31 Mar 2025
We are delighted to present to you our second special issue of the year. This one is devoted to ageing and SFF, a theme that is ever-present (including in its absence) in the genre.
31 Mar 2025
For many English-language readers, the first reference for time loop stories will be Groundhog Day. Balle takes the proposition in a profoundly different direction.
28 Mar 2025
I often think about orangutans when I’m driving to work. Although I’m sure I first saw this anecdote on Twitter, I’ll give you a real citation: Jacobus Bontius, a physician with the Dutch East India Company, wrote in 1658 that the Malays believed the apes had the ability to speak but chose not to, "lest they be compelled to labor." [1] Bontius was incredulous, but the orangutans are onto something given the resonance of that quote centuries later amongst doomscrollers. For his part, José Maria de Eça de Queirós muses at the end of his Adam and Eve in Paradise—when Adam and Eve become "irremediably human" and "will progress with such speed and impetus towards the perfection of the Body and the glory of the Mind"—on whether the orangutan, who "lingers idly on the soft moss, listening to the limpid songs of the birds, savoring the rays of sunlight," is worthier of admiration than humans, when one considers all the pitfalls of God’s gifts granted the latter through evolution (pp.
26 Mar 2025
Carson Winter shapes his horror novella around the friction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat.
24 Mar 2025
Honeymoons in Temporary Locations can be as subtle as an anvil, but to quote an old internet staple TV Tropes, "some anvils need to be dropped."
24 Mar 2025
Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.
24 Mar 2025
It’s not that I never read realistic fiction and not that I don’t like it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get it. I know realistic fiction, speculative fiction, and genre fiction are just terms we made up to sell more narrative, but I’m skeptical of how the expectations and norms of realism lurk, largely uninterrogated or even fully articulated, in the way readers, editors, and publishers interact with work that purports to depict quote unquote real life.
Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live in.
21 Mar 2025
Familiar stories can often be reinvented for renewed emotional impact, but they require precise handling.
19 Mar 2025
Chan portrays community tensions, prejudice, and xenophobia with nuance, but her simplistic depiction of leftist violence made me uneasy.
17 Mar 2025
What is this show about?