This Blog is going to feature reviews mainly and other occasional pieces orientated to the future. Nick Hubble @thehubble101.bsky.social @[email protected]
Prospective Cultures
This is the post excerpt.
50-Year Reread of The Lord of the Rings – 2: On Hobbits
I reread LOTR 50 years after I first read it, age 10, over the winter of 1975-76:
Introduction: Three Different Books
As I noted in my last post on how LOTR is a sequel to The Hobbit, the reason I wanted to read LOTR at the age of 10 was because I was ‘interested in hobbits’ and the final page of The Hobbit instructed people like me to go on and read LOTR. Ironically, when I did this, I didn’t read the Prologue but dived straight into Chapter 1, ‘A Long-Expected Party’. This was ironic because the Prologue seems to be purposefully designed to meet that desire to learn a lot more about Hobbits and begins: ‘This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history’. However, I think it’s true to say you learn more about Hobbits from the actual novel and that what the Prologue does mostly is to try and translate the more incongruous elements of Shire society, such as the existence of pipe tobacco and post offices in Hobbiton and Bywater, into accordance with the epic-fantasy scope of the rest of LOTR. Hence, the Prologue is divided into quasi-serious sections such as ‘Concerning Pipe-weed’ and ‘Of the Ordering of the Shire’. In the latter, we learn that the ‘only real official’ in the Shire is the Mayor, who is also Postmaster and First Shirriff and therefore responsible for managing the Messenger Service and the Watch. This all sounds reassuringly like the language of fantasy (in Terry Pratchett vein) but it’s only necessary to read a few sentences concerning the preparations for Bilbo’s long-expected Party to realise that the Shire can’t really work in the manner described by the Prologue and is instead more like pre-WW1 rural England (according to Hammond & Scully’s LOTR Reader’s Companion, Tolkien once described the Shire as like a rural Warwickshire village of about the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee):
The next day more carts rolled up the Hill, and still more carts. There might have been some grumbling about ‘dealing locally’, but that very week orders began to pour out of Bag End for every kind of provision, commodity, or luxury that could be obtained in Hobbiton or Bywater or anywhere in the neighbourhood. People became enthusiastic; and they began to tick off the days on the calendar; and they watched eagerly for the postman, hoping for invitations [. . . .] A notice appeared on the gate at Bag End: NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON PARTY BUSINESS [. . . .] A draft of cooks, from every inn and eating-house for miles around, arrived to supplement the dwarves and other odd folk that were quartered at Bag End.
This clearly isn’t any form of medieval society, such as those in the fantasy of Robert Jordan or George R.R. Martin. We can infer the existence of banks and tradesmen etc from the references to ‘business’, ‘orders’ and so on. There’s no evidence of industrial production – no repeat of the mention of bicycles in the early editions of The Hobbit – but the sensibility is a bit too modern for the Shire to be a version of pre-industrial 18th century England. The result is that it does read like late Victorian/ Edwardian rural England as remembered from childhood, which is indeed how Tolkien remembered it. In other words, the temporality of the Shire was already internally recursive when LOTR was published in the 1950s, as it reflects Tolkien’s sensibility in the late 1930s (when he wrote these chapters), which in turn reflects his nostalgic feelings for his pre-WW1 childhood.
An extra layer of recursion, is added for the reader. The Hobbit and most of the rest of Fellowship were written in the 1930s, but both are known to us as texts of the 1950s, when the second edition of The Hobbit and the first edition of LOTR were published. I – like many others of broadly my age (young boomers and old X-ers) then read these 30s/50s texts in the 1970s. Many of the other children’s books I liked as a child (and which filled the shelves in the junior section of West Wickham Public Library) were from that same oddly extended period. For example, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons was first published in 1930 and the 12th and last in that series, Great Northern came out in 1947. Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street was first published in 1937 and the sequel Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street came out in 1956. Broadly speaking, as historians such as David Edgerton have demonstrated, the 1950s was a kind of resumption of the 1930s as though the war hadn’t happened. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books were all first published in the 1950s, but in many respects might have been 1930s novels. The first few of Michael Bond’s Paddington books, which appeared from 1958 onwards, also belong to that period of mid-century English children’s literature. And things hadn’t changed that much by the 1970s because although values were changing in the 1960s particularly for those who came of age in that decade, the mid-century values of the 1930s-1950s remained contemporary for those who were older and their children. Therefore, if you were someone like me, born in the 1960s but whose parents had been born before the war, reading these mid-century books in the 1970s seemed in keeping with the values of home life. Sure, as the 1970s progressed and I entered my teens at Hayes Secondary School during the period of punk, I was aware that times were changing but by then I already had a nostalgic attitude to the Shire, despite – as I noted in the first post of this series – coming eventually to identify mostly with the orcs. So, when rereading the chapters in the Shire, as I did earlier this winter, I instinctively react warmly to them, as I would to most of the other above examples (apart from the Narnia books, which I never particularly liked as discussed in a previous post). In this respect, the Shire has a nostalgic quality which ties in not so much to a specific historical period as to the mid-century imaginary (in turn, oriented towards an imagined Edwardian golden age), which has been successively rekindled in later generations, thus preserving a nostalgia for social conditions and values that nobody living today has ever experienced firsthand and which, in any case, probably never existed in that form anyway.
Nevertheless, whatever the exact temporal and affective status of the Shire as depicted in the early chapters of the Fellowship, it is still infinitely preferable to the dry account of Hobbits given in the Prologue. For a start, there are female Hobbits in the opening chapters, whereas the only implication we have of their existence in the Prologue lies in these lines:
The houses and the holes of Shire-hobbits were often large, and inhabited by large families. (Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves).
As we critics like to say, this parenthesis – which is not a late edition to the text but was originally drafted in 1938 [i] – requires a lot of unpacking. Indeed, I can tell you now that the unpacking will continue into the next post in this series, ‘Elves, Elf-friends and “Friends of Gandalf”’, even though there is still quite a lot of exegesis before we get to the end of this post. The first thing to say is that there is no apparent reason to include this parenthesis in the Prologue because it only really makes sense if we’ve already read LOTR. We don’t even really know who Frodo is at this point, apart from a passing reference several pages earlier to him being Bilbo’s heir (and also a reference in the original Foreword, if we happen to be reading a first edition).
I am (duh, obviously) going to discuss the queerness of Hobbits in what follows but clearly Tolkien was not here deliberately implying that Bilbo and Frodo were queer. The conscious point of the parenthesis seems rather to establish that they are exceptional in a refined sense. Much later in a September 1963 letter (No. 246 in Letters), Tolkien defines ‘exceptional hobbits’ as ‘those who had a grace or gift: a vision of beauty, and a reverence for things nobler than themselves, at war with their rustic satisfaction’. He continues by explaining that Sam is only saved from ‘rustic satisfaction’ due to his education by Bilbo and his fascination with Elves. The Gaffer and the Cotton family provide a ‘sufficient glimpse’ of non-exceptional Hobbits. The logic of the Prologue, therefore, is that some Hobbits are exceptional and some – including women and the rural working classes – are not. But this, of corse, is the logic of older-Tolkien-the-ideologist; younger-Tolkien-the-novelist fortunately displays rather better instincts. Hence, the opening chapters lay on the rustic charm and are all the better for it. As a consequence, the Shire is one of the few places in Middle-earth in which women are actually shown to exist (or haven’t understandably abandoned yet, in the manner of the Entwives).
Female Hobbits
Everyone knows there are very few female characters in LOTR (actual counts vary and often miss out some of the those I list below – see, for example, the Wikipedia page on this topic). Once the hobbits leave the Shire, there are only five named female characters in Fellowship: Lúthien, who is long dead, Arwen, who was a late insertion into the story, Celebrian (Arwen’s mother, Galadriel’s daughter, Elrond’s wife), who has left Middle-earth, and the two who actually speak, Goldberry and Galadriel (‘Should Galadriel Have Taken the Ring?’). There are also invocations of Elbereth (Sindarin name for Varda of the Valar, the creator of the stars). However, within the Shire there are a number of named female characters: Primula Brandybuck (Drogo’s wife, Frodo’s mother), Lobelia Sackville-Baggins (still after Bag End since the end of The Hobbit), Miss Melilot Brandybuck (who dances the ‘Springle-ring’ on a table with Master Everard Took at Bilbo’s party), Esmeralda Brandybuck (née Took, daughter-in-law of old Rory Brandybuck, who is Primula’s oldest brother and therefore Frodo’s uncle), Dora Baggins (Drogo’s sister, Frodo’s aunt, long-time correspondent of Bilbo), Angelica Baggins (a young Baggins who considers her face shapely), Mrs Maggot (wife of Farmer Maggot). The Maggots have three unnamed daughters. Primula is the daughter of the youngest of the Old Took’s three daughters (who we eventually learn in Appendix C to LOTR was called Mirabella; we know of the oldest of her two sisters, Bilbo’s mother Belladonna, from The Hobbit). And by implication there are other unnamed female hobbits at Bilbo’s party and elsewhere in the Shire (this might seem an obvious point which could be applied to other locations in the novel but, for example, even in Bree – the closest location in kind to the Shire – there is no real evidence of the presence of any women whatsoever).
Surprisingly, there is no mention in the Fellowship of Mrs Cotton or her daughter Rosie, who Sam eventually returns to marry. Sam and Rosie’s daughter, Elanor is born in the final chapter of LOTR, ‘The Grey Havens’, and the unpublished Epigraph to the novel includes the names of Elanor’s many younger sisters (and brothers). In the early 1950s (in Letter 131), Tolkien described Sam’s love for Rosie as ‘rustic’ and ‘absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero’s) character’. We are repeatedly going to come back to the twist by which Sam became the hero of LOTR during the course of its writing and the fact – as indicated by the 1963 letter quoted from above – that Tolkien later came to regret this. However, for the time being, the point to bear in mind is that Tolkien did at this point (which is after LOTR had been more-or-less finished but still several years before it was published) value ‘rusticity’ as an essential component of the novel. In other words, he consciously includes a relative cornucopia of female and child Hobbits in the early chapters because they are necessary to demonstrate the essential value – a kind of life force – of the Shire in the context of all else that comes in the novel. This is not to say, of course, that he feels the need to give them agential roles.
Indeed, only two of these female hobbits from the early chapters of the Fellowship actually speak and, in both cases, Tolkien employs the dialogue for comic effect. Thus, Lobelia in the opening chapter comes across as a cartoon villain when she tells Frodo, ‘You’ll live to regret it, young fellow! Why didn’t you go too? You don’t belong here; you’re no Baggins—you—you’re a Brandybuck!’ The other example is Mrs Maggot in Chapter 4, ‘A Short Cut to Mushrooms’, who calls to her husband, Farmer Maggot, as he drives Frodo, Sam and Pippin to Bucklebury Ferry, ‘You be careful of yourself, Maggot! Don’t go arguing with any foreigners, and come straight back!’ Significantly, both of these examples are directly concerned with the boundaries of the Shire: foreigners are bad and even Buckland is a dubious location. Roseanna Pendlebury, in her ongoing LOTR read-through, writes about this matter of the insularity of the Shire
There is a clear strand to me of how Tolkien conceives of insularity and willingness to take an interest in the world beyond the Shire’s borders through a lens of class – it is Frodo and Bilbo who speak with elves and dwarves, and the Gaffer and his fellows who distrust them, whose maps show only white outside the borders of the Shire. Sam exists as a cross-border person, but his interest in the elves – and in stories – seems to be linked in this section (by the Gaffer at least) with his association with the Bagginses who, it is added, taught him to read. It seems clear to me that Tolkien’s safe haven of the Shire has connections to the outside world in the elves who cross it to the Grey Havens, the dwarves who bring news, and to whom Frodo talks to find out what is afoot out in other lands. And so in this insular Shire, I feel like what is not being constructed is an idyll of isolation, but instead a stratified society in which outward-looking-ness is a trait of the middle and upper class (and, I think, portrayed as a positive one), but not shared by the working classes, who write off much of what we who have read the story before know to be true as superstitious tales.
This is true and it touches on some of the contemporary political jockeying over LOTR, with right-wing commentators such as the New York Times’s Ross Douthat claiming the novel as an example of conservative culture. A key part of the contemporary culture wars is a right-wing populist argument that the working class are instinctively conservative and community-minded, with a distrust of strangers and outsiders, and that what we might think of as liberal values are purely the product of a metropolitan elite, like Bilbo and Frodo. Although LOTR can be interpreted as supporting this position, it’s pretty clear that Tolkien is not a populist. He is on the side of Bilbo and Frodo and sees their rebellious Tookish desires to see more of the world as an understandable desire for escape from the stultifying conformity of the Shire, which nonetheless is still ultimately worth defending. Hence, we have Frodo saying in Chapter 2, ‘The Shadow in the Past’: ‘I should like to save the Shire, if I could—though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.’ This provides a contrast with Bilbo, whose attitude to the Shire is bound up with the mischievous delight he takes in playing his ‘trick’ at the end of his speech at his birthday party despite Gandalf’s evident disapproval. In this respect, Frodo is intended as a more serious version of Bilbo, who even at this early stage of the composition of LOTR is already proving a little bit too much of a freewheeling anarchic force for Tolkien’s purposes.
But while this is partly about class, it is also about gender and identity. Arguably, it’s not the middle and upper classes who have an outward-looking perspective, but queer male Hobbits, which is of course the other way of reading the parenthetical statement in the Prologue about Bilbo and Frodo being exceptional on account of not marrying and having lots of children (and thereby not supporting the twenty-furst-century desire of the authoritarian right to increase the birth rate). ‘Queer’ is a repeated term in the text. People in the Shire think it ‘queer’ that Frodo retains his robust and energetic appearance as he nears 50. Sandyman the miller tells the Gaffer that ‘Bag End’s a queer place, and its folk are queerer’, which prompts the response, ‘If that’s being queer, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts’ (hear, hear!). Sam becomes the character who uses the term most, but often reflectively. At one point, he muses, ‘Queer things you do hear these days, to be sure.’ Later on, he notes, ‘I am sorry to take leave of Master Bombadil. He’s a caution and no mistake. I reckon we may go a good deal further and see naught better, nor queerer.’ Queerness is clearly a positive virtue which is being recognised cross class (at least by Sam). By the 1930s, when Tolkien was writing, ‘queer’ already had the connotation it has today in some quarters, but more generally it was a term for being outside the norm, which doesn’t necessarily contradict the then narrower sense of the word. Therefore, it is difficult to pronounce definitively on the use of ‘queer’ in interwar texts. When blogging about queer author Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, I’ve noted the similarities between that text and The Hobbit and LOTR, but we wouldn’t call these later novels by Tolkien queer would we? But maybe we should? Especially, if we think of queerness as a fluid form of identity and sensibility, rather than as a fixed sexual identity. This is the question I’ll be focusing on in a couple of weeks’ time in the next post in this series, which as I’ve said will be titled ‘Elves, Elf-friends and “Friends of Gandalf”’.
Back to index.
[i] This parenthesis is in the first draft of the ‘Concerning Hobbits’ section of the Prologue, written during 1938-39. See Tolkien, The Return of the Shadow (Harper Collins, 2015), History of Middle-earth, vol.6, pp.310-314. Other sections in the Prologue, including the ‘Concerning Pipe-weed’ and ‘Of the Ordering of the Shire’ sections were, according to Christopher Tolkien, probably written during 1948 while his father was completing the final chapters of LOTR, which include the return to the Shire. See Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle-earth (Harper Collins, 2015), History of Middle-earth, vol.12, pp.14-15.
BSFA Awards Longlists 2026: Some Thoughts and Recommendations
The longlist of nominations is here. They are long lists but I think that is good. It’s good for writers and artists because it helps promote their work to a wider audience. It’s good for voters because we get to be reminded of the full range of work produced across the year. It’s good for critics – especially those with sociological and anthropological bent – because it’s a way to get a handle on the exact state of the field. Below, I’m going to have a look at those of the awards that particularly interest me and pick out some titles. I’m not going to discuss the Art, Audio or YA categories because I don’t think I have anything useful to say about these. I’ll start with the fiction and then go on to non-fiction and finish with the collections and anthologies.
The Best Novel category includes a huge number of good books. For example, I’ve read and very much enjoyed Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide, Nina Allan’s A Granite Silence, Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting and Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent. Plus there are a number of titles that I would like to read and will hopefully get to some of over the coming weeks: Torrey Peters, Stag Dance; Bora Chung, Red Sword; Tasha Suri, The Isle in the Silver Sea; Lorraine Wilson, The Salt Oracle; Aliya Whiteley & Oliver Langmead, City of All Seasons; Dave Hutchinson, The Essence; Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author; Helen Marshall, The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death; and others.
Obviously, I probably won’t have time to read more than one or two of those but until then I won’t be able to finalise my selection. However, the one novel that I will definitely be voting for is E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again, which I’ve reviewed for ParSec and also written about in my column in the forthcoming issue of Vector. There are good reviews of it by Cheryl Morgan (here) and Paul March Russell (here) which indicate some of the discussions about the next 50 years of British history that it provokes. I think there is a lot more to be said and it will be said one way or another but it would be great if When There Are Wolves Again makes it on to some of the big shortlists this year so that conversation can take place more prominently. So, if there is anyone reading this post who hasn’t yet read this novel, I recommend that you prioritise this one out of all the enticing options.
Best Shorter Fiction is the perhaps confusing category for both novelettes and novellas (in Hugo terms). Again, there is an abundance of good things here. I have read two, both of which I very much enjoyed: Amal El-Mohtar, The River has Roots – a beautiful tale of the borderlands with Faery that is in dialogue with Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist – and Stark Holborn’s For the Road – a trippy, supernatural Western that I simply had to read. Historically, I have tended to prioritise novels but in recent years I have found myself reading more novellas than hitherto. Going through this list, I’m going to make an effort to read EM Faulds’s Bring Me Home and Stephen Oram’s Brain Fruit and then see how I am for time.
Short Fiction is the category for short stories, which I tend to read via the medium of collections or anthologies (see further below). So, I’ve read none of these so far. What I tend to do with the BSFA awards is to read the stories at the shortlist stage and then vote according to my judgement. If I have time, I will have a look at some and vote for anything I like to be on the shortlist.
Best Short Non Fiction is obviously the most important category (!) I hope you’re all considering voting for my essay, ‘Should Galadriel Have Taken the Ring’ … However, I can’t vote for myself, so I’m going to vote for the other two essays from Speculative Insight, both of which I highly recommend: Abby Roberts’s ‘What Lies and Threats? History and Nationalist Myth-Making in The Lord of the Rings’ and Val Nolan’s ‘The Dublin Portal… Or the Dublin Intrusion?’. I also recommend taking out an annual subscription to Speculative Insight which is a bargain at A$30 (c.£15). I’m going to vote for ‘Discussing The Female Man’ (Hogmanay SF Book Club 2025) with Farah Mendlesohn, Jed Hartman, Melanie Fishbane and Rebecca Fraimow because it was a great online panel discussion and the kind of event I’d like to see more of. Also, because I will become editor of Foundation in the autumn and therefore henceforth unable to nominate or vote for essays in Foundation, I will be voting for Fiona Moore’s excellent ‘Comparing Colonialisms in Dan Simmons’s The Terror and its AMC Adaptation’. But, then, there is also a lot of other good stuff on this shortlist including Dan Hartland’s Snap! Criticism essays for Ancillary Review of Books and Roseanna Pendlebury’s ‘A Path Through the Landscape: My Own Route Through Science Fiction’. What’s clear is that separating the Non Fiction Award into two awards and publishing the full nomination list has made a lot of good criticism visible, which otherwise would require serious dedication to tracking down, and this is undoubtedly a good thing.
The Best Non Fiction (Long) category has also massively benefitted from the new system. We are now being given a list of nearly 20 books from a range of publishers, academic and trade. Here, I have a clear idea of what I want to vote for to be shortlisted. In the case of Payton McCarty-Simas’s That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film (Luna Press) – reviewed in Strange Horizons here – and Paul Kincaid’s Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction (Briardene Books) – reviewed in Strange Horizons here – there is an opportunity not only to support very good books, which have both already prompted discussion, but also great independent publishers who are supporting works of criticism outside the Academy. Within the current political climate, it’s absolutely essential that we support these kinds of writers and publishers.
The other two books I am going to vote for can be read in dialogue with each other and so I am hoping they are both on the shortlist because I think we do really need to talk about Fantasy. I’m talking about Joy Sanchez-Taylor’s Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-Imagine a Genre (Ohio State University Press and Adam Roberts’s Fantasy: A Short History (Bloomsbury Academic). Sanchez-Taylor includes excellent readings of a number of key texts of recent years challenging heteronormativity and the gender binary by writers such as Nghi Vo and Shelley Parker-Chan and argues that we should dispel the very existence of the fantasy genre itself for being too bound up with false ideas and habits of whiteness: ‘Assumptions about what fantasy is (The Lord of the Rings) have caused fantasy critics to deify a mostly white, Western, heterosexual subset of the vast amount of literature that has the potential to be read as fantasy’. In contrast, Roberts gives us a reading of fantasy that is centred on The Lord of the Rings and the Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy List (1965-74). This makes the two books sound more opposed than they are. In practice, I think there are lots of opportunities for complementary readings that allow us to develop a fuller critique of fantasy as it exists. This is because I think I agree with Sanchez-Taylor that we need to move on from ‘fantasy’ as a category, but at the same time I think we need a full account of the ‘fantasy’ we are moving on from so that it doesn’t just bubble up again in a transposed form, which is something that Roberts discusses in his interesting conclusion. In different ways, both books also highlight the ways that fantasy – especially in genre criticism – is repeatedly constructed through an unhealthy (to my mind) binary opposition with SF. Anyway, I would like to see both on the shortlist!
Last but not least, Best Collection is the category I think has transformed my reading practice the most as I now find myself reading more anthologies and collections. I’m a big fan of NewCon’s Polestars series of story collections and I’m definitely going to pick Rose Biggin’s Make-Believe or Artifice as one of my four choices (see my recent post). Again, there’s a lot of enticing titles on this list. I definitely need to look at both Lee Mandelo (ed.), Amplitudes Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, which was reviewed for Lightspeed here,and L. Timmel Duchamp’s Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air, which was reviewed for Strange Horizons here. And there’s lots of other good stuff.
However, the title in this category that stands out for me overall, and which I’m definitely going to vote for is SF Caledonia: Anthology One, edited by Noel Chidwick. SF Caledonia is part of the Shoreline of Infinity ecosystem (as I like to think of it). I really love the way this anthology begins by referring back to the 2024 Glasgow WorldCon. A number of publications came out in 2024 for that con: Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson’s anthology Nova Scotia 2 (Luna Press), Ken Macleod’s collection A Jura for Julia (NewCon Press), Brian M. Milton, E.M. Faulds & Neil Williamson’s Gallus: A Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle Anthology, and an issue of Shoreline. But what SF Caledonia: Anthology One does really well is carry the story forward from the con. It’s a beautiful looking, imaginatively designed anthology. Not only is there a lot in it but it directs us to other content online and elsewhere – there’s a great section by Pippa Goldschmidt on Shoreline’s four brilliant anthologies bringing together science and science fiction. Amongst the stories anthologised here is Ken Macleod’s ‘The Shadow Ministers’, which was first published in Shoreline and if you haven’t yet read it you should (I wrote about it towards the end of this post). Above all, SF Caledonia: Anthology One holds hope for a genuinely science-fictional future. I really really hope it gets shortlisted.
Back to Index.
NewCon Polestars: #10 Juliet E. McKenna, Different Times and Other Places and #11 Rose Biggin, Make-Believe and Artifice
On of the things the new awards introduced by the BSFA a few years ago made me think about that I didn’t think about before are collections. By serendipity, NewCon’s Polestars series of collections, all currently by women writers, began at a similar time and as a consequence I am trying to read them all and have also reviewed several. NewCon have published a bargain-priced ebook sampler, Polestars Shining Brightly, featuring one story from each of the first twelve collections to give people a flavour. But here are my reviews of volume 10 and 11 in the series (I haven’t yet got around to reading #12 Ana Sun’s Futures to Live By).
Different Times and Other Places by Juliet E. McKenna (NewCon Press, 2024)
This review first appeared in ParSec #13 (Spring 2025)
This is number ten in NewCon’s ongoing ‘Polestars’ series of short-story collections and another fantastic addition to the set. Different Times and Other Places showcases McKenna’s distinctive blend of no-nonsense narration and clear-sighted moral worldview, often seasoned with a quirky sprinkling of wild magic. What I particularly like about her fiction is its anthropological quality: the way even the shorter stories give us a picture of how the wider society and culture of their respective worlds are structured. Moreover, reading McKenna’s work gives us understanding of how our own world works. I am convinced that this explanatory value is one of the underlying reasons for the success her Green Man series, which now runs to seven books, with 2023’s The Green Man’s Quarry having won the BSFA Award for Best Novel.
Fans will be pleased that this collection includes a new previously unpublished story, ‘The Green Man’s Guest’, about which all I am going to reveal is that it is a delightful self-contained story. Like all of the stories in Different Times and Other Places, it is followed by a brief but informative author’s note. This discusses the immediate inspiration for the story but also discloses that the original idea for the Green Man series itself was prompted by another story included in this collection, ‘The Roots of Aston Quercus’, which was originally published in 2012. I have to say that I absolutely loved this charming story of dryads organising to prevent the demolition of their copse. It’s an absolute pleasure from beginning to end in every respect, from the expanded sense of historical time provided by the long-lived dryads to their interest in the passing mortal men they occasionally manage to seduce. Honestly, if you are a Green Man fan, it’s worth buying this volume just for these two stories. The bonus is that there are many other really good stories included in the package.
There is also a really wide mix of different genres. A Victorian vampire story, ‘Now You See Him, Now You Don’t’, has a pleasing intertextual reference to Dracula and earned extra points from me by including a camera obscura among the settings. ‘The Echoes of a Shot’ is a full-on alternate history featuring Amelia Earhart. There’s an amusing little twist at the end of ‘Insight’, in which a teacher is trying to keep control of her class. I particularly liked ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle’, which plays on classic children’s fiction to tell a nicely worked story of a progressive young governess fallen on hard times. Another favourite of mine was ‘Do You Want to Believe in Magic? and, believe me, you do, as the story’s protagonist discovers for himself.
McKenna does both love science fiction and write it from time to time, as she notes in relation to the couple of sf stories included in the collection. ‘The Sphere’ is a first-contact story that unfolds across the duration of several generations. ‘Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick’ unfolds pretty much as you might imagine but is no less satisfying for that. However, I think it’s fair to say that many of her best stories draw on her historical knowledge. For example, ‘The Wisdom of the Ages’ is a deceptively straightforward short story that packs in some quite complex ideas. The author’s note for this story includes the wonderful fact that the coming of bicycles improved the genetic health of European populations by tripling the ‘marriage radius’ for ordinary people. McKenna’s point is that magic provides a fictional means of telling such stories of unintended consequences resulting from new ways of doing things. ‘Magic is a tool’ she informs us in relation to the convent-set tale of revenge, ‘Patience: A Woman’s Virtue’. In the second of the collection’s two original stories, ‘A Stitch in Time Saves One’, magic and medieval technology are entwined in another very enjoyable story, which also proves to be quite educational concerning how the tapestry industry functioned.
At heart, I’m a sucker for epic fantasy; although, like alcohol, I can only consume it in very strict moderation these days. There’s just the right amount of the hard stuff on offer at the end of Different Times and Other Places. Indeed, the titles of the last two stories – ‘Coins, Fights and Stories Always Have Two Sides’ and ‘Win Some, Lose Some’ – sum up the ambivalent virtues of the genre. The first of these held me spellbound for its duration, transported to the mud and smoke of an encampment where fighters overwinter, and utterly caught up in what McKenna refers to as the joys of ‘dirty work at the crossroads’. ‘Win Some, Lose Some’, the oldest story in this collection, is ostensibly about a burglary that goes wrong but is really just a kind of entertaining romp through your favourite fantasy locations, from the tavern to the jailhouse, in the company of freebooting women Halice and Livak. It left me with the realisation that I might need to read McKenna’s Tales of Einarinn sequence, which this story is related to [and I have since read and enjoyed the first of these, The Thief’s Gamble, which I posted about here]. Overall, therefore, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this strong collection, which had some standout stories
Make-Believe and Artifice by Rose Biggin (NewCon Press, 2025)
This review first appeared in ParSec #15 (Winter 2026)
Number eleven in NewCon’s ‘Polestars’ series of short-story collections is an irresistible chocolate box of artful confections. Some of these, as the title of one of stories proclaims, have ‘The Tartest of Flavours’. The tone for Make-Believe and Artifice is set by Jared Shurin’s Introduction, which asks ‘where to begin with Rose Biggin?’ He goes on to explain how his first encounter took the form of a mysterious unsolicited story submission from an unknown entity for an anthology he was editing. This was ‘A Game Proposition’, the first paragraph of which consists solely of the two words, ‘Well, now’, and the accompanying impression of the narrator fixing you with her gaze and arching her eyebrow. I won’t lessen the impact of the story by saying anymore about it, but I can see how its unheralded arrival in the inbox would have generated excitement, wonder and the delirious sense of reality reconfiguring itself in an unexpected way. Biggin takes familiar stories and opens up new dimensions within them. She’s not afraid to take on the work of anyone from Conan Doyle to Shakespeare but, as Shurin notes, her ‘approach is neither pastiche nor imitation’. Rather, we’re transported into new worlds of possibility as the shackles of tradition are shrugged off and a playful, teasing, knowing sensibility is released.
The two Irene Adler stories – ‘The Modjeska Waltz’ and ‘The Chandelier Bid’ (this latter written with Keir Cooper) – are perhaps the standout examples of how Biggin’s stories work by revealing to us the full beauty of perspectives we’ve hitherto only been dimly aware of. So, as Adler respectively ‘helps’ Moriarty with a diamond heist and Holmes with a case, the giddiness we experience is due to the entire world tilting on its axis. The function of Holmes might be to serve justice and order, but what kind of justice and order is that? It’s scientific rationalism in an idiosyncratic form. There’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed, the fact that so many of us love it is why these stories retain their popularity and cultural power. However, there is room for alternative forms of justice. As Biggin’s Adler reflects, ‘If I have a fault, it is that, when poetic justice requires, I am also sometimes willing to put personal and professional pride above common sense.’ An alternative title for this collection might have been Poetic Justice, because that is what determines the stakes in most of these stories.
Another really strong example is ‘A Map to Camelot’, which appears at first to be comic advice to those determined to set forth on a magical quest. It only takes a page or two for the reader to realise that the story is not just funny in a good-humoured way, but actually rather good advice to follow as a writer and in life. For instance, you really should beware of castles that perform hospitality and avoid getting caught up in a hard verse/prose binary. I won’t reveal it here but the last paragraph of the penultimate section of the story does contain one of the secrets of universe known only to those who understand genre. Both the first and last stories of the collection – ‘Chanticleer and the Peacock’ and ‘The Arousing Adventures of Gelato Peacock’ – dispense similar wisdom in the form of modern fairy tales. According to the very brief biography provided, Biggin is also a performer and I suspect it would be illuminating, as well as entertaining, to see her read from her work.
Another of my favourites was the longest story of the collection, ‘The New Woman’. This is a literally fin-de-siècle tale, set in the last week of the nineteenth century. In marketing terms this might be pitched as Oscar Wilde meets Mary Shelley. There is also a reference to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which was – I found out when looking it up – originally published in 1899. Mentioning the sources runs the risks of making this story look like an academic exercise but I can’t emphasise enough how much fun it was to read and how contemporary in mood it felt. The cumulative effect is to suggest that we are living in an age of fantastic romance that was ushered in by those nineteenth-century writers such as Wilde, Shelley and Chopin.
As for the other stories: reading Raymond Chandler will never feel quite the same again after ‘The Gunman Who Came in from the Door’. I’ll have to choose the title character of ‘Miss Scarlett’ the next time I play Cluedo. ‘Helen/Hermione’ revisits classical questions. ‘Golden Girl’ also has a timeless feel and made me hope to see longer pieces of similarly stylised writing in the future. ‘Mrs Pepper’s Ghost’ is a nicely worked theatrical ghost story. Stories such as ‘The Ghost of Cock Lane’ and ‘The Diamond Twenty Thousand Times Bigger than the Ritz’ read as though they are well-loved works from the past being anthologised for a new generation of readers. In other words, by the time I had finished the collection, I felt that not only was I living in Biggin’s world but that I always had done.
50-Year Reread of The Lord of the Rings – 1: A Sequel to The Hobbit
In my introductory post to this series, I promised that this next post would be about how by reading LOTR as a sequel to The Hobbit, we find a very different novel to the hierarchical one loved by Christian nationalists. We know that Tolkien started writing a sequel in December 1937 at the request of his publisher, Stanley Unwin, following the immediate success of The Hobbit, which had been published on 21 September 1937 (and had already been reprinted to meet Christmas demand). The progress of this project can be followed through Tolkien’s correspondence and the various drafts that are collected in Christopher Tolkien’s 4-part history of LOTR: The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring and Sauron Defeated, which are respectively volumes 6-9 of the wider 12 volume ‘History of Middle-earth’. The early drafts of The Fellowship of the Ring up to ‘The Mines of Moria’ (the original chapter name for ‘A Journey in the Dark’/’The Bridge of Khazad-dûm’) are included in Return and were written over the course of 1938 and 1939 (see Return, p. 461). The composition history revealed in Return is fascinating and accounts for some of the peculiarities of the published version. For example, learning that Strider wasn’t originally Aragorn but a hobbit ranger called Trotter explains a number of things including why the hobbits are so quick to trust him and prepared to sleep in the same room as him. However, I don’t want to over complicate this post too much with these early drafts. So, while I will make a couple of brief references at appropriate points, I’m going to mainly concentrate on how the published version of Fellowship may be seen as a sequel to The Hobbit that largely replicates the structure of the earlier book.
First, let’s return to my 10-year-old self in the Autumn/Winter of 1975 reading LOTR for the first time. What motivated me to read this massive book? On one level, my aunt had just given me the 1000+ page one-volume paperback Book Club Associates (BCA) edition. However, she gave this to me because I was ‘interested in Hobbits’. I’d read The Hobbit frequently since I was 7 in a hardback copy, which was a 1963 ‘FOURTEENTH IMPRESSION’ of the ‘SECOND EDITION’ (first published in 1951). Obviously, I didn’t understand the significance of these numbers much at the time. To me – initially, at least – it was just an ‘old’ book that seemed fairly obscure. Only gradually, did I come to understand that it was well-known. Each time I finished the last word – ‘tobacco-jar’ – my eyes would track down 4 cm (because we had the metric system by this point in the early 1970s) to read the intriguing note at the bottom of the page:
If you are interested in Hobbits you will learn a lot more about them in The Lord of the Rings:
- THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
- THE TWO TOWERS
- THE RETURN OF THE KING
The point I’m working my way up to is that when we read LOTR as a sequel to The Hobbit, we’re reading it because we are interested in hobbits. I am actually intending to talk about hobbits in general in the next post in this series, but I shall just say at this moment that reading for the hobbits does a lot of work against the overt Christian nationalist interpretation of the novel. (Yes, Tolkien does some things with Frodo that try and reconcile these two viewpoints but to my mind that is one of the least successful elements of the novel; not least because Tolkien was divided on this issue and part of him always resists his own more totalising tendencies). I’ll also just point out now that you cannot really be a true fan of LOTR and use ‘hobbit’ as a term of abuse. But anyway … more of hobbits in the next post.
So, it’s late in 1975 and I’m reading LOTR because I’m really interested in hobbits. Not, it’s true, sufficiently interested to read the Prologue (to this day, I remain very bad at prologues, forewords, introductions, notes to readers, etc unless I’m obligated for reasons of professional scholarship). In any case, I’d already seen on opening the book that the first chapter is called ‘A Long-expected Party’, which obviously corresponds to the first chapter of The Hobbit, ‘An Unexpected Party’. So, I plunged straight in. Bilbo? Check. Gandalf? Check. Tonally, it’s similar to The Hobbit. So, for example, in the earlier book we have: ‘Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventures after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins. Bungo, that was Bilbo’s father, built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her (and partly with her money) that was to be found either under The Hill or over The Hill or across The Water, and there they remained to the end of their days’. In LOTR, we have: ‘For Angelica’s use, from Uncle Bilbo; on a round convex mirror. She was a young Baggins, and too obviously considered her face shapely’. While both of these examples might be considered exceptional because they involve named female characters, which are extremely rare in both books (especially outside the Shire), they do capture the almost quasi-portal-fantasy approach of Tolkien in starting off with modern 1930s settings (luxurious homes, convex mirrors) that his intended middle-class child readership would find familiar. At the time of writing, of course, he had no inkling that Fellowship wouldn’t see light of day until the mid-1950s. In any case, it is clear that the first chapter of LOTR is intended as a direct sequel to The Hobbit.
In its published form, Chapter 2, ‘The Shadow of the Past’ – see Abigail Nussbaum’s ongoing close-reading here – is a bit of departure in style, but this was one of the chapters that was altered and developed as the LOTR developed. In the very first draft, it’s not a chapter in its own right but just Gandalf explaining the backstory to the ring to Frodo (who is called Bingo in these early drafts) for several pages, which Tolkien is not yet sure where to insert (see Return, pp. 76-84). Despite there not yet being any plan at all, they agree Frodo must leave the Shire with friends and head at first to Rivendell. While the published version, ends up being longer and rather more serious in tone, it still serves much the same function. In both cases, the scene is set for replaying the first stages of Bilbo’s journey in The Hobbit so that the adventure can begin. Okay, the journey to Rivendell is told in much more detail in Fellowship than in The Hobbit, but the key moments of peril – the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs, and Weathertop – are all told from Frodo’s point of view rather as the adventure with the trolls in The Hobbit is told from Bilbo’s. After the departure from Rivendell, both Bilbo and the dwarves and Frodo and the fellowship attempt first to cross over the Misty Mountains and end up having misadventures in the tunnels beneath them. In both books, Gandalf leaves the group before they enter the enchanted woods (Mirkwood in The Hobbit, Lorien in Fellowship). Even the final chapter of the Fellowship bears some structural similarity to the arrival in Laketown in The Hobbit. There actually is a lake below the falls at Rauros; Frodo screws himself up to leave the fellowship and head alone into Mordor rather as Bilbo screws himself up to head alone down the tunnel into Smaug’s lair underneath the Lonely Mountain. There’s also a structural analogy between the role of Thorin in The Hobbit and that of Boromir in Fellowship, which Peter Jackson accentuates in both sets of film adaptations by using their classical-tragedy character arcs to structure his narrative trajectory.
On one level, of course, Tolkien was just replicating the successful structure of the earlier novel in order to write a sequel, which he initially considered would be of a similar length. Certainly, while he was first trying to write what became the Lorien chapters, he was under the impression that he was starting to build to the climax of the whole story. One of the things that would complicate that plan was the way that the Lorien chapters slowly took shape into what are arguably the pivotal scenes of the entire LOTR. I’ll come back to discuss this in a later post (but see my essay ‘Should Galadriel Have Taken the Ring?’ currently available to read for free here). However, another of the complications that would eventually extend LOTR beyond Tolkien’s initial plans actually stems from the replication of the structure of The Hobbit. Let’s think for a second of that earlier book not in terms of the journey via Rivendell, mountains and woods but as a 3-act piece of creative writing in the fantasy genre. There’s a set-up in which we are introduced to Bilbo as a meek and mild homebody and see him thrown into the metaphorical deep end with trolls, goblins and wolves. Then, there’s the middle act, in which Bilbo finds hidden strengths in his dealings with adversaries such as Gollum and the spiders. The novel switches increasingly to his point of view as he develops genuine agency, able to shape events to his own will by saving the dwarves from the spiders and then rescuing them from the Elvenking’s dungeons. Then in the final third, he transcends even this heroic capacity by developing genuine moral stature and the independence of mind to ‘betray’ his friends the dwarves in the cause of peace and justice.
I would argue that Fellowship corresponds to the first 2 acts of this structure, with Frodo as the character that we are initially introduced to. He is a bit better informed at the outset than Bilbo was and, for example, already capable of holding a conversation with elves but, nonetheless, he is still a relatively sheltered and innocent person thrown in at the deep end and would have come to a bad end without the help and guidance of others from Tom Bombadil to Strider. In the second act, which broadly corresponds to Book Two, he comes increasingly into his own, with the novel also switching more frequently to his point of view. The key challenge he passes through using his own wits is the encounter with Galadriel, in which he manages to hold his own. Afterwards, he is revealed as possessing sufficient agency and maturity of mind to make the morally correct choice of going to Mordor at the end of Fellowship. The scene is set for a final act in which he duplicates the achievements of his predecessor, Bilbo, and delivers peace to the world. In practice, however, the resolution to the novel turned out to be far more complex, requiring two further volumes and, in the end, for Frodo to become more than just peacemaker but also saviour and redeemer of the world. In this manner, Tolkien almost manages to reconcile the sequel structure of LOTR with the Christan nationalist agenda which slowly builds across The Two Towers and The Return of the King. However, even without taking the third (‘faery’) version of the novel into account, the ‘Hobbit sequel’ and ‘Christan nationalist’ versions don’t quite gel because something else has happened during the course of writing Fellowship, which Tolkien almost certainly hadn’t fully anticipated when he began writing his sequel to The Hobbit. By the time he got to the end of Fellowship, he found that instead of one humble hobbit rising to point-of-view self-awareness and moral stature, he had two. And this tilts the balance of the entire novel.
This second self-aware hobbit is, of course, Sam. Sam clearly underwent rapid development as the drafting process progressed, so that by August 1939 Tolkien had worked out a plan that Frodo would be caught by the enemy at some point and rescued by him (see Return, pp. 381-2). However, it’s only in the Lorien chapters that Sam really comes into his own, becoming henceforth a second viewpoint character, who is capable of thinking and acting independently for himself. Consequently, Sam goes on to do all sorts of things that Tolkien didn’t initially have in mind and, in some cases, later came to regret. I’ll discuss this all in more detail in subsequent posts but the point I want to emphasise here is that the reason Sam becomes a meaningful character who affects our overall reading of LOTR is because the novel originally began as a sequel to The Hobbit. Indeed, in many ways, Sam ends up more closely following the trajectory of Bilbo in the earlier novel than Frodo does. In this respect, he becomes an agent of something much closer in 21st-century terms to social justice than Christian nationalism. But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Before we go any further with this rereading of the novel, it’s necessary to think a bit more about hobbits in general and that’s what I’ll be doing in the next post.
The Politics of Fairyland #2: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes 1926-2026
It’s the centenary of Lolly Willowes and I recently reread the novel in the 2025 US paperback edition from Union Square & Co, with an introduction by Alix E. Harrow. It’s been clear for some years now that the interwar fantastic romances of writers, such as Naomi Mitchison, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Townsend Warner and others resonate with the contemporary SFF of the past decade or so being written by Harrow, Amal El Mohtar, Zen Cho and others. One smart way for publishers to put recovered feminist classics like Lolly Willowes in touch with their potential contemporary readership is by having someone like Harrow write an introduction. And a very good introduction it is too. Referring to the reception history of the novel, which she categorises as divided between the ‘charming-satire crowd’ and the ‘feminist-parable crowd’, Harrow homes in on the past reluctance to celebrate Lolly Willowes as a fantasy novel. As she patiently explains, ‘Magic, in a fantasy novel, is not a metaphor or a gimmick … [but] … a microscope, which enlarges reality … It exposes, lays bare, holds up to the light; it makes the invisible visible, the impossible possible.’ In effect, Harrow is arguing that not only is Warner advocating for witchcraft and ‘(implied) lesbianism’, but that she was a witch, which allowed her to lay claim to whole way of life outside the normative parameters of mainstream Anglo-American heteropatriarchal society.
This argument is significant because I don’t think it would have been presented so straightforwardly until relatively recently: the last 10-15 years or so. Yes, Warner was thinking like that in the 1920s – Harrow even quotes her answering Virginia Woolf’s question as to ‘how she knew so much about witches’ by stating ‘because I am one’ – and other writers of that period such as Mitchison, Mirrlees and Woolf herself were also situating their selfhood and imaginative lives far beyond the boundaries of mainstream society. However, that broadly feminist fantastic romance of the 1920s and 1930s was a relatively contained counter public sphere. It existed, it challenged mainstream values but before it could get to the point of openly contesting the dominant cultural and symbolic order, it was shut down by various events and processes, such as the 1928 trial for obscenity for another work of fantastic romance, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and the overt suppression of the women’s movement conducted by the fascist countries in the 1930s. Following the Second World War, there was a coordinated move across Western Europe and North American to restore a reformed version of the 1920s normative heteropatriarchal symbolic order, now supported and shored up by welfare states, universal education systems and liberalisation of laws concerning divorce, abortion and censorship. However, as this postwar reformed order has gradually crumbled (a process that has accelerated since the 2007-08 financial crash), the stakes that were glimpsed in the interwar years – fascist patriarchy or queer witchcraft – have not only reemerged but become totally foregrounded as the dominant struggle of our times from the political spectacle of the 2016 US election to the organised state fascist violence currently taking place on the streets of Minneapolis. Everybody knows there is no return to ‘normal’, whatever that was. In this context, it’s not just possible once more to articulate stakes that had been swept under the carpet, but it’s absolutely essential to state clearly that there is an alternative to what is happening.
As Harrow notes, what Lolly Willowes demonstrates is that ‘a witch’s life – a life of fierce, joyous freedom – is neither easily found nor easily kept … an illicit state, inimical to king and country’. Or, in other words, it’s witches vs patriarchy and nation states – themes which you can see Harrow developing across her own fiction, such as The Once and Future Witches (2020) and last year’s The Everlasting, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons. But let’s have a look at what actually happens in Lolly Willowes.
The novel begins in 1902, when 28-year-old Laura Willowes goes to live in London with her elder brother, Henry, and his family after her father’s death. For the next 50 pages or so we are treated to an enjoyable social commentary on Laura, or ‘Aunt Lolly’ as she is to her nieces or nephews, and her superfluous existence according to the norms of upper-middle-class Edwardian society. This is summed up through the thoughts of her sister-in-law, Caroline, who considers Laura too old to begin living by herself: ‘It was not as if she had had any experience of life; she had passed from one guardianship to another: it was impossible to imagine Laura fending for herself. A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through Caroline’s thoughts’ (44). However, as Warner points out, while such attitudes were socially dominant at that time, it’s not that there were no alternative values in existence: ‘Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated’ (12).
However, neither Henry nor Caroline, who Warner describes as ‘stupid people’, nor anyone else in Laura’s family or acquaintances has the imagination to comprehend such a possibility. Therefore, they are stunned when in the winter of 1921, Laura announces that she is going to live in the village of Great Mop in the Chilterns. As she points out to a bewildered and angry Henry, ‘I have reminded you that I am forty-seven. If I am not old enough now to know what is sensible and suitable, I never shall be’ (71). It’s worth noting at this point the parallel with that other great counter-cultural fantastic romance of 1926, Mirrlee’s Lud-in-the-Mist (I blogged about it last year), which is that in both cases the protagonist is middle-aged – 47 and 50, respectively – at the point they depart from bourgeois mundanity and gain a completely transformed outlook on the world through accepting magic. (This is also the model adopted by another well-known interwar fantastic romance, Tolkien’s The Hobbit). Only by leaving the social reality of bourgeois London can Laura find her way to the ‘secret country of her mind’ (92). Gradually, she acclimatises to the different rhythm of an enchanted countryside. For example, she learns to care for chicks by helping the dropout war veteran, Mr Saunter; a scene that is briefly reminiscent of another great work of interwar fantastic romance, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (written in 1926 and first published in 1928). Laura finds her personality merging into that of the henwife in fairy tales.
Then in the final third, ‘She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year of 1922’ enters ‘into a compact with the Devil’ (115) and comes to the realisation that all along she has been destined to become ‘a witch by vocation’ (118). She experiences a Witches’ Sabbath and then, in the climactic scenes of the novel, has a long conversation with Satan while sitting out on a hillside, in which they discuss the conditions under which women live, the nature of women (like sticks of dynamite), that there are also warlocks, and how ultimately the decision to become a witch is the choice ‘to have a life of one’s own’ (157). This description makes Lolly Willowes sound like a novel of ideas, but really it’s more a novel of mood and attitude, in which the pleasure derives from following Laura’s thoughts as the narrative proceeds. It’s a subversive novel rather than an explicitly revolutionary one, such as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975). However, despite that difference, Lolly Willowes is like The Female Man in that it describes the awful necessity of wrenching the mind free of the values of mainstream society in order to live freely. Both novels show the need to create a new morality rooted in alternative values that don’t just stem from both authors’ queerness but also reflect the chaotic aspects of the politics of fairyland, such as wild magic, witchcraft, and demons, which feature in both novels (yes, Faery does feature in The Female Man). We need magic just as much in 2026 as we did in 1926 and Lolly Willowes remains one of the best places to find it.
50 Year Reread of The Lord of the Rings – Introduction: Three Different Books
I first read the Lord of the Rings 50 years ago in the winter of 1975-76 when I was ten years old. In fact, I read it in the autumn of 1975 and then immediately reread it. Then for Christmas that year I got Richard Adams’s Watership Down, which I read three times in succession, and also C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, which I read twice – and then I went back and read LOTR again. Thus, a pattern was established in which I read LOTR several times a year every year until I was 17. After which I didn’t read it again until the run-up to the release of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, in 2001 (when I was in my mid-30s). Since then, I’ve read most of it aloud to child 3 and during the Covid years, I read most of Tolkien’s drafts collected in the various volumes edited by Christopher Tolkien. But this current re-reading (I’m most of the way through the Fellowship at the moment), will be only the second full read through of my adult life.
At this point, I should note that there are two other ongoing read throughs (both of which are at least several posts in) that I am aware of. Abigail Nussbaum has a blog series, ‘The Great Tolkien Reread’, with the introduction here, and Roseanna Pendlebury is blogging ‘A Close Reading of LotR’, starting here. I think my approach is going to be more like Abigail’s, as I’m going to post short pieces periodically on different topics rather than attempt a sequential reading (but there probably will be some close reading as well).
Although I’m partly using this as an opportunity to reflect back on my personal relationship with the book over the last half century, there is also a political context. While during the 1960s, it was often seen as a countercultural book, LOTR is now more likely to be seen as a conservative work. For example, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written a number of pieces on Tolkien over the years and in this piece from May 2025 notes its position in the familiar list of novels beloved by conservatives, alongside Atlas Shrugged and ‘maybe’ Brideshead Revisited. [Which I find amusing because after 17-year-old me stopped reading LOTR, I immediately went on to read Brideshead – because of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the TV series – and then worked my way through the rest of Waugh]. I’m not sure about Ayn Rand, but I’m fairly confident that both Tolkien and Waugh have been enjoyed by wide readerships across the political spectrum. Of course, Tolkien has been mobilised by the political right from Brexit supporters (as revealing how the ordinary people of England [the Shire] can stand up and win against the evil empire) to Musk. A couple of years ago, the Ministry of Culture in Meloni’s Italy funded an exhibition, ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’, at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, leading to critical articles in both the Guardian and the New York Times, which I wrote about in this post. Even more problematic than the persistent attempts to harness LOTR to fascist, authoritarian, or Christian nationalist ideology, is the general way in which it has become – complete with its undoubted imperialism and colonialism – the basic model for the fantasy genre itself. For example, in her recent book, Dispelling Fantasy (2025), Joy Sanchez-Taylor refers to Brian Atterbury’s ‘fuzzy set’ theory of the fantasy which implicitly situates LOTR as the central text of the genre, and notes that ‘The fuzzy set of fantasy demonstrates how assumptions about what fantasy is (The Lord of the Rings) have caused fantasy critics to deify a mostly white, Western, heterosexual subset of the vast amount of literature that has the potential to be read as fantasy’. While there are different ways of reading LOTR, as I will touch on across this series, I think Sanchez-Taylor is correct to argue that the general reception of LOTR (and its film adaptations, and related epic fantasy texts such as G.R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaption as Game of Thrones) has worked to legitimise ‘Christian hierarchical values’. Indeed, I think we’re partly in the world we’re in in 2026 because of the way that the values represented by these hugely influential texts have changed behaviour and what people are prepared to accept.
But what do we do about this? Well, I agree with Sanchez-Taylor that we need a different understanding of fantastic texts (and perhaps should even abandon the category of ‘fantasy’) than one centred on Tolkien and Martin. However, at the same time, I don’t think we can abandon Tolkien to the political right. Therefore, I have been thinking for some time about different ways of reading his work. Last year, I wrote an article for Speculative Insight asking ‘Should Galadriel Have Taken the Ring?’ (currently available to read for free here). I was also intending to give a paper to the Tolkien Society conference in September last year on ‘Tolkien as a Thirties Writer’ but unfortunately I got ill/fatigued over the summer and was unable to finish or deliver the paper (I will get back to it over the course of this year). This blog series is intended as part of this wider project of rereading Tolkien in the sense of reading him differently. In particular, it is about how the full meaning(s) of a novel is partly rooted in the personal relationship of the reader to the book.
So, back in the winter of 1975/76, when I was in my final year of primary school, I absolutely loved LOTR. I loved it far, far more than the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. Indeed, the only two of those books I even liked at the time – I later enjoyed reading The Silver Chair to my kids because I could perform Puddleglum with a Brummie accent – were Prince Caspian and, to a lesser extent, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe starts okay, and I like Mr Tumnus and the beavers, but as soon as Aslan appears it become pretty much unreadable. I, like Edmund, would rather hang out with the White Witch and eat Turkish Delight. Watership Down was a rival to LOTR for a few years but I became annoyed with it and, in retrospect, I would say it’s more explicitly right-wing than either Tolkien or Lewis. I think Michael Moorcock once wrote something along the lines of his reaction to someone reading Watership Down on the train with enjoyment would be the same as if they were reading Mein Kampf with obvious pleasure. That’s an overstatement but I can see where he was coming from.
Eventually, however, as I progressed through my teens, I also fell out of love with LOTR. It finally dawned on me during the course of my last couple of readings that the only bits I really enjoyed anymore were the two sequences extensively involving orcs: Book Three, Ch III ‘The Uruk-hai’ (Uglúk and Grishnákh) and Book Four, Ch X The Choices of Master Samwise (Shagrat and Gorbag). In 1970s outer London suburbia, I wasn’t reading orcs as racist representations, but I was reading them as classed and by then the tone of the later sections ofLOTR was starting to wear on me a bit. So, I was hoping that (after Pippin and Merry had safely escaped) Uglúk might actually cut his way free from the encircling riders of Rohan and escape. I also liked to imagine Shagrat surviving the final battles and going on to open a pub somewhere further east out beyond the Sea of Nurnen. In retrospect, I don’t think this was particularly surprisingly for the late 70s/early 80s, when there was an anarchic-cum-nihilistic disillusionment with the socially conservative values of respectable postwar Britain, which was culturally expressed in punk and also the success of a comic like 2000AD. One of the enjoyable aspects of the Amazon Rings of Power series is how they lean into this dynamic so that I found myself wanting Adar and his orcs to team up with Galadriel and form some sort of queer republic (but this is probably the topic for a different type of post altogether). The wider point to make here is that one of the ways to read LOTR is as depicting a struggle between a conservative and hierarchical cultural order and the anarchic forces of alterity. Tolkien clearly favours the first side against the latter and on this level LOTR is a conservative novel and hence the likes of Douthat – who thinks that, for example, Portland is an evil manifestation of lawless anarchy that needs to be abolished – see it as a conservative novel.
As the 1980s progressed and I was further jailbroken from the cultural straitjacket of postwar Britain by, variously, Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels, the leftwing anti-racist and LGBT-friendly policies of the Greater London Council, and the programming of Channel Four, Tolkien wasn’t uppermost in my mind. Although, I still liked The Hobbit because it was so obviously in alignment with the values of the 1980s peace movement. Bilbo steals the Arkenstone and gives it to the Elf King and Bard in order to enable peace – what could be more radical than that? I still think it is an amazing children’s book in this respect. And in this context, it is important to remember that Tolkien started writing LOTR as a sequel to The Hobbit. One of the things I am going to argue in my next post in this series in a few weeks’ time is that by reading LOTR as a sequel to The Hobbit, we find a very different novel to the hierarchical one loved by Christian nationalists. To be sure, it’s still conservative in some respects but it’s very different in overall vibe … and that’s not just the weed smoking.
Finally, there is a third LOTR that exists in tension with the other two and that is the book presided over by Galadriel, the Fairy Queen herself, in which time and meaning flow differently. It’s the way that these three different books interact which make the LOTR such a powerful work of culture and worth rereading (at least every few decades!)
My 2025
Once more I find myself limping over the line at the end of the year, sniffling with a minor virus. I’ve been limping metaphorically since November, when I ran out of spoons at PictCon – which was excellent – after talking on the ‘SF in Scotland’ panel. The year didn’t start entirely auspiciously either with redundancy from my university at the end of January. Although I opted in ‘voluntarily’ because, after reflection on my circumstances (longcovid/fatigue), it made more sense to go than to stay, it was still a shock to the system. I had just renegotiated my contract at the beginning of the new academic year in September 2024 and my intention was to carry on for at least a few more years. Aside from adjusting to the change in circumstances, the actual redundancy process itself was stressful, completing paperwork for the university and sorting out self-employed status with HMRC going forward. Then in short succession, my youngest turned 18, my dad turned 90 and I turned 60. Too many milestones in one go. Once all that was out of the way, I went on to have my best May and June, in terms of feeling fit and healthy, since before the pandemic. Most of July and August was taken up with the intense completion of the manuscript for my book Culture Wars in Britain, which will be published in May 2026. Then the last volume of the Decades series that I co-edit, The 1920s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, came out in hardback at the end of August at the same time as the paperback edition of The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. I was a bit up and down during September and October, but felt pretty good in time for going to Scotland in November. Overall, I’ve hit all my big targets (apart from missing the Tolkien Society conference due to illness) and managed to travel a fair amount but I had to let most of my ongoing blogging projects slide over the last few months. I’m intending to pick these up again in the early part of 2026.
My favourite books this year were Nina Allan’s A Granite Silence, Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons (and also spoke about on the SH Critical Friends podcast), and E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again, which I have reviewed for the next issue of ParSec. I also really enjoyed Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk, which I blogged about here, and Amal El Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, which I reviewed for ParSec. I researched and wrote an article on Margaret Bennett for SF Caledonia, which ended up surprising me by connecting with stuff I’ve written in the past about the Spanish Civil War for academic publications. I particularly loved writing ‘Should Galadriel Have Taken the Ring’ for Speculative Insight, a journal which is absolutely worth your while to subscribe to for a very modest annual fee. They have published an absolutely amazing set of essays published this year (check out the trailers here). I wrote on austerity for Bylines Cymru back in February. I’ve also had a number of academic book chapters come out: ‘Everyday Life, Class Consciousness and Social Change in Mass Observation Narratives’ in Lucy Curzon and Ben Jones, eds, Mass Observation: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses (Bloomsbury); ‘Proletarian Futures: Some Representations of the Working Class in Science Fiction’ in Ben Clarke, ed., The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature (Routledge); ‘Fairy Fruit and Creative Auto-Intoxication: The 1920s as a Decade of Fantastic Romance’ in Tamás Bényei, Shené Boskani and Nick Hubble, eds, The 1920s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (Bloomsbury); and ‘Devolution, Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Independence’ in Benjamin Kohlmann and Mathew Taunton, eds, The People: Belonging, Exclusion, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press).
Although I have previously been to all of the capitals in the UK, 2025 was the first calendar year in which I have spent time in all four: Belfast (April), Cardiff (June & November), Edinburgh (June & November), central London (June & September). The reality of four nations has been one of the stories of the twenty-first century, despite being wilfully ignored by mainstream politicians and the media. I don’t believe in a centralised British state or the political parties, forces and interests that uphold that distorted reality. I think 2026 is likely to be another landmark year in the ongoing paradigm shift towards a more pluralistic sense of the Isles of the Northern Atlantic. Living as I do in Aberystwyth – now Wales’s first UNESCO City of Literature – I look forward to embracing and writing about these changes. All that and plenty more coming in the new year!
Road from Glasgow 2024 to PictCon 1: Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction (1995)
Part of my series of posts on Scottish SFF, which began in the run-up to the Glasgow WorldCon and are now continuing on to PictCon 1 in November 2025 and will continue afterwards. I began this series in April 2024 with a post on Newton’s Wake, because Ken MacLeod was one of the Guests of Honour at the then forthcoming Glasgow WorldCon and the plan was to reread all his work by the Con, but I ended up overrunning on that. However, I’m finally getting close and now rereading the Fall Revolution quartet, which I’d left to last (of the novels) intentionally.
(NB. I am discussing the plot and ending of the novels in detail here).
I actually read The Stone Canal (1996) first in the early 2000s. I think that was the first MacLeod novel I read but Cosmonaut Keep (2000) was also out by then and I may even have begun with that. Either way, I didn’t start with The Star Fraction and therefore when I did read it, I was trying to fit it into a framework that I had in my mind that possibly wasn’t how it was supposed to fit. In fact, it is only on rereading The Star Fraction this week (possibly for the third time) that I actually understand (I think) why it is called the Fall Revolution quartet. I have notes at the front and back of the book and reading through, I was thinking to myself this time that past me highlighted the wrong things. I can see now that on one level the novel plays with a variety of left political positions before coming down on a slightly cynical fuck-it-all position (MacLeod describes this somewhere in the early 2000s as trying to reach the most ‘comfortable and civilised a barbarianism as possible’). However, that was kind of my position anyway without having done all the hard yards in left politics that MacLeod did. Therefore, some of the intricacies of the plot were lost on me as it didn’t really occur to me that it might go anywhere else than it eventually did. But even as I’m typing this, part of me is thinking that I did read it right because Macleod – whatever he might say about it (and he also notes in Giant Lizards from Another Star [2006] that even by then he didn’t agree with all of his own explanations of the Fall Revolution) – actually writes it the way I read it back then despite himself. But what I didn’t get then in the way that I can see now, is that his distinctiveness as a writer is that he is able to self-reflexively include that ‘despite himself’ in his writing. Afterall, the last sentence of the novel is ‘I hope I see you again’.
The Star Fraction is set in the mid-2040s, with a few flashbacks. There are very few actual dates given. However, the timeline is provided in more detail in The Stone Canal. The key events of the past are that a radical reforming government was elected in Britain in 2015 and instituted a republic. In the early 2020s, the Germans launched a war of European integration, which eventually leads to Israel nuking Berlin and Frankfurt, as US/UN global hegemony is reinstated. The US/UN also occupy Britain and institute a restoration of the Hanoverian monarchy, but the resultant kingdom is balkanised into mini states with different values and laws. For example, Norlonto (North London Town) is a completely libertarian state, home of the space movement, while neighbouring Beulah City is an evangelical Christian state. Then, the Army of the New Republic launch an offensive… One of the questions I had for myself on rereading was whether I thought these predictions/projections from 1995 held up. And, despite this precise sequence of events not having unfolded (yet), the answer is, yes, much of this is pretty on the money. There is now open war in Europe. Britain didn’t become a republic in the 2010s but it has still experienced something of a constitutional reset since 2019, despite the resulting arrangements not commanding the same democratic legitimacy that they did in the 1950s. (For example, we could see Charles’s coronation with its bodged attempt to introduce an oath of allegiance from the British people as a version of MacLeod’s Hanoverian restoration). Despite these and other crude attempts to celebrate ‘faith, flag and family’, our 2025 UK is increasingly virtually balkanised and may well become so on the ground. Similarly, the central divide in contemporary politics is less one between left and right, than one between authoritarianism and libertarianism such as the divide MacLeod portrays between Norlonto and Beulah City. (Although, in 2025 UK there is often little agreement as to which positions are authoritarian and which are liberal/libertarian). Shanty towns on the greenbelt in twenty years would just be a progression from existing rough sleeping.
The importance, expressed at the point hostilities break out in The Star Fraction, of ‘hurry[ing] the civilians out of civilian areas, carry[ing] the wounded out of anything with a red cross on it’ is sadly still relevant. Brunel University – where the novel opens – is identified as a ‘Free Speech Zone’, which is meant positively but made me laugh because of how the actual Brunel university put this into practice when celebrating the run-up to its 50th anniversary in the 2015-2016 academic year by having a panel including Katie Hopkins debate ‘Does the welfare state have a place in 2015?’
Although we haven’t had a republic in recent British history, leftwing republican values still have cultural and moral hegemony in the same way that they do in The Star Fraction. Not, to be sure, in today’s mainstream press, which expresses a business-friendly middle-class liberalism that doesn’t correspond with any form of material reality outside of a handful of suburbs and home-counties dormitory towns. However, beyond that, there are still huge numbers of people (including several hundred thousand with at least a past fleeting commitment to Trotskyite organisations) who cut their teeth in the various political movements and struggles of the second half of the twentieth century (from CND and anti-apartheid to poll tax and the miners’ strike) and would welcome and potentially get out on the streets for a republic – if there was a credible organised left-wing party or movement to launch such a programme. Then and now, of course, there isn’t such a party. This is why MacLeod’s jokes about the Labour Party in The Star Fraction will intensify a couple of decades later in Intrusion (2012). In 2025, we’ve got beyond the point of that punchline working anymore.
I realise, I’m not saying much about the plot. It starts with a guy (Moh) with a talking gun and ends with a woman (Janis) with a ‘telesex bodynet’ abandoning a failed revolution for space. I should note that they’re not the same person, although Moh does find himself temporarily a woman in a ball gown at one point. It’s a wild ride but like all of Macleod’s books, it’s warm, witty and human, with characters we care about. It’s pro-feminist and the men are seen doing chores as well as boy stuff, while the women are seen taking up arms and engaging in political arguments as well as girl stuff. It’s also got the allusions to fairies and ‘elflandishness’, which will become a key element across MacLeod’s oeuvre (see especially Learning the World, Intrusion, Descent). In short, The Star Fraction is the first version of the MacLeod programme, which as in all its incarnations is not as doctrinaire as you might imagine: ‘The Plan is the programme; not the old pamphlet you got, not necessarily the ideas in any detail, but the set of practices that it codes for.’ In other words, ‘the programme creates the Party not the other way round.’ This is basically applying systems theory to politics and it’s quite refreshing, leading to the recognition that ‘what we thought was the revolution was only a moment in the fall’. Hence, ‘the Fall Revolution’, which on one level is the offscreen fall of the US empire but is also a secular version of the biblical fall: a fall from the promise of socialist utopia. In this respect, The Star Fraction is an epitaph for ‘the lost revolution’ that we are told grieved Moh ‘like a phantom limb’. But it’s not a wake, just the prelude to aiming for the stars (but I’ll leave further elaboration until I get to the other volumes…).
Road from Glasgow 2024 to PictCon 1: Margaret Elphinstone, The Incomer (1987)
Part of my series of posts on Scottish SFF, which began in the run-up to the Glasgow WorldCon and are now continuing on to PictCon 1 in November 2025. This also ties in with my – recently becalmed, for the meantime occasional – BlueSky thread featuring SFF by women writers. In this context it is worth noting that The Incomer was published in the Women’s Press SF imprint, with the characteristic grey border and spine.
(NB. I am discussing the plot and ending of the novels in detail here).
The Incomer starts evocatively with a traveller ‘walking purposely northwards along the road from the south’ in late November to reach Clachanpluck, a village at the crossroads. Naomi is a musician – she has a fiddle strapped to the pack on her back – and she will be invited to spend the winter in the village, paying for her bed and board with her music. It becomes apparent we’re in a post-collapse future in which a rural life is organized around the seasons of the land. Beyond that, the setting becomes more difficult to describe.
Reviewing the novel, Jack Deighton suggests, ‘Despite the almost unspoken matriarchy in Clachanpluck human nature hasn’t much changed’. But change or not is perhaps the central question that the novel addresses. It would probably be more accurate to describe the society as matrilineal (although, Alison Phipps – see below – also describes the society in The Incomer as matriarchal). It is adult women who ‘hold’ households and the men of those households are their brothers, sons, uncles etc. Emily, who in a non-hierarchical way is nonetheless the nearest thing to a leader (at least, until she passes on this role to her daughter, Fiona, at the end of the novel), upbraids herself at one point for not taking a man from outside the village (as her friend Bridget has done) to father her children, which would be in keeping with how a full matrilinear society might function. On the other hand – in a nice moment in the novel – Bridget’s rather stolid brother, George, who is the father of Emily’s two daughters, comments self-reflectively: ‘I gave you both of them. It’s probably the most useful thing I ever did’. The context is not so happy, because it’s in the aftermath of the central dramatic sequence of events of the novel, which takes the form of a rape and then the subsequent off-screen death of the perpetrator. George is worried that their whole way of life must change because it turns out that far from having gone from the world as they had all thought, rape is still a possibility. But Emily has just reassured him that ‘All that I have off the future was what you gave me, and I don’t want to lose you now’.
Change is something that can both be feared and hoped for. For example, Bridget is momentarily cross with Emily for allowing Naomi to stay in the village and thus open the door to change. On the one hand, Bridget finds Naomi ‘intriguing, attractive even’ as though representing ‘some part of herself that she might have been but had not quite been become’. On the other hand, she cries silently for Naomi to stop playing her (i.e. Bridget’s) harp ‘before the whole fabric of life was rewoven, before she took Bridget’s ordered years and unravelled them, setting them up in a new pattern, a new weaving of threads which would wind her away from everything that was sure and familiar.’ In contrast, as she discusses with Fiona, Emily had ‘thought once that my time would be the time that changed everything’ but comes to realise that Fiona is correct in her assertion that her mother can’t change the world for her and that she’ll have to deal with the world the way she finds it.
Naomi’s function as the agent of change and weaver of new cultural patterns is not limited to her effect on the women of Clachanpluck, she also teaches her music to Emily’s brother, Davey, who is also a fiddle player. He also learns to adapt and change in line with the new patterns Naomi introduces. Deighton suggests that it is unconvincing when Naomi eventually chooses to sleep with Davey after originally making it clear that she didn’t want to have a relationship with him. But the dynamic of their relationship has changed completely by the point of the novel this happens. As readers, we’ve been taken out of the default heteropatriarchal assumptions of our society (of the late twentieth century but still dying hard today), and we can now accept this relationship as another dimension of the musical exchange, which is itself a metaphorical expression for a model of free intersubjective exchange between people.
In some ways, the novel appears to be picking up from earlier interwar structures of feeling. George, for example, reminds me of some of the men in Katherine Burdekin’s matriarchal dys/utopia, The End of This Day’s Business, which was written in the 1930s but only published in 1989. There is also a very interesting (from my point of view as a specialist in 1930s literature) passage in The Incomer in which Emily is describing to George two old books she has been reading, which are T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and something that sounds a bit like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (although the description doesn’t quite fit). Emily describes the latter as a ’bad dream’ that is complicated and difficult to understand, but considers the former as ‘easy, quite clear and plain and about everyday things that anyone could understand’. This is a nice way of indicating that we’re in a completely different temporality to the linearity of clocktime and historical ‘progress’. As Emily reads aloud to him, George recognises Eliot’s ‘Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future’ as being about ‘the forest’, which functions in the novel as the living dimension of the land.
This temporal context is useful for thinking about The Incomer because it helps detach it from an incautious reading that might take it as being a kind of leftover from 1970s second-wave feminism. Alison Phipp’s chapter, ‘Nonviolence, Gender and Ecology: Margaret Elphinstone’s The Incomer and A Sparrow’s Flight’ (from Caroline McCracken-Flesher, ed., Scotland as Science Fiction, Lewisburg; Bucknell University Press, 2012) situates Elphinstone’s work in specific relation to her Quaker principles of nonviolence and her earlier 1980s involvement in the Greenham Common protests. Phipps further situates Elphinstone’s first two novels to Scottish contexts, including the 1980s renaissance (Gray, Kelman, Lochhead), which was twinned with resistance to Thatcherism, and the specific mood following the 1979 referendum, the Falklands War, Chernobyl, and the stationing of Cruise and Pershing Missiles in Scotland. On the one hand, Phipps describes Elphinstone’s novels ‘of a future’ as ‘returns to a pre-Enlightenment pre-Romantic past which is shaped theologically and offers a serious lament for the present together with a vision of alternative worlds’. On the other hand, she also links Elphinstone to the work from the 1920s onwards of Naomi Mitchison (still publishing in 1987), whose social and sexual politics increasingly came to focus on rural advocacy and the possibilities of island communities, noting that Elphinstone ‘too offers fluid portrayals of socially accepted sexualities (although she is less interested in sex as androgynous or hermaphrodite), and presents women in leadership positions’. (I shall come back to Phipp’s chapter when I post in due course on Elphinstone’s A Sparrow’s Flight, which is the sequel to The Incomer.)
Finally (for this post), I just wanted to think about the depiction of ‘the land’ in the novel. There are a number of stories interspersed throughout The Incomer (in a manner reminiscent of some of Le Guin’s work). One of these starts (resonantly in theological terms), ‘in the beginning was the land’ but goes on to explain how people created ‘Space and Time’ and
tossed them around the land, until the land was bound up and imprisoned. Where there had been only infinity, there were now lines, and limitations. And because there were limits, the people began to fear what lay beyond them, and their minds were soon weaving again, creating possibilities out of what lay beyond the boundaries they had made.
And then having imagined this threat of the monsters outside, the people enacted their own annihilation. We know how this works. The antidote is to remember that ‘we are the land’. Obviously, this should be possible anywhere but it’s also the case that traditions of ‘the land’ that can be readily deployed are more easily accessible in some cultures than others. Scotland does have a culture in which the concept of ‘the land’ is not just recuperable but central to trajectories of mainstream Scottish literature from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932-34) to James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010). It speaks well, I think, that a novel called The Incomero, giving expression to a new cultural pattern of living revolving around some sort of matrilineal nonviolent society, fits that trajectory too.
Back to index.
Jane Alexander, The Flicker Against the Light (2021)
This review originally appeared in ParSec #2 (Winter, 2021)
Before examining in detail one of the stories included in The Flicker Against the Light, it is worth thinking for a moment about how we categorise this volume. It is not just a story collection because it includes an essay, ‘Writing the Contemporary Uncanny’, at its end and it’s published under Luna’s academic imprint, Academia Lunare. From the acknowledgments, we learn that it began life as a creative writing PhD. At the online launch earlier this year, Alexander elaborated on this genesis story by describing the project as a hybrid combining fiction and non-fiction. This notion of ‘hybridity’ is important to understanding the project because the critical essay, rather than being an appendix or an extended footnote, is an integral part of the collection. It’s not just that the ideas in it inform the stories but that the stories themselves are the expression of the ideas, which would not fully exist otherwise. Alexander wrote these stories at the same time as her recent (second) novel, A User’s Guide to Make-Believe (2020) and has noted that the fact that it is a quicker process to write a story than a novel, helped in making the stories more experimental. Therefore, whereas that novel had certain expectations relating to the uncanny incorporated within it, these stories are able to play off of those expectations.
Alexander’s essay provides a concise and accessible account of both what Freud originally meant by ‘the uncanny’ and how it has become reconfigured in recent decades to reflect an uncertainty triggered by people’s fears of the loss of self-determination in the face of automation and globalisation. She explains that in this collection she has aimed at this more modern sense of the uncanny by creating ‘a productive kind of uncertainty where possibilities remain open’ allowing her stories ‘to linger, as a kind of question’. While the technologies and situations she investigates, from cloning to virtual reality, are very familiar to us – in fact, have been familiar to us long in advance of their practical advent – the approach she takes, whether to cybernetic software or lab-grown meat, is a far cry from the traditional humanist responses adopted to such destabilising developments in the past.
For example, the title of ‘You the Story’ is taken from the name of the app which the anonymous protagonist has been using for three years to automatically record and share the mundane details of his generic commuter life: ‘At 07.56 I checked my email. At 07.57 I checked the weather forecast’. Suddenly he finds his account unexpectedly accumulating ‘likes’ because it has started recording an extra level of bio data: ‘I did not catch the 08.21 tram. My heart rate increased by 14%. I was agitated.’ The level of interest surpasses that of his one perfect day, when he accidently bumped into Helen from the office after work and walked along a road talking to her for nine minutes. But then the app begins to record events that may not have happened such as a trip to a bar, which in his imagination becomes a drink with Helen. By this point in the story, the app is recording his actions even though he is leaving the associated wristband device and his phone behind when he goes to work. The protagonist is now caught between the allure of submerging himself within his own social media image and the fear that some sort of data double is invasively taking over his life. In a classic sf story, he would now enact some form of complex chicanery that would enable him both to regain control of his timeline and get the girl. However, any male readers’ anticipations along such lines are brutally quashed by the ending in which the protagonist’s sudden realisation that this situation effectively frees him to do whatever he wants to is accompanied by Alexander’s abrupt switch into second-person narrative: ‘You have all night’. It is an excellent story and by no means an exception for this volume.
Because of the way that creative writing has expanded in universities over the last ten to fifteen years, there now exists a fair-sized potential market for hybrid fiction-non-fiction of this sort. Alexander is currently working on a new novel set, like most of these stories, in Edinburgh and involving multiple timelines and perspectives. This promises to be a book worth keeping an eye open for but perhaps we should also hope for another accompanying critical essay. The identities of reader, writer and critic were fixed a long time ago but now they are more uncertain. Soon perhaps they will be little more than ghosts in the machine or, in Alexander’s terms, flickers against the light. This collection leaves us poised uncannily on the threshold of unknown futures.
Back to index.
Prospective Cultures 
