Book Review: The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang

Linguistics science fiction that isn't just the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis redux? And that will emotionally devastate you? Hook it to my veins.

The first thing you need to know about The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang is that none of the characters in it are human, and that's great. 

It's not at all surprising that space-faring science fiction tends to focus on situations that at least contain some humans, even when they're a mixed species galaxy. Writing the alien is, I imagine, pretty hard, because aliens that feel properly alien but are still written to be accessible to a reader's emotions surely take some work to get right. It's a tight balance. I don't blame people for not doing it. But when someone does... it's always a little bit exciting. If I'm going to imagine a galaxy that contains a wide array of sentient life, it's nice to get a chance to revel in the unfamiliarity of it, to truly explore what that imagined spectrum of life looks like.

Huang predominantly explores that unfamiliarity via the medium of language, unsurprisingly given the novella's title. The main character, Ro, is a linguist, who has trained hard to become fluent in one specific language but with a lot of facility in a wide array of others. Moreover, Huang has written him as someone gregarious and chatty, whose internal monologue (and external dialogue, sometimes) is peppered with little factoids about this or that language and how it relates to culture and physiology of this or that species.

But Huang also takes care to embed Ro's narrative in his own body, as well as his thoughts about those of other species. While they never provide a full, clear description - the typical look in the mirror scene of the start of many novels - Ro experiences the world in terms of his physiology, and that is deftly conveyed in his internal monologue. We know he is furred, that he has two hearts, we know about his empathic capabilities, the shape of the world he lives in and how that reflects the shape of his own body. It's very well done, and very necessary. If a story is going to explore a perspective outside of the humanoid this way, downplaying it takes away half of the fun. 

Ro is, in mind and body, the perfect balance of strange and accessible, not least because of his own alienation within his society. He feels like an outsider, someone whose behaviour doesn't quite meet the demands of his elders, and in that difference he gives us a window into what that normal looks like, and what the deviation from it feels like for Ro. He is the ideal window into a story that goes on to focus on these kinds of alienations and disconnections.

The second thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is that it spans a whole universe of worlds, and their interlocking needs and differences. In brief, deft strokes, Huang manages to create the sense of a vast, complex and interlocking, galaxy spanning set of polities, not just through Ro's understanding of language, but in a wider, political sense. This is a universe whose function demands the constant mining and utilisation of a specific resource - meridian - to bridge the gaps between worlds. Many of those worlds, including Ro's own, would cease to function without it and lack the means to produce their own basic needs, right down to oxygen. While the story focuses in on Orro - Ro's world - there are constant nods and gestures to the other places within it, their needs, their respective status compared to Orro, their political inclinations and oppositions. Huang has the knack of explaining little but giving just a big enough suggestion of it to let me nod and carry on. Everything has enough sense to fit with intuition, to imply the necessary complexity, without having to get into the weeds of intergalactic trade routes. For which I'm grateful, because that's not really what I'm here for reading (sorry economics nerds). But it's also very difficult to do well, and a skill I think is particularly critical for novella authors.

There's a narrowing of priorities necessary to make a good novella, to cutting all the things that need to be cut to make something substantial fit into the space of 155 pages as this book does. There are a lot of ways to achieve it, but Huang has cut themself off from a lot of them by going for this high stakes - because boy the stakes are indeed high - and wide space narrative. And so, if they can't focus in tight and small, they instead have to skim things, hint things, let the reader do some of the work of embedding this world into plausibility. Luckily, they have done so masterfully.

The third thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is that even if you see the end coming, even if you know what the story is going to tell you about this world before you get there, the revelation is still going to hurt. Ask me how I know. I had an inkling early on that I might know where some of the clues were pointing, but it truly did not matter one bit. The discovery, the way Huang set up and deployed the information the book coalesces around, does not rely on surprise to deliver its value.

Such plot summary as I'm willing to give is this: Ro is a linguist studying to make what's called a "jump", that transports him into the body of an alien race called the Star Eaters. It's a rare talent for linguists on his world, but a necessary and highly honoured one, on that Ro is desperate to achieve as a way to prove his worth to the society he struggles to fit into (despite his great talent for languages). And, despite and because of his doubts about himself, he succeeds. The Language of Liars is the story of what happens when he does so.

It's about language, about relationships between people, about exploitation and the weight of moral decisions, and who gets to make them. And it's about the big impacts of small decisions, not just the sweeping horrors of the universe but the tiny, individual atrocities that can be committed too. It handles all of those things incredibly well, bringing them together to deliver a gut punch at the end that gets into a lot of big ideas about how history and politics work, and what the right choice is in a hard place.

And a last, little, enormous thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is one you'll only learn properly if you read it yourself: that it is an incredibly bold book, because it leaves you in a state of unresolved emotion that is far more productive than any tidy conclusion would be. Huang has made such a good decision in how they close this story, and the sort of thoughts they leave the reader to experience in the aftermath.

That ending, that sucker punch and the refusal to give the reader an easy closure, is the capstone of a bold, interesting, deep book, and a very worthy end indeed to the complexity of the story they've given us up until that point. The Language of Liars is an exquisitely formed novella, a stunning example of what good writing, good ideas and a willingness to do something different can achieve, without the need for sprawl.

And it's a book of science fiction linguistics that isn't just a rehash of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That's a gold star right there.

--

The Math

Highlights: a story situated well in alien mind and culture, deep and full use of language to great effect, big stakes tackled thoughtfully

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: S. L. Huang, The Language of Liars, [Tordotcom, 2026].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: Look Out for the Little Guy, by Rob Kutner

Ants! Ants! Metafictional narratives!

When I was reading this book, the quote that was bouncing around in my mind, over and over again, was something attributed to Dolly Parton:

“It costs a lot to look this cheap.”

Parton was talking about fashion, but it applies, in a somewhat meandering sense, to literature, and particularly to Look Out for the Little Guy, the alleged autobiography of Scott Lang, alias Ant-Man, the size-changing, ant-commanding hero from the Marvel Cinematic Universe played by Paul Rudd. I will dispense with the mouse-enforced kayfabe on this book and refer to this book by its actual author, Rob Kutner, who wrote two books with Jon Stewart (America: the Book and Earth: the Book) which had amused me greatly when I was younger. There’s something unbecoming about the whole charade of pretending this book was written by a fictional superhero; Kutner’s name is absent from the cover and can only be divined by opening a few pages (admittedly, it does lead to a very funny joke in the acknowledgements section at the end), the kind of elevation of fantasy over reality that companies like Disney impose to both keep the magic alive no matter the cost and obscure the effort of workers who make the magic possible. I don’t know how Kutner felt about this, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Throughout this book, I kept thinking about how people tolerate in fiction what they’d never tolerate in reality. The most striking and obvious example of this is violence, even horrific violence, of the horror movie or war movie variety. In comedies, we tolerate obnoxious people because they are funny, but we’d seldom ever actually want to actually be around such people. This book manages such an effect on a structural level, or a genre level, as it is written in the style of one of those inoffensively droll celebrity memoirs that were concocted by publishers and written under contract, possibly by ghostwriters (as Kutner is acknowledged to be in-universe), and most obnoxiously feel the need to dispense inane, banal life advice as if it were holy writ. But this time, you see, it’s coming from a superhero.

One particular memoir came back to me as I read this book: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. Both books, accepting the conceit of the novel under review for a moment, are about interesting people with interesting experiences recounting them for the benefit and interest of the masses who will never experience such things—let’s be honest, for most people being an astronaut is as fantastical as being a superhero, as we will experience neither over the course of our mundane existences. Each is a capable raconteur of rare anecdotes, with a sense of humor, a sense of place, and a sense of wonder. Each, also, feels the need to end many of those interesting anecdotes with a hackneyed life lesson, like “never give up” or other such platitudes delivered with the weight of gospel at the end of children’s cartoon episodes. Each book succeeds, mostly, as a platter of sweets, each dazzlingly unique, each coalescing into a delicious range of flavors, and then periodically devolves into something very, very bland, the potential of the presentation being squandered for a brief moment. I wanted Hadfield to just be the space nerd he was born to be, and I wanted Scott Lang to be the superhero he had thrust upon him by Hank Pym.

But one of those books is memoir, and one of them is fiction masquerading as memoir. The latter wears the costume well, but the fictionality of the enterprise leads to a markedly different effect. The knowledge that Scott Lang’s experiences are fictional draws the reader’s attention to the psychological realism underpinning Kutner’s writing. Yes, the flashiest parts of the chronological narrative are summaries of Marvel movies with Lang’s characteristic wisecracking, but it is in the parts between the big fights where the writing really shines. Kutner-as-Lang talks a lot about his relationships—with his ex-wife, with his daughter, with his ex-wife’s new boyfriend, with his coworkers in the Avengers. In doing so, the narrative has this profound levelling effect—you see that his daughter Maggie and Steve Rogers are cut from the same human stuff. You are pulled into the Marvel universe because Steve Rogers is treated, ultimately, as some guy in a suit.

Kutner’s writing really shines in segments discussing a time between films, when there were no villains to fight: the period after the battle at the airport in Germany, when he is sentenced to house arrest for a period of years. His experience is almost monastic, a situation where he has no choice but to probe the depths of his own thoughts. He can get deliveries, of course, and that includes a gaming console, but even so he has to confront himself. He gets new hobbies. He finds ever more ways to occupy his time, in a way that has to have been informed by the real-world experience of the COVID pandemic (I had several little twitches as I could see myself and my family in these anecdotes).

What I ultimately think made this book so readable is that it was written by a professional writer interpreting the work of professional writers (among other film professionals, of course) rather than a professional writer interpreting the recollections of a non-writer, or a non-writer trying their hand at creating a narrative out of the chaos and randomness of everyday experience. Everything feels very coherent in this book; stories and opinions and, dare I say, life advice are all selected in such a way that they create a single whole artistic unit. As Mark Twain wrote:

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

As such, the fiction holds together while drawing attention to its own fictionality; you understand that the people Scott talks about are all nonexistent, but they feel consciously and deliberately well drawn in a way most great characters don’t. Most characters don’t need to do that in the first place, as the narrative structure around them is not aping reality so bluntly, and as such they are not “colliding” with reality in your mind, creating sparks of differentiation. If we read a bad celebrity memoir, we roll our eyes because they have not managed to craft a narrative out of reality. In this book, we are engaged because Rob Kutner has assembled a compelling narrative out of unreality, and that is what good fiction does.

I’m afraid I’ve alienated some potential readers because I’ve made it sound like a bizarre postmodern novel that is skeptical towards many metanarratives. The actual experience of reading this book on a purely surface level is breezy, fun, and amusing. Disney’s stunt of presenting this book as the creation of a fictional character obscures the fundamentally created aspect of the narrative, and as such the result of a human creator, Rob Kutner. Mr. Kutner has left you in good hands, and it is good fun for any Marvel fan. It just has some layers, if you’re inclined to peel the onion a bit.

Reference: Kutner, Rob. Look Out for the Little Guy [Hyperion Avenue, 2023].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Microreview: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Will we be able to prevent the end of the world if we’re having so much fun with it?

Just like Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a dystopia of absolute control sustained by brutal coercion, whereas Brave New World showed it was easier to sustain it by seduction, the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to imagine a Skynet that intervenes in the timeline to ensure its own existence, but instead of bothering with assassin robots to enforce its violent rule, it preemptively lures humankind into passive obedience via irresistible apps and delightful virtual environments. This time, the scruffy resistance fighter who jumps from the future to prevent the machine takeover doesn’t come with the warning that AI will seize the bigger arsenal, but that we will be too absorbed by our phones to do anything about it.

This time traveler doesn’t bring the most persuasive sales pitch. At the start of the film, he randomly shows up at a diner and asks who among the present is willing to join him in his unspecified quest to save the world. Understandably, no one believes him. In his defense, let’s keep in mind that he’s given the same speech at the same diner over a hundred times, and it’s always ended in disaster, so by now he’s tired of pleading. For some reason, he’s convinced that that place contains a set of people with the precise combination of skills that will help his mission, and in all his attempts, he’s yet to find the right selection of team members.

What follows from that point on is a dual narrative structure: on one thread we watch the improvised squad of heroes clumsily and hilariously evade police cars, masked gunmen, paid actors, a flashmob of hypnotized teenagers and a certain nightmarish monstrosity I won’t spoil, while on the other thread we watch the respective backstories of some of our heroes, who have already had some unpleasant experiences with the convergence of digital trends that will result in AI’s tyranny. In those flashback segments we learn about addictive videogames, consciousness uploading, a clandestine cloning business, the trivialization of school shootings, the omnipresence of militaristic propaganda, the difficulty of living off the grid and a terrifying form of mass mind control—one third of this movie has enough material to fill a whole season of Black Mirror, except with an actual sense of humor and sans the nihilistic posturing.

The time traveler’s mission turns out to be rather straightforward; the hard part is getting from point A to point B in one piece. Most of the film’s entertainment value comes from watching complete amateurs die in ridiculous ways. And that’s an obvious point of self-critique; you can’t write an action script about the toxic potential of entertainment without acknowledging your complicity in the problem. Accordingly, the time traveler warns against the easy promise of a neat plot with a satisfying ending, which is the AI’s favorite way of distracting humans from their oppression. And the film itself avoids giving us a happy ever after; the ending gives very strong hints that the AI has far more control over the events than the time traveler realizes. Maybe that’s the most ingenious form of propaganda: letting us enjoy a story where we believe we have a fighting chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Microreview: Redux Redux

Beware when you fight with monsters…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled o another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

Irene is no longer the person she knew herself to be. In the film Redux Redux, one of the best science fictional examples of literalizing a feeling I’ve ever seen, Irene is stuck in an endless cycle of hatred, ruminating on her unprocessed grief and pursuing the same quest thousands of times because she feels unable to return to her own life. In every universe she’s visited, her heartbroken counterpart has committed suicide, so she believes (there’s the classic Lie that a protagonist typically believes at the start of a story) that repeating the perpetual hunt for the killer is the only alternative she has left.

In general, this film delivers information in a carefully measured manner. The editing at the beginning, which repeats Irene’s vengeance in a rapid-fire sequence, seems on first watch to be telling a time travel story, and the script is comfortable with letting us sit with that confusion until it’s the proper moment to reveal the actual story.

The multiverse-crossing routine Irene has established for herself mirrors what real life looks like for someone caught in a self-destructive pattern. She no longer keeps a job or friends. She has no other task beyond chasing the killer and making him pay again and again. She has brief flings with the same cute guy from a grief support group in every universe, much like someone may serially hook up with thousands of casual partners looking for the same ideal in all of them.

It’s only when Irene unexpectedly rescues the killer’s next victim that it begins to feel conceivable for her to live for something other than anger.

This other character, Mia, gives Irene a mirror for her own situation. She’s only a kid, but Mia has been bounced from one foster home to another; jumping between universes isn’t any weirder for her. She’s eager to join Irene’s bloodthirsty campaign against the serial killer, and that’s what finally makes Irene realize that the life she’s leading isn’t something she’d want to inflict on anyone. For the first time in too long, she has a reason to stop. The problem is Mia doesn’t want to.

Redux Redux makes efficient use of its minimal special effects to keep its multiversal plot at just the right measure of complicated. Most of the time, it looks like a standard noir tale of self-perpetuating violence, but its allegory for unresolved trauma is never far from view. In the middle of its runtime we follow a side quest that gives us a quick glimpse of a larger underground community of multiversal travelers, but fortunately, it doesn’t draw too much attention away from the central problem about Irene and Mia.

If some horrible harm has been done to you, perhaps you’ve spent your waking hours thinking of the countless gruesome ways you’d like to take revenge. Redux Redux is saying: if you could really do that, if you could enact all your fantasies of getting even, it would destroy you. It would consume your life and leave nothing, and the people who make a living from fueling that obsession are the last people you should trust. And if you find yourself already down that road, saving someone else from it may show you your own way out.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Philip A. Suggars

 An impressive multiversal picaresque that has maybe a few too many meanders

I’m not typically one to start a review with comps, but I think that might be the best way to situate the very interesting, quite deliberate mashup of influences that is The Lighthouse at the End of the World. 

Our main character, Oyster, is a smalltime gang member running cons in London who discovers an undercurrent of magic in London and stumbles into a tangle of alternate worlds, including an alternate London. With that setup, there are very definite nods to the British portal fantasy tradition here; you can see the dialogue to Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. But those nods, while affectionate, are also critical. Forgive a wretched colonial for perhaps not quite getting the class nuance, but the protagonists of those classics are all, to a greater or lesser extent, posh. Oyster and his associates are very much not that, and neither are essentially any of the people he meets during his adventures. And none of these books really feature cities, indeed, some are visibly hostile to them. Perhaps the layered Londons of V E Schwab’s Shades of Magic series are closer cousins, but even there the vibe is different, the crime more gentleperson thief than street kid tough. The Lighthouse at the End of the World is grimily, borderline threateningly, defiantly urban, and it is also, in an engaging, accessible way, really quite weird.

At heart this is a picaresque novel, with a likeable, flawed rogue (Oyster) falling into scrapes, travelling to strange places, and having adventures which poke obliquely at issues of contemporary relevance (climate change; ecofascism; capitalist excess). But it’s a multiversal, biohacked version thereof. The worlds oyster travels to range from unfamilar to bizarre – a beach packed with the lost detritus of urban development (dead tube trains, bicycles, office chairs) was particularly striking. And the creatures and people he meet are similarly so, from slightly insectoid fairies (?) to semi-biological flying machines to adorable beetle pets which nest against your rib cage (this last being an example of a light but effective thread of body horror throughout).

The nature of this sort of novel is the plot tumbles along and to some extent just happens to the protagonist. There is still enough action, contrasted with points of calm, to keep things interesting, but I could have wished a little bit more focus. I saw when looking up some details online for this review that the book is listed as “Book 1 of the Cities of the Drift,” and its status as Book 1 of a series (not something clearly advertised in the ARC copy I read) might explain the slightly unsatisfying conclusion, and even somewhat excuse it; it is a good setup for more books set in this world. But in my view the book isn’t quite, in its own terms, a wholly satisfactory conclusion to a wholly satisfying plot arc in and of itself.

Suggars’ character work is effective but thinly sketched, with the exception of a compelling, complete central character in Oyster. Fantasy fronted by firmly working class characters is rarer than it should be, and he is an excellent portrayal of such. Flawed, prickly, a bit lost, but with a basic decency at his core. He’s also never patronised by the narrative, again something that is rarer than ideal in this space. The rest of the cast, though, is closer to Dickensian caricature than realist portrait, though I do think this is deliberate, and effective in creating the appropriate atmosphere if not quite the depth I might ideally prefer. On the other hand, I’d give bonus points to Suggars for the lively and well-realised sometimes very odd non-human characters that populate the novel.  

One particular narrative choice which grated was the attempts to render dialect and accent in the text. It’s clearly deliberate and part of the project – working class, street-level urban fantasy – but doesn’t quite work for me. Not, as far as I can tell, an inaccurate representation of vocabulary and accent (Suggars is from South London), but it’s just hard to do that in a way that reads well and I don’t think it quite succeeds. And this isn’t only true of Oyster’s South London cant, the (hugely entertaining) Marya Petrovna who doesn’t speak English as her first language also comes across just a little unnaturally. This may not bother others, but for me pulled me – significantly, at times – out of the otherwise really well crafted, slightly hallucinatory fever dream setting of the novel.

Ultimately, The Lighthouse at the End of the World reads very much like a first novel (Suggars already has a number of very good short stories in print), but a good first novel. Not everything entirely lands. There’s the occasional (metaphorical) missed dot on an i or cross on a t. But the creativity and eye for imagery lingers more than the flaws for me. A good read in its own right, and an even better signal for what might come next.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Unapologetically working class, street level fantasy
• A well-developed taste for the bizarre
• Flashes of brilliant prose

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference:  Philip A. Suggars, The Lighthouse at the End of the World [Titan, 2025].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social 

Festival View: IT'S HARD NOT TO BE ROMANTIC ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

Sometimes, a title hides the way the film you’re about to watch will move. Other times, it says exactly what kind of world you’re about to step into. This latter segment is the realm in which It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time Travel falls into. 

The premise is simple: an ex-con named Swan’s weed-loving best friend Randall has decoded the secret to romantic time-travel that has been hidden in the film Somewhere in Time. To combat this secret information from getting out, the rest of Hollywood has flooded the zone with their constant stream of impossible time-travel films. He’s deduced that the real secret to time-travel hides within copious amounts of marijuana, falling asleep, knowing what someone looks like and where they’ll be at some point in time, and love. This he uses to go back to the party that was taking place in the house where Randall lives at the same time as the robbery Swan was framed for. There, Swan meets an incredibly charming young true crime podcast aficionado who apparently likes ‘em a little scruffy. They flirt and try to “solve” the crime. Well, they mostly flirt and make brief mentions of the crime. Randall spends the time eating edibles and having adventures...and being chased by “the golden girls.”

If this sounds like a lot to pack into twelve minutes, you’re right, but the script by director Michael Charron is just about perfect and hits the beats at every moment. It’s a remarkable act of content stuffing, especially when he’s also able to give things time to land with appropriate impact. The direction is incredibly solid, and the cinematography and editing by Steven Gunter only helps put the entire package together in a way that feels both polished and immediate. That’s a fun realm for a work of fiction that literally dwells in the not-so-distant past. Production wise, it’s a simple series of locations made to feel foreign through character interaction, which probably speaks to the actors ability to play the room. 

Let me explain:

There is a genre-acting theory that a character makes the setting. If a character reacts to the environment in a way that shows the foreignness of what is otherwise a normal situation, it is what’s establishing the setting far more than any prop or piece of set design. Hence an actor can change a romance into a horror film, a science fiction film into a stoner comedy. That’s what’s going on here, because there are elements of romance, stoner comedy and science fiction all roller-up into a single, tight, twist-ended package, and there is a character who is embodying each of those settings with their performance in the piece. Randall provides the stoner comedy with not only the prodigious amount of herb he eats, but by a reaction to the world that is a little bit Cheech and a whole lotta Chong. Swan delivers the romance by his focus on the new woman he’s just met at the expense of the weird, messed up situation he’s in vis a vie his time travel. Liv provides the science fiction by reacting to the world she finds herself in with a happy mix of confusion, disassociation, and utter reaction. They are creating different genre settings within the same visual frame. I love that. 

And I should mention that Liv, played by Alyssia Rivera, is absolutely eye-gluingly perfect in her role. She’s insanely charismatic, and certainly out of Swan’s league, but more importantly, she’s believable in a world where suspension of disbelief is exactly as difficult as the plot it works in. None of this should be easy to accept, but somehow she makes it feel so incredibly natural. We tie into Liv, and her placement in the universe (multiverse?) is one of the most important drivers of the story.  She’s an actress to watch.

I would be remiss to not mention that another film I’ve written of lately, Fireflies at Dusk, dwells in the same cinematic region. In fact, it turns out that the filmmakers know each other. They both reference, obliquely in the case of Fireflies and explicitly here, Somewhere in Time. Both make excellent use of the idea of that long-ago premise to explore contemporary cinematic ideas. Really, there’s just no way an audience who likes to laugh would ever reject either of these. While Fireflies at Dusk is about the class between past and present, It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time-Travel is far more about the actual petty complications of time traveling stoners, a problem that we are certain to encounter as the technology becomes available and decriminalization spreads ever-wider. 

I will also say that this is a film that shows things like Dude, Where’s My Car are valid expressions of science fiction. I have long held that to be not only true, but vital to a genre that often eats its own tail and says that it’s reinventing itself. Science fiction comedy does not always have to be high-brow (like Buckaroo Bonzai) nor even middle brow (like Teenagers from Space) but can comfortably sit among the types of comedy that appeal to smart teens and 50-somethings who occasionally run Pineapple Express-Ted double feature evenings. I love when we still have to think, but might still get a classic He’s so wasted! Laugh out of things. 

Keep an eye out for this one. 

--

Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Book Review: When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift

The journey from here to there you've been waiting for

Cover Artist: Jack Smyth

I write this review the weekend after When There Are Wolves Again won the BSFA prize for best novel of 2025 (published late Oct 2025 in the UK and Mar 2026 in the US). I had been on UK radio the week before telling people it was going to go on and win a load of prizes. I’m glad to have been right.

So you can stop there if you wish. When There Are Wolves Again is a triumph of a novel – you should go read it.

For those of you who remain, here’s a more detailed review of this exceptional novel.

 

When There Are Wolves Again follows two women from 2020 through to 2070. Both women are young at the beginning and we travel with them through one version of the energy transition and how a society wrestles, successfully, with the consequences of climate change.

 

Yes. This is a speculative climate novel. It is also the speculative climate novel I’ve been waiting for, for a decade since I spoke at a conference in London and gave a speech saying that climate fiction was following behind the science and there were no great stories about climate yet.

Why it sits in this space for me is threefold.

 

Firstly, this isn’t dystopia and nor is it hopepunk (if we can accept such a classification). This is a contemporary speculative novel that is about science and hope. It is classic SF in the sense that it posits the use of science to solve our problems and presents us with a roadmap that outlines what that could look like in one version of this world.

 

Yet it departs from golden age, NASA sponsored vibes in several key ways. It is about community, it is also about ordinary people who are struggling to make sense not just of the world but of themselves and out of their struggles we see choices that impact the world around them.

 

This centring on a journey through the troubles rather than existing in the aftermath of failure or in some far distant world where all our problems have been magically solved is central to why this feels like what will come to be seen as the defining text of climate fiction.

 

Secondly, this story is situated. Most importantly, it isn’t situated in America and it very definitely has no sense of destiny of exceptionalism to it. Swift writes of the UK with a deftness that captures the heart of Britain in the 2020s but extrapolates what this looks like across the next 50 years with a delicate touch. This lightness in the face of catastrophe exists because she has chosen to follow two women, Lucy and Hester, as they live through these times. These women aren’t chosen ones, they’re not technocrats or genius techbros – they’re ordinary people who have (extra)ordinary lives whose choices where they are situated make the difference. It’s clear all the way through that Hester and Lucy are a microcosm of the UK, that millions of others are acting, changing, choosing, that community is central to what allows hope to flourish and the challenge of transition to be met. I think this story could be told across a number of European countries with similar characters, but I do not think this story would survive in this form with these sentiments if situated elsewhere. This is no criticism of other places, just that Swift has localised her narrative in the most successful way possible – the UK is essential to the story she’s telling.

Third and far from final – this is a generational novel. Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, this sits with just two people and it’s as concerned with their lives as it is with anything else. Technology here, politics, utility, they are all secondary to how two women navigate a world they want to live in. There’re no grand gestures, no sweeping social policies or discoveries that these two enact. They simply live and we follow them. It’s generational specifically in the relationships Lucy and Hester have – from grandmothers to wolves to brothers and strangers, to found family and networked community – Wolves is about how human networks make the difference, not science on its own. You could argue that human networks are the substrate for politics and, sure, but the politics in Swift’s story is the thing you and I do from day to day to lift up the people around us, not what our voted representatives do in their grand palaces.

More than this, the story decentres humanity as part of its narrative. We don’t get points of view of animals or anything so cliché. Instead we see a humanity on a journey to reclaim the truth that it is part of this world, not over and above it, not to one side. It is a decentring that brings into focus the damage of an exploitative capitalism and questions our willing collaboration in myths that elevate humanity above everything else – including that which allows us to live in the first place.

Swift, in decentring humanity has written something uniquely humane and hopeful. This is a tremendous novel that treads lightly and doesn’t trumpet its achievements because to do so would be anathema to the world she is writing into being. I have been reflecting upon it in the weeks since I finished it and keep coming back to this: it’s a world I would actually want to live in and that, for speculative fiction, is extremely rare.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Wolves!
• Hope and science
• Two women making choices that change the world for people around them

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, a meditative hopeful story that stares the challenges ahead of us in the face and offers a hopeful solution to the journey we have to make.

Reference: Swith, E. J., When There Are Wolves Again [Arcadia 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.