The Enduring Influence of Kafka on Speculative Fiction

It is a rare feat for a fiction writer to so heavily influence both literature and culture that their name becomes an adjective used to describe not only the works that they wrote, but also the worldview and perspective that they possessed and shared us with us. In fact, so rare is this feat that we can count on one hand those writers whose names have become common parlance: Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kafka and Orwell. Say the words Machiavellian, Dickensian or Kafkaesque and you’ll probably see a flicker of recognition, even if a person has never read The Prince, Great Expectations or The Trial. Through a combination of authorial ability, individualistic writing styles and historical circumstance, their fictional versions of reality provided brand new ways of seeing and understanding the world, life and existence itself.

What is truly remarkable is that everyone on this list apart from Kafka achieved great success in their own lifetimes, and saw their works vindicated and celebrated – Kafka was a man whose work received scant critical or commercial attention, whose fiction was too all often consigned to obscure journals, who struggled to finish his fictions and never finished some of his novels, who instructed the executors of his estate to burn the entirety of his unpublished works after his death. In the face of such setbacks and confidence blows, it’s a wonder that he managed to produce the works that he did; the fact that his name has become a kind-of shorthand for an entire way of seeing and interpreting the world is nothing short of miraculous.

If Kafka was writing today, he would more than likely be known as a writer of speculative fiction, magic realism, slipstream fiction or trans-realism. Nevertheless, his influence on science fiction is undeniable and enduring. However, it’s the varied devices that Kafka employed in his fiction that are the most influential, rather than his overall style. While quite a few writers have used his style as the basis for their own fiction, Kafka’s worldview and perspective are so incredibly individualistic that these writers cannot help but be compared to him. Novels like Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat, and short story collections like George Saunders’ Tenth of December, Manuel Gonzales’ The Miniature Wife and the appropriately titled anthology Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka, tend to read as either homages, tributes or satires of Kafka’s style. On the other hand, the adoption by so many science fiction writers of the varied stylistic devices that Kafka employed and combined in his fiction have become so commonplace throughout the genre that they have almost become cliches, and so their connections to Kafka have tended to disappear from view.

Take the kinds of names that Kafka used, especially in his two most widely known novels: The Trial and The Castle. Their respective protagonists are Joseph K and K; in both a narrative and technical sense, names like these are almost completely devoid of personality and individuality, functioning more as identifying ‘tags’ or ‘markers.’ But on a thematic level, these kinds of names function in a very different way: they emphasise the theme of dehumanisation that featured so heavily in Kafka’s work, stripping the protagonists of a sense of identity. Joseph K and K are known this way because their actual names don’t really matter, just as they as people don’t matter. All that does matter are the roles that they fill and perform as part of the almost bureaucratic web that binds together their worlds. They exist, to put it more bluntly, as cogs in the machine rather than as the controllers of their own lives, with their ‘designations’ designed to deny their identities. If all of this is starting to sound a little familiar, that’s because names like these, and the reasoning behind them, underpin myriad dystopian science-fiction stories—it’s no great stretch of the imagination to conceive of THX-1138 as a futuristic version of K. As well, often when we encounter an oppressed or subservient class in science fiction, its denizens are referred to by these kind of technical signifiers rather than by actual names, and when the inevitable rebellion occurs one of the rebels’ first acts is often to reclaim their identities by renaming themselves.

Take Michael Bay’s The Island (2005) as a mainstream example. While the film’s initial promise is quickly smothered by Bay’s shock-and-awe approach to movie-making, its central premise is thorough and sturdy science fiction: people have themselves cloned so that ‘spare parts’ are on hand in case of accident; these clones grow up and live in a self-contained environment, believing that they are the last survivors of a terrible war; when the time comes, the clones are told that they are being sent to the last patch of inhabitable land on Earth, but are instead drugged and harvested for their organs, limbs, blood and so on. It should come as no surprise that the clones bear names like Lincoln Six Echo, Jordan Two Delta and Lima One Alpha—although they don’t know it, these characters exist only for their body parts, and to those who have power over them, they are little more than living machines fulfilling a function within a greater machine, exactly K.

However, it isn’t just names that are regularly missing in Kafka’s work. Quite often, his stories are also devoid of a concrete sense of time, place and historicity. Withholding this kind of information was simply narrative necessity—these things did nothing to advance the themes of his stories, and so didn’t need to be included. In fact, their absence often strengthened his stories, adding another facet to Kafka’s obsession with the threatening and impersonal nature of modern society and the unconscious fears of an individual living in an anonymous landscape. A consequence of this is that Kafka’s ‘voice’ often became cold and detached, as if his protagonists were spectators in their own stories rather than active participants. It is this combination of withheld information and detached narrative voices that has proven influential on a certain style of science fiction, though rarely is the withholding so extreme as that employed by Kafka, and can most prominently be seen in what some have dubbed ‘psy-fi’ (psychological science fiction), best exemplified by the work of J G Ballard. Psy-fi is typically more interested in examining the emotional and psychological ramifications of whichever science fiction idea lies at the core of each story, in contrast to science fiction’s usual focus on exploring the ‘ripple effects’ of the idea itself. Because this examination involves emotional and psychological spaces, once the science fiction device at a story’s core has been established, a concrete sense of time, place and historicity become somewhat insignificant. After all, emotions and psychological states are universal to a large degree, and often tend not to rely on specific geographies and times. In fact, if these kinds of stories are too reliant on these factors, their universality is reduced: These kinds of factors often do nothing to advance the stories and so their relative absence is a narrative necessity, and consequently the narrative ‘voice’ can be read as detached. Supporting this sense of detachment is the fact that authors of psy-fi also often further the exploration of their interests by drawing upon the vocabulary and concepts of psychology, which are necessarily technical and scientific, and thus somewhat dry and detached.

The third device of Kafka’s that has heavily influenced science fiction is his way of structuring the plot of his stories. Rather than using a typical Aristotelian plot—protagonist, antagonist, rising action, climax, denouement—Kafka tended to structure his plots around the elaboration, qualification and evolution of a new and fantastical fact that contradicts the ‘reality’ of his stories. The result is an almost obsessive focus on and examination of one single fantastical idea, rather than a broad observation of the ripple effects created by this idea. Books like William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters, William Sleator’s House of Stairs, Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside, Paul Hardy’s The Last Man on Earth Club and Max Barry’s Machine Man are all, to varying degrees, more concerned with the fantastical idea at their core rather than in exploring the ramifications, consequences and ripple effects of the ideas, as are films such as Cube (1997), John Carpenter’s version of The Thing (1982), Source Code (2011), Primer (2004) and David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly (1986).

However, much like Kafka’s use of a detached voice, the influence of his abandonment of a traditionally Aristotelian plot is rarely as extreme as that which he employed in his own stories. There are some notable exceptions to this, of course, with Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work being perhaps the best example. At face value, it seems like just another ‘Last Man on Earth’ story, but within the first dozen or so pages we soon realise that Glavinic is barely interested in exploring the ‘event’ that caused everyone but the protagonist to disappear. Instead, his focus is on the emotional and psychological ramifications of the event solely as it pertains to the protagonist. There are no other characters and hence no antagonist, no traditional character growth experienced by the protagonist, no real narrative arc or conflict-driven action, and no climax, denouement or actual resolution. Another notable exception is J G Ballard, who employed an obsessive focus on and examination of one single fantastical idea time and time again throughout his career. His novel High Rise is perhaps the best example of this, detailing as it does the descent into savagery and barbarism experienced by the occupants of a futuristic high-rise apartment block. This is Ballard’s focus from the very beginning, and the remainder of the book explores the evolution of this descent in great and painful detail. And while Ballard does use a facsimile of a protagonist-antagonist relationship, this relationship ultimately has little relevance to the book as a whole and is instead presented as just another symptom of the occupants’ descent.

As we have seen, Kafka’s influence on science fiction can be found almost everywhere. From obvious homages, tributes and satires to the more subtle use of the literary devices that he employed, science fiction writers have shown this influence almost since the genre’s inception, even if they didn’t consciously know it. If only the sickly, depressed and ultimately unsuccessful Kafka could have lived to see how heavily his works have influenced those who came after him.

(Originally published in Aurealis #98, March 2017)


Ten Works of Science Fiction That Will Bring You to Tears or Heal Your Heart



What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam




Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut




The Road by Cormac McCarthy



Happiness TM by Will Ferguson




The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger



The Humans by Matt Haig





The Dog Stars by Peter Heller



Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes




Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut




Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam



(Originally published on duffythewriterblog, 3/2/2018)

Dressing the Part and the Clothes of the Future

Details matter, in any form of science fiction. I’ve covered similar territory in the past, but I believe that this territory needs to be elaborated on with a more specific focus.

A science fiction idea might be so original, thought-provoking or both that it actually make our hearts race, but it will ultimately be a letdown if its details aren’t internally consistent and contemporaneous with its story’s time period. These details consist of large factors such as dialogue and setting, and what might be called the ‘little things’ (despite their varying degrees of importance to each individual story): Architecture, the role and presence of nature, transportation systems, food and clothing, musical styles and other forms of entertainment, household devices, the presence or lack of cultural vices, domestic environments, the weather, and so on. These little things that exist in the background have to be as watertight as those large factors that exist in foreground, otherwise the story risks quickly becoming dated – if the characters in a story speak like private detectives from the 1940s or hippies from the 1960s, then the stories in question should feature 1940s-style private detectives or 1960s-style hippies. If not, their creator is merely betraying the influence of particular cultural and literary movements of the times in which they were writing. Likewise, if a story is set in a future more then four or five years ahead of the present, then the little things in said story must accommodate this passage of time, even if only in subtle ways – some of these little things will quite probably be the same as they are today, but some will definitely change even if they have to share the stage with their predecessors. The world of 2017 is both different and similar to the worlds of 2012 and 2007 – think the ubiquity of smartphones, the rise of nationalist populism, the dominance of the McMansion and the mainstream integration of the archetypal hipster – and likewise the slang of today will become part of everyday language in a year or two, and then retreat into the realm of daggy and old fashioned a few years after that. In crafting their science fiction worlds, creators must make decisions about which of these factors to address to ensure that these worlds are logical and convincing – nothing removes us from a story and makes us aware of our suspension of disbelief like one of these factors being illogically out of date.

This brings us to clothes and their importance in ensuring that a story is internally consistent. This importance rests upon two distinct reasons: The sense of historicity that is inherent in clothes and ingrained into our cultural psychology, and clothes’ contribution towards shaping and expressing an individual’s identity. A brief word of warning is necessary before unpacking these ideas, however – I have done no further research on the role of clothes in society, instead relying solely on my own observations and reflections.

In many ways, clothes are one of the chief signifiers of specific time periods, especially since the rise of post-World War 2 youth culture. Even a layperson who knows very little about a time period in question will probably be able to identify clothes belonging to that period, especially if that period is part of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Think of hipsters and the rise of activewear in the 2010s, rave and retro in the 2000s, grunge and homies in the 1990s, hair metal and bigger-than-big in the 1980s, disco and punk in the 1970s, hippies and mods in the 1960s, rockers and apple-pie-American in the 1950s, all the way back to the flappers and bohemians of the 1920s. Even in the far-flung past, clothes are still one of the chief signifiers of the times – think of gladiator sandals and togas, top hats and monocles, suits of armour and leather jerkins, buckle-up shoes and pantaloons. Even those will little interest in history will probably be able to identity these items as respectively belonging to the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, Victorian England, Medieval England and Renaissance Europe. With just a glance, these types of clothes establish a specific time period, and when used in a story they effectively ‘place’ it in time and consequently ‘bleed’ contextual associations and historical references (a point that we’ll return to). In written fiction, for example, the description of a character in a Victorian-era story as being dressed in ‘top hat and tails, sporting a cane and a monocle’ allows us to take an educated guess at the story’s time period, extend by association this manner of dress to the other characters and make inferences about the rest of its world (once again, a point that we’ll return to). In other words, with a few judicious touches in terms of describing clothes, a writer allows the reader to fill in the blanks thanks to their prior cultural knowledge of the story’s time period. Visual fiction is different, of course, as we are able to see the clothes of every character that appears on screen. What remains the same is the principle: The inherent historicity of clothes.

The upside of this historicity is that, for the same reasons as it allows a story to be ‘placed’ in time, it also allows a story to be ‘displaced’ if taken advantage of. On one hand, nothing screams futuristic like a dramatic and striking change to the clothes that people wear. On the other hand, if a creator is more interested in showing how even in the future some things might never change, then the inclusion of clothes from our present amongst the story’s futuristic mise-en-scene is a simple and effective way of doing so.

In terms of bedding-down the futuristic setting of a story, the use of clothes in A Clockwork Orange (1971) is still the example set for every other piece of visual science fiction, despite its age and the fact that much of the rest of the film has become dated. Even today, just one look at the uniforms/gang-colours worn by Alex and his droogs tells us that the film takes place in a science fiction future connected to and yet distinct from history as we know it. This can be seen in the contrast between their all-white jumpsuits and codpieces with their black bowler hats and bovver-boy boots: The jumpsuits and codpieces signify the future – all-white being one of the defining colours used to illustrate this – while the hats and boots connect the story to the real world through their inherent historicity (Victorian-era and punk). In combination, a sense of displacement is created, effectively defamiliarising the familiar and presenting it anew. And while dressing gangs and teams et al in matching uniforms/colours is an ancient part of our culture, and so could be used to argue that A Clockwork Orange takes place in some kind-of alternate past, the futurism of the droogs’ outfits also extends to the clothes worn by the secondary and background characters. Velvet, silk and polyester; lace, frills and oversized buttons; burnt primary colours; scarves, ruffles and brocade – it’s as the clothes worn by its characters are a mish-mash of fashions from the Georgian and Victorian eras and the 1970s, in a future that is taking place not long after our own present has concluded.

In terms of using clothes to show how even in the future some things might never change, Alien (1979) is probably still the example to which all other works of visual science fiction will be compared. Unlike A Clockwork Orange, its future is radically removed from our present, as it concerns a spaceship in deep space and the crew’s battle with a hostile alien that they inadvertently bring on board. However, even though this future is far removed from our present, when the crew are revealed we see that they’re wearing work shirts, coveralls, bomber jackets and sturdy boots, with each member sporting individual touches to their uniforms. If these clothes sound familiar that’s because they’re the quintessential outfit of a blue-collar worker – a factory hand, garbo, street sweeper, labourer, cleaner, gardener or mechanic et al. And that’s exactly what the crew are. They aren’t typical science fiction heroes – scientists, explorers, soldiers etc.– but people working a blue-collar job with all its pitfalls: Bad pay, lousy conditions, unsociable hours, unsafe environments. These associations and others (a sense that the characters will be practical, down-to-earth, unpretentious and maybe a little rough) immediately come to mind the first time we see the crew, thanks to the historicity attached to their uniforms. In other words, these clothes help define and emphasise the characters’ blue-collar traits, unlike in A Clockwork Orange where the primary purpose of the clothes on display is to solidify the film’s futuristic mise-en-scene.

The second reason why clothes are important in ensuring that a story is internally consistent is because of clothes’ contribution towards shaping and expressing our individual personalities. They might identify us as being a particular type of person – sporty and active, in the case of exercise wear and muscle tops; outdoorsy and practical, in the case of solid boots and durable fabrics; relaxed and comfortable, in the case of thongs and shorts; narcissistic and vain, in the case of revealing or obviously expensive attire. Furthermore, they can identify us belonging to a specific subculture or social group: Punk, goth, surfie, hippy, raver. Lastly, they can also identify us as belonging to a particular socio-economic segment, from the previously mentioned boilersuits all the way up to bespoke business suits. As we can see, clothes’ contribution towards shaping and expressing our individual identities is actually an exchange between the wearer and witness. For the wearer, their clothes are an expression, a part of their personality that they have decided to show the world. For the witness, however, they are an identifier, even if the identity thrust upon them is a stereotype or generalisation.

When harnessed by a competent creator, these two factors can be an incredible tool for establishing a well-rounded character. By relying on the audience’s cultural awareness of clothes, a creator can use them in their fictions as a kind-of shorthand, whereby the associations they conjure are used by the audience to fill in the blanks and add layers of meaning. Think of Deckard’s overcoat in Bladerunner (1982). We immediately associate such attire with hardboiled private detectives of the Phillip Marlowe-type, and so we make assumptions about his character, ascribing to him traits such as cynicism, world-weariness, possession of an individual moral code and bachelorhood (which is fitting for perhaps the greatest science-fiction noir ever created). A creator using clothes to instigate this process of association-assumption-attribution is employing one of the ultimate forms of ‘show, don’t tell’ – when supported by appropriate mise-en-scene, a massive amount of narrative information can be encoded into something as simple as a hat, a coat or a pair of shoes. For other examples, think of Max’s leathers in the Mad Max series (1979-1985, 2015), which tell us so much about his scavenger-nature, practicality and ability to handle himself in a fight; or the chrome sunglasses and shiny black coats of The Matrix (1999), which mark their wearers as fully-fledged cyberpunks; or the way different outfits are used to differentiate each incarnation of the titular Doctor Who (1963-1989, 2005-2017), from the shabby bohemian-chic of Patrick Troughton’s cosmic-hobo portrayal of the character, to the linen suits and cricket-influenced attire of Peter Davidson’s English-gentlemen portrayal, to the young-man-in-tweed-and-a-bow-tie of Matt’s Smith whimsical portrayal. In each case, what these characters wear helps us create a story for them outside of that proscribed by the creator, whilst simultaneously allowing the creator to designate the character in their own particular way.

As we’ve seen, clothes matter if a story is aiming to be internally consistent and contemporaneous with its time period, and if its creator wants their audience to remain somewhat ignorant of their suspension of disbelief. As well, the sense of historicity inherent in clothes and ingrained into our cultural psychology allows a futuristic setting to be more convincing than it would otherwise, while clothes’ contribution towards shaping and expressing an individual’s identity is a fantastic way of quickly and easily giving a character depth. But no matter which way clothes are used, a creator must show an awareness of these functions if they want to create the best story they can.

(Previously unpublished)


Is Climate Fiction the New Black?



  • The Island of Doctor Moreau—H.G. Wells
  • The War of the Worlds—H.G. Wells
  • 1984—George Orwell
  • The Martian Chronicles—Ray Bradbury
  • Fahrenheit 451—Ray Bradbury
  • The Body Snatchers—Jack Finney
  • Make Room! Make Room!—Harry Harrison
  • Stand on Zanzibar—John Brunner
  • The Forever War—Joe Haldeman
  • Neuromancer—William Gibson
  • The Postman—David Brin
  • Ender’s Game—Orson Scott Card
  • Jurassic Park—Michael Crichton
  • Snow Crash—Neal Stephenson


  • Governmental censorship, and social conformity (Fahrenheit 451)






And so the sub-genre of climate fiction was born.





(Originally published in Aurealis #94, September 2016)

Don’t Believe the Hype



















(Originally published in Aurealis #92, July 2016)

The Rise of the New Weird

21st-century science fiction and fantasy narratives are very different from that of the 20th, both in terms of what writers and filmmakers are producing and in terms of what audiences expect and desire. Much has been written on these differences in regard to fantasy – especially on the boom in Big Fat Fantasy novels as an escapist-driven response to the events of 9/11 – but far fewer words have been written on the changes permeating science fiction. This disparity in critical and cultural attention caught my attention and piqued my interest, especially after I stumbled across an article describing one of the changes affecting contemporary science fiction: the rise of what some critics are calling “the new weird.”

From one point of view, the new weird could perhaps be described as the latest catchphrase/label adorning works of science fiction that don’t really fit into the genre’s mould. On the other hand, Sofia Samatar, one of the leading lights of the new weird field, describes it as form of fiction that has “a complicated relationship to genre. It might blend genres or overturn their conventions, while still remaining clearly anti-realist.” Another way of looking at it is as the re-emergence of a long dormant form of writing that has been around almost as long as science fiction itself, a form whose tropes, themes and forms were set and shaped by authors as diverse as H.P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Yet another way of looking at it, according to JS Breukelaar, another leading light of the field, is as a form of fiction that “represents the desire for or pursuit of some hidden principle beyond the mundane.” The truth, I daresay, lies somewhere in between these different perspectives – the new weird might best be described as a kind of post-postmodern fiction that blur genres and forms, resists realism, and rests upon a foundation the blends elements of what we now call science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Take Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy as an illustrative example. The basic premise at its core is pure science fiction: a region of land in North America has been changed through unfathomable extra-terrestrial means, its physics, topography and ecology becoming suddenly unearthly, so much so that the region is quickly dubbed “Area X.” However, within this science fictional framework exist elements of a multitude of other genres, all of which work together to create something greater than the individual parts. The creatures and beings that inhabit Area X – dolphins with human eyes, shuffling monstrosities that resemble transmogrified humans – seem born of the kind of body-horror made famous by David Cronenberg; Area X’s own peculiar geographic features – mysterious tunnels and cave systems, abandoned lighthouses that seem to have once played host to massacres and murders, lonely forests and swamps – evoke traditional elements of horror; the governmental agency charged with investigating Area X seems inspired by the kind of absurdist bureaucratic nightmare narratives made famous by Kafka; and the vast psychological changes experienced by the personnel sent to explore Area X are undoubtedly influenced by the kind of psychological-fiction pioneered by JG Ballard, an author whose work could easily be called a precursor to the new weird.

But this is a digression. The important thing to keep in mind is that the manner in which you interpret the new weird in no way diminishes it or the importance of its rise. The real question to ask in terms of its rise is: Why? Why is a subgenre that has traditionally been seen as an odd diversion on the way to the main attraction now experiencing an upswing in popularity?

The correct answer is, of course: Who knows? This rise is far too current to have been studied in any real depth, and the vagaries of the publishing industry are too arcane to deliver satisfaction. But I have a hunch, a hunch borne from something as cursory as a glance at my fellow passengers on a peak-hour train.

That’s right – I see smartphones as the cause of this rise. Or, to be more specific, what smartphones represent.

To make it plain: advanced technology has become so ubiquitous in modern Western society that it no longer seems to awe us. When you carry in your pocket a device the size of a notepad that can instantly access almost the entirety of recorded knowledge and store as many photos, videos and songs as you wish, then why wouldn’t you be a little blasé about our relationship to technology? Especially the core-technology at the heart of this device is almost unbelievably more sophisticated than that which put a man on the moon, The same thinking applies to driverless cars and cars that park themselves; to realistic three-dimensional holograms fronting live bands and computer created pop-stars; to a planned Mars mission made feasible thanks to reality TV; to GPS tracking and facial recognition scanners; to the dominance of social media and the almost total penetration of the internet; and to skyscrapers and apartment buildings that are almost arcologies, and rise to heights undreamt of only a few years ago.

Even something as mundane as a peak-hour train ride makes me feel like our present resembles a science fiction future from yesteryear. To quote JG Ballard: “Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” The only real difference is that in our present, everything has become science fiction – what was once a fanciful genre has now become our reality.

In light of this, it should really come as no surprise that the new weird has become so popular. After all, even though nowadays we might not be awed by advanced technology, there is still something that fascinates and enthrals us, something that lies at the heart of the new weird: the mysteries of human nature, the bizarreness of human behaviour, and the beguiling impulses and contradictions that drive us. I see these oh-so-human characteristics and traits as underpinning the new weird: one thing that the subgenre always seems to do is to turn science fiction’s typically outward gaze inwards, examining how we as people might react to the strange events, circumstances and beings populating its narratives, rather than simply focussing on the make-up and existence of these things themselves. And yes, this kind of examination also occurs in other forms of science fiction, but in the new weird it is pushed to the foreground and becomes the root of the story rather than the branch.

To put it another way: the strange events, circumstances and beings that populate the new weird function as analogues of the impenetrable mysteries and rich and weird variety of life, and the examination of these things and of our own relationship and reaction to them, mirrors our own fascination with those aspects of the real-world that we can’t really explain. When the “outer” world no longer seems to captivate and awe us, and when so many of its mysteries have been explained and so much of its weirdness has been reconciled by science and therefore made mundane, our thoughts then turn to that which is still inexplicable and bizarre, no matter how hard science tries to rationalise and explain it: the human mind, human behaviour, and our own individual psychologies. In a world where a vast portion of the population doesn’t have access to clean water, and yet people are seemingly more interested in finding this water on other planets, the only real question to ask is: why? And it is these kinds of questions underlining the complexity and perplexing nature of human behaviour and thinking that the new weird is ultimately interested in examining.

(Previously unpublished)



Postcolonial Science Fiction and Peter Docker’s The Waterboys









(Originally published in Aurealis #89, April 2016)