You’ll have (hopefully!) seen that we recently posted our new book round-up for October on the blog. But those aren’t the only books that arrived at the library – far from it! A number of fantasy and science fiction books also made their EFL debuts last month. Here you’ll find a few highlights that showcase the breadth of these new books, as well as some of their similarities.

The selections below range in style from high fantasy to dystopian future, incorporating visions of war, social breakdown, and eco-terrorism. But like all good science fiction and fantasy, although these books explore new worlds and possible futures they also speak to the issues and challenges we face today.

The main issue: climate crisis. All these writers are exploring what a world ravaged by climate change might look like, and how – or even if – humanity can respond. While some are more hopeful than others, they all ultimately ask the question: what if it’s too late to change our future?

Interested in finding out more? These books barely scratch the surface of the EFL’s collection! You can browse our newest fantasy and science fiction books on LibraryThing (as ever, you can also have a look at all our new books if you’d prefer) and remember to keep an eye on the new books display in the library too. Or read on for helpful pointers about some of the reference guides, films and other resources at the EFL, as well as a reminder of last year’s Fantasy Fiction: Scattered Seeds virtual display …

The Books

N. K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017)

Each year, the Hugo Award is presented to the best science fiction or fantasy work published in the preceding calendar year. With The Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin became the first African American writer to win the prize, the first author to win three years in a row, and the first to win for each book in a trilogy. It’s easy to see why!

The story is set in a supercontinent called Stillness, home to many races and species. Among them are orogenes who have the power to control energy, meaning they can, for example, prevent earthquakes and manipulate temperatures. Because of their power, the orogenes are feared and misunderstood, often persecuted and even murdered. But now, Stillness is experiencing what is known as the ‘Fifth Season’, a period of immense climate catastrophe which comes around every few centuries. Huge clouds of ash darken the sky, civilisations collapse, and resources are scarce. Across the trilogy, we follow three orogene women who must ultimately decide: does the apocalypse offer a chance to fix what is broken and build a new world, or is destroying what is corrupt once and for all the only option left?

Throughout the trilogy Jemisin holds a mirror to our world, reflecting racial and religious intolerance as well as climate change and environmental issues. But it cannot be denied that The Broken Earth series is a masterful and gripping adventure story too!  

Octavia E. Butler, Earthseed series: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)

Butler (1947-2006) wrote 11 novels in total, including Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). Together these two novels form the Earthseed series.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future (beginning in the far-off year 2024!), they lay bare the dangers and potential consequences of climate change, social inequality, and religious extremism. In Parable of the Sower, faced with the breakdown of society, one girl tries to find a different way to live, establishing her own religion and setting up a new community. In Parable of the Talents, Butler explores how this new community comes into conflict with the right-wing fundamentalist Christians and populist politicians who dominate the political landscape.

Although she was writing in the 1990s, Butler’s vision remains an all-too-plausible future. She describes a world in which basic commodities like water have become scarce and unaffordable luxuries, where physical walls separate rich from poor (or rather, just-surviving from destitute), and where a populist president rises to power with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. Taken as a whole, the Earthseed series not only exposes the dangers that could yet lie in our future, but proposes alternative philosophical and religious solutions to them.

There are many books by Butler at the EFL. You can browse them on SOLO.

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2010)

The Windup Girl is Bacigalupi’s first novel and in 2010 it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The story is set in the twenty-second century, in a world that is fighting environmental collapse and where corporate bioterrorism is rife.

In a break from common science fiction templates, Bacigalupi does not locate his narrative in America or the west. Instead, the action takes place in Bangkok, where rising water levels are just-about kept at bay against a backdrop of isolationist policies in Thailand aimed at avoiding the worst of the dystopian excesses that have taken root elsewhere. That includes a ban on ‘New People’, genetically modified humans created to obey and serve – like Emiko, the ‘windup girl’ of the title, who has been abandoned in Bangkok by the Japanese businessman who bought her, leaving her with no choice but to work in a brothel and try to avoid the authorities.

With themes of climate change, ecology, and environmental destruction, Bacigalupi deftly explores issues of gender, race and corporate greed without suggesting that humanity will somehow magically solve our tendencies towards intolerance, selfishness and cruelty. In this captivating debut, Bacigalupi has undoubtedly created ‘a realistic plunge into a plausible future’ (from Travelfish review).

Also by Bacigalupi at the EFL: The Water Knife (2016).

Jeff Vandermeer, Hummingbird Salamander (2021)

Hummingbird Salamander follows ‘Jane Smith’ (not her real name), a cybersecurity guard and suburban mom in the American Pacific Northwest who one day receives a mysterious package containing a key, an address, and the number seven. She pieces together the clues to find a taxidermy hummingbird, which leads her deep into the dark worlds of eco-terrorism and wildlife trafficking and propels her towards a realisation of the extent of humanity’s exploitation of our planet.

Vandermeer’s setting is intriguing too. While clearly set in the future, initially that future doesn’t seem too remote. There are mentions of climate refugees and unusually intense storms but, much like Jane, we’ve become desensitised to the crisis that these events portend. It’s only as the story progresses and Jane’s quest becomes more urgent that we fully grasp the scale and inevitability of the climate crisis hurtling towards us.

Undeniably Jane is not a sympathetic character. She is selfish and single-minded, and her often-inexplicable decisions frequently put innocent people and those she loves in danger. But at the same time, her story is fascinating and engrossing, and the question it poses – whether we have realised too late the enormity of the disaster we face – should give us all pause.  

Also by Vandermeer at the EFL: Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (2013). Illustrated by Jeremy Zerfoss.

Omar El Akkad, American War (2018)

American War is set in the late twenty-first century and concerns the events of the Second American Civil War. The root cause of the conflict is climate breakdown: while most of the USA has outlawed fossil fuels, some southern states refuse and attempt to secede from the union. However, the Civil War itself is only one aspect of the narrative.

The story is an allegorical reflection of America’s meddling in other countries’ affairs, and an exploration of how war and trauma lead to extremism and terrorism. By considering the circumstances in which extremism emerges El Akkad aims not to inspire sympathy for terrorists, but to facilitate an understanding of how ordinary people can be dehumanised and radicalised by conflict.

This central message is intriguing, yet its universalising aspects are arguably carried too far into the narrative itself. Many reviewers have observed that the story doesn’t seem very rooted in its American South setting, and that the main character, Sarat, appears neither very American nor very naunced (from the Guardian’s review and The Atlantic’s review). Even so, set against a backdrop of climate change and the horrors of war, American War is a chilling cautionary tale extrapolated from the Middle East of today to the America of fifty years hence. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (2018)

It’s a common image in disaster movies as much as science fiction: the world is crumbling, and New York stands (or falls) as a totemic symbol of either catastrophe or resilience. As overused and omnipresent as this trope can be – not least for the unfortunate New Yorkers who seem to have fallen victim to every apocalypse-level event imaginable – Robinson succeeds in putting a new spin on it.

In the year 2140, sea levels have risen 50 feet, leaving huge swathes of New York underwater. But it’s not only an inhospitable climate that twenty-second century New Yorkers face. The world Robinson creates is a consequence of (and continues to suffer under) our current financial systems and rampant toxic capitalism, of which climate change is but a symptom. Nevertheless, people have not abandoned the city, though admittedly they’ve retreated from the lower floors of buildings! Robinson focuses on the inhabitants of one skyscraper and how they both cope with the new world order and ultimately seek to change it.

The potential for change in Robinson’s narrative should not be understated. While many books (including many of the selections here) present a dystopian vision of a climate-ravaged future, Robinson keeps his narrative tinged with optimism, underpinned by a fundamental belief in people’s ability to come together. As one reviewer said, ‘beneath its anger at toxic capitalism and its despair over inadequate environmental measures is the thread of hope that somehow, maybe, we might yet balance the boat enough to make it through the ruins’ (from NPR review).  

Also by Robinson at the EFL: The Ministry for the Future (2020).

Hungry for more?

If you’d like to learn more about fantasy and science fiction literature, there’s plenty of resources available at the EFL, including a wealth of reference material, films and online databases.

The reference material available includes books such as:

• The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (2012). Available online and in the library.
• The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003). Available online and in the library.
• Richard Mathews, Fantasy: the liberation of imagination (2011). Available online and in the library.
• Patrick Parrinder, Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia (2000). Available in the library.

Clockwise from top left: The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature; The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction; Learning from Other Worlds by Patrick Parrinder; and Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination by Richard Mathews

Beyond Books

Although books are great (obviously!) maybe you’re interested in fantasy and science fiction on film and TV? There are loads of online resources and databases available through the library. Some are freely available, such as films you can watch free on the BFI player, but you can get access to even more with your Oxford Single Sign-On (SSO).

Through Box of Broadcasts (BoB, also known as Learning On Screen), for example, you can access over 2 million TV and radio broadcasts from channels including BBC One, Two and Four, Channel 4, Film4, and ten foreign language channels. You can find a range of fantasy and science fiction programmes here, from the classic 1953 adaptation of The War of the Worlds and the first episode of Doctor Who (‘An Unearthly Child’, 1963) to documentaries such as 2014’s Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction. Bear in mind that these programmes are available for educational purposes, and do look over the BoB terms and conditions if you want to use any of the material in your work.  

Homepages for Box of Broadcasts (top) and Kanopy (bottom)

Another site you have access to with your Oxford SSO is Kanopy. Kanopy have partnered with libraries and universities to provide ‘thoughtful entertainment … with no fees and no commercials’, for everyone ‘from film scholars to casual viewers’ (from Kanopy’s website). There’s an enormous range of films available, from early- and mid-twentieth-century films like Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) to cult classics such as Donnie Darko (2001) and more recent offerings like No Men Beyond This Point (2015), a mockumentary which explores a world where men are no longer needed for reproduction and face extinction.

These resources – and all the other databases you can access through the library – can be found on the Bodleian’s Databases A-Z page. If browsing all 1,700 databases at once is a little too much, try filtering by subject – you could narrow it down to databases relating to English or Film Studies for example.

The Databases A-Z list, filtered to show databases relating to English

Scattered Seeds

Did you catch the Fantasy Fiction: Scattered Seeds virtual display in January? Written by last year’s EFL Graduate Trainee, it’s a deep-dive blog post exploring the growth and transformations of the fantasy genre from ‘Scattered Seeds’ and ‘Classic Roots’ to ‘Branching Out’.

It begins with The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a short tale dating from Middle Egypt (2040 – 1782 BCE) and arguably the world’s oldest work of fantasy. You can read the story online or find it at the Sackler Library. From that original seed of the genre, we jump to more scattered ones with the advent of mainstream film and TV in the twentieth century. In fact, one of the oldest examples of fantasy on screen is the 1924 film The Thief of Baghdad, which is available in the EFL’s film collection. The blog post also includes a discussion of fantasy in gaming, from videogames like The Witcher to table-top RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons.

And finally …

What I hope this (very long!) post has shown is that there is huge variety in fantasy and science fiction, from books through films and TV to gaming, and that there is an enormous wealth of resources available at the EFL.

All of these works are incredible stories full of adventure and often not a little magic. But whether they look to the future or new imagined worlds, the best of the genre also say something about the world we live in today. They prompt us to think about our choices and the consequences of our decisions, to recognise and perhaps change our prejudices and preconceptions; more than anything, they inspire us to creativity and to see the world – and ourselves – in a different light.