Cheryl Morgan

Blackheart Man

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Book Review, Nalo Hopkinson

A new Nalo Hopkinson novel is always a treat to look forward to. I’ve known that Hopkinson has been working on this one for many years. Sadly life has got in the way and slowed her production, but the book is now available and already picking up accolades. It is a finalist for this year’s Ursula K Le Guin Prize, which should give you some idea of what to expect.

The action takes place on the island of Chynchin which exists in an alternate world analogue of the Caribbean. The inhabitants are all brown-skinned. However, we learn that some 200 years ago they were enslaved by pale-skinned people called Ymisen who live far away across the sea. The people of Chynchin rebelled and, thanks to the intervention of three witches, the Ymisen army was drowned in one of the tar pits for which the island is famed. These days no one quite knows how the witches managed to make a tar pit appear suddenly under the enemy army, and make it solidify as soon and they have been subsumed, but everyone knows it happened, and the island has been free ever since. Now a Ymisen fleet has been spotted off the coast, and the island is in danger once again.

This being Hopkinson, things are not quite that simple. To start with, there are two distinct ethnic groups on Chynchin. There are the darker skinned people, who are in charge, and the Mirmeki, known as ‘Deserters’, who are very much second class citizens.

Our main character, Veycosi, is a young man from a wealthy family. He is training to be an academic, and once he graduates he is due to marry Thandiwe, who owns a fish farming business. However, Veycosi has many of the less attractive qualities of elite men. He is convinced of his own brilliance, and consequently prone to doing things on a whim without thinking of the consequences. Nor does he pay much attention to anyone else. And he is totally blind to his own privilege.

Fortunately for Thandiwe, the custom on Chynchin is for women to take two husbands. Her other betrothed, Gombey, is a much more sensible fellow. But Thandiwe already has a child, a girl about to become a teenager. This is not the result of a youthful dalliance. Kaïra was conceived by parthenogenesis, which is rare on the island but not unknown. Any girl child born in this way is destined to become a priestess in the service of the island’s twin cayman goddesses, Mamapiche and Mamagua.

So there is a lot going on, and that’s without a fleet of ships full of pale-faced soldiers in too-warm woolen uniforms showing up and attempting to annex the island. Really, Veycosi can cause enough trouble all by himself, without these foreigners making matters worse.

Meanwhile, in the tar pit, some of the dead soldiers are beginning to stir.

The title, Blackheart Man, is a reference to an island folktale of a demonic figure who emerges from the tar pits to kidnap badly behaved children.

The core of the story is Veycosi’s journey to self-knowledge, with the invasion being dealt with along the way. But a lot more has to happen to obtain that result in addition to having Veycosi learn to think before he acts, and to care about other people. A second theme running through the book is one of sexual and gender diversity. I’ve already mentioned the polyandry. The people of Chynchin have a very relaxed and sensible attitude to sexuality and gender. As with Hopkinson’s other work, this is a very thoughtful book. I can quite see what the Le Guin Prize jury picked it.

Oh, and there is a camel called Goat, who also has an important role to play in the story.

Title: Blackheart Man
By: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: Saga Press
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The Folded Sky

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Book Review, Elizabeth Bear

This is the third book set in Elizabeth Bear’s White Space universe. Unlike her fantasy work, which seems to come neatly packages in trilogies, these books more or less stand on their own. I’m pretty sure that you could read The Folded Sky without having read the other two books. You’d soon pick up on how the universe works and the various bits of futuristic technology involved. At least I hope that’s the case, because I want Bear to produce more of these books. They are very fine Space Opera.

As is often the case with Space Opera, The Folded Sky is a first contact story. It also has a murder mystery. And of course there is a Big Dumb Object. Well, not so dumb in this case.

The central character in the book is Dr. Sunyata Song (Sunya to her friends). She is an archinformist – someone who studies ancient archives – and she has embarked on a mission to study the Baomind, a vast swarm of computing structures created by the now vanished Koregoi civilization. The Baomind is almost certainly intelligent, but it communicates only in mathematics and music. Sunya hopes to establish contact with it and thereby reignite her flagging academic career.

Naturally things are not that easy. To start with the Orbital on which she is going to have to live is old and ramshackle. Also the star around which the Baomind orbits is becoming increasingly unstable. Sunya’s mission is combined with an urgent need to rescue as much of the Baomind as possible before it is too late. And then there are the Freebooters.

If you have read the other White Space novels you will know that the Freebooters are fanatically xenophobic human pirates. As well as hating aliens, they also hate all forms of artificial intelligence. And the star around which the Baomind orbits is far from the usual shipping lanes. It is an easy target.

So poor Sunya is going to be stuck on a rickety space station orbiting a star that might be about to explode while being attacked by pirates, and with a murderer amongst the crew. And yes, Bear does ramp up and tension from there. An important thing about Space Opera is that it should be a thrilling ride. Bear absolutely knows how to achieve that.

Another reason that I love these books is the aliens. Those of you familiar with my presentations on worldbuilding with sex and gender (or the article in the Luna Press book, Worlds Apart), will know that I despair of the tendency of science fiction writers (and fantasy writers) to create new species that are just humans with a few superficial modifications. Why do lizard women have two breasts, when they presumably lay eggs? I don’t know if Bear has seen or read any of my work on this, but she has absolutely got the message. There’s an alien in The Folded Sky whose species has multiple biological genders, and one whose species dies when they give birth to provide their offspring with food.

Towards the end, The Folded Sky gets deep into the weeds about the nature of the universe and the origins of intelligent life. It is fairly abstruse stuff at times, which may be off-putting to some readers. I’m also unsure of the wisdom of Bear nailing her colours to the twin masts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The more I think about them, the more I conclude that they are sticking plasters over the broken equations of astrophysics and that one day some clever physicist will render the need for them moot. But they are, of course, what science fiction writers are stuck with these days.

In summary, this is a very intelligent, and very big-hearted, book that rushes headlong from one extreme peril to a succession of ever greater ones. Also there are cats. They are mostly very unhappy cats, as they spend much of the book stuffed into spacesuits, but books are always better with cats.

Title: The Folded Sky
By: Elizabeth Bear
Publisher: Gollancz
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The Ministry of Time

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Book Review, Kaliane Bradley

This one is clearly very popular. It is being promoted heavily by Waterstones, and is a Hugo and Clarke finalist. I can see why. But, as sometimes happens, it also irritated me quite a bit. Let me explain why.

One of the things that you need to do as a publisher is catch internal inconsistencies in novels. Writers, bless them, are forever doing weird stuff like killing off a minor character in one chapter, and having them alive again a few chapters later. Or having characters walk eastward into the setting sun. Novels are hard, so it is not surprising that such mistakes happen. Our job, as publishers, is to help the authors catch as many of them as they can before they go to print.

Or perhaps it used to be, because whoever had that job for The Ministry of Time seems to have been dozing at the wheel.

In chapter 5, Margaret, one of the time-travelled ‘ex-pats’, asks, “what is Hollywood?” Yet in chapter 4 she gives a presentation on the work of Charlie Chaplin. (And yes, I know about Niles, but he moved to LA soon after. He was one of the founders of United Artists, for heaven’s sake.)

In chapter 5 Graham Gore asks, “what is Guinness?” Yet in chapter two he and the narrator go to a London pub together.

I find it really hard to believe that the ‘ex-pats’ are given access to the internet and television, and yet they are kept unaware of the Holocaust.

There’s probably more of this stuff, those are just the issues that leapt off the page at me.

I don’t blame Kaliane Bradley for this. Like I said, writing novels is hard. It is the job of the publisher to help catch such things. But, with the increasing emphasis on profit margins, I suspect that mainstream publishers are becoming increasingly lax with regard to quality control, even for a book that is getting such a big publicity push as this one.

What I am less happy with Bradley about is the portrayal of the ‘ex-pats’ – people pulled out of their own time as experiments by the eponymous Ministry. Graham Gore is obviously a very well rounded, and researched, character. The others seem much more like caricatures of their periods. What’s more, I am not sure that, after a year of training to fit in to 21st Century Britain, some of them should be unable to shake a small number of obvious language habits that mark them out as having lived several centuries ago. I’m sorry, I’m an historian, I care about this sort of stuff.

Quibbles apart, this is a fun mystery novel. I spotted some of the twists in advance, but not all of them. The book is also deeply sceptical of the morality of Whitehall and the British political machine. That I very much approve of.

Something else I liked is that, with the story being set only a few years into the future, the weather in London has become terrible and unpredictable thanks to the unfolding climate disaster. More near future SF will have to deal with this.

Finally, because I am currently reading Absolution, it occurred to me that The Ministry of Time probably draws a lot on Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. Both books involve agents of a shadowy, quite powerful and seemingly incompetent government department struggling to deal with something totally out of the ordinary. If you are going to be looking for inspiration, Area X is as good a place as any to start.

Title: The Ministry of Time
By: Kaliane Bradley
Publisher: Sceptre
Purchase links:
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The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Book Review, Malka Older

Pleiti and Mossa are back. Hooray! I had The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses on pre-order and read it immediately it arrived. Didn’t you?

As we are now three books into the series, it is worth taking a step back and looking at the world that Malka Older is constructing.

For the benefit of those of you who have not read the books, they are mysteries set in universities that are in human colonies in the skies of Jupiter. Earth has become uninhabitable and, after a period of desperate survival in space stations, humanity has started to build a new life for itself. The main characters are loosely based on Holmes and Watson, with the main viewpoint character being Pleiti, an academic who tries to study life on Earth through the medium of novels written by people who lived there. Her on-off girlfriend, Mossa, is a professional if somewhat unorthodox detective.

A major theme of the books is the conflict between Classicists such as Pleiti (people who study Earth) and Modernists (people who study Jupiter). This book brings that conflict much more into focus as Pleiti is recruited to help a Modernist scientist at another university whose career is being threated by a jealous rival. That the rivalry is often silly is made very clear.

Of course the overriding theme of the books is the awfulness of so much of academic life. Older clearly has an axe to grind, but from my limited experience it is one that desperately needs use. Politics in academia can be even worse than in fandom.

Meanwhile Older is working on building up a vision of the new world she has created. Novellas don’t give you much space for worldbuilding, but over the course of a series more can be done. One of the things Older does very effectively is note a shift in language. She uses new words such as ‘graduents’ (graduate students) and ‘dafuq’ (a swear word). There’s just enough of it to show the reader that we are not in Kansas without the text becoming hard to decipher.

The plot of the new book is also tied in to the worldbuilding. On Jupiter (Giant, as it is called in the books) humanity lives on artificial platforms that float in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. Each platform is covered by an atmoshield which keeps the breathable air in. However, the air quality is not good, and when outside everyone wears an atmoscarf to provide further filtering. Vilette, the scientist to whose aid Pleiti comes, has invented a miniaturized version of this technology that is a threat to the existing atmoscarf industry.

A common theme of the books is the difficult relationship between Pleiti and Mossa. It seems that Mossa is highly neurodivergent and mostly incapable of rationally understanding her feelings for Pleiti. In the new book this spills over into fully-fledged depression. It is an interesting setup, but one that I think could become dull if it is repeated in every book, which I fear it might be because of the straightjacket requirements of the romance genre.

Finally we are seeing the beginnings of an overarching story arc. Academic rivalry notwithstanding, the key issue facing Giant society is whether to devote their efforts to the eventual re-colonisation of Earth (the Classicist position) or to make the best of their new world and forget the old. Pleiti, as a Classicist, has obviously devoted her career to the former position, but she is beginning to fear that she might be wrong. I look forward to seeing how that develops.

Which is another way of saying, “more please!”

Title: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses
By: Malka Older
Publisher: Tor
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Immaculate Forms

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Book Review, Helen King

The question of what defines a woman is very much on people’s lips right now, especially in the UK where the Supreme Court has taken it upon itself to appeal to biology. No matter that no actual biologists were consulted, or that members of the British Medical Association have described the ruling as “scientifically illiterate”; the concept of a “biological woman” has now apparently been enshrined in UK law (if not yet in the Equality Act, over-enthusiastic compliers in advance please note).

Much of the commentary around the issue also maintains that we (that is humans) have always known the difference between men and women. It also maintains that the definitive test for femininity is the possession of XX chromosomes, as opposed to XY for men. This is despite the fact that sex chromosomes have only been known to science since 1905, and that many humans are known to have chromosome patterns that are neither XX nor XY.

Of course if you are an historian who specializes in gender diversity (which I am) it is important to understand how people in the past understood sex and gender. There is no greater expert on such issues than Helen King. She’s a Classicist by training, and Professor Emerita at the Open University. Her particular specialty is the history of medicine, and her latest book, Immaculate Forms, takes her on a quest to understand how the female body was understood from ancient times until now.

King has structured the book in four main sections, each of which looks at four supposedly feminine body parts: the breasts, the hymen, the clitoris and the womb. I’ll follow her structure here.

Breasts are, of course, the most obvious signifier of womanhood, being both large and visible. It is significant, therefore, that the anti-trans movement has made it an article of faith that only cis women can have them. Trans women, they claim, can only gain breasts through having implants. King knows better. Breast tissue is common to both men and women, and with appropriate doses of hormones trans women not only grow breasts, but can lactate. I have been roundly ridiculed on social media by TERFs for stating this, so it is something of a pleasure to have support from Professor King.

Men are also deeply obsessed with breasts, for entirely different reasons. King does a fine job of showing how, down the centuries, male doctors found excuses to fondle women’s breasts, and even sample their milk, all in the name of ‘science’. The clergy have had a harder time of it. Did the Virgin Mary have breasts? If so, did she lactate, and did baby Jesus suckle? For some that was just too icky to contemplate.

Whereas breasts are famed for their visibility, the hymen may not exist at all. King refrains from coming down on either side of the debate, if only because hymen-replacement surgery for divorced women is now apparently big business in certain parts of America. If the hymen did not exist in the past, it certainly does now. And, whether or not it did exist, the concept of the hymen has had a massive influence on women’s lives through history.

In contrast, we can be certain that the clitoris exists now, because so many male doctors claim to have been the first person to discover it, rather in the manner that Columbus claimed to have discovered the Americas. Women, like the indigenous Americans, have known where it is all the time.

Of all the female organs, the womb is undoubtedly the most powerful. Not only is it responsible for nurturing new life, it has also been accused of being the source of all manner of female ailments down the years. Hysteria, anyone?

Well actually no. The ancients were big on how the womb might wander around the body, and how it might get hungry and angry if it were not made pregnant on a regular basis. However, the mental illness of hysteria, which we now associate solely with women, was once a more general condition.

King reveals that the term was coined as a mental illness in 18th Century France. Frightened aristocrats found that, if they were diagnosed with a mental illness and confined to a nursing home, they might be spared the guillotine. Hysteria only became a women-only condition after WWI because it was felt that diagnosing soldiers with such a term impugned their masculinity; so ‘shell-shock’ was coined as an alternative.

While a certain type of man only values women as long as he can make them pregnant, we now know that even possessing a womb is not a definitive indicator of womanhood. King notes:

Of course, not all women have a womb; some are born without one, others lose it to surgery, and others have transitioned to being women.

For those wanting more background, the intersex variation that results in a woman being born without a womb is called Mayer-Rotikansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. King notes that at least one such woman has successfully received a womb transplant and become pregnant using her own eggs.

So it is complicated. How one defines a ‘biological woman’ is open to debate, has changed regularly with changes in medical knowledge, and will always end up excluding some people who were assigned female at birth. King notes:

These modern methods of appealing to chromosomes and hormones, features of our embodiment that others can’t easily see and of which we are entirely unaware, can still prove far from conclusive in deciding whether someone is a man or a woman, and we rapidly revert to the evidence of our eyes. Culturally, we continue to crave binaries.

And yet…

Men and women have been set up as entirely different, with their bodies claimed as bearing clear witness to this. But one of the messages from studying bodies across history is that, while the dance between describing difference and acknowledging similarity has been going on for centuries, binaries simply don’t work.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Supreme Court and the government continue to refuse to listen, either to history or to science.

Title: Immaculate Forms
By: Helen King
Publisher: Wellcome Collection
Purchase links:
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Urban Fantasy

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Book Review, Stefan Ekman

One of the things that often infuriates me about academic books on SF is the insistence that so many academics (usually men) have on rigidly defining genres, and then tying themselves in increasingly convoluted knots trying to make actual books fit the tiny pigeonholes that they have constructed for them. It is therefore a delight to read an academic book that calmly accepts the fact that authors will continually seek to create new approaches to their fiction.

Having said that, Stefan Ekman does have a definition for urban fantasy as a genre, and it is one that is much wider than most people would expect. It certainly took me by surprise, but I ended up liking it a lot.

The subtitle of the book (it is an academic book, of course it has a subtitle) is Exploring Modernity Through Magic. That requires some explanation. ‘Modernity’ is a specific term in the study of history, and as such has a more limited temporal scope than Ekman gives it (we are now, apparently, deep into the Post-Modern era). However, over the course of a short chapter discussing various definitions of Modernity, Ekman makes a convincing case for dividing fantasy into two camps: one in which it happens in the deep past and is primarily a function of the supernatural; and one in which it takes place in the modern world and is firmly in the realm of the rational.

By this definition, urban fantasy becomes that subset of fantasy in which magic can be understood by logical, rational means. This doesn’t necessarily result in a neat time-based split. I can see a justification for writing urban fantasy in the Roman Empire, and indeed much supposedly mediaeval fantasy has a very rationalist approach to magic systems (usually the result of the author having played too much Dungeons & Dragons). But urban fantasy works best in the modern world where it exists in concert with things like police forces, computers, television and social media.

I usually describe Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books as Contemporary Rural Fantasy, but by Ekman’s definition they are very clearly Urban. Dan Mackmain and his friends have a very rationalist approach to the supernatural, and are regular users of computer technology. They are constantly concerned about being exposed in the media.

Ekman seems unfamiliar with Juliet’s work (something I would be keen to remedy, save that I know academics, having published a book on a particular subject, can’t wait to read something different for a change), but some of the examples he gives are very similar. While he does spend some time on legendary forebears of the genre such as the work of Charles de Lint, and Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons, he also focuses on things like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Less obvious is the inclusion of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, which proves that you can write urban fantasy as science fiction.

One of the more interesting sections of the book focuses on Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles, books with which I am unfamiliar. Ekman is interested in the books because the hero, Atticus, is thousands of years old and therefore has a very different worldview to those of the contemporary Americans amongst whom he lives. While he styles himself as a champion of nature, Atticus has little interest in doing anything about human environmental destruction because Gaia will sort that out in her own way (presumably to the extreme detriment of the humans). He is more interested in the danger of the god-like powers who have the capacity to destroy the environment entirely. It is an interesting perspective.

Obviously academic books are not for everyone. However, for anyone writing contemporary fantasy, I think that Ekman’s Urban Fantasy provides an excellent overview of the field and plenty of food for thought as to how to approach it. For young academics it provides a welcome and necessary example of how to do your work without getting trapped in the weeds of definitions. And for me it is a reminder that I need to sit down and read my way through the Craft Sequence, because it is very clever writing.

Title: Urban Fantasy
By: Stefan Ekman
Publisher: Lever Press
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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Hay Literary Festival, 2025

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Convention Report

The chances of getting good SF&F writers at Hay are very slim, but you do get good history and feminism writers, and anyway it is just over the mountains from me, so I figured I should go and support the general idea of books.

Much to my surprise and delight, I managed to pick a day on which there were four writers I was interested in seeing, and one of whom was a friend. So off I went.

The first session I attended was with Edith Hall. She’s a well-known Classicist, but the book she was promoting is a bit of a departure. It is an book about The Iliad seen from an environmentalist perspective. That may seem a little odd, but actually there is a substantial amount of environmental destruction that takes place in the book. Have you any idea how many trees you have to fell to build a thousand ships? And then the Greeks are camped outside of Troy for 10 years, meaning that a lot more wood is required for building camps, repairing ships, cooking meals, raising funeral pyres, and of course building a wooden horse.

There’s also the question of weapons. The Trojan War took place in the Mediterranean’s Bronze Age. Smelting metal requires a very hot fire which means, you guessed it, more wood. Hall is of the opinion that we should date the start of the Anthropocene from the birth of metallurgy. I can see her point.

What you may not know is that the area around Mount Ida, the mountainous country to the south of the plain on which Troy stands, is an area of outstanding natural beauty. In times past it was sacred to the goddess Cybele. However, Hall revealed that a mining company has been busily felling many of the trees in the area. The Turkish government is now supposedly taking action, but the damage has been extreme and it is unclear whether the govenrment has sufficient will to do anything effective. I was so appalled that I went straight to the Woodland Trust tent at the festival and signed up. Not that that will have any direct effect in Turkey, but I’m assuming that Cybele will notice. I’m sure she can think of a suitable punlishment for the miners.

Anyway, the book is called Epic of the Earth, and I am looking forward to reading it.

Next up was Amy Jeffs and her new book, Saints. This is a collection of stories about saints, some of whom have remarkably interesting lives. Jeffs seems to have constrained herself to writing about people whose sainthood has actually been approved by the Catholic Church, which is a shame because many of the Welsh saints have even more bizarre lives. I might have to write a companion book.

Jeffs is a remarkably talented young woman. She does all the art for the books as well as write them. The content is a combination of fiction and history. And in the session she showed that she has a fabulous singing voice as well. Fortunately I am too old to be jealous.

Session three was with one of my feminist heroes: Cordelia Fine. She’s a psychologist and feminist philosopher from Australia who has written some wonderfully insightful and entertaining feminist books. I did a review of her previous book, Testosterone Rex, on my blog back in 2017 and have included it in this issue.

The new book, Patriarchy Inc., is all about the Diversity & Inclusion industry, and why Fine thinks it fails at what it sets out to do. As a former diversity trainer, this is of considerable interest to me. Fiona Moore, if you are reading this, you should get the book too.

I got to ask a question at the end of the session. Fine said that it was “very insightful”. I can die happy now.

Mid afternoon my friend Jo Lambert arrived and we did a bit of shopping. Then there was the food hall. Pizza!

The final session that I had booked was with Sion Faye, whom I knew from Bristol (where she grew up). Her new book, Love in Exile, is not specifically about trans issues, but it is of course deeply informed by the difficulties and dangers of dating while trans. It is also informed by her time as an agony aunt for Vogue. Sion is very smart, and I’m looking forward to seeing what she has to say.

I stayed over in a nearby hotel because I couldn’t face a 2 hour drive home late at night. I highly recommend the Castle Hotel in Brecon, should you ever be around these parts. And I spent Saturday morning checking out the Roman remains in the area. Brecon was home to a unit of cavalry from Hispania. That makes it hugely important to the post-Roman history of Wales.

Testosterone Rex

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Book Review, Cordelia Fine

Originally published on Cheryl’s Mewsings in April 2017

While most of the reading I am doing at the moment is either history research or Tiptree-related, occasionally I have to read books because they are relevant to doing trans awareness training. This means that I get to read Cordelia Fine for work. Result!

The latest book by my favorite Australian feminist is Testosterone Rex, a scathing excoriation of the idea that everything about Patriarchy; from the supposed superiority of men over women, to the supposed innately violent nature of men; from the idea that men can’t look after children to the idea that trans women can never be women; all of this is explainable by one central fact: that men’s bodies are suffused with testosterone and women’s are not. The subtitle of Testosterone Rex is, “Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds,” and the book aims to deconstruct the idea of men being from Mars and women from Venus with the same ruthless efficiency that Fine’s previous best-seller, Delusions of Gender, destroyed foolish ideas about gendered bodies.

But wait, Cheryl, I hear you say, surely this does you no good. Surely the cause of trans people is crucially dependent on their being actual, fundamental differences between men and women. Shouldn’t you and Ms. Fine be enemies?

Well, no. Firstly there is the entirely practical point that I can’t think of anyone I’d less like to get into a philosophical debate with than Professor Fine. She has a mind like a laser cutter and I know I’d end up in tiny pieces. Besides, she doesn’t argue that men and women are identical; that would be foolish. What she does argue is that the differences between men and women are by no means as all-encompassing as is generally claimed, and what differences that do exist are rarely explained solely by chromosomes and/or hormones.

What Fine argues against is biological essentialism. And it so happens that biological essentialism is also at the root of the TERF argument against trans women. Because we have Y chromosomes, they argue, and because our bodies have, at least for a while, been suffused with testosterone, we have an innate and inescapable violent nature that we can never shake off. That, they say, makes us a danger to women, and makes it important that we be excluded from women-only spaces. It is rather ironic that the arguments TERFs use to claim superiority over trans women are rooted in the same fallacy that men use to claim superiority over women.

So I see Fine as being on my side. She’s arguing that the biology of gender is much more complicated than most people think it is, and that’s fine by me.

She’s also not averse to poking fun at the whole nonsense edifice of gender mythology. Here’s an example:

Over the past eight years or so, I’ve taken part in a lot of discussions about how to increase sex equality in the workplace. Here, I would like to clearly state for the record that castration has never been mentioned as a possible solution. (Not even in the Top Secret Feminist Meetings where we plot our global military coup.)

Elsewhere in the book she explains how a biological catalyst called aromatase that exists in human cells is capable of turning testosterone into estrogen. She notes, “even the ‘sex hormones’ defy the gender binary.”

Talking of which, did you know that female gonads make testosterone as well as estrogen? Most women do have testosterone in their bodies, just at a much lower level than men. No one is entirely sure why. It occurs to me, however, that trans women are different. Those of us who no longer have testes are on hormone replacement regimes that only supply estrogen. Trans women thus eventually end up have less testosterone in their bodies than cis women.

The book is full of fascinating and very accessible explanations of cutting edge scientific research that blows gaping holes in the nonsense ideas of evolutionary psychologists and shows us just how weird the natural world can be. My favorite set of stories involves an East African fish called Haplochromis burtoni, a species of chiclid. In a series of elegant experiments various biologists have shown that large body size and high levels of testosterone are a product of, not the cause of, social dominance. You can take a “submissive” male chiclid from one colony, put it in a different tank where it has more chance of winning fights against the local males, and it will magically take on all of the biological characteristics of a “dominant” male.

Even better, one experiment identified a lone male chiclid who, despite the fact that he won fights more often than not, did not establish a territory or a dominant social position among the other fish. His testosterone levels were way down compared to his fellow bruisers. The scientist who discovered this fish suggested that he didn’t have sufficient self-confidence to believe that he was a winner, even though his fighting record was good. I suggest a possible alternative explanation: that they simply didn’t identify as that sort of fish.

There’s nothing in Testosterone Rex that specifically supports the validity of trans identities. However, the more evidence we have that biology, and in particular human biology, is way more complicated than tabloid newspapers pretend that it is, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Social inequality is based on the idea that certain groups of people are fundamentally superior to other groups of people. If such differences don’t really exist, and no one is better than Professor Fine as dispelling them, then the cause of equality is advanced.

I’d like to end with one more scientific anecdote. It is about the idea of “failure-as-an-asset”. Here’s Fine:

It turns out that presenting men with evidence that they have done poorly at something at which women tend to excel provides a little boost to their self-esteem, because incompetence in low-status femininity helps establish high-status masculinity.

Fine goes on to explain that men can increase their chances of getting a job by talking about how bad they are at “feminine” activities in their resumes and interviews.

Which is all very well if you are actually hunting for a job, but it just goes to show that sexist nonsense means that there are activities that men are effectively barred from because of sexism. If we get rid of the nonsense, the barriers go away. Equality: it is better for everyone.

Title: Testosterone Rex
By: Cordelia Fine
Publisher: Icon Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Doctor Who 15.2

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, TV Review

Oh dear, all Doctor Who fandom is plunged into war once again.

What I can say about the past two seasons is that I am not in the least surprised by this outcome. Russell T Davis has not been in any way cautious about what he is doing. There have been highly unusual episodes such as ‘73 Yards’ and ‘The Story and the Engine’. There have been episodes that dealt with Culture War themes head-on. There was a magnificent guest-star performance by Jinx Monsoon in ‘The Devil’s Chord’. And there was the totally gonzo idea of doing a Eurovision-themed episode that aired just before the actual Eurovision final.

Inevitably the right wing media has been calling for Davis’s head throughout. It is almost as if he knew this would happen and decided to go all out on the ‘woke’ content for as long as he could.

Alongside this there has been some decidedly wobbly plotting the make up for the fact that Disney has paid to get rid of the wobbly sets. On the one hand, I can see where fans are coming from. Some episodes had plot holes that you could drive a Culture GSV through. But what fans tend to forget is that Doctor Who is, above all else, a show for children. The BBC wants it to be suitable to be shown on Saturday in the early evening so that the family can watch it together. What a six-year-old expects from a plot is very different from what a forty-something long-time Whovian expects.

What Davis does for his older Whovian audience is wallow in nostalgia. I’m not sure that this is a good idea. Obviously the kids won’t have any idea who Omega was. I didn’t either. The whole thing was a bit embarrassing. And, as others have pointed out, very wasteful of the character. But it seems that the nostalgia box needs to be ticked every now and then to keep someone in the production crew happy.

I wasn’t in the least bit surprised that Ncuti Gatwa is moving on. After all, the Daily Malice had claimed victory the week before. They had presumably been tipped off by their allies inside the BBC hierarchy. But hey, Who got away with being outrageously progressive for a whole two seasons and, given how right-wing the BBC management has become, that’s a major victory.

I was not expecting Billy Piper to pop up. I’ll be interested to see what Davis does with her. It may be more wallowing in nostalgia. I hope not.

Next up is the spin-off mini series, The War Between the Land and the Sea. That has already been filmed, so it seems unlikely that the BBC will refuse to show it, no matter how much the gutter press complains. It would probably be a breach of their contract with Disney if they didn’t show it.

Where things go from here is uncertain. There has been much talk of a ‘hiatus’, which is a polite way of saying that the show will be cancelled until there is a significant change in management at the BBC. I hope not, because it is a major source of revenue and employment for Wales. Meanwhile the BBC has promised to produce more drama that will appeal to Reform voters. So look out for a space opera series that features brave troopers whose job it is to kill alien Muslim boat people and queers.

Editorial – June 2025

July 1, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 071, Editorial

Well, only a day late. That’s not too bad. I was hoping that I could get this online yesterday while I was on the train back home from Heathrow, but that didn’t work out. I got to read a significant chunk of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Lords of Uncreation instead.

As to “Why Heathrow?”, I have been to Archipelacon, this year’s European Science Fiction Convention. More of that next issue, but I certainly had a great time I know a lot of other people did too.

The next few months are going to be much more relaxed. I have a couple of academic conferences to do, and Carmarthen Pride, but things don’t ramp up again until October when there is Octocon, BristolCon and World Fantasy. I do have a virtual membership for Worldcon, but that’s primarily so I can vote in the Hugos and Site Selection.

Hopefully next month’s issue will actually be on time.

Issue #70

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the May 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: Belle and the Dragon: This issue's cover is an illustration from Belle and the Dragon, a children's book by A E Waite

Alien Clay: Adrian Tchaikovsky uses some decidedly weird biology to ask some very pertinent questions about human politics.

Tomb of Dragons: Celahar, Witness for the Dead (temporarily retired) returns in this new book. Can you guess from the title what sort of ghosts he ends up speaking to this time?

The Vengeance: Avast there me hearties, here be a new book by the fabulous Emma Newman. It be full of pirates (but they are French so they probably don't talk like this).

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost: Wait, is Cheryl reviewing a Crater School novel? How does that work?

Eastercon 2025: This year's Eastercon was in Belfast, which these days is a thoroughly delightful city. A Wizard's Tower book was up for an award.

Science Fiction in the Atomic Age: Can television tell the history of science fiction in four hours? Even with the help of John Clute? It is a tall ask, but even so this series did not need to be quite as bad as it was.

Llandeilo Lit Fest, 2025: Are there literary festivals in rural Wales (other than That One, of course). Why yes, of course. Cheryl attends her local event.

AWWE Conference, 2025: AWWE is the Association for Welsh Writing in English. They have an annual conference. Cheryl attended.

Editorial – May 2025: To the surprise of absolutely no one, Cheryl has been busy.

Cover: Belle and the Dragon

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Art

Continuing our tour of the online archives of the British Library, this issue’s cover is an illustration from Belle and the Dragon: An Elfin Comedy, a children’s book published in 1894 and written by none other than the famous Occultist, A E Waite (he of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck).

The artist is Evelyn Stuart-Menteath, on whom the character of the dragon is also apparently based. Other characters represent Waite’s wife, Ada, and his true love, her sister, Dora.

The title of the story is a play on an apocryphal section of the Book of Daniel, ‘Bel and the Dragon’, in which the prophet tries to convince the King of Babylon of the foolishness of worshipping graven idols.

As usual, an unadulterated version of the image is available below.

Alien Clay

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

Does anyone manage to keep up with Adrian Tchaikovsky? His output is staggering. These days it seems like he’s not just writing with four pairs of hands, he must have a whole nest full of baby spiders writing for him as well.

So no, there are many Tchaikovsky books that I have not read. But Alien Clay looked very interesting, so I made time to have a look at it. I am so glad that I did.

Like many of the best books, Alien Clay is many things at once. To start with, it is a fascinating piece of science fiction. Tchaikovsky (whose knowledge of biology is far better than mine) starts with ideas such as the theory that the mitochondria in our cells (which provide the energy for them to operate) were originally independent, single-cells creatures which chose to live inside other cells. There’s also the fact that our digestive system only works because our guts are home to large numbers of useful bacteria that do most of the digestive work for us. Tchaikovsky dials this up to the max.

On the planet Kiln, all life has evolved through symbiosis on a macro level. Thus every creature is made up of several other creatures. It is nightmare of an ecosystem to study, and also a hard place in which to survive. You might think you have killed the alien creature that was trying to eat you, but actually you only killed one of its component bodies. The others are still very much alive and awaiting their chance to get revenge.

But why, you may ask, are humans on Kiln anyway if it is such a weird and dangerous place? Well, most of them are not there by choice. Kiln is, in effect, a penal planet. Earth is ruled by an authoritarian government known as The Mandate. Dissenters are sent into space where they are put to use as fodder for the exploration of potential colony planets. Kiln, sadly, is the most promising candidate yet discovered.

Which brings us to the second thing about the book: the politics. We see an awful lot of dystopian novels these days. Alien Clay is the first one I have read in quite a while that sounds like the author has thought a lot about how such regimes work, and how hard it can be to rebel against them.

In this respect, Alien Clay is a descendent of 1984. Like Big Brother, The Mandate rules by fear. It succeeds in crushing rebellion because there is always someone in a revolutionary cell who is weak, and can be bullied or bribed into selling their comrades out. Given all the naïve nonsense we see on social media these days (no, baby anarchist, you should not be discussing your plans for revolution on Mastodon where anyone can read them), this is very refreshing, and frankly necessary.

Something else I like about The Mandate is that it has no need for truth. It has an ideology. All academic research must serve that ideology, whether the facts support it or not. Having ideas that challenge the ideology marks you out as a dangerous dissident, and tends to result in a one-way trip to somewhere like Kiln. Anyone who is following the anti-trans movement in the UK will know that Wes Streeting is only one step away from ordering anyone who disagrees with his beliefs to be disappeared.

The third thing about Alien Clay is that it is about the future of mankind. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but it seems to me that Tchaikovsky may have read Sheri Tepper’s Raising the Stones, a book that made me very angry indeed. Tepper, of course, grew to hate humans, and would probably have been happy to see most of them exterminated. Raising the Stones provides an alternative solution to her problem. Alien Clay sees Tchaikovsky consider the same question, and find a very different answer.

I note that Alien Clay is one of two Tchaikovsky books on this year’s Best Novel ballot in the Hugos. Looking at the rest of the field, I suspect I shall be giving it my first preference.

Title: Alien Clay
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Tomb of Dragons

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Book Review, Katherine Addison

I’m a big fan of Katherine Addison’s Witness for the Dead books, so I immediately pounced on the new one when it came out. The title, Tomb of Dragons, is a bit of a spoiler, given that Celahar is always involved with the dead, but there is a lot more going on in the book.

Those of you who remember the previous book in the series, The Grief of Stones, will remember that Celahar has lost his ability to speak to the dead. Obviously he’s going to get it back at some point, because that’s the primary basis for the stories, but I will leave you to find out for yourselves how and why it happens. In the meantime, Celahar is busy.

The book starts with him being rousted out of bed by guardsmen searching for an escaped political prisoner. Then he gets a letter from the Archprelate giving him a mission, given that he can’t be a Witness for the Dead any more. And shortly after that there is a murder of an important person at the opera, which takes us back to the events of Witness for the Dead because the deceased turns out to have been the lover that Tura Olora was trying to protect. All of this happens before we get anywhere near any dead dragons, the story of which begins when Celahar gets kidnapped.

So yes, there is a lot going on. But what is the book about? Primarily it is about capitalist exploitation. Dragons, you see, live in caves in mountains. And these are often places where you also find deposits of valuable minerals. You can’t run a mine if there is a live dragon in it, so if you are a wealthy businessman who owns a mining company you really need any local dragons to be dead. Hence Celahar’s involvement, and in this case a witnessing involving people of such wealth and power that he has to get the Emperor involved.

That’s the basis of the book, which is all very heartwarming and progressive. I’m pleased to say that there is no simplistic resolution. After all, emperors rely on access to gold and the like to run their empires. But there is another aspect to these books that I’m also very pleased about: their treatment of religion.

Those of you who read my essay in Follow Me, the Luna Press Publishing book on religion in fantasy, or who came to the panel on the same topic at Worldcon last year, will know that this is something I tend to rant about. I’m pleased to say that Addison does a fine job of portraying a real religion in a fantasy setting. Celahar is a priest of the god, Ulis. There is no doubt that Ulis exists, and that he has powers with which he influences the lives (and deaths) of mortals. But no one, least of all his clergy, really understands him. They just know that he exists and needs worshipping.

In this book Celahar visits some doctors at the university who hope to be able to restore his ability to speak to the dead. They try a treatment. Nothing happens immediately. Then Celahar gets kidnapped and we get to the point where he gets his abilities back. Is this because the treatment took time to take effect? Is it a miracle? No one knows. It is ineffable.

The other major thing that happens in the book concerns Celahar’s love life, which has been pretty much dead since the terrible events of The Goblin Emperor. He has some good close friends, but none of them seem that way inclined. The new book see Celahar mooning over a handsome guard captain in the service of Prince Orchenis. Imagine our surprise (not) when said soldier is appointed as Celahar’s personal guard because people involved in the dragon case are trying to kill him. It is a very slow burn romance, but it gets there in the end, and it looks like it will be developed more in the next book.

Title: Tomb of Dragons
By: Katherine Addison
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Vengeance

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Book Review, Emma Newman

One of the joys of this year’s Eastercon was finding a new Emma Newman novel in the Dealers’ Room. Newman has been busy doing other stuff for a while, but I’m pleased to see that she hasn’t lost her touch.

The Vengeance is not a book in the Planetfall series. Indeed, it is fantasy. There are werewolves and vampires, and it is set in France in the 17th Century. Newman makes no secret of her love for the works of Alexander Dumas, and this is very much a book inspired by his output.

Morgane is the daughter of the notorious pirate queen known as The Scourge (Anna-Marie to her friends). Or at least she thinks she is. When Anna-Marie is assassinated by a ship deliberately sent to trap her, her dying confession is that Morgane is actually her niece, whom she rescued from her evil sister.

However, amongst her captain’s possessions, Morgane finds letter from her real mother begging her to come home. Who to believe: a pirate captain, or the wife of one of the richest men in France?

We all know, of course, that oligarchs are arseholes, but young Morgane has very little experience in the world and has to learn some lessons the hard way. She hasn’t been in France since she was a baby, and she has no idea how French society works. Fortunately she is contacted by a man who claims to be her father, and he finds her a governess.

Ah, now here is the story. At first Morgane and Lisette despise each other. The former sees no value in learning manners, and the latter is appalled to be put in charge of someone so uncouth who can’t even read. But it is soon very clear that their skills are highly complimentary, and they will grow to like each other. There may even be kissing.

I thought there was something of a Xena and Gabrielle vibe to the relationship, though it is a long time since I saw any of that show so I could be wrong.

If I have one complaint about the book it is that I waited patiently through 330-odd pages waiting for D’Artagnan to turn up, and he never did. This is sad because, regardless of what may have happened in any TV shows or movies, I am convinced that his part should be played by Charles LeClerc. I want that version.

The good news is that, while The Vengeance is complete in itself, the book is subtitled The Vampires of Dumas – Book I. Which means that Newman has future books in which to put right this egregious omission. Get with it, Em, please…

Title: The Vengeance
By: Emma Newman
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Book Review, Chaz Brenchley

It is, perhaps, a little dodgy for me to be reviewing a Chaz Brenchley book featuring Rowany de Vere. However, this is not a Crater School book. It is a novella published by NewCon press. Some explanation is in order.

When Chaz approached me about this book I had no plans to publish novellas. Indeed, I didn’t want to. The Wiz Duos series only came about because of the collapse of Kristell Ink, and the need to rescue the novellas that Roz & Jo had edited for them. So I suggested to Chaz (and his agent, John Jarrold) that they talk to Ian Whates instead. I knew Ian did novellas, and that Chaz and John would trust him to do a good job. As indeed he has done.

This being a Rowany book, I splashed out and got the limited edition hardcover edition. It is very nice. But you don’t have to pay that much for a copy.

So what is it about? Well, as Crater School fans will remember, Rowany’s acceptance at Oxford was delayed for mysterious reasons, causing her to spend an extra year on Mars and be available to feature in three more novels.

Rowany is the daughter of the famous General de Vere. She has three brothers, all of whom are in the army. Dealing with such annoyances are part and parcel of what has made Rowany the highly competent young woman that she is. Brothers are a pain in the arse.

Rowany is not in the army. She has been tapped for something much more prestigious. Having graduated from Oxford (one assumes with a First), Rowany now works for the Colonial Service. This is a euphemism of sorts. Yes, she is a civil servant. Were this our world rather than Benchley’s Imperial Mars, we would probably say that she works for MI6.

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost tells of her first serious mission in her new job. An important Russian gentleman is on Mars for a chess tournament. He has been in secret contact with the Colonial Office and has expressed a wish to defect. Rowany has been tasked with collecting him and bringing him in, before the Russians can manage to assassinate him.

This, then, is a very different Rowany. She is still, of course, highly competent. She still has that poor opinion of men that only a girl who grew up with Too Many Brothers can have. She certainly has no truck with the sexist views of her Russian charge, who is outraged that his personal safety has been entrusted to a mere girl. But Rowany too is a valuable asset. The Colonial Office would not have sent her on this mission were she not thoroughly well prepared. And that is the difference.

Yes, this book is about Rowany de Vere, much loved former Head Girl of the Crater School and the sort of person who can be relied upon to keep a cool head and think her way out of the most dreadful scrapes. Because of the nature of her new job, getting out of scrapes can include the use of extreme measures. This is a new Rowany: one who is Licensed to Kill.

Title: Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost
By: Chaz Brenchley
Publisher: NewCon Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eastercon 2025

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Convention Report

This year’s Eastercon took us back to Belfast and the site of the 2019 Eurocon. I’ve come to love Belfast as a city, so I was keen to go, even though the post-Brexit bureaucracy surrounding getting goods in and out of Northern Ireland made having a dealer’s table impossible.

For the Eastercon we had space in the convention centre attached to the Hilton. I’m not sure if this is new, but it is certainly excellent space. We didn’t use all of it, so it could have handled a much bigger event. Getting around is a bit of a challenge, but once you got your bearings it was easy enough. The only weird thing was that to get from the hotel to the convention centre you had to walk along a passageway that was airwalled off from the biggest programming room. Quite why the builders did that is a mystery to me.

Something that is new is Belfast Grand Central Station. The old Victoria station is in the process of being torn down and replaced by a shiny, new modern facility just to the north-west. It is very impressive. There is still a lot of work to be done, but it is already sporting a sign claiming that it is Belfast’s premier shopping destination despite the fact that the only shop it has right now is an M&S food hall. Doubtless more will come.

One thing that concerned me about the event was getting food. Belfast has a reputation of being a rather religious city, and regardless of their sectarian beliefs no committed Christian is going to be working over Easter. I needn’t have worried. Belfast is a tourist destination these days. The lovely St. George’s Market was only open on Saturday, but there were plenty of places open through the weekend. The M&S in Grand Central Station seemed to be open any time I passed through.

I didn’t attend a lot of programming, but I was very pleased to get to meet Emily Tesh and chat to her about The Female Man, a book which manages to be fiercely feminist and appallingly TERFy by turns. I’m looking forward to reading Farah Mendlesohn’s new book, Considering The Female Man, which is due out from Luna Press Publishing in the summer.

On the subject of feminism, the shouty feminist panel that Juliet McKenna and I were on got put in the main hall. The room was less than half full, but I think that is because there were not that many people at the convention. Some of the other panel rooms filled up and had to turn people away. We had a good rant anyway, but it is rather depressing to keep having to say the same things decade after decade and see nothing much change.

The Dealers’ Room was fairly sparse, primarily due to the aforementioned bureaucracy. A few people from the UK smuggled books in via suitcases and car boots, but the main book dealer was a shop from Cork. They had a pre-release copy of the new Emma Newman novel, which I was very pleased about. They did not have anything by Everina Maxwell, which was sad because she was getting praised highly on several panels. Must catch up with her work.

Some kind folks (who might not want to be named due to the aforementioned book smuggling) volunteered to put the few copies of Fight Like A Girl 2 I had with me on their table. They all sold. We didn’t win the BSFA Award, but the Punks for Palestine anthology did, and I cannot complain about that.

The art show was much more full of stuff from the rest of the UK. Goodness only knows why. Much of it was for sale, after all. There was some lovely Fangorn art on show.

Overall I think the weekend went very well, despite numbers being somewhat down on an English or Scottish Eastercon. I’m delighted that Northern Ireland has got to host the convention at last, and it now seems even more egregious that Wales has never done so. Facilities are, of course, a major issue. I’ve looked at hotels in Swansea and there is nowhere I would even try to host something like BristolCon. Sigh.

Science Fiction in the Atomic Age

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, TV Review

I have enjoyed Adrian Munsey’s two previous forays into SF&F documentaries. The original series looked in some detail at British writers of children’s fiction in the 19th Century. It covered famous names such as JM Barrie, AA Milne, Beatrix Potter and, of course, Tolkien, but also some less well-known writers. Unusually it looked at the lives of the writers, to see how their particular circumstances might have influence what they wrote.

Series two looked at The Gothic. Again the focus was quite tight, though it did wander all the way from The Castle of Otranto to Wuthering Heights, and from Dracula to Dorian Gray. It also brought in Freud’s theory of the Uncanny, which seemed reasonable because Freud was popular and taken seriously when many of the books being examined were written. And in any case, Gothic fiction relies on psychological horror for effect.

The new series, which is on Sky Arts rather than the BBC, is called Science Fiction In The Atomic Age. Like its predecessors, it is four one-hour episodes. And reader, it is a mess.

The title is somewhat clickbaity. The series begins with Mary Shelley and includes Verne and Wells, all of whom were active before the atom bomb was invented. Wells did predict such a device, but he massively underestimated its destructive power. Then there is WWII, and from there the series tries to cover the whole history of science fiction. In four hours. That would be a challenge to anyone.

I should note that the series has some excellent contributory talking heads, including John Clute, Farah Mendlesohn, Adam Roberts, Mark Bould, and even a brief appearance by Tade Thompson. I do not hold any of these people responsible for the final product. I know how these things go. You get interviewed, and do your best to give coherent answers to a bunch of leading questions. You have no control over how those answers are edited into the documentary, and in this case all the responses are devoid of context, in that we are never told what they question was.

The series starts well enough, looking at the origins of science fiction in a time of heady scientific progress and American exceptionalism. It then looks at how things like the demise of the space programme have punctured the optimism of the science fiction project. By episode 3 it has got on to Le Guin and Butler, and the rise of social SF. And it goes straight from there to Ted Chiang and Arrival.

There are lots of things you can get wrong about telling the history of science fiction, but skipping over the whole of cyberpunk seems pretty high on the list of potential faux pas. Except that it does get a mention in episode 4, when the series is talking primarily about AI. There is even a supposed quote from Neuromancer used as voiceover for a piece about robots. I don’t know the book well enough to recognise the text used, but I suspect it was the caption that was wrong.

What episode 3 does do is engage in what can only be describe as psychoanalytical bollocks. Freud, and Joseph Cambell, do get a proper airing when it comes to discussion of Star Wars in episode 4, but Cambell is mentioned in episode 3 without any explanation. It is sloppy narrative structure. And as for the Freudian stuff…

Instead of looking at cyberpunk in its proper place in history, episode 3 goes on an extended rant about The Matrix. Apparently it is bad because it says the wrong sort of thing about superheroes, or doesn’t, the narration wasn’t clear. Also it is bad because gender transition means that you can no longer have a Oedipus Complex, which means that Freud’s theories no longer work.

Munsey returns to the Wachowskis in episode 4 and shows what I think are a couple of pictures of them pre-transition. That’s the video-equivalent of deadnaming, and completely unnecessary. I was very unimpressed.

I should also add that there are times when it is not at all clear whether the voice-over is from one of the talking heads, a quote from a book, or editorialising by Munsey. And some of the choices of images used are very odd, and seem to have nothing to do with the narrative.

This is very disappointing, given how interesting the previous two series were.

Llandeilo Lit Fest, 2025

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Convention Report

Here in rural Carmarthenshire we have our own little literary festival. It is very Welsh, and there is little in the way of speculative literature at the moment. I plan to change that, but for now I’m just attending to hear interesting stuff, and to sell books.

The selling books thing wasn’t exactly official. Sarah, my hairdresser, offered to let me run a pop-up stall in her shop. It wasn’t hugely well advertised, but I sold five books over the weekend and didn’t have to pay for a dealer table. I’m happy with that. It also meant that I had three days very close to Llandeilo’s amazing donut shop.

My main reason for going to the festival was to support my friend Jo Lambert. She has a book out, Found Wanting, which is a YA queer romance set against the backdrop of the County Lines drug dealing network. It sounds really great when Jo talks about it.

Also appearing at the event was my local Senedd Member, Adam Price. He was interviewing Richard Wyn Jones, a professor of politics from Cardiff University who has a new book out on the political thought of Plaid Cymru (Putting Wales First). Like all political parties, Plaid has mutated through the years. Listening to Richard threw a lot of light on why my parents, so proudly Welsh, were so antipathetic towards Plaid.

Finally on my list of things to attend was a talk by my friend Kirsti Bohata from Swansea University. She has been editing the diaries of Amy Dillwyn, a successful woman novelist from the late 19th Century. After the death of her MP father in 1892, Amy inherited his spelter works and became a successful businesswoman. She was also active as a Suffragist.

Despite the tomboyish nature of many of her heroines, and her very masculine style of dress, no questions had previously been asked about Dillwyn’s sexuality. On reading the diaries, it was immediately obvious to Kirsti that this was because the matter had been deliberately suppressed. In fact Amy nurtured a lifelong crush on her childhood friend, Olive Talbot (yes, those Talbots, Kingmaker players). What’s more there are passages in which Amy dreams of being a mediaeval knight. As Kirsti explained, Dillwyn’s novel set in the Rebecca Riots (The Rebecca Rioter) can now be read as a very complex meditation on gender.

One session that I missed and am kicking myself about featured the new Manawydan Jones novel from Alun Davies. The books are written in Welsh, which is how come I hadn’t noticed the content. As far as I can make out, they are a Welsh version of Percy Jackson. Manawydan Fab Llyr is generally accepted to be an ancient Welsh sea god, and Percy is (spoiler for book 1) the son of Neptune. My Welsh isn’t up to reading these yet, but I’m working on it. One day I would love to publish English translations of them.

AWWE Conference, 2025

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Convention Report

I was somewhat surprised, last year, to discover that there was such a thing as the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Jo Lambert told me about it. People at Aberystwyth University were encouraging her to go. It looked like a serious literary event, but I offered them a paper on Nicola Griffith’s Spear and it got accepted, so I went.

I think I had four people in my audience. There were two parallel sessions and the other one had papers about poetry.

On the other hand, the conference takes place in a fabulous location, Gregynog Hall in central Wales. Also I made friends. It turns out that Matt Jarvis, one of the then co-chairs of the Association, knew Farah and Edward well. His fellow co-chair, Kirsti Bohata, gets featured in my report on the Llandeilo Lit Fest. She talked a bit more about Amy Dillwyn at the conference as well.

This year I offered them a paper on the figure of the Lady of the Lake. That was a lot of fun to research, and led me down all sorts of avenues of Welsh folklore. It turns out that lakes in Wales are often inhabited by moistened bints, but rather than handing out magic swords they are far more likely to gift people herds of magic white cows. Which, if you think about it, are probably a lot more useful. If you are going to be at Archipelacon 2 you will have a chance to hear an expanded version of that paper.

The paper seemed to go down very well, and I got some good questions. One in particular came from a Celticist friend, Rhys Kaminsky-Jones. He asked me why it is the Lady of THE Lake. Which Lake? Why does it have a definite article?

I had to admit that I had never thought of that before. Being brought up in Y Gwlad Haf tends to result in your assuming that there is only one Lake, and it is the one that surrounds Glastonbury in the winter. But Rhys asked the question, and the answer came to me in a flash of inspiration. It is a translation from Welsh.

Welsh does not have an indefinite article. There is no ‘a lake’, there is just ‘lake’, but Welsh also puts in a definite article when an English speaker might not expect it. For example, a street which, in English, is called Park Lane, would in Welsh be rendered Lôn y Parc — Lane of the Park. So our mythical woman might be Dynes y LLyn – Woman of the Lake. Or perhaps, as my Welsh tutor suggested, Morwyn y Llyn, if these women were supposed to be virgin priestesses.

There were plenty of interesting papers this year. There was an entire panel on coal mining horror stories. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘underscapes’ so a lot of underground (and underwater) stuff happened. But the other paper I wanted to mention was the one by Aidan Byrne from Wolverhampton University. It was titled ‘Among Others’, and if you guessed that it featured the Jo Walton of that name you would be dead right. It also featured stories of Welsh girls in English boarding schools, which led me to talk to Aidan about the Crater School books.

Slowly but surely we are getting more spec fic content at AWWE. Hopefully I can continue the progress next year, though May 2026 is very busy what with the Senedd elections, Satellite in Glasgow, and Åcon.

Editorial – May 2025

May 29, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 070, Editorial

OK, that’s been a busy two months. Sorry about the lack of issue in May, but I was very busy with day job stuff and had no time. There has been more in May, plus a bunch of academic conferences. That at least has given me time on trains and aircraft to read.

June should not be quite as hectic, but I will be in Finland for a couple of weeks. Irma has invited me up to Jyväskylä for mid-summer, and then it is off to Mariehamn for Archipelacon 2.

During May I also did an interview for the British Fantasy Society’s website, which you can read here.

And I had a story published! It is in the latest issue of Gwyllion magazine, which you can buy here.

There is a whole lot of Wizard’s Tower news going on, but I have just sent out a new edition of the company newsletter and don’t want to repeat myself. Ya’ll should sign up for the newsletter, right?

Issue #69

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the March 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour: This issue's cover is from Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour (The story of a visit to the planet Mars.) by Charles Dixon (Bliss, Sands & Co , 1895). The artist is Arthur Layard.

Written on the Dark: A new Guy Gavriel Kay book is on the way. Does Cheryl love it? Of course she does.

Loka: S B Divya's follow-up to Meru is every bit as thoughtful as its predecessor

Future’s Edge: Gareth L Powell's latest novel is fast-paced and full of ideas

Mediaeval Women: Having been to the exhibition, Cheryl reviews the book of the exhibition

Navigational Entanglements: This novella from Aliette de Bodard is all about love between women, and so much more

The Tusks of Extinction: Ray Nayler brings the mammoth back from extinction, but this book is not just about people being chased by dangerous prehistoric animals.

The Many Selves of Katherine North: A review from a few years back that nicely compliments to Ray Nayler book

The Wild Robot: Lots of air travel, so much media, so little worth watching...

The War of the Rohirrim: Despite its feminist themes, Cheryl is less than impressed with the latest Lord of the Rings movie

Editorial – March 2025: Yes, this is a bit late. Cheryl was away in Canada.

Cover: Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Art, Arthur Layard

This issue’s cover from the British Library’s online collection is an illustration for a novel called Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour (The story of a visit to the planet Mars.) by Charles Dixon. It was published by Bliss, Sands & Co in 1895. The artist is Arthur Layard.

I note that 1500 mph is not a great speed for a spacecraft, though obviously far in excess of anything achieved on Earth in the 19th Century. At that speed it would take over 2.5 years to reach Mars, at closest approach.

As usual, an unadulterated version of the image is available below.

Written on the Dark

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Book Review, Guy Gavriel Kay

A new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is always a cause for excitement in these parts. I love history, and I love the way that Kay makes use of it in constructing not-quite-historical novels. Kay’s last few books have been set in the Mediterranean, originally inspired by a visit to Croatia and learning about that country’s history. The cycle also encompassed the war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and the condottiere of Renaissance Italy. I will miss Folco d’Acorsi, but there are other stories to be told.

Written on the Dark is set in Ferrieres, Kay’s version of France, in mediaeval times. The central character, Thierry Villar, is a poet well known in the taverns of the capital city of Orane. If he reminds you a little of Jaskier, well, Kay is allowed to watch TV as well, but he is also based on a real-life French poet who had an equally adventurous life.

Villar did not want fame, though he would not have said no to fortune had it fallen in his lap. Indeed, he was not above trying to acquire it by less than honest means. Fame, however, found him first. Loose lips owned by one of his confederates have brought him to the attention of the Provost of Orane – a sort of mediaeval police commissioner – who just happens to have a difficult and deeply political murder to solve. An intelligent lad who is well known in the taverns of the city is just the sort of agent that Robbin de Vaux needs. Which is how Tierry will come to the attention of the King and Queen, and spend much of the rest of his life trying to avoid being murdered on the orders of the Duke of Barratin (Burgundy).

Those of you familiar with the history of mediaeval France will now be wondering which other notable characters from the real world will find their way into Kay’s narrative. There is, for example, a king from a country to the north of Ferrieres, separated from it by a narrow sea. That king, the fifth of his name, won a legendary victory against overwhelming odds.

Then there is the matter of the humble peasant girl who, having seen a vision from God, dons armour and seeks out the French army so that she can lead it against the perfidious English.

Not all of the characters that Kay uses in the book are quite as well known. However, anyone who visited the Mediaeval Women exhibition at the British Library will be expecting one other person to make an appearance. Like Thierry, she is a poet. Of noble birth, following the death of her husband she was able to make a living writing for the Court. Much of her work has strongly feminist themes. I am, of course, talking about Christine de Pizan, or Marina di Seressa. Of course her path and Thierry’s have to cross.

If you are trying to work out actual timelines, you will get into something of a mess. This book, possibly more than anything else Kay has written, plays fast and loose with our world’s history. He has characters he wants to use and, because this is not an historical novel, he doesn’t have to worry about when they actually lived. I’m OK with that. After all, Kay has been very clear that this is his world, not ours.

That, of course, means that other things can and do diverge from what the reader might expect. They do so in quite dramatic ways. The English may be a little upset as a result.

The other thing I should note about this book is that it is rather more literary than genre. What I mean by that is that there isn’t exactly a unifying plot. Yes, the book tells the story of Thierry Villar’s life. Yes, his conflict with Laurent The Bold, Duke of Barratin, bookends the story. But beyond that what we get is a series of vignettes – key moments from Thierry’s life that are not particularly connected except that he lived them, and many of them are important to the history of Ferrieres.

This again did not worry me. Kay writes beautifully and I was more than entertained seeing how he made use of the various human and historical pieces he had chosen to weave his narrative.

I note that Guy sent me a PDF of the book in advance of publication. I will be buying the hardcover as soon as it comes out.

Title: Written on the Dark
By: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Hodderscape
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Loka

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Book Review, S B Divya

This book is a more-or-less direct sequel to Meru, though set some 16 years into the future. Some spoilers are inevitable, so if you have not read Meru yet you may want to look away.

By the end of Meru, Jayanthri has succeeded in her quest to be allowed to open a colony on the planet for which the book is named. Jaya’s sickle cell condition makes her ideally suited for life on Meru, whereas baseline humans would struggle there. She and her partner, Vaha (an ‘alloy’, a type of sentient spaceship evolved from humans) have created a human child who shares Jaya’s unique genetics. Controversially, Jaya has also given her daughter some alloy genes which provide the child with chromatophores on her arm to allow her to speak the alloys’ sign language.

The new book, Loka, opens with young Akshaya on the cusp of adulthood. She has spent most of her life on a transport alloy called Chedi so that she could have human friends growing up. Her alloy genes are still a closely guarded secret. Being a typically rebellious teenager, Aks is furious that her mother designed her to live on Meru, a planet largely devoid of animal life. She desperately wants to see Earth, and all the amazing creatures that are reclaiming the planet now that the human population is under control.

Aks and her childhood best friend, Somya, discover something called the Anthro Challenge in which humans attempt to circumnavigate Earth using only human-era technology. Aks strikes a deal with her parents to the effect that, if she is able to complete the challenge, she will have proved her ability to survive on Earth and not have to go to Meru.

Being parents, Jaya and Vaha have entirely forgotten their own rebellious youth, and are terrified for their child. Seeking a way to keep tabs on the two teenagers during their journey, they strike a deal with a documentary film-maker, and allow called Nara. He agrees to provide regular updates to the worried parents in return for being allowed to make show about the youngsters’ travels. Parents can be very foolish.

On the face of it, Loka is a science fiction re-telling of Around the World in 80 Days, with Aks and Somya facing peril (both natural and human) as they race to complete the challenge before Chedi is due back at Earth to pick them up. But, as I mentioned in my review of Meru, SB Divya is an author who uses science fiction to examine interesting questions. The new book is no exception, and it is those questions that I would like to focus on.

By the way, Loka is the name given to the alloy-managed part of Earth where most humans live. There are also areas known as OOB – Out of Bounds – which are not alloy-managed and which have become home to humans who resent the benevolent dictatorship of the alloys. The Anthro Challenge requires travel to include time in the OOB.

Loka is a book that is primarily about personal autonomy in three different ways. Firstly there is the right of Aks to determine her own path through life and not be bound by her parents’ ambitions for her. Secondly there is the right of humans to have adventures such as the Anthro Challenge, even though this might pose a cost to society and cause a small amount of environmental damage. Finally there is the right of humans to evolve by acquiring alloy genes.

While Aks and Somya initially admire the people of Earth, especially the Out of Bounders, for living on an actual planet rather than in a very safe environment such as travelling on Chedi, they soon find out that the Earthlings are deeply conservative. While their travels are done in a very environmentally conscious way (primarily by solar-powered bikes and sailboats), they are seen as unnecessary adventurism and probable evidence of Aspiration and Avarice Disorder, the mental illness that almost led to the destruction of Earth’s environment in times past.

As for the alloy genes, it is inevitable that a media-savvy operator like Nara will discover Aks’ secret, and reveal it to the public at a time intended to cause maximum outrage.

Before this, however, the documentary series results in two other major political movements. Firstly the humans of Earth decide that the Anthro Challenge needs to be banned before any other reckless teenagers can get daft ideas. In addition, because Nara grounds the narrative in the story of Jaya and Vaha, the show leads to a movement amongst alloys to scale back some of the more cruel punishments for social deviance. Those of you who have read Meru may remember that the conservative alloy, Pushkara, and his unwitting dupe, Kaliyu, have been condemned to exile for their part in attempting to sabotage Jaya and Vaha’s mission to Meru.

While Aks and Somya don’t want the Challenge to be banned, they become very much aware that a significant part of alloy society is heavily invested in their story because it is providing fuel for the anti-exile campaign.

All of this gives us plenty to think about while we follow Aks and Somya on their journey. There is a certain amount of personal growth that they go through as well, not to mention some genuine peril caused by Earth’s weather, but that by itself would have made for a dull book. The sort of philosophical debate that Divya indulges in is all too rare in science fiction these days. I for one am grateful that she’s around to do it.

Title: Loka
By: S B Divya
Publisher: 47North
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Future’s Edge

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Book Review, Gareth L Powell

The latest offering from Gareth L Powell is a fast-paced space opera with multiple themes. A little background is required to explain what goes on.

The central character of the book is Ursula Morrow, a young archaeology student who is studying the remains of an alien civilization. While on the dig she meets and falls in love with a dashing naval officer called Jack. However, Ursula makes the mistake of putting her bare hand on a piece of alien technology and ends up infected with, well, something.

Leaving hospital on Earth where her infection was being examined, Ursula gets urgent word from Jack to flee the planet as it will soon be under attack. Thanks to Jack’s warning she is able to get on an evacuation vessel and ends up living in a refugee camp. Two years pass, and she hears little of the war against the mysterious aliens called Cutters. All she knows is that Earth has been destroyed and Jack is out on the front lines.

Then Jack turns up. He needs Ursula’s help because the alien technology with which she is infected may be the key to fighting back against the Cutters. Also he is now married. To his starship.

In the book, most of that is background which is related in the first chapter or two. It is a lot. We already have war against an implacable and seemingly unstoppable foe (similar to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series), archaeology on an alien civilisation that is millions of years old (around 64 million, to be precise, think about what that means in Earth chronology), a human-starship relationship, and the problem of dealing with your ex’s new wife when she happens to be an intelligent war machine with the unlikely name of Crisis Actor (Cris for short).

In his social media posts, Powell has occasionally talked about writing thrillers. It is clear from the opening chapters of Future’s Edge that he’s been practicing the style. The book doesn’t slow down from there. A story that Tchaikovsky might have spent three fat novels over, Powell wraps up in a single, fairly short, stand-alone. It certainly pulls you through the book, but personally I would have liked more space to explore the themes and characters.

And there is more. We get to meet Ursula’s old professor, and her gay best friend, both of whom are still studying the aliens. There’s a whole thing about Ursula’s dead twin, Chloe. There’s the rest of the crew of the Crisis Actor, who make for interesting found family. But blink and the narrative has moved on.

This is possibly a little hypocritical of me, because I don’t have time to read big, fat books. (I still haven’t read part three of The Final Architecture.) But I did finish the book feeling like I wanted to know more about just about everything in it.

Title: Future's Edge
By: Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Mediaeval Women

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Book Review, Eleanor Jackson, Julian Harrison

Those of you who follow me on BlueSky will remember me posting about my visit to the Mediaeval Women exhibition at the British Library. As social media is rather ephemeral, I will recap some of what I said here, but mainly this is a review of the book of the exhibition.

While seeing an exhibition in person is wonderful because of the personal connection you can have to the items on display, I often find the book to be of equal or greater value. You are not pressed for time when reading it, not surrounded by crowds. Also the curators have much more space in which to expound their themes. That is particularly valuable in the case of any exhibition where there may be political constraints on what can be said on the exhibit labels.

My main complaint about the exhibition is that it foregrounded a very “traditional” view of women and played down they amazing things that the women of that period could and did achieve. At first glance the book follows the same pattern. It begins with a section on ‘Private Lives’ in which women are kept firmly in their roles of daughter, wife and mother. We then go through ‘Public Lives’ and ‘Working Lives’ to ‘Spiritual Lives’ where women are once more sequestered away, this time in the cloister.

However, once you dive into the book, you get a much more nuanced view. The ‘Private Lives’ section spends a good deal of space talking about women’s role in medicine. ‘Public Lives’ opens with an admission that this section is mainly about women who achieved political power. And the ‘Spiritual Lives’ section does make it clear that entering a nunnery was a way in which women could achieve wealth and power (and pet cats) with very little interference from men, and freedom from the expectation to breed.

As a consequence, the book is far better in its coverage of Empress Matilda, who was most shamefully disparaged by the exhibition label. She was Empress of the Romans by dint of her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, and Queen of England by order of her father, Henry I. None of this was invention or self-aggrandisement on her part.

The book (and exhibition) concentrates primarily on Europe because the term ‘mediaeval’ has little meaning outside of that context. But there was significant contact between the Christian and Muslim worlds, and one European country – Spain – was in large part Muslim ruled. As a result we do have a few Muslim women in the book, perhaps most excitingly the amazing story of Shajar al-Durr who rose from being a slave concubine to be, for a few glorious months, Sultan of Egypt and Syria. She held her country together when her husband died fighting the Crusaders, and seems to have relinquished power to one of her generals only because of the impracticality of ruling from the confines of the women’s quarters. She continued to play a major role in Egyptian politics for years afterwards.

The full title of the book is Mediaeval Women: Voices and Visions. That’s partly because we do sometimes have their words, as opposed to words written by male contemporaries, and partly because women sometimes played a major role in the book trade. One of the stars of the book is the feminist writer, Christine de Pizan who, along with Isabella of France and Joan of Arc, is a major inspiration for Guy Kay’s Written on the Dark. Also featured is Jeanne de Montbaston, the creator of the hilarious ‘penis tree’ image.

The book is edited by Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison, primarily because of their jobs at the British Library looking after its collection of mediaeval manuscripts. While having a male co-editor does not perhaps give the right impression, the majority of the contributors are women. Also two of them openly identify as non-binary, including Rowan Wilson who penned the excellent and very respectful section on the transfeminine sex worker, Eleanor Rykener.

Although the exhibition is now closed, the book is still available from the British Library shop and from Amazon. At around £25 for a hardcover it is exceptional value. It is a hefty tome with high quality paper and is absolutely stuffed full of colour illustrations that are mainly taken from stunning illuminated manuscripts. Yes, it is a coffee table book, but it is also informative and has an excellent section on suggested further reading for those of us who want to know more about the women it features.

Title: Mediaeval Women: Voices and Visions
By: Eleanor Jackson (ed.) & Julian Harrison (ed.)
Publisher: The British Library
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Navigational Entanglements

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Aliette de Bodard, Book Review

These days Aliette de Bodard’s books are best known for their themes of Sapphic romance. That’s not really my thing, but if it wins her extra sales I’m all in favour because it means that more people are reading interesting SF.

The plot of Navigational Entanglements revolves around a creature known as a Tangler. They apparently live in the void between worlds, the place where spacecraft go to travel between stars. One of these creatures has escaped into our world. It is dangerous. A group of young people from the Navigators’ Guild have been tasked to capture it before there is an unfortunate incident. Complicating matters, the Guild is divided into rival clans. Because of the importance of the mission, each clan has to have a representative, and of course they all despise each other.

Our main characters are Viêt Nhi from the Rooster clan, and Hḁc Cúc from the Snakes (my apologies about the lack of fully correct accents on some of the vowels, I got as close as the fonts I have allowed). Nhi is smart and good at manipulating others, which frankly is just what the mission needs, but really doesn’t like people. Cúc is an assassin, with the sort of massively over-developed sense of morality that comes from having to live with the fact that your job is killing people. Inevitably they will fall in love.

However, that isn’t really what the book is about. The main theme is one of politics. The main questions that confront our heroes are ones such as, “how did the tangler get free in the first place?”, “who is responsible for the murder that takes place early on in the story?”, and, most importantly, “who stands to gain from all of this chaos?”

Ultimately, Navigational Entanglements is a book about old people who will do anything to stay in power, and young people who have to choose between their careers and doing the right thing. I’m afraid that’s rather more interesting to me than who gets to kiss who.

Title: Navigational Entanglements
By: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: St. Martin's
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Tusks of Extinction

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Book Review, Ray Nayler

Bringing animals back from extinction has been a fascination of science fiction at least since Jurassic Park, probably much longer. Usually what people want is dinosaurs, but the wooly mammoth also holds a significant place in the human imagination, and resurrecting it seems slightly less unlikely.

Ray Nayler clearly knows his biology. In The Tusks of Extinction he correctly notes that mammoth fur was not orange, no matter what the creatures found frozen in Siberia might look like. In life the fur would have been a chocolate brown colour. It fades when it gets frozen. Also Nayler knows that extracting actual mammoth DNA from those Siberian corpses is not going to be possible. What might be possible, and indeed has been trialed on mice, is implanting genes for furriness in modern elephants.

A creature manufactured in this way is, of course, described as transgenic – it has crossed genes – and it may well be mice transformed in this way (they look adorable) that Donald Trump was thinking of when he went off on a rant about “transgender mice”.

Back with Nayler, his interest is not just in mammoths, but also in the fate of elephants, and by extension most of the natural world. Mammoths are extinct now. Elephants will be extinct in the not too distant future. The fewer elephants there are, the more valuable ivory becomes, and the more money and effort will be put into hunting them.

Nayler’s heroine, Damira, is a conservationist specialising in elephants who has dedicated her life to fighting poachers. We also catch up with her in the future where her mind has been implanted into that of a genetically manufactured ‘mammoth’. These poor creatures were reared in zoos and have no idea how to survive in the wild, let alone in the frozen wastes of Siberia where there is at least land that is not wanted by humans and can therefore become a wildlife sanctuary.

The idea of putting human minds into animals is not new, of course. If you would like to see it done very well, at novel length, I warmly recommend The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen. I’ve put my review of that book, originally hosted on my blog, in this issue.

Back with Nayler, what his novella is actually about is the economics of conservation. There are two opposing viewpoints here. One holds that the only way we are going to save the natural world is to make it valuable to humans. That means, among other things, eating meat, and allowing a certain level of hunting. The alternative view is that all animals are sovereign beings in their own right, and should not be killed by humans for any reason. The problem with that approach is that stopping humans killing animals is a monumental task, and probably the only way to make it stick is to kill most of the humans. Nayler hints at this, but doesn’t make it explicit. I got the impression that he favours the ‘kill most of the humans’ plan, which is a bit worrying.

Title: The Tusks of Extinction
By: Ray Nayler
Publisher:
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Many Selves of Katherine North

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Book Review, Emma Geen

This review was first published on Cheryl’s blog in June 2016.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a tiger, the mightiest beast in the jungle? Or a majestic eagle, soaring over mountains with consummate ease? Perhaps you’d just like to be a dolphin, swimming merrily through the open ocean with a pod of playmates.

Kit North has been all of these things and more. It’s her job.

Kit works for ShenCorp, a startup company that grew out of a research lab at the University of Bristol and is still based in offices at the top of Park Street. Their primary work is zoological research through phenomenautic projection. There are two main areas of scientific activity here. The first is the ability to grow ResExtendas (Ressies), artificial animal bodies that have most of the physical characteristics of the real thing but are not, themselves, alive. The other is the projection of human consciousness into those bodies so that the researcher can see the world through the senses of the Ressy and, with any luck, mingle with natural populations. It is, if you like, the ultimate hide.

As a phenomenaut, Kit’s job is to become an animal and find out how it operates in the world. How important is it to have a sense of smell far beyond normal human imagination? How do social interactions between animals work? There’s a huge amount of valuable research to be done, and that is all the more important as so many of the Earth’s animal species are on the verge of extinction. Kit works closely with Buckley Maurice, her Neuro, the scientist whose job it is to monitor her projection, record her observations and activities, and make sure that she can Come Home to her Original Body at the end of the experiment.

Kit’s primary specialism is with vulpines. She is helping ShenCorp understand the lives of urban foxes — where they go, what they do, what do they eat? She has even, in her fox life, adopted an orphan cub, whom she calls Tomoko. She knows enough about fox life now to teach the youngster to hunt and scavenge. She and Buckley have written some ground-breaking papers off the back of this.

Of course great advances in science don’t come easily. There have been a few problems along the way. ShenCorp recruits phenomenauts as teenagers because young people’s brains are much more plastic and able to cope with the stresses of projection into animal bodies. Mostly they don’t last very long in the job. Continuous psychological monitoring ensures that they suffer no permanent damage, but many of them have to retire after only a few years in the role. It’s for their own good. Kit, with seven years under her belt, is the most experienced phenomenaut in the company.

That’s because she has learned how to be careful. She knows how to hide herself, to not give anything away. It pays to be cautious around humans. They might leave food out for you one day, but turn on you the next. They can’t be trusted.

One of the least trustworthy of the humans is Mr. Hughes, the man who manages ShenCorp now that its founder, Professor Shen, has taken an extended sabbatical. Mr. Hughes has big plans for the company. Scientific research is not very profitable. Hughes thinks that the projection technology has lots of commercial potential. He’s relying on his most experienced team to make his plans work. What this means for Kit and Buckley is not clear. Kit thinks that something bad is being planned. She’s also worried about whether, if it comes down to it, Buckley will be loyal to her, or to the company. He is, after all, human.

Bloomsbury is marketing The Many Selves of Katherine North as literary fiction, aiming at the same market that lapped up Station Eleven. The book is, however, a solid piece of science fiction. Emma Geen confesses in an afterword that she may not have always got animal abilities right. That’s because, after reading a ton of academic papers, she couldn’t always find a consensus among the scientists. In effect the book is cyberpunk, but cyberpunk with a strong environmentalist tinge to it. It is also beautifully written, and perfectly passes muster in its literary mufti.

Emma is one of the products of the Bath Spa University creative writing program where Colin Harvey studied. Jack Wolf has also been involved with them, and of course many of their graduates go into other fields of literature as well. I’m impressed with what they are turning out. And I am really impressed with this book. Don’t miss out on it just because it isn’t being marketed at us.

Title: The Many Selves of Katherine North
By: Emma Geen
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Wild Robot

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Movie Review

Air Canada’s offerings on my trips this month were underwhelming. That wasn’t for any lack of choice. There were huge numbers of films and TV shows that I could have watched; but there were very few that I actually wanted to see. I mean, I could have re-watched the entire Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings series which, with the addition of The War of the Rohirrim, is now up to 7 films. I could have re-watched all four Matrix films. I did re-watch Jupiter Ascending, but only once out of four flights. What was lacking was something new that I actually wanted to see, and that was as much the fault of Hollywood as anyone else.

The one new-ish film that I did watch was The Wild Robot. People on BlueSky recommended this one too me, but I wasn’t hugely impressed. It is basically something that riffs off the emotional notes of ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, with a lost robot thrown in for good measure.

The main character is Roz, also known as Rozzum 7134, which is a clear reference to the Capek play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, for which the word ‘robot’ was coined. A container ship carrying Roz is shipwrecked on a remote island inhabited only by animals. Searching a client to serve, Roz ends up parenting a baby goose called Brightbill, with the aid of a sly fox called Fink who starts out planning to eat Brightbill when the young goose is bigger, but slowly comes to love the kid.

There is plenty that is quite silly about the film, most obviously the idea that all of the animals on the island share a common language which Roz is able to learn. If you can get past that then the film is competent, if very predictable. It hits all the right tear-jerking notes.

The highlights for me were the performances of Pedro Pascal as Fink, and Mark Hamill as Thorn, a giant grizzly bear. Catherine O’Hara as Pinktail, an opossum with a large and boisterous brood of children, is also a lot of fun.

I’m glad I didn’t spend money to see this film in the cinema, but as a piece of light entertainment on a long flight it did the job.

The War of the Rohirrim

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Movie Review

Now that the rich mine of Middle Earth has been opened up for exploitation, the corporations that have rights to exploit it are keen to do so as rapidly as possible before the movie-watching public gets bored. Rings of Power is at least nominally based on the events chronicled in The Silmarillion. The War of the Rohirrim is mostly just shameless recycling of previously used material.

The idea was attractive. With live-action movies being expensive and much of the sets from the Lord of the Rings movies having been dismantled, Peter Jackson and his collaborators have turned to animation. Specifically they brought in a well-known anime studio. That would give a very different look to the film.

I am not a great expert on animation. I gather that the film was put together at breakneck speed. I have seen suggestions that the resulting work is of poor quality. Whether this is true, or is simply a bunch of dudebros having a hissy fit over the feminist elements of the plot, I don’t know. It looked OK to me.

What was not OK was the plot. Yes, it was simplistic and clichéd. I can cope with that. Yes, in theory, it was set in the past and about wholly different characters. But the extent to which it recycled themes from LotR suggested a stunning lack of imagination on the part of the scriptwriters. Let us count the ways:

Aged and foolish king of Rohan who comes good in the end
Willful princess who wants to be a warrior
Miranda Otto (Eowyn in the movies) narrating just in case we have forgotten what this is about
Advisor to the king who turns out to be a traitor
Bad guys using Isengard as a base
Our heroes besieged in Helm’s Deep
Eagles to the rescue (but only at the last minute)
Idiotic downhill cavalry charge
Gratuitous guest appearance by Saruman just in case we have forgotten who will move into Isengard

There are probably others, but the downhill cavalry charge was the single most idiotic element of the LotR movies (which, for the most part, I loved). This film has taken it, and made it even more stupid. I despair.

Editorial – March 2025

April 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 069, Editorial

As predicted, this issue was late. I did manage to get some work done on the train home from Heathrow, but Tuesday was mainly spent in a state of slumber. In other news, Canada was lovely. Kevin and I had a great time. There was a lot of anti-American feeling on show, but much sympathy for individual Americans.

This month is Eastercon, and I’m delighted that Fight Like A Girl 2 is up for a BSFA Award. Roz and Jo can’t make it, so it will be down to me to turn up at the award ceremony. It would be astonishing to have two wins in consecutive years, but I can but hope.

Lots of Wizard’s Tower work is going on in the background, but I can’t talk about much of it right now. Suffice it to say that we have 8 books in the pipeline for this year or early next, with probably more to come.

I note that today is a day of protest by The Society of Authors against the wholesale theft of millions of copyright works (including some of mine) by the pirates at Meta. I doubt that the government will be willing to stand up to them, but here’s an example of the protest material.

And I must rush as I am off to a writing retreat for the weekend in a lovely part of Wales that has No Internet.

Issue #68

March 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the February 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: The Dragon’s Den: This issue's cover is by Sedgwick and comes from Among the Gnomes. An occult tale of adventure in the Untersberg by Franz Hartmann

The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain: Sophia Samatar's novella is set in space, but is very much about the here and now

Kaos: Netflix does Greek Gods in a way that Classicists will love, but probably left the studio bosses scratching their heads

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins: In P Djèlí Clark's new fantasy world there are dead cats that are not cats and do not have tails

Adwaith – Solas: Carmarthen's finest launch their latest album in front of their adoring home fans

Mapping Middle Earth: From the Glasgow University Fantasy Centre comes a fascinating look at the maps of Tolkien's Legendarium

The Substance: Paul Driggere takes a look at the latest horror movie senasation so that you don't have to

Gŵyl y Golau: Cheryl and friends usher in spring in traditional Welsh fashion

Fantasy News & Lifestyle Magazine: A German magazine about fantasy is newly available in English. Cheryl checks it out.

Hugo Voting Time: It is award season again, and Cheryl has some recommendations

Section 31: OK, you were all right, it was terrible

Editorial – March 2025: Cheryl has a lot of travel plans, which may or may not be interrupted by the insanity of global politics

Cover: The Dragon’s Den

March 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 068, Art

Continuing our theme of raiding the free image collection provided by the British Library, here we have a fantasy-themed cover. The image is titled, ‘The Dragon’s Den’ and it comes from Among the Gnomes. An occult tale of adventure in the Untersberg by Franz Hartmann. The book was published in 1895 by T Fisher Unwin. The illustrator is known as Sedgwick, but I haven’t found out any more about them. There is a version of the book available on Project Gutenberg should you want to know why a bunch of gnomes are oggling a mostly-naked girl.

As usual, there is a larger copy of the image below.

The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain

March 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 068, Book Review, Sophia Samatar

The title of this novella from Sophia Samatar gives you no clue as to what it is about. The cover does not help. In starting to read through you understand that the book is set on a space ark of some sort. That is not what the book is about at all.

Our two main characters are the boy and the professor. The boy is an inhabitant of The Hold, spending his life in the dark attached to a Chain. He has significant artistic talent. The professor lives in the main part of the ship. She is not chained, but her father was. She wears an anklet. She is on probation. Which makes it all the more brave of her to advocate for the rights of the inhabitants of The Hold, and to believe that they can be educated.

Naturally she is hopelessly naïve. Having not grown up in The Hold, she has no idea what it is like, nor how to relate to someone who has never lived anywhere else. Equally, she has no idea how much contempt the free inhabitants of the ship have for people like her, or how ruthlessly they will protect their privilege.

The Practice is a way of thinking and being put forward by an old man from The Hold known as The Prophet. The boy is a disciple of sorts, but will eventually surpass his master.

The Horizon is something that the Ship does not have. It embodies a way of thinking that those who have grown up on the Ship are unable to contemplate: that there are directions other than up or down.

The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain is a book about living on Earth. It is about how those with power and wealth view those without as infinitely disposable, and whose reaction to any sort of crisis is not “what should we do for the best”, but “what’s in it for me.” It is very much a book about the here and now.

Title: The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain
By: Sophia Samatar
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Kaos

March 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 068, TV Review

I’m a bit behind with this one due to the large quantity of interesting TV demanding my time. When it first came out, my Classicist friends were absolutely delighted about it. I can see why. I can also see why it was not renewed.

For those that don’t know, Kaos is a heavily re-imagined story of Greek gods in modern dress. Zeus is worried about a prophecy that suggests that Olympus will one day fall. As he becomes increasingly paranoid and vicious, the other gods realise that he is in danger of bringing about the very disaster he is trying to prevent.

Alongside the heavenly drama there is action in the mortal realm of Krete, where the Trojans live as unwanted refugees and President Minos uses the threat of the Minotaur to keep power. His daughter, Ariadne, has a crush on her bodyguard, Theseus. Everyone loves Krete’s favourite rock star, Orpheus, except for this wife, Eurydice.

Whoever saw Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok and decided that he would be a perfect paranoid Zeus deserves a medal. Much of the rest of the casting is fairly meh, but I did appreciate seeing Suzy Izzard getting a staring role as Lachesis, one of the Fates. Also Billy Piper is great as Cassandra.

I’m not sure how this show was sold to Netflix, but I suspect it was a combination of “sex and violence just like Game of Thrones” and “Classical re-tellings are all the rage at the moment.” There is apparently an Odyssey movie in the works, which would have been sold the same way. However, that is not what Kaos delivered.

What we actually got was a very innovative and imaginative re-telling that will have those who only know a bit of Greek myth saying, “but it didn’t happen like that,” and those who know those myths well punching the air in delight. The result is a clever satire about authoritarian rule that has a lot in common with Sophia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon and The Chain.

Naturally my favorite character in the show is Caeneus. He’s a little-known character from myth. The original story has Poseidon raping a girl called Caenis, after which he turns her into a man and a great warrior. Why this happens isn’t clear, though it is very un-Poseidon-like. He was more likely to turn his victims into a snake-headed monster. Some versions have the god taking pity on Caenis, others say she asked for the transformation as a favour to avoid pregnancy. Nowhere is it suggested that Caenis identified as a boy before the rape.

In Kaos, despite what you might have read on the internet, Caeneus is portrayed as intersex. Specifically he appears to be someone with the trait known as 5-alpha reductase deficiency, whereby a child is born appearing female, but develops male genitals during puberty. Such children often identify as boys when young, or behave in a boyish manner. Parents of such children often say they could tell from an early age that something was different.

It is a bold move by the show, and one that was doubtless part-responsible for its demise. But the thing I like best about it is the suggestion that the gender binary is somehow ‘divinely’ mandated (by Zeus and his bullying family), and that Caeneus’s transformation somehow offended the gods. It also, very clearly, offended the female-separatist Amazons, who seem very TERFy. In other words, Caeneus’s transformation is presented as pissing off a bunch of awful people, and therefore as a Good Thing.

Here now is an example of why Classicists love this show. In the scene in which young Caeneus meets his childhood friend, Leos, he is shown carrying a dead hare. In ancient Greek culture, a present of a dead hare was a traditional gift between same-sex lovers. There are several vases showing such a gift between men, and one very famous one showing two Amazons. You have to be pretty heavily nerdy about Greek myth to know such a thing, but the showrunners did know it, and thought to put it in.

Sadly the show was much too ingenious and obscure for the money men at Netflix. The clever references will all have gone completely over their heads. They will have seen the social media blow-up about Caeneus being “trans”. I’m not surprised that they cancelled the show.

Having said that, it did wrap up fairly well. I would have liked to know what Hera and Artemis were going to do with their Amazon army. I was also looking forward to Dionysius and Ari getting together, because that’s the closest that actual Greek myth comes to a happy ending. Maybe Netflix can be persuaded to let someone write a novelization, with sequels.

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

March 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 068, Book Review, P Djèlí Clark

In the prosperous merchant city of Tal Abisi there is a flourishing trade in assassination. Among the guilds of assassins, the Dead Cat Tails are generally acknowledged to be the best. And among the Dead Cat Tails, Eveen the Eviscerator is one of their star performers. This means that she gets some of the most interesting and challenging commissions.

Even Eveen, however, did not expect to get a commission to kill herself. You see, the thing about the Dead Cat Tails is that they are not cats, nor do they have tails, but they are, most assuredly, dead.

Whether P Djèlí Clark is a fan of Deadpool or not is open to question. What is certain is that similar considerations apply. Being dead, Eveen and her fellow assassins cannot be killed. Being magically re-animated, they heal ridiculously quickly. Which makes them highly formidable fighters. It also allows the author to craft the most fabulously over top fight sequences. After all, written fiction still has far fewer constraints than even the best CGI. If an author can imagine it, they can write it.

However, back to Eveen and her mysterious commission. The person that she is sent to kill is not exactly herself, but rather her younger self pulled through time for the express purpose of being killed by her. What the effect of this young woman’s demise will be on Eveen is unclear. What is clear is that, should she fail to carry out her commission in a timely fashion, she will have violated the third and most important of Clark’s Three Laws of Assassins. (Sorry, they are actually called the Three Unbreakable Vows, but I couldn’t resist the temptation.)

Breaking the Third Unbreakable Vow has consequences. Aeril, the Goddess of Assassins (and Chefs, and anyone else who likes playing with Very Sharp Knives) will notice. Not just Eveen, but her entire guild, will be in deep trouble.

So here we have a lovely set-up. Eveen has just a few hours to work out what the heck is going on, and to avoid the wrath of her fellow Dead Cat Tails and their goddess. Along the way, there can be some fun fights between Eveen and her co-workers.

Clark is clearly having fun here. No more so than when we get to this bit:

“There are three … fools, she spoke at last. “With grand ideas of doing forbidden magic.”
“Edgelords,” Tamu spat with disgust.
“Edgelords?” Sky asked, looking truly puzzled.
“A bunch of privileged pricks,” Eveen answered. “Usually from well-off families who got themselves kicked out of decent colleges. Like to find banned texts or unsanctioned thaumaturgy. The riskier the better. Claim to be freeing magic from restrictions, pushing it to the edge.”

Later in the book we get to meet one of these idiots. And yet, he does tend to start every sentence with the words, “well, actually.”

If that’s not sufficient recommendation for you, I don’t know what would be.

I should also note that The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a short book, only 213 pages. Clark describes it as a novella, but Locus has decided that it is a novel which presumably means it is just a few words over the 40,000 word limit. I have complained about this sort of mindless adherence to word limits before, but no one seems to care so a Very Short Novel it is. Regardless, you can read it quite quickly.

Title: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins
By: P Djèlí Clark
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Adwaith – Solas

March 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 068, Adwaith, Music Review

Adwaith are a three-piece all-girl band from South Wales. They were founded by Hollie Singer and Gwenllian Anthony, who were school friends in Carmarthen. With a couple of successful albums behind them, some appearances at Glastonbury, and support work for the likes of the Manics and Idles, they have done that thing that many newly successful bands do: spend two years in the studio.

The result has been a double album, Solas, which the band are now taking on tour. For their opening night they played the entire album straight through in front of their home crowd at the Lyric in Carmarthen. Jo, Chris and I went along, and were thoroughly entertained.

It was an interesting crowd. Because they are a local band, there were parents, grandparents, neighbours and so on. I was by no means the oldest person in the audience, which was unusual for a rock gig.

There was a support band: five lads who could certainly play but had little in the way of stage presence or an act. They were very shoegazy, but listenable. Hopefully they will learn to perform better in future. I never found out their name.

In stark contrast, Adwaith were very obviously A Rock Band. The core of their sound is provided by Gwenllian’s base guitar and Heledd Owen’s furious drums. Hollie, appropriately given her name, provides vocals, and also lead guitar. There was one number where Hollie and Gwenllian swapped roles and Gwenllian did a decent impression of Liza Minelli in Cabaret, but for the most part the pyrotechnics are provided by that classic base and drum sound.

I have the band’s two previous albums, but the songs on Solas were all new to me. Foolishly I ignored the queues at the Merch table after the gig, only to find out when I got home that the album is not yet on Bandcamp and their record label has sold out of the initial pressing. Argh.

Anyway, there were some really great songs. The one that opens side three was particularly memorable as it is a real head-banger. I’m looking forward to listening the album again when I can get a copy.

Adwaith’s lyrics are entirely in Welsh, which is why you have never heard of them. They are very good. Most of the tour will be over by the time you read this, but they are at the Oslo in London on March 6th and the Louisiana in Bristol on the 7th. Go see them, they are fabulous.

Mapping Middle Earth

March 3, 2025 Cheryl Morgan 068, Anahit Behrooz, Book Review

One of many great things about the Perspectives on Fantasy series from the Glasgow University Fantasy Centre is that their contract with Bloomsbury requires the publisher to produce paperback editions at affordable prices. You have to wait a year from initial publication for the paperback to appear, but once it has you should be able to get it for around £25. Or, having waited a year already, you can wait a little longer for Bloomsbury to have a sale. Which is how I ended up getting a copy of Mapping Middle Earth for just over £20.

The book is the product of research done by Anahit Behrooz for her PhD. As the title suggests it examines Tolkien’s use of maps in his Legendarium. In many ways it builds on Stefan Ekman’s ground-breaking study of fantasy maps, Here be Dragons. Behrooz, however, is interested in only a very small, albeit very famous, subset of the fantasy genre, and that allows her to go into much greater depth.

I should start, as Behrooz does, by noting that all maps are political. We should all know that. I presume that most of you know that the well-known Mercator projection of Earth over-states the size of land at the poles, and under-states the size of land at the equator. That has been all over social media of late, as people have gleefully pointed out that Greenland is nowhere near as bigly as Donald Trump thinks it is.

Behrooz situates Tolkien’s maps between two traditions: the mediaeval map (such as the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi), and the modern map (typified by the UK’s Ordnance Survey). Mediaeval European maps are mostly religious in nature. They generally have Jerusalem at the centre, and are oriented towards the East, where the Garden of Eden was believed to lie. Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth in the First and Second Age are much more like mediaeval maps. Prior to the sinking of Númenor, Middle Earth was flat and it was possible to travel directly to Valinor. So the heaven of Middle Earth was literally on the map.

The Ordnance Survey, as the name suggests, was originally a military project. Specifically it was created by the English army to help them find their way around the Scottish highlands, all the better to round up any Jacobite resistance. Military maps need to be highly accurate, and while that has been a great boon for later generations of hikers, we still have to remember that the maps were created as a tool of military conquest.

Personally I think that Behrooz has missed a trick here. I suspect that the maps of Middle Earth are in large part influenced by the work of Thomas Moule, a Victorian producer of faux-antique maps. Moule’s work was very popular, and I’m sure that Tolkien would have been familiar with it. The maps use the Ordnance Survey as a basis, so are highly accurate, but are also decorated to look like something much older.

Behrooz then goes on to talk about Tolkien’s relationship to the environment, and his representation of the non-human on his maps. We are all familiar with the Ents and Huorns, with the grumpy old mountain, Caradhras, and with Old Man Willow. The Legendarium gives a voice to many non-human characters, and not just members of races other than mankind. The maps represent places like Mirkwood and Lothlorien, and give some indication of their character.

This section led me to a grudging acknowledgement of the necessity of Tom Bombadil. Behrooz points out that his function in the story is to disabuse the naïve Hobbits of their simplistic views on life, and introduce them to the world outside the Shire. I can see that is an important story function, though I still don’t see why he also has to be a purveyor of terrible poetry.

The next section is all about geography and geology. There is a lot of focus on Númenor’s Atlantis-like fate and how Tolkien sought to navigate between this essentially mediaeval view of history, punctuated by god-sent disasters, and the modern scientific view of deep geological time with its fossils and continental drift.

Finally we come to a section on Imperialism and Race, where Behrooz looks at how maps are used as a function of imperialist projects, erasing the existence of indigenous peoples and replacing them with “unexplored” lands to be conquered and assimilated. This also happens in Middle Earth, as various human societies, mostly notably Númenor, seek to expand their territory at the expense of both other races and of the natural world.

What I particularly like about this book is how it zeroes in on the contradictions in Tolkien’s work. He’s pro-environment, but also pro-Hobbit, and the Hobbits are very much managers of their environment. He has written a religious history of his world, but is also aware that science has moved on since mediaeval times. And he is concerned about the destruction of cultures by industrialisation, but is also a product of the British Empire and its educational system. Behrooz writes:

Readling Tolkien, I am struck continually by the contradictions of his approach: the moments where he edges towards a strikingly anti-colonial mindset, the moments where he falls back on the harmful racialization that characterized, and indeed fueled, the gutting force of the British Empire. To place Tolkien within a context is to place him inevitably within an imperial context, which is to say, inevitably within a racist context. What can looking fearlessly and unbiasedly at his work tell us about the necessities of understanding the entanglement between human and non-human harm? What can it tell us about an author who was suspended, constantly, between past, present and future?

And that sort of thing is why I like reading academic books. They can be so much more interesting than the simplistic takes you see on social media, or even in blog posts.

The book has also got me looking forward to the forthcoming seasons of Rings of Power, as the story should get much more interesting, if the script follows what Tolkien wrote.

Title: Mapping Middle Earth
By: Anahit Behrooz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

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