are empires always bad? What is the connection between empires and postcolonialism? And what does SF tell us about the long history of empire building?

When I wrote my essay about Aztecs in SF (to be found here), somebody messaged me expressing their disappointment that it did not mention Arkady Martine’s recent space opera A Memory Called Empire. I promised I would write about it, so here it is!

Spoilers alert! If you plan on reading Martine’s novel, this essay might spoil whatever surprises you may expect. On the other hand, there are few surprises in the novel’s plot, so you might just as well read on.

Let me start by saying that I liked the novel, despite its glacial pace. It is one of those books that are more fun to discuss than to read. It got the Hugo in 2020, which, despite my gripes, I believe is deserved. It is well-written. Its worldbuilding is incredibly detailed - sometimes, too much so. Its characters, apart from their memorable names, such as Nineteen Adze or Three Seagrass, are not particularly interesting but not completely cliche either. And most importantly, it offers a defamiliarizing view of the stock -in-trade of both SF and postcolonial theory: the Evil Empire.

Empires have gotten a very bad name in SF. Star Wars is an obvious example, but Asimov’s Foundation and Empire (1952) is another early SF text that contributed to the stereotype of the Evil Empire as an all-powerful totalitarian entity crushing dissent and enslaving or oppressing indigenous populations. Interestingly, when Ronald Reagan accurately used this very stereotype to refer to the USSR in his 1983 speech, the left was outraged, even though the definition fit to a t. We shall come back to this later.

In Martine’s novel, the Teixcalaan Empire is modeled on the Aztec Empire that annexed large swaths of Mesoamerica, imposing a brutal regime of tribute in both wealth and human sacrifices on the conquered tribes. However, while the cultural similarities are clear, the novel offers no historical continuity between the Aztecs and Teixcalaan. In SF, the future is almost always positioned in some relation to the present, either part of the same linear history, or an alternative timeline, embedded in the larger multiverse of possibilities. Neither is the case here. Is this an alternative history, in which the Aztec Empire never fell and eventually attained space travel? Is Teixcalaan a deliberate imitation of the Aztecs by another population group, as happens in Michael Bishop’s novel Stolen Faces that I discussed in my last essay? We do not know. And because of that, the novel reads less as an SF and more as an allegory.

There are two kinds of allegorical representation: personification, and historical or figural allegory. The first kind is typical of medieval plays, such as Everyman, in which characters embody abstract qualities of virtue and vice. But it is the second kind that is more relevant today: a narrative which represents something that actually happened in history but in an oblique and disguised way. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a perfect example: the Bolshevik Revolution retold as a farmyard tale.

A Memory Called Empire tells the story of Mahit Dzmare, the ambassador from a tiny independent orbital station Lsel to the capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire simply called the City. The plot centers on Mahit’s fight to preserve the independence of the station from the annexation by the Empire, while simultaneously being embroiled in the fight for succession to the aging Emperor Six Direction (as in the actual Aztec Empire, the succession in Teixcalaan does not automatically follow the bloodline). At the end, after much complicated intriguing, Lsel succeeds in preserving itself from the conquest by redirecting the Empire’s attention to the alien threat looming on the galactic border where unknown nonhuman enemy is about to invade.

It hardly requires profound knowledge of history to think about Tlaxcalans, Totonacs and other indigenous Mesoamerican tribes that joined Cortes in his conquest of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Without them, he could not have succeeded. Cortes and the Spaniards were as alien to these tribes as they were to the Aztecs, but the tribes’ calculation was simple: better the conqueror you don’t know than the one you know all too well. In Martine’s novel, the unknown aliens play the same role as the conquistadors (the aliens are central to the sequel, The Desolation Called Peace, 2021, which I am not going to discuss today).

But what if the tribes had not joined the Spaniards? What if the Aztec Empire survived? What, in fact, if all the empires whose collapse is celebrated today by every postcolonial seminar in every academic institution in the West had survived? The Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, what if they all continued existing until today? Would the world be better or worse than it is now?

An empire by definition is a multicultural, multiethnic polity. An empire grows by conquering or annexing other countries, tribes, and populations and by imposing a uniform set of laws and regulations on these areas. They may be economically exploited for the benefit of the metropole but not always. Perhaps the most important aspect of an empire is that it spreads its culture/religion/ideology and imposes it, by force or by the simple weight of its presence, onto the indigenous peoples that it absorbs. Martine describes the imperial dynamics of hard and soft conquest:

And each and every one of those captains has led troops down into a new system, carrying all the poison gifts she can muster: trade agreements and poetry, taxes and the promise of protection. black-muzzled energy weapons and the sweeping architecture of a new governor’s palace…(11).

From Alexander the Great to Osman Gazi (the founder of the Ottoman Empire); from Caesar to Cortes; from Itzcoatl to Sir Francis Drake; from Qin Shi Huang to Queen Victoria; founders and rulers of empires saw themselves as bringing civilization and order into the chaos of barbarism and violence. Were they all wrong?

Let us consider what happens when an empire collapses. The fall of the Roman Empire ushered in the Dark Ages. The fall of the Ottoman Empire was marked by the Armenian genocide and the unrest in the Middle East that continues until today. The withdrawal of the British Empire from India led to the death of almost two million people during the Partition.

Empires may be violent; but the fall of an empire does not guarantee peace. After all, what is the opposite of empire? The nation-state. In the mid-19th century, the rise of nationalism as a dominant political ideology ushered in a period of European unrest which culminated in WW1. And today, while few liberals would defend the idea of empire as a civilizing force, even fewer would defend nationalism, which they erroneously equate with Nazism. This leaves the Western left in a bind. If empires are bad, and nation-states are bad, what is left? As per DSA platform, open borders. Not many takers here, as proven by the last US elections.

The real problem with empires, according to postcolonial theory, however, is not economic exploitation as much as cultural imposition (or “cultural genocide” in the most extreme version). Martine’s book frankly acknowledges the irresistible pull of Teixcalaanli imperial culture, which is described in elaborate details, from its strange naming system, to its stupendous architecture, and its complex and ever-growing stock of poetry and traditional narratives. Mahit is seduced by this culture, torn between her barbarian heritage and her growing love for Teixcalaan. And even though at the end she chooses to return to Lsel, she knows that she may have left the Empire but the Empire will never leave her:

“Nothing the Empire touched would remain hers. Very little was hers already” (447).

Franz Fanon would understand this sentiment. In his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he writes about the cultural impact of colonialism, which is not merely economic exploitation but irreducible cultural transformation of the colonial subject:

All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave —position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture.

And yet, Fanon who is often interpreted as the father of postcolonial theory, also has this to say:

As painful as it is for us to have to say this: there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white.

In other words, Western culture is here to stay. “Nothing empire touches remains itself” (Martine 421).

You cannot undo the cultural impact of imperial conquest. The Roman law is still the foundation of the legal system in most European countries. Mexico still speaks Spanish and worships the Savior born in the distant land of Judea rather than the native god Huitzilopochtli. The Middle East, which used to be Christian, is still largely Muslim. “Cultural decolonization” and the glorification of “indigeneity” is limited to the academic lounges and the radical fringes of the Western left. Most former colonial subjects cannot return to their ancestors’ ways, and would not if they could.

The intersection of cultural impact and brutal violence is at the heart of imperial history. Good SF (as opposed to ideologically engaged SF) thrives on hard questions, not pat answers. Martine’s novel is not Star Wars because it acknowledges the complexity of imperial conquest and refuses to reduce it to the cartoonish tableau of evil stormtroopers and heroic resisters:

That was the problem. Empire was empire - the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died (392).

Contemporary postcolonial theory misreads Fanon and other early scholars, such as Homi Bhabha, by excising “the part that seduced” and focusing only on “the part that clamped down”. And while oppression may be fought, cultural influence is irreversible. When empires fall, what it left in their wake is hybrid identities, not some pristine Rousseau-inspired “noble savage”, an orientalist delusion if there ever was one.

But there is more. Racism and empire have become synonymous. Self-flagellating Westerners, laser focused on the Transatlantic slave trade, forget that race was irrelevant to most empire builders in history. Romans and Greeks did not care a whit about skin color: their distinction between imperial subjects and barbarians rested exclusively on the acceptance of the Roman law. The Seljuks and the Ottomans, despite the brutality of their Islamic regimes, accepted converts of any ethnicity (though their treatment of black slaves did indicate a racial prejudice). And of course, the USSR, the latest and possibly the worst of the world empires, prided itself on its anti-racism - which may account for the anger of the left when Reagan accurately diagnosed it. In the eyes of his opponents, an anti-racist empire was an impossibility, an oxymoron.

And this is why Martine’s book is so interesting. By modeling her empire on the Aztecs, she short-circuits the usual ideological nexus of empire=racism. The Teixcalaanli are “people of color” - they are described as being very much like the original Aztecs in their physiognomy. Race plays no role in the plot, but the reader, confronted with an “indigenous” galactic empire will has to re-examine their “progressive” assumptions about race, colonialism, and culture. Teixcalaan is both magnificent and dangerous; both seductive and violent; both highly civilized and barbaric.

A sub-plot of the novel deals with the technology that allows the preservation of a person’s memories. If we read A Memory Named Empire as a historical or political allegory of empire-building, we can interpret this technology as a reference to the danger of forgetting the complexity of history and as an invocation of the urgent need to preserve the accurate knowledge of the past. Empires, like wars, are a human universal. Whether they are good or evil depends on what they do. But you cannot erase the past and pretend that decolonization will lead us back to the paradise of cultural purity and authentic “indigeneity”. History does not run backward.

Teixcalaan is not a Star Wars caricature of villainous colonizers. It is a memory of all the empires in the past that have shaped our present and future.

Works Cited

Martine, Arkady. A Memory Called Empire (Tom Doherty, 2019).

In 1487, about 30 years before Cortes invaded Mexico and destroyed the Aztec Empire, the Great Pyramid was dedicated in the capital city of Tenochtitlan. The ceremony was conducted over 5 days and involved the industrial-scale slaughter of tens of thousands of people. The Aztec records claimed the figure of 80,400; contemporary historians reduce it to between 10,000 and 30,000. But there is no debate as to how it was done:

“A line of prisoners and slaves had been assembled…They were organized into a line that stretched… a considerable distance from the base of the pyramid. One by one, they walked up the steps of the temple. One by one, they came before the priests at the top. One by one, their hearts were removed and offered to Huitzilopochtli” (Myers 176).

The beating heart was removed; the body thrown down; and the blood poured down the sides of the pyramid, eventually covering most of the city, rotting and stinking in the sun.

The Aztecs were not mindless savages. The city of Tenochtitlan was larger than any contemporary city in Europe, built on the lake and boasting impressive architecture, broad avenues, and sophisticated civic infrastructure. The Aztecs ruled a large empire, which they had conquered not long before the slaughter of the Great Pyramid. Like Cortes who put an end to this empire, the Aztecs were newcomers to the region we now called Mexico after them. They used to be a wandering tribe, originating in the semi-mythical island of Aztlan and led to glory by the promise of their god Huitzilopochtli who designated them as his chosen people.

So why did they do it? Why the unfathomable scale of human sacrifice, accompanied by ritual cannibalism? The common answer is: it was their culture. And because the Aztecs happened to be non-Europeans, any criticism of this culture in certain circles is perceived as verboten. For a long time, the conquistadors’ stories of towers built of human skulls and cloaks made of human skin were perceived as an exaggeration or slander. When the racks of skulls called tzompantli were discovered in Mexico City in 2016, confirming the conquistadors’ testimony, anthropologists’ comments centered on the theology of the Aztec religion which regarded human sacrifice as repayment of debt to the gods, before conceding that

“The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world.”1

Obviously, the postcolonial crowd immediately sprang to the defense of the Aztecs with the good old-fashioned “what-about-ism”. The site called Mexicolore responded to accusations of cruelty and barbarism:

The idea of what ‘barbarism’ is really lies in the eye of the beholder. Although Spanish priests thought many Aztec practices to be base and even evil, they preached in the name of an empire (the Holy Roman Empire) that regularly tortured people for the Inquisition!

The obvious answer to that is: so what? If you justify Aztecs’ hecatombs by their theology, what, exactly, is wrong with the Inquisition which was also theologically motivated? In fact, if you take cultural relativism seriously, no cultural practice can be criticized as long as it is rooted in sincere belief. This applies to FGM, slavery, and widow-burning, to name but a few. In fact, it applies to colonialism itself. Since Cortes believed that he was saving the indigenous people’s souls from eternal damnation, why should he not be seen in the same positive, or at least neutral, light as the flaying priests wearing cloaks of human skins?

The reason why so many academics continue to evade the question of moral evil in relation to the Aztecs is the same reason why so many justify the stomach-churning violence of October 7. Both events are seen in the context of settler-colonialism, which, as Adam Kirsch points out, justifies any violence by the indigenous population against the “settlers”, no matter how long ago the initial settlement occurred (7). The irony of this approach is that it cannot be logically squared with cultural relativism, and yet both function in tandem in the academy in the context of postcolonial theory. Ideology subsumes logic and common sense, as it always does.

Of course, cultural relativism is not the only lens through which to see other cultures. Theories of objective morality claim that there is a universal moral code, and that the Great Pyramid slaughter represents a clear instance of its infringement, and therefore can safely be regarded as evil. Religious deontologists argue that the foundation of this code lies in some form of divine mandate; evolutionary psychologists relate universal morality to our evolutionary origin:

An objective basis for morality can be found in an evolutionary account of its origin and development. 2

But this view also runs into a problem when confronted with the Aztecs. Human sacrifices on this scale are clearly dysfunctional for the society that practices them. Cortes’ victory was largely due to the fact that his tiny band of adventurers was joined by the conquered Mesoamerican tribes who took their chances with the unknown white invaders rather than with their cannibal overlords. Aztecs, not Europeans, were the original settler colonialists, and the way they treated their vassals was so outrageous that the rebellion, with or without Spaniards, was inevitable. Clearly other Mesoamericans recognized that there was something wrong with Aztec culture. So, why did not Aztecs themselves?

As always, SF provides us if not with the answers, then at least with the guidelines for asking the right questions. SF constantly deals with alien societies that violate our moral intuitions, as I discussed here. But aliens are, well, alien; evolution may have equipped them with a completely different set of survival tools. But what about human cultures that challenge moral relativism? SF has some illuminating examples to offer as well.

Star Trek has its Prime Directive which is constantly being violated when the crew encounters some particularly egregious example of cultural dysfunction. But Star Trek is a popular mainstream show that has very clear guardrails around uncomfortable or ideologically dissident topics. Literary SF, on the other hand, is much bolder in going where no academic mindful of their tenure prospects has gone before.

So let us consider an Aztec-related SF novel that asks whether cultures, like individuals, can be evil. And an even more “problematic”, to use the meaningless woke parlance, aspect of this novel is that the culture in question, much like indigenous Americans themselves, are victims of colonialism.

In Stolen Faces (1977) by Michael Bishop, the colony planet of Tezcatl is ruled by Glaktik Komm, a vaguely Soviet-style federation. The new kommissar Lucian Yeardance is dispatched to preside over the Tezcatlipoca Reserve where a community of people infected with the incurable leprosy-like disease called muphormosy are locked up in the Long Quarantine. The disease, much like leprosy, causes horrifying deformities: lost digits, missing eyes, noses, faces. The muphormers live on handouts from their supervisors. Unable to fend for themselves, they are supported and ruled by Glaktik Komm. Their religion centers on the worship of babies. When a healthy baby is born to sick parents, he or she is designated as a Teo/Tea, until they begin to exhibit the signs of the disease and are thrown away, to run with children’s wild packs. There is no real family and no social bonds in the Reserve; just anger and savagery.

Lucian feels guilty about the way the muphormers are treated. But digging deeper, he eventually discovers the shocking truth. There is no disease; or rather, the disease had run its course a log time ago. The muphormers are perfectly healthy. There is no need for a quarantine.

So, where do the horrifying injuries come from? You guessed it. The community inflicts them upon itself. In an atrocious blood-letting ceremony, they cut off healthy limbs, gouge out healthy eyes, slash healthy faces. Their culture is the disease.

Why do they do it? Lucian eventually comes to believe that the mutilation ceremony in which the normal babies are turned into disfigured lepers is the only way for the muphormers to achieve transcendence through ritual self-abasement, cruelty, and cannibalism:

Everything that was cut away was saved - fingers, buttock halves, ears, toes, lips, everything… you had to believe these people were deliberately abasing themselves out of a conviction of their own despicability…Everything was terribly methodical - an abattoir whose victims came sedated and smiling to the slaughtermasters…(188)

The Aztecs sacrificed others out of the sense of their own spiritual superiority; the muphormers sacrifice themselves out of the sense of their own spiritual inferiority. The result is the same because it stems from the same perverse need for purification. The muphormers’ culture is explicitly and deliberately modeled on Aztecs; and the novel includes a long and excruciatingly accurate depiction of the human sacrifice ceremony at the Great Pyramid. The Aztecs and the muphormers worship the same bloodthirsty deity: the Flayed God, Xipe Totec.

The novel ends with the Long Quarantine lifted and the muphormers’ society “reformed” by sterilizing all of its children, even though the Glaktik Komm knows perfectly well that the disease is cultural, not biological. The ultimate choice is between the ritual violence of the sick indigenous culture and the bureaucratic violence of its colonial masters. Those Mesoamerican tribes that joined Cortes faced a similar dilemma.

If you ask postcolonial thinkers, they will tell you that colonialism is the original sin of the West, far worse than anything else any other culture has ever been guilty of. Even a superficial glance at the annals of world history shows this to be a bare-faced lie. Slavery, conquest, rape and ethnic cleansing are endemic in many indigenous cultures. So, confronted with the slaughterhouse of the Great Pyramid, the temptation is to minimize, deny, or simply label you a racist for even bringing up the indigenous city literally washed in blood. As recently wrote, European colonialism is purged of its historical specificity in order to become the fungible moral currency in the West’s never-ending self-flagellation.

And this is where Bishop’s slender SF novel goes beyond simply reminding us that the Aztecs and other indigenous cultures could be evil. Muphormers, after all, embrace human sacrifice and cannibalism because they have internalized others’ view of themselves as sick, unworthy, in need of expiation and purification. The more you keep telling the West that it is irredeemably corrupt, the more likely it is that it might either succumb to the leprosy of self-loathing or lash out at its detractors. The bloody mask may eventually become the face.

Works Cited

Bishop, Michael. Stolen Faces, Dell, 1977.

Kirsch, Adam. On Settler Colonialism. Norton, 2024.

Myers, Eva. The Aztec Empire. 2026.

Here is my promised list of ten best biopunk novels. I am going to do something different this time: briefly explain why I chose each particular novel and to relate it to my definition of biopunk, found here. I invite all my subscribers to comment in the chat, so I can add your recommendations.

I do not include novels I referenced in my first essay, so no Wells or Stapledon here. Move over, classics, for some unknown masterpieces. As always, spoilers alert!

1. Cordwainer Smith, “The Ballad of Lost C’mell” (1962).

I know, it is not a novel. But a) it is part of Smith’s (real name Paul Linebarger) long series about the Instrumentality of Mankind and b) it offers an interesting counterpoint to my discussion of the animal descendants of humanity in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. In his stories, Smith creates the opposite: rational and humanlike creatures descended from “uplifted” animals. The same idea is later explored in David Brin’s Uplift series. But Smith uses it to show how humanism can be deployed in service of discrimination and exclusion:

“Ever since mankind has gone through the rediscovery of Man….there had been the problem of the underpeople - people who were not human but merely humanly shaped from the stock of Earth animals. They could speak, sing, read, write, work, love and die; but they were not covered by human law, which simply defined them as ‘homunculi’ and gave them a legal status close to animals or robots” (Smith 318)

So, when we hear complaints about how AIs take jobs from “real human beings”, perhaps we should ask about the ethical status of AIs themselves. They are not self-aware (yet), but when they become sentient, why should “real human beings” be more important than others who can also “speak, sing, write”? C’mell is an uplifted cat, but she is a more interesting heroine than a majority of SF human characters.

2. Brian Stabelford, Critical Threshold (1977).

This is the second in Stableford’s Daedalus series of novels describing humanity undergoing evolutionary changes on alien planets. The whole series is exceptional; but this novel captured my imagination when I was in my teens and is still a paragon of biopunk for me. It has impacted the SF trilogy I am working on now.

On a forested planet named Dendra, human colonists seem to have disappeared except for some mentally disabled survivors barely clinging to the ruins of the colony. The crew of the ship Daedalus discovers that there is a flourishing settlement deep in the forest but its inhabitants, though outwardly human, are anything but. They have lost the ability to speak; and their minds are completely alien. The biological explanation of how and why this happened is fascinating, but I won’t disclose it. Suffice it to say that if C’mell is uplifted into humanity, the colonists on Dendra pretty much undergo the opposite process.

3. Poul Anderson, The Night Face (1978)

Also known by the unfortunate title of “Let the Spaceman Beware!”, this short novel is a masterpiece of Grand Idea SF. The colony planet of Gwydion seems to be a peaceful paradise of non-violence, cooperation, and creativity. Its inhabitants live in harmony with nature, enmeshed in a web of complex storytelling. But then the local plant called baneflower blooms - and everything changes. The inhabitants of Gwydion change into homicidal maniacs, acting out the dark roles and bloody deeds of their mythology. The novel offers an interesting interpretation of Jungian psychoanalysis, in which what Jung called “the shadow”, the night face of the unconscious, acquires a separate existence. But more importantly, just like Critical Threshold, the novel reminds us that posthumanity does not have to be located in the body. It is not just a matter of baroque corporeal modifications and DNA tinkering. The people of Dendra and Gwydion look like us; but their minds are not human.

This poses a provocative question: are there aliens among us right now, people whose minds are so different from the human norm that they might as well be a different species?

4. Bruce Sterling, Schizmatrix (1985)

I met Bruce Sterling and did not like him. This completely irrelevant piece of information is only added to indicate that I fully subscribe to the distinction between the (actual) writer and the (textual) author explored in Michel Foucault’s “What is the Author?”. Schizmatrix was revolutionary in its time. It presented the future humanity divided between the Shapers, posthumans who use genetic modifications to adapt to conditions on other planets and in space, and Mechanists who use technology for the same purpose. There is war between these two factions, complicated by a whole range of posthumanist ideologies, from Galacticism that rejects any loyalty to the human species, to Preservationism, a retrograde humanism. There are also aliens thrown into the mix and a whole lot of complicated intrigue. Sterling is most often associated with cyberpunk as the editor of the groundbreaking anthology Mirrorshades (1986) but his contribution to biopunk should not be overlooked.

5. Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood (1989)

I have complicated feelings about this one. I wrote about this trilogy, consisting of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989) in my academic book Beyond the Golden Rule. At the time, I saw it as a counterpoint to Judith Butler (no connection) and her linguistic theory of sex. Nowadays, I suspect that Octavia and Judith have more in common than I saw at the time. Regardless. Octavia Butler is a talented and important writer, and Lilith’s Brood is a challenging and interesting book (I treat it as one text since all three novels are closely connected).

Dawn opens with a black woman named Lilith Iyapo waking up in a living spaceship among members of the alien species called the Oankali. The Oankali are gene-traders whose biological imperative is to combine with other species. They consist of three sexes: male, female, and ooloi who manage the gene-transfer among both intra-species and cross-species breeding partners. The Oankali have saved a remnant of humanity and partially rehabilitated the planet on condition of cross-breeding with humans. Lilith has been chosen to become the “mother” of this new world by managing the awakening of other humans from cryogenic sleep and talking them into collaboration, while integrating herself into an Oankali family. The rest of the trilogy follows the fate of the Earth, of the human-Oankali hybrids (also called “constructs”), and of the unrepentant band of pure humans who pressure the Oankali into allowing them to create a new colony on Mars.

Butler’s posthumanism centers on deconstructing the biological sex binary. In the Oankali-human world, there are a multiplicity of reproductive sexes. In Judith Butler’s world, there are a multiplicity of non-reproductive genders. But both Butlers come back to embracing the very humanism they ostensibly repudiate. The human-Oankali hybrids may have an exotic biology, but their minds are pretty much human-standard. The Oankali are not genuine aliens but a figure for a communalist utopia.

Judith Butler’s writings, which inspired trans movement, perform the same sleight-of-hand: seemingly offering a revolutionary repudiation of sexism, they end up reproducing the tritest sex stereotypes. And Butler’s own political trajectory shows the reversion to the retrograde leftism of the last century. Extolling Hamas and socialism is not the same as offering a new vision of humanity.

6. Stephen Baxter, Evolution (2002).

If any SF writer today is a rightful heir of H. G. Wells, it is probably Baxter. He actually wrote sequels to The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds endorsed by the Wells estate.

is similar to Dougal Dixon’s Man After Man but in a novel form. Composed of separate stories, each focalized through a different link in humanity’s evolutionary tree (including primates, hominins, humans, and our devolved descendants), it is a magnum opus of literary Darwinism. I love this novel because of its engagement with time. Biopunk, even when it references evolution, often skips the laborious, slow, and painful process of natural selection unfolding over millions of years. Evolution manages what very few SF works (with the exception of The Time Machine) do: show how time is the ultimate arbiter of human destiny, and how contingent history, not timeless values, determines the fate of our species.

7. Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006)

This novel is a masterpiece because it goes beyond the superficialities of Sterling’s Shapers’ and Mechanics’ body augmentations and cuts to the chase. What makes us human? And is humanity even worth saving?

In the world of Blindsight, there are no “natural” humans left. Siri, the protagonist and narrator, has half of his brain cut out and the skull filled with hardware. Other members of the crew of the spaceship Theseus, sent to meet an enigmatic alien entity nicknamed Rorschach, are even more exotic. The crew’s linguist is the Gang of Four – a woman whose brain has been surgically manipulated to enable the emergence of four distinct and separate personalities. And the nominal leader of the expedition is a member of the genetically resurrected Homo sapiens vampiris, a formerly extinct predatory hominin species.

But this is just the beginning. Cutting through the superficialities of corporeal form or lifestyle, Watts questions the irreducible core of our humanity: self-consciousness. In becoming posthuman, everything, including this core, has to be transformed. In this case, transformed out of existence.

The Rorschach is an alien artifact, talking to humans, ostensibly answering their questions and interacting with them. But eventually the crew of the Theseus realize what they are dealing with. There is no there, there, no conscious mind behind the words and images on their screens. But neither is it a recording or a mere machine. The aliens of the Rorschach are intelligent but not sentient. The (post)humans are not talking to the aliens. They are talking to a Chinese Room (114).

The Chinese Room is a philosophical thought experiment. It is also our daily reality. AI agents with whom we interact daily, ask for advice, and even fall in love, are the digital equivalent of the Chinese Room and of the Rorschach aliens: intelligent but not self-aware.

The Rorschach is an unconscious super-organism which destroys self-consciousness as automatically as leucocytes zeroing in on an infection. Consciousness is a cosmic cancer, an unnatural aberration peculiar to Homo sapiens. And though the Theseus manages to blow up the alien entity, the entire crew with the exception of Siri perishes, while on Earth the resurrected vampires are engaged in the wholesale genocide of humanity.

Siri, our narrator, poses a series of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions. What is self-consciousness good for? Is humanity something worth saving? Is this talking self simply a ghost of language, an epiphenomenon of narration itself?

“Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? …I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

What a stupid fucking question”(314).

And yet, are we really ready to get rid of our self-awareness? Are we ready to become, as Siri unsuccessfully trying to, a biological equivalent of ChatGPT? Are we willing to become zombies?

Blindsight, like any good SF, poses questions but does not give answers. The next novel on this list, however, answers it in the affirmative. Yes, the future belongs to zombies. But it is not quite the philosophical zombie of Watts’ novel….

8. M. Carey, The Girl with All The Gifts (2014)

Melanie is a little zombie girl. She lives in the world infected with a mutant fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which transforms human beings into mindless flesh-eaters called “hungries”. Melanie and other infected children like her, however, retain their mental capacities, while being irresistibly attracted to live human prey. Indeed, Melanie is exceptionally intelligent. She and others like her are locked up in an experimental facility with scientists looking for a cure, while being educated by Melanie’s favorite teacher Miss Helen Justineau in Greek classics and mythology. The educational process takes place in the classroom where children are chained to their desks while the teacher has to wear a protective suit to mask the flesh smell that can drive her charges into a feeding frenzy. After the facility is breached, Melanie, the teacher and several others escape into the zombie-infested wilderness, still looking for a cure.

It turns out, however, that there is no cure. Melanie and other intelligent hungries are a second-generation, born with the fungus in their bodies. They cannot be cured because they are the disease. The novel ends with Melanie deliberately releasing the spores of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis to infect the rest of the world. In order for the second-generation hungries to inherit the Earth, humanity has to go:

“This way is better. Everybody turns into a hungry all at once, and that means they’ll all die, which is really sad. But then the children will grow up, and they won’t be the old kind of people but they won’t be hungries either. They’ll be different” (399).

Melanie is the ultimate posthuman, not just passively evolving from the human race but actively exterminating her predecessors.. But she is also, and rather strangely, an ultimate humanist.

Melanie is a pretty little girl, “like a princess in a fairy tale; skin as white as snow” (1). But when she preys on humans, she becomes a cannibalistic predator, swift, unrelenting and deadly. Trying to prevent herself from eating her beloved teacher, “she wrestles with a wild animal, and the animal is her” (115). Melanie is Beauty and the Beast in one body.

At the end of the novel, Melanie creates a school for hungries, in which Miss Justineau, kitted out in a sealed-environment suit to protect her from her students’ appetite, teaches the Western canon, passing the baton of the Enlightenment to zombies.

What makes the hungries superior is that they are better at the Enlightenment game than humans themselves. They are smarter, savvier, more technologically astute. So what is Melanie is a cannibal? She can do differential equations in her head. Humanity is dead but humanism lives on.

9. A. J. Ryan, Red River Seven (2023)

And now for some fun! After the heavy philosophy of Blindsight and the moral ambiguity of The Girl with All the Gifts, how about an unabashed monster spree? One reason why biopunk is so popular is our fascination with bizarre body shapes and monstrous creatures, all the more frightening because they retain some vestiges of humanity. The online fame of All Tomorrows is due to this fascination of (human) monstrosity and Koseman’s skill in imagining the baroque bodily shapes of our posthuman descendants.

And if you liked All Tomorrows, you will like Red River Seven that has no pretense to philosophical depth but offers monsters galore, all tied up in a tight and compelling plot. Seven people with amnesia wake up on a boat that is guided into the fog-shrouded city of London that has become Ground Zero for a disease that turns humans into bizarre composite creatures: a human Venus flytrap; sentient trees; underwater squids with human faces; crabs wearing John Lennon glasses; and worse. The explanation for the disease and for the amnesia is quite interesting, and I am not going to disclose it. Read for yourself, and enjoy the wild ride alongside a crew composed of seven people with no history, no memory, and the names borrowed from literary giants of the past.

10. Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay (2024)

I wrote about it here, so I am not going to repeat my analysis. I hesitated whether to add another Tchaikovsky’s novel, Children of Time, which also deals with evolution, uplift of animals, and degradation - or ascension - of humans. I think Alien Clay is more interesting, but please consider this a two-pronged recommendation. Tchaikovsky’s work demonstrates that biopunk is alive and well in our transhuman/posthuman/nostalgically humanist world.

And if you want to understand this world, read SF.

Works Cited

The Best of Cordwainer Smith, Ballantine Books, 1975.

Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts. New York: Orbit Books, 2014.

Watts, Peter. Blindsight. Tom Doherty Books, 2006.

There are too many “punks” in SF: cyberpunk, solarpunk, hopepunk, etc. They are the spinoffs of the original portmanteau term “cyberpunk” created by the SF writer Bruce Bethke in 1980 and popularized by the legendary editor Gardner Dozois. Cyberpunk metastasized into a minor industry with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984 . However, this essay is not about cyberpunk, though I have written about it elsewhere. It is about its unjustly unrecognized younger sibling: biopunk.

So, what is biopunk? The standard definition you find online is that it is a subgenre of SF involved with biological enhancement or modification of humanity. It is analogous to cyberpunk but while the latter focuses on digital technology and AI, biopunk deals with DNA manipulation or other forms of biotechnology. Instead of mechanical or digital prosthetics found in cyberpunk (the prototype being Molly’s implanted mirrorshades in Neuromancer), biopunk offers genetic engineering, DNA resequencing, cloning or other similar technologies to create a posthuman world. The rise of DYI “biohacking” is often heralded as the dawn of a biopunk reality:

Biopunk, “with connection to do-it-yourself (DIY) biology and an open-source research in the life sciences, had already been introduced into general discourse in the form of journalism dealing with technoscientific progress…”1

But the hopes and fears of all SF punks have come up short. Anybody remembers Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, a 2005 book by Ray Kurzweil, promising instant transcendence into immortality and godhead through AIs? AIs are here, but godhead seems elusive, and as far as I know, Kurzweil now relies on vitamin supplements rather that uploading his mind on the cloud for extending his lifespan.

Similarly, biohacking has so far failed to deliver immortality, superpowers, or even cool body modifications. The scandals of COVID have soured people on RNA and DNA-tampering, and the excesses of trans ideology have sent them running back to the good old-fashioned biological essentialism.

But the dream of transcending humanity has not died. Instead, it has turned into a nightmare. Not the nightmare of “mad science” as conservatives believe; not of corporate malfeasance, as progressives insist; but of the real nature of humanity.

I offer a different definition of biopunk: not one focused on biotechnology but rather on biology. Biopunk, in my reading, is the SF genre of evolutionary fluidity, showing humanity not as the pinnacle of creation or the measure of all things but rather as a cosmic accident, prone to endless mutations.

Biopunk shows that we are a random and contingent fluctuation in the ocean of evolution, an accident that may never be repeated; and that our flesh, just like our minds, is a plaything of the same indifferent biological forces that have lifted us out of animality and may deposit us back in the mire any time. Or we may seize these forces and indeed turn ourselves into gods - or monsters.

Aimless Torture in Creation

Let us start a hundred years before Neuromancer and even before Watson and Crick’s 1953 discovery of DNA. In 1895 H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, and SF has never been the same.

If you have only seen the cringeworthy movies based on this masterpiece, you may be forgiven to think it is an adventure romance, in which ethereal Eloi in floating white togas are being hunted down by the evil subterranean Morlocks. If you are a bit more savvy, you may believe the novel is a satire of the Victorian class division into the Haves and the Have-Nots. Neither is true.

The Eloi and the Morlocks are not allegorical representations of capitalists and workers. They are not victims and victimizers, exploiters and exploiters, good and evil. They are animals. And as animals, they are beyond all such categories into which we divide our own kind.

H. G. Wells was a trained biologist and a strict Darwinian. Taught by “Darwin’s bulldog”, T. H. Huxley whose bleak essay “Evolution and Ethics” was a major influence on The Time Machine. Wells later described the novel as the refutation of I “the placid assumption of that time [fin-de-siecle] that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind”. The Time Machine was written as an expression of his own alternative “vision of the aimless torture in creation” (1933, 242-243).

Neither Eloi nor the Morlocks are self-aware or truly intelligent. As devolved evolutionary descendants of Homo sapiens, they are locked into a mutually dependent cycle of predation.

“These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon – probably saw to the breeding of” (311).

But this is not cannibalism. Not only are the two kinds different species, but their relationship is dictated by the iron law of biological survival rather than by the moral calculus of good and evil. The Morlocks have to feed on the Eloi because there is nothing else for them to eat; the Eloi have to be herded by the Morlocks because they will starve on their own. The two key metaphors used to describe the two species are cattle and ants. The Eloi, the Morlocks’ cattle, have lost all that makes us human: intelligence, civilization, choice. They are no more than domesticated animals whose human-like appearance only underscores their biological degradation. “Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.” (321). As for the Morlocks, who have retained some of our species’ mechanical dexterity, they are ugly subterranean creatures surviving in the ruins of technological civilization like mindless ants in the anthill.

But evolution never stops; and the degradation of the Eloi and the Morlocks is not the end. The Time Traveler journeys on ahead into the future where the rotation of the Earth gradually stops and the sun goes out. He encounters more and more devolved descendants of humanity, who spread across the empty planet to fill the biological niches left untenanted by the extinction of other animals. In the episode cut out of the book version of the novel as too gruesome but included in the magazine publication, he shoots a small gray kangaroo-like animal, which still has five-digit hands and a rounded forehead. His conclusion is that “there is no reason why a degenerate humanity should not come at last to differentiate into as many species as the descendants of the mud fish who fathered all the land vertebrates” (326). Besides the kangaroo-like creature, he meets a huge white butterfly crying out in a desolate voice; giant slow-moving crablike monsters; and the ultimate horror, “a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about” (326). All of these are our descendants, as the Traveler makes clear that in the year 802,701 AD there are no animals left - besides humans. Biopunk here is the story of humanity’s gradual and inexorable descent into animality.

Man After Man After Man….

Following Wells. the great British SF writer Olaf Stapledon created in his future history Last and First Men (1930), a cosmic panorama of 15 different evolutionary species descendent from humanity and unfolding over tens of millions of years. Some of these species are highly intelligent; some are brutish. Some reach the height of civilization; some slide back into barbarism. All go extinct. Stapledon, like Wells, questions the pieties of humanism that was becoming the dominant ethical and philosophical framework after Christianity. If man is the measure of all things, as humanists insist, what is man? Where is the dividing line between humans and animals? Evolution, as Huxley argued, is amoral. So if you discard God, where does the foundation of ethics come from? Consider that once upon a time, there were dozens of coexisting hominin species. Which one of them was truly human? If Homo erectus survived until today, would we be inclined to grant them human rights?

After Stapledon and Wells, biopunk evolved in two intertwined directions: evolutionary extrapolation and biotechnology. The most interesting descendant of The Time Machine is the online genre of speculative evolution, which follows Well’s unflinching Darwinism into imagining what the biological future of humanity might be like if we simply allowed nature take its cruel course. These works are fascinated with bodily modifications and corporeal monstrosity. The Morlocks, gray nocturnal creatures, variously compared to monkeys, lemurs, and swarming ants, and even Eloi, with their diseased beauty, are the prototypes of the endless YouTube videos depicting human-animal hybrids or animal-like human descendants. The early works of speculative evolution were the lavishly illustrated book by Dougal Dixon, Man After Man (1990). But now online communities and AI tools offer almost unlimited freedom to create your own posthuman descendants.

Probably the most famous of these evolutionary domains is All Tomorrows (2006), the illustrated timeline of human devolution into a myriad bizarre and highly imaginative shapes on different planets created by the Turkish artist and scholar C.M. Kosemen. 2

The initial impetus is artificial: human beings are genetically engineered by the alien race Qu but the subsequent development is natural. The Qu depart and humans keep devolving (or evolving) as their environments and history dictate. Some posthuman lineages die out because of a cosmic accident; some develop highly sophisticated cultures; some are destroyed by ecological imbalance or disease. All outcomes are equally likely; all are morally neutral; none comes as a punishment or a reward for ethical behavior.

I love speculative evolution not just because I am fascinated with monsters but also, and more importantly, because it tells us the truth that is obscured by the platitudes of humanism. We are a cosmic accident. Our ethics is irrelevant to nature. At most, it may be grounded in the specific - and random - circumstances of our evolutionary history. Once these circumstances change - as happens in The Time Machine - cannibalism, infanticide and mutual predation may become not just acceptable but inevitable.

Posthumanism is not, as some would have you believe, a sinister plot by techies to upload your mind onto the cloud. It is philosophical recognition that biology matters; that evolution never stops; and that history is more important than ideology. Posthumanism is the acknowledgment that humanism has failed to deliver utopia. In fact, it is the acknowledgment that utopia is impossible because human nature is not fixed. Our needs and desires; our very essence are in constant flux.

Becoming Gaia

Let us move on to contemporary SF. I asked one of my FB groups to offer examples of biopunk, and their response was overwhelming. In order not to overload this essay, I will post a list compiled from their suggestions separately. But I want to discuss one of the novels mentioned by several people, both because it is relatively new and because it provides an interesting contrast to The Time Machine. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay (2024) is an optimistic take on biopunk. I do not believe that this optimism is warranted, and I want to show you why (spoilers alert! If you want to read the novel, stop right here).

The action takes place on a concentration-camp planet where our smart-aleck first person narrator Arton Daghdev is imprisoned for resisting the authoritarian government. The novel explicitly invokes both the French Revolution and the gulag, though strangely, it never quite explains what the political ideology of the evil government called Mandate is. This is par of the course for contemporary SF, in which “oligarchy” is a meaningless label for anything oppressive (let me just remind you that actual oligarchies never had concentration camps). However, one philosophical position of Mandate is clear: it is deeply humanist, believing that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution and rejecting the very idea of “randomness” (95). According to them, “the universe is a pyramid”, with humanity on top (104).

The planet named Kiln has an unusual ecosystem based on the principle of modularity. Genetic traits can be transplanted between different organisms and different species, and even body parts can migrate freely, New organisms are “Frankensteined together by Kilnish evolution, out of parts already in our records” (95). The ecosystem is cooperative, symbiotic, and non-hierarchical.

I think we can all see where it is going. Exposed to this, cooperative biosphere, the narrator and his friends are incorporated into it, becoming part of this alien Gaia. An equal, diverse and all-inclusive community of former humans, giant worms, and moving plants is created in place of the atrocious hierarchy of the prison camp. Biology is the ultimate DEI: “I understand what it is to be part of something body and soul. And I understand what must be done to preserve this thing” (295). What must be done is, of course, a revolution that would create a utopia of mutual collaboration and interdependency:

Kiln “makes Earth look like a boxing match. How do you become the fittest on Kiln? It’s not about how many enemy empires you can trample to dust with your sandaled feet. Surviving on Kiln is all about how much life you can interlock with” (309).

After the pessimism of Lyotard and Foucault, posthumanism was co-opted by feminism and critical theory to create a new utopian ideology. Epitomized by such books as Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman (1999) and Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013), progressive posthumanism (which must be the most ridiculous oxymoron in the history of ideologies) promotes a world without hierarchies, without national and even species barriers, without strife and violence - except, of course, against those who stand in the way of this glorious vision, as we have seen in the discussion of the Child in the Basement. As Braidotti describes it, a posthumanist utopia will be based on the rejection of the centralized individualistic subject and “an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others” and on contribution to “the well-being of an enlarged community, based on environmental inter-connections” (Braidotti 48).

The posthumanist utopia is different from the hierarchical humanism of Mandate. But it is just as deadly. In his last musings, Arton knows that what he is bringing to Earth is “the second greatest monstrosity ever perpetrated upon the human species” (358). But he cannot resist. Humanism is dead. Is posthumanism any better?

So, here is biopunk, locked between the two poles of posthumanism as animality and posthumanism as transcendence. Neither offers a respite from the cruel calculus of evolution and the irresistible flow of history. But maybe embracing this flow and acknowledging both the dangers and the potential of biology is the only liberation worth having.

Works Cited

Braidotti, R. The Posthuman. London: Polity Press, 2013.

The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells with an Introduction by the Author. London: V. Gollancz, 1933.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay. Hachette, 2024.

Before the much-anticipated Odyssey by Christopher Nolan even hit the theaters, the Greek Times published “A Letter to Hollywood and Nolan’s Odyssey Cast from Us Greeks”, which states clearly and unequivocally a simple fact: Greeks exist. Yes, the same people who created the myths of Helen and Achilles, or Agamemnon and Odysseus, of Zeus and Athena - they are still here. They speak the language that Homer would have recognized. They look like their ancestors. They have survived persecution, genocide, the cruel Islamic occupation - and yet, they refuse to be obliterated. They are not hobbits or elves but actual people, and the Odyssey is their national heritage.

This is what the letter says:

‘What we are asking is something simpler and more human.

That when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them…

In discussions around The Odyssey, some have argued that mythology belongs to the world and should not be bound by cultural origin. Others see casting diversity as a reflection of the modern global audience rather than historical specificity.

We understand those perspectives. But universality does not require disconnection from origin”.

Unsurprisingly, there is already a heated discussion (to put it mildly) surrounding the letter. We can dismiss those who fling accusations of racism at any hint that casting a black actress as Helen of Sparta is a puzzling choice. The anti-racist shtick has grown stale. But there is still a question to be asked. What, exactly, are the writers of the letter asking for? That only Greek actors play characters of the Greek epic? That the Greek origin of the epic be acknowledged? That the historical specificity of the Odyssey be respected? These are different demands. Let us take them one by one (and do not worry, I will come back to Lupita Nyong’o at the end).

Writing (as) Japanese

The Tales of the Otori is a series of fantasy books set in a mythical Japan written by Lian Hearn. This is a pseudonym: the writer’s actual name is Gillian Rubinstein and she is Australian. When her identity was revealed, she was interviewed about the “cultural appropriation” involved in writing Japanese-themed novels:

“There has been a lot of discussion online in recent years about cultural appropriation and the issues associated with writing in a culture not your own – given the setting of the Otori and Shikanoko books, I would love to know how you avoid the pitfalls of doing this?

I was very hesitant about writing Tales of the Otori. I was captured by the characters and I desperately wanted to tell that particular story, but it seemed a very risky undertaking. Receiving an Asialink fellowship in 1999 gave me a certain degree of confidence. I was determined to learn Japanese and immerse myself in the culture and history of Japan, as well as spending as much time as possible there. I wanted above all to avoid stereotypes and cliches, and write about women and ordinary people as well as warriors and assassins. It helps that my world is a fantasy world but it is grounded in a real landscape that I have become very familiar with.”1

It is hard not hear an apologetic note in the bestselling writer’s response, as if writing the Tales of Otori, while being named Gillian Rubinstein, is a morally dubious undertaking.

But this is nothing compared to the firestorm that engulfed other writers who dared to venture outside the narrow limits set by the culture warriors. Laura Moriarty was all but cancelled for having a Muslim character in her YA novel. Comments on Goodreads accused her of “profiting off people’s pain” and said “a white writer should not have tackled this story, and neither should a white character be the center of it”.2 The story of The American Dirt (2020) by Jeanine Cummins, a novel about Mexican immigrants to the US, pilloried for the sin of having been written by a non-Mexican writer, is too well-known to repeat. But even fantasy novels that deal with imaginary races have not escaped the ire of would-be censors. Laurie Forest’s The Black Witch was pilloried for being “racist, ableist, homophobic, and … written with no marginalized people in mind”, despite the fact that “the marginalized people” in the novel are fae and elves. Can one be racist against fairies?

The very idea of cultural appropriation rests on the notion of the immutable inherent characteristics that each culture possesses: a postcolonial distortion of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s concept of the Volksgeist, the unique and organic spirit of the people. It is ironic but not surprising that Herder, mostly associated with conservative movements in the 19th and early 20th century, is now echoed on the left, though I doubt that “culture cops” on Goodreads have any idea who he is.

But of course, the rigid policing of cultural boundaries quickly becomes a self-parody. Should only fae write about fae? Should fantasy writers hire hobbit sensitivity readers? How much Japanese “blood” should a writer have to be allowed to write about Japan? Once we start asking these questions, we are moving into the realm of racial anthropology, with its ominous history. Striving for cultural purity is no different from striving for racial purity. It is based on the same flawed premises: that cultures are homogenous; that there is some mystical quality that all members of the same culture share; and that outsiders trying to understand another culture are actually imperialists, taking over.

In addition, there is a hypocritical quality to the cultural appropriation witch-hunts. If the culture being appropriated is higher on the totemic pole of victimhood than the appropriator, the viciousness is unrelenting. If they are roughly on the same level, the objections are muted. Rubinstein got off relatively easy because Japan is a First World country. But try to write about Mexicans, Native Americans, or blacks while being white and the entirety of Bluesky will be after you.

The Greek letter exposed the intolerable hypocrisy of postcolonialism. Greeks were victims of the cruel Islamic imperial conquest and domination that crushed the country for 500 years. And yet they won their independence in a heroic struggle. Should they not be a poster-child for postcolonial liberation? But they are not POC, and in addition, they have the misfortune to be the founders of Western civilization. Remember how at the height of woke hysteria, NYT published articles with titles such as “Should We Cancel Aristotle?”

If the demand of the Greek Times is to have only Greeks involved in the filming of the Odyssey, it is no better than asking for a DNA test before you can be allowed to write about Anasazi. We can dismiss it as yet another narrow-minded attempt to enforce cultural purity.

However, what about using this demand strategically, as a way to push against the “culture cops”? For every action, there is a counteraction. Maybe meeting the absurdity of cultural boundary-policing with equal absurdity from the other side will finally stop the whole thing in its tracks.

Cultural Translation versus Cultural Appropriation

The interesting thing about the Odyssey is that it is one of the most cross-culturally adapted texts of all times. Forget Nolan. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) transposes Odysseus’ wandering into his contemporary Dublin, casting Leopold Bloom, a Jew, in the role of the king of Ithaca. This fits perfectly with the European legend of the Wandering Jew that postdates Homer by millennia. Cultures do speak to each other across time and space. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate, wrote a powerful and touching poem “Ulysses” (1972) while in jail, subtitled “Notes from here to my Joyce class”, entering in a dialogue with Homer from Africa via Ireland:

On minds grown hoary from the quest

Rest, rooted even in the turmoil agency

A boulder solitude amidst wine -- centred waves

And hold, in paradox of lighthouse windows

On dark-fallen seas, are lighted beings

Suspended as mirages on the world’s reality.3

And then there is Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey 2001 (1968), a cinematic masterpiece that while not following the plot of the epic, resonates with its themes of quest for home, rebirth, and encounter with the mystery and wonder of the Universe.

The list of fantasy and SF novels that build on Greek mythology in general and the Odyssey in particular would run into hundreds of titles, from Rick Riordan YA sagas to the latest instalment in Greig Beck’s series of plunder of classic adventures called The Titans (2026). Let me add that despite these books not being equal of Joyce or Clarke, you should still read them because - why not? They are highly entertaining. I even wrote a Greek mythology-themed fantasy myself: Nine Levels, in which Hades becomes a mountain and minor daimons of the Greek Pantheon take over after the death of the Olympian gods.

But all these adaptations, whether fantasy or not, acknowledge their indebtedness to the Greek original. Precisely because cultures are not police states with chicken-wire borders patrolled by woke stormtroopers but open-ended domains of the imagination, their mutual influence is what keeps them alive and breathing. Yet at the same time, for a dialogue you need to have all participants respected, and priorities and hierarchies acknowledged. No matter what liberties they take with plot or characters, all of these cultural adaptations and translation signal that Homer and Hellas were there first. So, the second demand of the Greek Times letter - that the Greek origin of the epic be acknowledged - is not only reasonable but has been the default rule for centuries.

Black Athena?

But then we come to the crux of the matter. It is not mentioned openly in the letter, but everybody knows what it is about. Helen of Sparta may not have existed but she was the beauty ideal of Classic Greek culture. Greeks were the first ones in human history to celebrate the realistically rendered human body as an aesthetic value. Greek statues and their Roman copies represent a version of physical beauty that is simultaneously universal and particular; speaking to all humanity but rooted in the ancient Mediterranean phenotype. And Lupita Nyong’o, no matter how attractive, is not this phenotype.

Why does it matter? Remember the third demand of the letter: historical specificity. In a movie, every single visual detail matters. Physical appearance of the actors is a kind of language, speaking above and beyond the lines of the script or the action scenes. And because judging by the trailer, the movie does not set the Odyssey in a completely fictional world (as it could have done) but in some facsimile of Bronze Age Greece, having a black Helen assumes that there were sub-Saharan tribes in the Mediterranean of that time. And this is simply not true. The ultimate example of tendentious historical pseudo-scholarship, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), tried to argue that Classic Greek culture was created by black people via Egyptian colonization. Needless to say, this is nonsense. First, archeology proved that there was no colonization of mainland Greece by Egyptians, though there was some cultural influence. But even more pertinently, Egyptians were not black or rather, they came in all skin shades and gave zero importance to the color of their complexion. Like most ancient Mediterranean cultures, they were color-blind (the tradition we should certainly embrace).

Projecting the racial grammar of contemporary America on the ancient Greek epic is not only disrespectful and dumb. It is also the colonization of the past by the present. It is the worst kind of presentism: the inability to see the past as it really was, a “foreign country”, as L.P. Hartley put it. Ancient epics matter precisely because they are not us. Fantasy is supposed to show us other times, places and people; to take us outside the bubble of our immediate concerns and to let our imagination encounter something genuinely different and new. Fantasy is a challenge to here and now. It will be very sad if the greatest fantasy epic of all times gets mired in the woke/anti-woke squabbles of the race-obsessed America circa 2026.

A recent op-ed in SFGate, the Silicon Valley newspaper, starts with a reference to an SF story. This in itself is not surprising: the Valley is crawling with SF fans, including most tech bros. What is surprising is the story chosen:

Recently, my partner told me about a 1973 short story by Ursula K. Le Guin called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s about a utopian city where hedonistic residents live in peace, abundance and harmony among its rollicking meadows and hillsides. But these same euphoric citizens harbor a shameful secret that they refuse to acknowledge: In order to maintain their bountiful harvest, their family’s health, and the beauty of their town, they must torture a bruised, helpless child trapped inside in a room. Once exposed to this known secret, some people decide to leave Omelas — but many don’t.

You might reasonably ask why the writer did not bother reading the story herself instead of receiving a summary from her partner but this is a minor point. The op-ed is an impassionate diatribe against the supposed “class war” waged by billionaires on the rest of us. It is a list of aggrieved complaints about tech and especially AI for killing white-collar jobs and eventually, as the new robotics developments demonstrate, manual labor as well.

They don’t care that data centers are depleting precious natural resources and creating heat islands. They don’t care that fake job postings are demoralizing unemployed workers. And they certainly don’t care about the thousands of recently laid-off employees who can’t feed their families. Why would they care about robbing retail workers of their livelihoods, especially when they’re the ones profiting off of it?

This is uncomfortably reminiscent of the complaints against factory automation penned a hundred years ago. But regardless of whether the apocalyptic predictions of mass unemployment are correct (not in my view), what does the abused child in Le Guin’s fable have to do with dancing robots?

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” was included in Le Guin’s seminal collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1973). What follows is a detailed analysis of it, so spoilers alert!

The story begins with a long description of a summer celebration in the city of Omelas. With her consummate skill, Le Guin describes the pure unenforced joy of the parade. But then, she breaks the fictional “fourth wall” of her world and addresses the reader directly:

Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King… But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb… 1

Let us start here. If you want to use Omelas as an allegory for the predation of tech capitalism, you may want to read it first. Omelas is not capitalistic. It is not based on slavery or wage theft. It is not based on surveillance or any other dystopian cliche.

So, what is it based on?

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good, “ it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer.

It is a devastating description; and what makes it even more devastating is its truthfulness. Le Guin does not mince words and does not use the weasel vocabulary of “political correctness”. The child is an “it” because it has been dehumanized by the utopians of Omelas to such an extent that it has no name, sex, or any other identity. It is intellectually disabled because some people are. It cries for its mother because it is being tortured.

And why is it being tortured? Well, because the existence of the utopia depends on the child’s torment.

They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weather of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

If the child is let out of its closet, the utopia will be over. Everything described in the first section - the joy and happiness; the equality and camaraderie; the perfect harmony of Omelas - will crumble in an instant. You will trade one already damaged life for the thousands of healthy and happy ones. Is it an ethical bargain?

Some scholars point to the origin of the story in a passage from Dostoyevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers (though Le Guin herself denied it). In this passage, Dostoyevsky, a passionate Christian, asks whether the suffering of a single child is the fair price to pay for the redemption of the world. His answer is no:

I absolutely reject that higher harmony. It’s not worth one little tear from one single little tortured child, beating its breast with its little fists in its foul-smelling lock-up, and praying with its unexpiated tears to its “Dear Father God!” 2

But Omelas is not about theodicy but about social harmony and justice. The child is not being tortured in the name of otherworldly salvation but in the name of a improving this world, getting rid of injustice, exploitation, and inequality. And so it is another Dostoyevsky’s novel that is relevant here: The Possessed (1872) (the Russian title translates as The Demons). The novel is a macabre depiction of the progressives of his time: a bunch of high-minded ideologues who quickly descend into terrorism, murder, and child abuse. An unparalleled analysis of the psychology of a revolutionary, the novel offers a glimpse into the nexus of utopia and violence and suggests that this nexus is necessary and not accidental.

Dostoyevsky offers a key to the mystery at the heart of Le Guin’s story: why is the torment of the child necessary? The answer is that no utopia can exist without the dark cellars where “enemies of the people” are being tortured. The child is a symbol; a stand-in for the many victims that the relentless pursuit of social harmony is bound to create. Since utopia aims for perfection, it cannot cope with the messiness and contrariness of human nature. The more it tries to realize its vision of social justice, the more it becomes clear that some people will never be on board with it, no matter what. So, what is left? Purification through violence. If we can just get rid of (capitalists, war-mongers, intellectuals, MAGA, Jews or whoever the enemy du jour is), the rest will live in peace and harmony.

But something happens as the relentless purification of society is being pursued: the process of killing itself becomes pleasurable, uplifting, sublime. Peace and harmony may be unachievable but the exaltation of of power and violence is real. Torture of dissidents, extermination of class enemies, cruelty inflicted upon the enemy families and children are no longer the means to an end but the end itself. It is not simply that you need to break eggs to make an omelet. The omelet is not the goal; breaking eggs is. Utopia IS violence.

But in Le Guin’s story, there are some who simply walk away. Unable to bear the torture of the child but also unwilling to destroy the happiness of their fellow citizens, they walk to…where? Nobody knows. The way to understand this enigmatic ending is perhaps through the juxtaposition of utopia and what Fredric Jameson called “the utopian impulse” - the desire to do better, the restless impulse to escape the constraints of the present and reach toward the future. Those who walk away are not walking toward a specific goal, be it socialism, communism, or any other version of the millennium. They are just walking. They do not know where they end up, and this is the beauty of their gesture. This walking away is what we call progress.

So, to go back to the SFGate diatribe against tech - it is based on the misreading of the story. Setting aside the fact that losing your job is not the same as being thrown into the Gulag (reread the description of the child to know what the latter was like), the tech entrepreneurs the author mocks are not creating a utopia. They are creating something new, something different. They themselves do not know what the end result is going to be. They are the ones who reach out toward the unknown and unpredictable. They are the ones who walk away.

In 2020, N.K. Jemisin wrote her own version of Omelas called “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”. If you want to understand the warning of Le Guin, read this repulsive piece of the giddy glorification of violence in the service of utopia. It is all here: the exaltation of righteous killing; the smug satisfaction of a murderer; the unshakable belief that the end justified the means; and most of all, the blind fanaticism of a true believer:

This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: We hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped.

But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate.

This is the same logic that drowned the world in blood in the last century and that still animates the would-be revolutionaries who believe that after more than a 100 million dead in the service of socialism alone, another victim will finally tip the scales and we will all tumble into the bright future of postcolonial bliss.

Let us be clear: Jemisin’s utopia has been tried in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, in the Cultural Revolution, in the Gulag, and on October 7. And the result has always been the same: an abused child, crying for its mummy in the dark basement, and the ideologues telling you that it does not matter.

Is there any point to having The Best Of lists for SF?

Apparently yes, because they are everywhere. Go in TikTok and find no end of influencers peddling their favorites. Ditto for Instagram and Medium. The Best of Horror and The Best of SF anthologies are very much a thing (I even had a story in one of those). Googling Five Best Novels of SF will produce so many clashing lists that the end result will be more like five thousand. In fact, I have been guilty of adding to this glut of listicles. In this very stack, I have several Five Best Novels Of essays, which you can find here and here.

But an innocent question made me stop and think about it. I am tutoring a very smart high-school student in SF and narrative theory. She asked me what the best SF short story ever written is. I opened my mouth to answer - and closed it (don’t worry, you will find out what I was going to say at the end of this essay). But what stopped me short was the sudden awareness that I would first have to define what my criterion is. My own favorite story? As with cakes and clothes, my personal taste in fiction is not universal. The most famous one? That is an entirely different matter. Best constructed? Most affecting? Most original? Most woke? Least woke? (I was trained to look for the ideological subtext in works of literature, and even though this approach has become grotesquely inflated, there is something to it. Progressives love Ursula Le Guin; libertarians love Ayn Rand).

So I decided to do something different. I descended into my SF basement library and dug out at random three different compilations of the Best of SF (leaving thirty more on the shelves). I wanted to see whether I could discern the underlying criterion of excellence in each of them. Here are my observations:

1. The Science Fiction Century, ed, by David G. Hartwell (Tor Books, 1997).

The first thing to note is that despite having “Century” in the title, the collection is not chronologically ordered. The first one, “Beam Us Home” by James Tiptree Jr (1969), is followed by “A Story of the Days to Come” by H. G. Wells (1897). SF fans will know that James Tiptree Jr. is Alice Sheldon, a fierce and uncompromising feminist. But this story is not one of her political fictions like the brutal and brilliant “Screwfly Solution”. It is a wistful take on SF fandom and Star Trek: about a boy who feels more at home with aliens than with his own all-American family. It is followed by a motley collection of tales from all over the world and across the hundred-year spectrum, including some very well-known ones, such as “Consider Her Ways” by John Wyndham (1956) and “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison (1965), but also some that would be obscure to the English-speaking audience, such as “Liquid Sunshine” (1913) by the Russian writer Alexander Kuprin. Clearly, the anthology wants to be ecumenical.

It also wants to be as unbound by genre as it is by time and space. In addition to freely mixing writers from the 1980s and 1890s, it contains stories that are only borderline SF, such as “The Hounds of Tindalos” (1929) by Frank Belknap Long, which I would classify as horror.

So, what is the hidden criterion by which the Best Of the Century is selected? It is universality. The editor wants us to believe that SF is unconstrained by history, speaking to all of us across time and culture. But is it really true?

At the heart of SF is what Darko Suvin called the novum, the deliberate deviation from the known and familiar, from the everyday reality of its readers. But without at least a passing acquaintance with this reality, we cannot judge the SF novum. Rudyard Kipling’s “As Easy as ABC” (1912), included in the volume, is about the social and technological revolution produced by the widespread use of the wireless, aka radio. We would need to put ourselves into the mindset of Edwardians to appreciate the innovation at the heart of the story.

2. Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology. Eric S. Rabkin, ed. (Oxford UP, 1983).

This is the exact opposite of The Science Fiction Century. Arranged in a strict chronological order and with extensive notes, this is one of the first anthologies of SF meant for college students and issued at the time when the genre was acquiring academic respectability. Suvin and Fredric Jameson had already published their groundbreaking studies, and many scholars were noting the similarities between SF tropes and cultural features of postmodernism, such as simulacra, alterity and techno-sublime.

The selection here is of the most representative texts. The emphasis is on what the editor thinks is the historical trajectory of the genre, from Cyrano de Bergerac and Jonathan Swift to Robert Heinlein and Ursula Le Guin.

Nobody, I suspect, would read this anthology for pleasure. It does contain some famous and popular stories, such as Robert Heinlein’s time-travel paradox “All You Zombies…” (1960), but a mind-numbingly boring excerpt from Hugo Gernsbeck’s Ralph 124c 41+ (1911) would only appeal to scholars of the genre who are interested in its pulp origins.

My problem with Science Fiction: A Historical Approach is the opposite of my problem with The Science Fiction Century. The latter ignores history completely. The former focuses on history but has little to say about the reasons why we read SF in the first place.

3. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1. Ed. by Robert Silverberg and Chosen by Members of SFWA (Doubleday, 1970).

Here we finally come to SF as seen through the eyes of its insiders: people who actually write in the genre and who are in touch with the heartbeat of the SF fandom. So, no surprise that we find the most familiar stories here. The TOC reads like a flashback to the Golden Age of the genre: Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” (1941), Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953). Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” ((1959). Subsequent volumes in this series of anthologies bring us closer to our own time but still list names and titles that any SF fan can recite in their sleep. The Hall of Fame anthologies are like online gaming communities: welcoming to its members, incomprehensible to outsiders.

Would a non-SF fan be persuaded by the Hall of Fame that SF is a respectable literary genre, deserving of serious consideration? No. The previous two anthologies, with their inclusion of “mainstream” writers, have a much greater chance to convince a literary snob to give the genre a chance. But by doing so, they also alienate a significant portion of the fandom who may feel that they miss what is special and unique about SF.

And what is it? Well, to go back to Suvin’s novum, it is the sense of wonder; the pleasure in creating and exploring new worlds; the jolt we receive when we are confronted with something different and strange. Tiptree Jr’s story I opened with captures the SF ethos perfectly: the child who longs for aliens because he is an alien in his own world.

The best SF story ever written would have to be imbued with this sense of wonder and yet also satisfy the general literary criteria of excellence: perfect narrative structure; consistent narrative voice; and a theme that resonates not just with its time and place but with universal human aspirations. If you compare the three anthologies, the only stories that appear in at least two of them are “Flowers for Algernon” and “Nightfall”, both of which have precisely the right balance of wonder and depth.

And so, what did I tell my student? Well, below is my own listicle, a short one. These are the three best SF stories ever written based on my own criteria of great writing, intellectual challenge, and a truly original novum.

Please feel free to add your own.

Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild” (1984)

Stanislaw Lem, “The Mask” (1974)

Jerome Bixby, “Its a Good Life” (1953)

From time to time, I want to post reviews of individual SF novels, either recent or classics. General spoilers alert! I cannot discuss a book without summarizing its plot, so if it is on your TBR list, skip this essay. I never add trigger warnings because I do not believe they do any good apart from enforcing the social hysteria that words are violence. However, knowing my taste for dark SF, you may rationally expect…well, some darkness.

In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Cathy tells her maid Nelly:

“I’ve dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”

For many SF readers and writers, there is one book or one movie that had the same effect on our minds as Cathy’s dream. For me, that was Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973). Exploring the vast and mysterious spaceship whose builders remain unknown and whose goal is never fully understood created my taste for alien and strange; for questions with no answers and enigmas with no solutions.

I don’t want human interest stories. I do not care if the protagonists has PTSD. I despise feel-good pictures of utopian bliss (in fact, I find them dangerous). SF, as Darko Suvin pointed out, is the literature of “cognitive estrangement”, meaning that it is supposed to engage your intellect, not your emotions - unless the awe, curiosity, and thrill of the unknown are considered emotions, as they should be.

I have always been looking for a modern-day equivalent of Rendezvous with Rama. There are some older books in this category (see the list at the end). But I was pleasantly surprised to find a relatively recent (2019) novel that captures, albeit imperfectly, the same thrill of exploration as Clarke’s classic: David Wellington’s The Last Astronaut. In fact, it can be seen as a response to Clarke’s novel, since it does have an explanation for the mysterious alien artefact at its core. Rama ends with a question; The Last Astronaut ends with a shocking answer.

Wellington, mostly famous for his zombie novels (Monster Island and its sequels) has also written an excellent dark SF series Red Space, the next book of which is coming out this July. The Last Astronaut is a standalone. The plot is simple. Sally Jensen, the last astronaut of the title, is responsible for wrecking the NASA mission to Mars, putting an end to manned spaceflight program by the agency. But when twenty years later as a giant decelerating (and therefore artificial) object enters the Solar System. Jensen is called from retirement to investigate.

The object is assumed to be an alien spaceship. And the novel is refreshingly open about why these two simple words possess such an irresistible magic. Often in SF, especially in alien invasion movies, there is the fig leaf of “human interest” to make palatable our thirst for encounters. Maybe they come to take over, so we need to defend ourselves; maybe a father sets out to rescue his daughter or husband his wife; maybe some other cliche tragedy strikes. But in fact, we all know that the real motivation for SETI, UFO enthusiasts and tens of thousands of alien-encounter novels, stories, movies, games and so on is sheer curiosity. We want to know. We want to see. We want to understand. Alien life is its own reward. If we ever discover it, some people will be scared; some indifferent; but a select minority of us will be deliriously happy. As one of the characters in the novel, a biologist named Rao says:

“‘I’ve spent my entire life looking for aliens,” she said. Since the summer in middle school when she’d read Asimov and Clarke and Leckie, it had been the thing she’d dreamed of” (33)

So they expedition is launched, and Sally with her small crew board the giant object named Oumuamua or 21. And this is where the real fun begins.

My second requirement from an SF novel, after originality and newness of ideas, is vivid descriptions. Strong visual imagination, as far as I am concerned, is the ne plus ultra of writing. One of the problems with the oversaturation of our environment by video is that it short-circuits the ability to translate words into mind pictures. Movies are important in sparkling our love for alien environments but they are not enough. You have to exercise your mental muscles to develop a truly effective imagination.

But I digress. My point is that the descriptions of Oumuamua’s interior are vivid and haunting. There is darkness and ice; there are caverns and strange constructions - enormous pulsating domes, intertwined and growing cables like crawling intestines; and hauntingly, forests of trees with hands instead of leaves. And the interior is changing, as the ice is melting, vines spread around, trapping the astronauts; hands clasp and unclasp, and eventually, enormous wormlike creatures emerge from cocoons, destroying everything in their way.

It turns out that 21 is not a starship but a living creature, an interstellar-traveling organism, and Jensen and her crew are trapped inside the belly of this galactic leviathan.

This is not a new idea. Stanislaw Lem deployed it in his story “The Rat in Labyrinth” (1957), which, for some unfathomable reasons, has been translated into Russian and German but not English. Still, Wellington makes a surprisingly effective and powerful use of this trope, as his team are stumbling in the dark through the awakening body of the enormous creature whose physiology and psychology are equally incomprehensible. And as any good body horror, the novel uses something intimately familiar to evoke the fear of the unknown.

Most people know the story of Jonah in the whale. But we have all been Jonahs. Each single one of us spent nine months inside the body of an alien entity, a tiny astronaut in the fleshy spaceship of the womb. Nobody remembers this experience, but its occlusion only adds to the mystique of the Jonah story. And as if to make explicit the Freudian undercurrent of his metaphor, Wellington adds a stunning twist to the plot.

Remember the wormlike creatures that attacked the astronauts? Well, they are not parasites, as you might expect. They are Oumuamua’s children. And they are eating her from the inside.

Matriphagy, as Rao explains, is a common reproductive strategy in spiders, nematodes and some other creatures on Earth. Larvae hatch in the body of the mother and consume her from the inside. 21 replicates this on a cosmic scale.

The ruthlessness of reproductive biology is something many of us prefer not to know. We would rather visualize cute puppies and smiling babies, cradled by their devoted mothers. But mammalian parental care is only one reproductive strategy among many, and not even the most common. Matriphagy and selective infanticide are equally widespread. Evolution does not care how you pass on your genes; only that you do.

Wellington’s novel ends with Jensen managing to steer 21 to Mars where her monstrous progeny will take over the planet, which is preferable to them taking over Earth. And she finally makes it to Mars too, albeit as a zombie-like element of the alien biosphere.

So, what are we to make of The Last Astronaut? Perhaps the best summing up of it is the immortal ending of Lem’s Solaris, where Kelvin, staring at the alien Ocean, hopes for the age of “cruel miracles”. Other genres may entertain you, distract you, try to make you a kinder person, or perhaps school you in other people’s emotions. SF gives you cruel miracles. For me, this is enough.

Suggested Reading (exploring alien spaceships)

Richard Paul Russo, Ship of Fools (aka Behold the Leviathan), 2001

Robert Reed, The Memory of Sky (A Great Ship Trilogy), 2014.

Philip P. Peterson, The Dark Ship, 2019

Greg Bear, Hull Three Zero, 2010