It’s comforting to occasionally lose yourself in an epic space opera — the worldbuilding, the sprawling cast, the deep characterisation. The story’s framing evokes Gene Wolfe — a memoir recounted by an older Hadrian, replete with frequent philosophising, lyrical reflections, and copious foreshadowing of future books. Hadrian’s unloving but privileged childhood is suitably grim, culminating in his disinheritance and flight from familial obligations. Things don’t go as planned, and the feudal lord-in-waiting becomes a destitute mendicant, scratching out a living on the streets with the plebeian masses.

Hadrian’s gradual recovery is chronicled in numerous slice-of-life chapters, dipping in and out over years as he faces the loss of his identity, escapes the streets, and begins his climb back to power. The world and its characters emerge slowly one anecdote at a time, resulting in a long low-momentum middle that often lacked the page-turning plotting to propel me into the next chapter.

Frustratingly, the main plot driver is usually Hadrian’s own idiocy rather than any external conflict or crisis. He’s his own worst enemy, a character you root for, but also want to slap some sense into. Happily, in the last couple of hundred pages the narrative gains pace, establishing the bigger story arc as the alien Cielcin appear, and we’re introduced to the central mystery of the extinct race known as The Quiet.

Empire of Silence succeeds as an epic blended SF-fantasy space opera. It spends hundreds of pages worldbuilding and introducing our protagonist, in a way that will only pay off if you’re prepared to go further. Hadrian is shaping up to be a complex character, set in direct tension with the monstrous figure he claims he will one day become, and I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of the series to see how he develops.

Written ‘67-‘70, the tales predate Russ’ later significant work, but even so, Russ’ strong character development is already evident. While second-wave feminist themes are inherent in Alyx’s outsider life story, there’s also a leitmotif of Alyx navigating complex relationships with the young female protégées she encounters.

Her prose is very natural, dialogue-heavy, replete with frequent interruptions and things left unsaid. At times, it’s hard to visualise and track; a jumbled stream of consciousness, time speeds up and slows down, the narrative jumping ahead without even a paragraph break. She prioritises sensation over clarity, demanding you lean back and let it wash over you.

Interestingly, the stories’ progression from pulp S&S to New Wave interiority parallels the genre’s own evolution at the time. Alyx mirrors the shunning of the genre’s technophilic roots in her refusal to submit to the technology she encounters and the hubris it encourages, instead prioritising her lived, embodied experience. It’s clear from this collection how Russ is rapidly maturing as an author ready to produce her signature works.

For all that, the sword-and-sorcery delivery dominates the collection, and while I can admire what Russ is doing, it’s unfortunately not a style that engages me.

Bluestocking (1967)

Alyx is hired to help a rich young woman escape an arranged marriage. Heading out to sea in a stolen fishing boat, their relationship develops from animosity to friendship as they survive some tough ordeals together.

I thought she was afeard til she stroked my beard (1976)

We catch up with Alyx as she abandons an abusive marriage to run away with smugglers and shack up with their leader, from whom she learns how to fight and steal.

The Barbarian

Alyx falls in with a techno-wizard who is proclaiming himself the god of the world. When she refuses his order to kill a child, she finds herself having to take him on.

Picnic on Paradise

In this novella-length story, an older, hardier Alyx has been pulled into the future by the Trans-Temp authority and put to work escorting some effete tourists across a modern war zone. It starts confusingly, as the backstory comes later, but soon settles into a survival horror as the group try to survive a long trek over a mountainous winter war zone to get to safety. You can see the later Russ start to emerge with this story - Alyx’s initially hostile relationship to the group slowly morphs as she takes young Iris under her wing and falls for one of the party. As the deaths start to mount, there’s real heartbreak and intensity in the prose.

The Second Inquisition

We move to a 1925 wartime family who are hosting a visitor from the future who seems to be a descendant of Alyx hiding out from the Trans-Temp Authority. Our narrator is a 16-year-old girl who, it’s implied, grows up to be an important figure in the Authority’s future, but today is having to deal with the everyday challenges of an awful father and a downtrodden mother.

While there’s a fair amount of science fictional action as the visitor is found by the Authority, at heart it’s a character portrayal of a teenage girl in a small town in the 1920s trying to find herself. Intriguingly, we’re left with an ambiguous final line that hints at the possibility that Alyx herself is less a character than a myth being continually reconstructed and retold.

Bookworm, run! (1966) ⭐⭐

An experimental chimp is connected to a computer containing all of humanity’s knowledge. Its intelligence rapidly outstrips humans and, realising the danger it’s in, it makes its escape.

An early singularity story written by Vinge when he was young (his second published story), it suffers from weak prose and plotting.

True Names (1981) ⭐⭐⭐

Vinge foresees a virtual cyberspace populated with hackers and infiltrated by AI, laying much of the groundwork for Gibson’s Neuromancer. What’s different is Vinge’s mythic feel — a world of magic and warlocks, more an RPG than the gritty cyberpunk noir which was to come.

Its cyberspace action sequences deliver the 80s style of virtual combat, which took me back to my excitement when first watching the film Hackers. But beyond that, it’s now a story mostly interesting for its foresight.

The Peddlers Apprentice (1975) ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

A simple encounter with a travelling Peddler escalates as mysteries compound and the forgotten history of the world is revealed. Great little story.

The Ungoverned (1985) ⭐⭐⭐

Set between his novels The Peace War and Marooned In Realtime, America is split between the Republic and the anarco-capitalist ungoverned. When New Mexico launches an invasion, it’s down to the commercial protection services and the preppers to save the day.

Confusing in this short form, where there’s not enough time to explain the complicated social and political landscape without the context of the bracketing books.

Long Shot (1972) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

An extinction-level event prompts the launch of an automated 10,000-year mission to Alpha Centauri. Coping with decay and malfunction resulting in the loss of knowledge of its mission, the unmanned ship finds a habitable world and prepares for landfall.

Very beautifully written - you feel the deep time and existential struggle as the little ship tries against the odds to complete its mission.

I loved that deep time has filled every galactic niche to overflowing, life existing atop accreted layers of older civilisations, technology, and knowledge: “nearly every rock formation, lake, forest and lonely mountain road had already been named, forgotten and renamed a hundred times already”. There is no frontier in Yokkun’s Depth – the galaxy is packed to bursting, swimming in civilisational detritus.

Geon’s imagination cannot be faulted – each chapter introduces fresh aliens and bizarre societies, feeling at times like it was conjured from a late-night pub brainstorming session. The downside of this fecundity is that we don’t spend long enough with any reality to deeply connect; instead, a superficial carnival atmosphere pervades the novel as we gawk at the parade of grotesque and macabre. More Douglas Adams than Iain M. Banks, the alien overload is nonetheless great fun.

Like Delany’s Nova, it’s messy and chaotic: the laissez-faire citizens are free to behave almost primally, protected by the backstop of godlike technology. In places, this leads to a few Deus ex Machina moments – a language ‘Pattern’ that makes all speech intelligible, nanobots that can make anything out of thin air, and body swapping to match the new reality as you drop between Phaslairs. It’s verging on too much Marvel-magic to merit the hard SF label its high concepts demand.

The biggest weakness of the story is the perceived threat. Whilst the antagonist is undeniably villainous, we’re never shown why he’s a galaxy-level existential threat worthy of such extreme measures. That being said, I can forgive the plot holes, and the magic, and simply enjoy the spectacle. This is an enjoyable, fast-paced read with well-crafted characters and big-screen action - it’s what space opera was born to be.

“Truly, the world is ending. Not by ice and not by fire, but by centrifugal force.”

We experience the camp through Sacchetti’s journal, a voluble poet and conscientious objector tasked with documenting the inmates’ imposed Faustian bargain. As the narrative unfolds, Disch marshals prose as a plot device, aggressively ramping its density in a lexiphanic orgy of obscure vocabulary. I soon tired of looking up words and literary allusions – the purple prose was technically impressive, but draining, and made a short book surprisingly slow going.

Sacchetti is an uninviting cerebral intellectual, his emotional detachment amplified by Disch’s choice of epistolary form. It’s a format I dislike, but as with Flowers for Algernon, it works well for an interior arc. Disch argues for an inverse correlation between intelligence and humanity, exploring the fine line between genius and madness in the tradition of New Wave’s interiority obsession. In this light, Sacchetti’s coldness isn’t a failure of execution; it’s a thematic choice.

The quiet acceptance of the inmates evokes the tragic bureaucratic horror of the concentration camp, the asylum, the Stanford prison, Milgram’s electrocutions. It’s a study of the terrible things people do as part of a system. Every character’s humanity, whether a jailor or jailed, is shredded by the situation, their freedom curtailed. The unthinkable becomes quotidian.

Religious allegory suffuses the narrative — Pallidine as forbidden knowledge, the enlightened as martyrs, transcendence as salvation and damnation. Yet the ending still caught me by surprise. I was expecting an echo of Russ’ We Who Are About To, but instead got a genre-pleasing deus ex machina crossed with heavy-handed religious symbolism – an unwelcome betrayal of a hard-fought polemic. It’s a book that will stay with me; I’m glad I read it and glad I’m finished with it.

The magical realism of the disappearances means it’s never clear whether this slow-motion apocalypse is psychological or physical. It’s certainly not the Orwellian dystopia that the title might suggest, but a more subtle metaphysical horror. The Memory Police are a symptom rather than a cause, whilst the fatalistic residents are collaborators in their own demise.

The spare and dreamlike prose has that Ballardian feel of desolation and surreal timelessness. Short austere paragraphs are packed with hauntingly evocative details that eschew the widescreen panorama, turning inward to a focus on the minutiae, the peripheral phenomenological details of everyday existence.

That is to say that the writing is excellent, but the narrative is cyclical, lacking escalation and momentum. To read in a single sitting is to be immersed, but over several sessions, it didn’t pull me back. Structurally, a couple of problems stood out. The embedded story felt redundant, foreshadowing but not establishing sufficient contrast with the main narrative to earn its time. Secondly, the companion R is an epistemic anchor for the reader. He acts as a witness to psychological decay over physical change, collapsing the metaphysical uncertainty. But this is undermined by the perpetual winter – what should have been an allegorical blank slate is apparently real, creating a dissonance I found frustrating.

Ogawa posits no explanation or opinion — this is allegorical speculative fiction rather than the social SF I was expecting, and I strained to find her meaning. It’s a poignant mood masterpiece, politically hollow in its analysis of authoritarian dystopias, but richly overflowing as a zoomed-in dystopian literary character study. For me, it doesn’t earn its length - as a phenomenological short story it would have excelled, but as an ideological novel its narrative potential is squandered.

The narrative focus is firmly on the characters — a psychologically dysfunctional yet incongruously stoic group whose crimes range from the political to murder. Seemingly resigned to their predicament, our attention is instead drawn to their personal obsessions and relationships. The book is of its time with misogyny, racism, and homophobia driving many characters’ motivations. The author doesn’t take a moral position, presenting these issues as the reality of the social order, but they make for harder reading today, not helped by a fair bit of wooden and inane dialogue.

After landing, the deportees face the harsh reality of subsistence living in an authoritarian society run by the unhinged. But the static sociopolitical construct is thin set-dressing for a loose set of personal character vignettes, eschewing the opportunity for deeper societal commentary or rebellion that would have gripped me. While the setting is science fictional, this could just as easily have been a bunch of character stories set in any harsh penal colony.

While credit is deserved for the ending, which I didn’t see coming, the overall narrative lacks a through plot — more a slice of grim life with little in the way of redemption, resolution, or enlightenment for the convicts. Compton is more interested in observation than interrogation, leaving his promising worldbuilding underexplored. I can see why the book has a literary reputation, but for me, it’s too character-focused, lacking plot and development. If this stasis is intended as the point, it’s one the novel fails to develop into insight. Ultimately, I didn’t care enough about these weird people to hold my interest in their petty soap operas.

This second entry in the enlightenment-inspired Terra Ignota sequence is a book of reveals, as over three days the consequences of book one shatters the world’s political system. Palmer’s utopia is rotten — in search of peaceful pluralism humanity has surrendered progress, morals, gender, and religion, but this can be sustained no longer. Each chapter uncovers another level of betrayal, another secret, a new twist.

As with the previous book of the series, Palmer has no intention of making this an easy read. A mere Dramatis Personae is barely adequate where a recap is needed to focus the blur of characters, many of whom have a profusion of flowery names and titles. Scenes are dialogue-heavy, awash with the unreliable narrator’s monologues and fourth-wall breaking. It’s a book where relating the series of events eludes me — I’m in the flow, inhaling the world through the layering of conversations and debates, immensely enjoyable in the moment, but frustrating later recall.

It’s a narrative built on weaponised sexual transgression. It’s an extensive debate on philosophy, gender, and religion. It deliberately obfuscates the boundary between technology and miracle, doubling down with an unreliable narrator. It is by turns performatively pretentious, preachy, and full of melodramatic weeping epiphanies. I should not like it, but I love it. It’s messy, demanding feeling over comprehension, seeping into your flesh as you read. Everyone will experience this book differently — my experience was intoxicating.

So many of these essays went over my head, but I enjoyed the challenge. I particularly valued the essays that placed writing in the context of their time, giving me a deeper understanding of the imagery and messages.

Anamorphic Estrangements of Science Fiction, Matthew Beaumont ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The anamorphosis in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors demonstrates that reality can be altered through changes in our cultural perceptions.

Posits that the novum of SF acts anamorphically, estranging us from our reality and offering a dialectical perspective on opposing realities.

Spectacle, Technology and Colonialism in SF Cinema, John Rieder ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Argues that special effects in SF cinema have replaced the cognitive exploration of the speculative with overpowering sensory overload — absorption over Brechtian theatre. 

The Urban Question in New Wave SF, Rob Latham ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The economic shocks of the 70s lead to collapse, defunding, and waves of privatisation. New wave urban dystopias and technocratic monumentalism were a reaction to the crisis of capitalist urbanism, characterised by the extreme es of development and decay, progress and poverty.

Utopian Art and Art in Utopia in The Dispossessed and Blue Mars, William J Burling ⭐⭐⭐

Examines music in the Dispossessed and argues that utopian art needs to abandon the forms dictated under capitalism’s means of production — our artistic and aesthetic assumptions are dictated by art’s trade value and ownership, our enjoyment is prescribed by societal ideologies.

Dense and difficult to parse.

The Singularity is Here, Steven Shiviro ⭐⭐⭐

Analyses Accelerando as a melioristic post-scarcity techno utopia that remains anchored by the capitalist economics of computation. Argues that our singularity is already here, it was born when capital became divorced from reality - the gold standard, derivatives, monetarism.

Ken Macleod’s Permanent Revolution: Utopian Possible Worlds, History and the Augenblick in the Fall Revolution Quartet, Phillip Wegner ⭐⭐⭐

A great overview of the fall quartet and its diversity of utopias. The message of the essay passed me by, but it was enjoyable.

Utopia and Science Fiction Revisited, Andrew Milner ⭐⭐⭐

An interesting discussion on the definition of genre and its boundaries with general literature.

Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory, China Miéville ⭐⭐⭐

Exploration of the boundary between SF and fantasy. This is academic in its language, but I found Miéville’s analysis of the literature of genre definition enlightening.

Marxism, Cinema and Some Dialectics of Science Fiction and Film Noir, Carl Freedman ⭐⭐

Exploring the dialectical tension in Marxism through the antithetical elements of the genres of SF and noir. Seems tenuous.

Species and Species-being: Alienated Subjectivity and the Commodification of Animals, Sherryl Vint ⭐⭐

Argues that animal labour’s contribution to capital accumulation should be recognised as an exploitation of sentients, drawing parallels with the underpeople of Norstrillia.

Weimar SF Film Criticism During the Stabilisation Period, Iris Luppa ⭐

An essay describing an essay on Metropolis - might as well read the original. Then analyses the obscure Frau im Monday. Dnf

Towards A Revolutionary Science Fiction: Althusser’s Critique Of Historicity, Darren Jorgensen ⭐

Far over my head. Dnf

Cherryh’s quotidian universe of traders, stations, and planets is the space operatic backdrop for an intense bottle episode of politics and conflict. The single point of view of the Hani captain is in sharp contrast to the action-driven modern multi-pov epics of contemporary SF, allowing for a more intimate character story full of introspection and interior monologues. That isn’t to say that Cherryh can’t do action — her infrequent conflicts are fast-paced and pack a powerful punch, bracketed as they are by contrasting quiet interludes.

While occasionally the Hani can feel somatically like humans with fur, Cherryh excels at manifesting the alien through their social differences - female-only crews, clan power struggles, loyalty and betrayal. By concentrating on the captain exclusively, we’re submerged in the culture of the Hani, though that can leave other perspectives, such as the outsider, frustratingly undeveloped in this short novel. Her realistic portrayal of the language barriers between species, and their subsequent pidgin English dialogue, prevents the reader from a deep connection beyond the Hani, but succeeds in immersing the reader in the captain’s personal experience of negotiating perpetual cultural dissonance.

There’s no radical social SF thesis on display here, instead this is a competent space opera adventure story that’s heavy on the politics. It’s a slice of life, in a broader universe, where a single conflict is worked out across just three stations and a planet. That deep focus, both on character and story, rewards those seeking the worldbuilding and prepared to read on in her universe, but may disappoint those looking for a more epic and action-oriented tale.