This is the story of the supernova event known as Lhonoja. By the end of it, several planets will have burned, a couple of civilisations will have fallen, and I will have spoken to an entity some consider a god, and whose theological status will remain in question throughout.

Before then, I must explain how I came to be, and for that, I must take you back several centuries, to Glastya Row.

?

Glastya Row started as a landing strip on the planet Tu-mdo.

Most urban establishments on most colonised worlds begin this way. Tu-mdo had been a prime terraforming candidate ¨C comfortable gravity, good magnetic shield, not too hot, not too cold, not tidally locked and already possessed of a moon which, once water was thawed out in sufficient volume, would serve to stir the great big mixing bowl of Tu-mdo¡¯²õ freshly churning oceans. The first colonists didn¡¯t even need to spend five centuries in arcologies waiting for atmospheric conditions to settle, but were out and breathing without aid within a couple of pioneering generations. Two millennia later, Glastya Row had been transformed from pioneer¡¯²õ outpost to merely another borough of some few million in the great city of Heom, a middling hub of profit and endeavour within the interplanetary-spanning United Social Venture.

They say you can tell a lot about a Venture based on how its employees name their children.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

In Antekeda, the Venture that ran my city, these were the most common middle names given to children at birth:

Chairman ¨C 15 per cent

Entrepreneur ¨C 10 per cent

Director ¨C 9 per cent

Abundant ¨C 5 per cent

Diligent ¨C 4 per cent

In Theymann, a Venture specialising in deep space habitation, the distribution skewed towards Pioneers and Engineers, while in Halsect there was an almost sentimental emphasis on children called ¡°Aspiring¡±.

My parents had all the ambition you might expect of residents of Glastya Row, combined with a grim realism. Thus when I was born, my name was registered as Mawukana ¡°Respected¡± na-Vdnaze. I might never achieve dazzling heights or have great Shine, but dammit, my neighbours would at least know that I was respectable.

It would be fair to say that things went downhill from there.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North¡¯²õ first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

I am told that I cried an unhallowed amount when I was born, though no one seems able to clarify what ¡°unhallowed¡± means. I imagine my scream rose a little in volume as they implanted my Chint in the top of my plump left bicep, already embedded with the debts I had accrued to the Venture that ran the hospital that sheltered me ¨C 400 Glint for a standard birth, plus another 1,873 Glint for basic costs such as bedding, vaccinations, postnatal checkups, vitamin shots, etc. . . .

Thus, before I was placed upon my mother¡¯²õ breast, I was marked with the overriding feature of life on Glastya Row ¨C the debt I owed.

As befits two individuals who named their child ¡°Respected¡±, my parents were not irresponsible. They had carefully saved for this moment, and were between them able to bring my initial debt down to a mere 700 Glint, and keep on top of the 1.5 per cent child-rate interest payments my existence accrued. Moreover, to welcome me into the world, Antekeda gifted me with fifty shares, my ownership marking me as a citizen of the Venture. By the time I turned fifteen and sat my assignment exams, those shares were worth nearly 600 Glint ¨C though my educational and civic debts were well in excess of 92,000.

This system, we were taught, was about fairness. We were pioneers and our world was a place of scarcity, hardship and struggle. Everything the Venture gave us ¨C the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in ¨C had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

All are born equal, and by their labours shall they rise.

This philosophy was the underlying constitution of the United Social Venture. Both it and the more anthropologically engaging qualities of social and economic status that arose from it were known as Shine.

?

We were not a high-Shine family. My parents ran a small restaurant that served cold-broth dumplings to hot middle Managers too tired and busy to cook. They did their best to improve their Shine, constantly cooing over difficult, well-dressed customers and putting themselves forward to run catering events in Shiny houses or at Shiny events, but nothing could really wipe the smell of Glastya Row off their grease-stained aprons and soap-scoured fingers. Every six months, an Antekeda representative would come by and offer them another course or long-distance learning diploma in business growth and radical enterprise, and sometimes my mother, always the more energetic of the two, would sign up and do her coursework and pay her fees, and talk at the table about how this was it. This was the change we needed to get out, move up. It never came to anything.

During my ¡°cute¡± years, which I was told were seven to eleven years old, I worked as a waiter in the shop in the hope someone would give me that most wondrous of miracles, a ¡°tip¡± for my services. By the time I was twelve, you could see the shape of the adult I was going to be. My father¡¯²õ thick, straight black hair was overgrown around my mother¡¯²õ sunset-through-smog face. I was always a little short, with green-grey eyes that narrowed to almost impossible lines when I squinted in confusion (as I did a lot) and pale lips that didn¡¯t smile enough, or smiled wrong, or just didn¡¯t quite get the smiling business right, whenever I tried to move them.

¡°Smile with your eyes,¡± my mother commanded, during one of her we-shall-advance phases. So I stood in front of the mirror in the grubby upstairs bathroom and squeezed my eyelids tight and waggled my eyebrows and tried to inventory every tiny muscle about my growing grubby dishcloth of a face, until I could at least achieve something that didn¡¯t seem to upset people too badly.

Despite, or perhaps owing to, these efforts, I was relegated to the back of the kitchen so that my mother could stay out front, charming and occasionally bamboozling the customers. By the time I was fourteen and my schooling was getting unfeasibly expensive, it was already apparent that I would not have a Shiny life. Most of my classmates were starting to drop out into the menial labour that was the heart of every Venture, and those who remained were preparing for adulthood with an endless dance of alliances, enmities, petty acts of cruelty and theft, out-daring each other in who could game the system. Bullies thrived ¨C so long as they were not caught. Being caught was far worse a sin than being a thief, a liar or simply cruel.

Many economists, observing the Shine, have marvelled at the low levels of educational obtainment common across its population. The circular economies of most other worlds, powered by the sunlight or atomic reactors and fed by agricultural systems whose architects can sit in their pantries dispatching drones to the harvest, consider education not merely of primary importance to the success of their systems, but as frankly the most interesting thing the population can do with their expansive time.

However, education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.

This is an extract from by Claire North (Orbit), the 91av Book Club¡¯²õ pick for July. Sign up for the Book Club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

The?91av Book Club?has been reading a popular-science classic in June: Richard Dawkins¡¯²õ?, which celebrates its 50^th?anniversary this year.

I hadn¡¯t previously read this one ¨C it had always intimidated me (an English graduate). But my colleague Rowan Hooper, a behavioural ecologist as well as our podcast editor, reread it to see how it holds up today and concluded it pretty much did. He had a few issues with the biology and said it ¡°feels its age¡± ¨C Dawkins himself admits to ¡°sexist pronouns¡± in a 1989 preface ¨C but Rowan found that ¡°the core message remains relevant not just because genes being selfish is a brilliant meme (a term Dawkins coins at the end of the book), but because it is such a powerful way to understand how evolution operates: the metaphor makes us think as if genes behave selfishly¡±.

Read an extract from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the 91av Book Club¡¯²õ read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

It was time to gird my loins and embark on a book I¡¯ve always been a bit embarrassed for omitting. I have to admit to being a little exhausted at first: there was preface after preface in my edition, in which Dawkins was arguing with all sorts of people about how the book had been received. This was somewhat confusing, given I hadn¡¯t ¨C yet ¨C ?read it. I should have skipped straight to the first chapter.

Once I got into it, though, I found myself (mostly) carried along swimmingly by Dawkins¡¯²õ writing. He certainly has a knack for a good metaphor ¨C I particularly liked the idea of our bodies as ¡°survival machines¡± for genes. Without having studied any biology after the age of 16, I got my head around his central point: that natural selection works because genes, or copies of them (replicators, as he calls them), are out to survive, building the optimal bodies (or survival machines) in order to do so.

I did find his tone a little irascible and hectoring at times. It was like he was having conversations with various colleagues/rivals about his points, rather than the general reader. For example, talking about how ¡°one gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies¡±, he writes that ¡°it is an argument that some of my most respected colleagues obstinately refuse to agree with, so you must forgive me if I seem to labour it!¡±. We¡¯re also firmly told about the correct pronunciation of ¡°algae¡± (a hard ¡°g¡±, people). There¡¯²õ a lot of that sort of thing, but I finished feeling pleased to have got my head (mostly) around his argument.

Book club members were less impressed ¨C this is, I think, the book that has received the most negative comments of any we¡¯ve read, with a handful of members deciding not to join us in reading it at all, as they disagreed with some of Dawkins¡¯²õ personal views. (I share the perspective of member pwhipp, who wrote on our channel: ¡°I don¡¯t think we should reject serious scientific writing simply because the author is combative, controversial, or personally irritating. If we did that consistently, the shelves would become very thin indeed.¡±) Pwhipp, by the way, called The Selfish Gene ¡°an important and very well-written book, whatever one thinks of Dawkins¡¯ public persona or his outspoken atheism¡±.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

Pwhipp was in the minority, however. Alan P was one re-reader who felt ¡°underwhelmed¡± by The Selfish Gene. ¡°The text is (as he admits himself but doesn¡¯t change) sexist throughout. It¡¯²õ not just the assumption of male pronouns for general statements, but there are some comments in the end notes and the text of the book itself that even for the eighties are questionable,¡± he wrote. ¡°The tone is argumentative ¨C sometimes I¡¯m not clear that it isn¡¯t argument for its own sake ¨C but it¡¯²õ definitely jarring. The endless footnotes contradicting the text are really difficult to follow. If the science has changed then the text of the book needs to change as well. So it may be that it was a masterly summary of the known science in its day ¨C but now it¡¯²õ a bad tempered, difficult to follow, mess.¡±

Alan did enjoy the new chapter ¡°Nice guys finish first¡±, added to later editions: ¡°I was always of the opinion that genes don¡¯t make ethics so it¡¯²õ nice to have the idea that even if genetic determinism was a thing, that cooperation is a successful strategy in the wild.¡±

The Selfish Gene at 50: Why Dawkins¡¯²õ evolution classic still holds up

When Richard Dawkins¡¯²õ first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book¡¯²õ gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today¡¯²õ genetic age

Dee55, meanwhile, first read The Selfish Gene back in the early 80s and found it ¡°an absolute revelation¡± at the time. Going back to it was ¡°interesting¡±, but, as a humanities graduate, Dee55 found ¡°specific challenges in following some of the arguments¡±. ¡°I enjoyed the Chapter 5 stuff on the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) as a fun ride, but I think I need to reread it before continuing. I am very aware that I am just not in a position to assess RD¡¯²õ ideas in the context of other evolutionary biology thinking,¡± Dee55 wrote.

Rowan took a deeper dive into the book in a longer piece for 91av, speaking to biologists about its message and what still stands today. Taking into account developments in the field that have happened over the past 50 years, Rowan wrote that ¡°all the evolutionary biologists I spoke to for this piece struggled to find major problems with The Selfish Gene¡±. There was one exception: the idea of the meme, which, despite its memetic proliferation today, ¡°doesn¡¯t hold up¡±, he was told.

Overall, then, a thorny choice: this particular piece of popular science was notedly unpopular for the 91av Book Club.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ¡®Have they discovered evolution yet?¡¯ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist. Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ¡®The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely¡¯.*

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun, but the full implications of Darwin¡¯²õ revolution have yet to be widely realized. Zoology is still a minority subject in universities, and even those who choose to study it often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance. Philosophy and the subjects known as ¡®humanities¡¯ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. No doubt this will change in time. In any case, this book is not intended as a general advocacy of Darwinism. Instead, it will explore the consequences of the evolution theory for a particular issue. My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.

The Selfish Gene: Still one of the most thrilling evolution books ever

Fifty years ago, Richard Dawkins shared an irresistible scientific metaphor with the world that modernised and democratised evolutionary biology. Half a century on, The Selfish Gene remains powerfully insightful, finds Rowan Hooper

Apart from its academic interest, the human importance of this subject is obvious. It touches every aspect of our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and our generosity. These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz¡¯²õ On Aggression, Ardrey¡¯²õ The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt¡¯²õ Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene). It is ironic that Ashley Montagu should criticize Lorenz as a ¡®direct descendant of the ¡°nature red in tooth and claw¡± thinkers of the nineteenth century . . .¡¯. As I understand Lorenz¡¯²õ view of evolution, he would be very much at one with Montagu in rejecting the implications of Tennyson¡¯²õ famous phrase. Unlike both of them, I think ¡®nature red in tooth and claw¡¯ sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably.

Before beginning on my argument itself, I want to explain briefly what sort of an argument it is, and what sort of an argument it is not. If we were told that a man had lived a long and prosperous life in the world of Chicago gangsters, we would be entitled to make some guesses as to the sort of man he was. We might expect that he would have qualities such as toughness, a quick trigger finger, and the ability to attract loyal friends. These would not be infallible deductions, but you can make some inferences about a man¡¯²õ character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered. The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. ¡®Special¡¯ and ¡®limited¡¯ are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.* I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene¡¯²õ law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true. This book is mainly intended to be interesting, but if you would extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.

As a corollary to these remarks about teaching, it is a fallacy¡ª incidentally a very common one ¡ª to suppose that genetically inherited traits are by definition fixed and unmodifiable. Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. It may just be more difficult to learn altruism than it would be if we were genetically programmed to be altruistic. Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down. Some would say that culture is so important that genes, whether selfish or not, are virtually irrelevant to the understanding of human nature. Others would disagree. It all depends where you stand in the debate over ¡®nature versus nurture¡¯ as determinants of human attributes. This brings me to the second thing this book is not: it is not an advocacy of one position or another in the nature/nurture controversy. Naturally I have an opinion on this, but I am not going to express it, except insofar as it is implicit in the view of culture that I shall present in the final chapter. If genes really turn out to be totally irrelevant to the determination of modern human behaviour, if we really are unique among animals in this respect, it is, at the very least, still interesting to inquire about the rule to which we have so recently become the exception. And if our species is not so exceptional as we might like to think, it is even more important that we should study the rule.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

The third thing this book is not is a descriptive account of the detailed behaviour of man or of any other particular animal species. I shall use factual details only as illustrative examples. I shall not be saying: ¡®If you look at the behaviour of baboons you will find it to be selfish; therefore the chances are that human behaviour is selfish also¡¯. The logic of my ¡®Chicago gangster¡¯ argument is quite different. It is this. Humans and baboons have evolved by natural selection. If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish. Therefore we must expect that when we go and look at the behaviour of baboons, humans, and all other living creatures, we shall find it to be selfish. If we find that our expectation is wrong, if we observe that human behaviour is truly altruistic, then we shall be faced with something puzzling, something that needs explaining.

? Richard Dawkins

Extract from ) in June 2026, available in hardback, paperback, and ebook formats, ?25.00

The 91av Book Club is reading The Selfish Gene in June. Sign up for the Book Club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

The 91av Book Club had quite a change of science-fictional pace in May, moving from the wilds of space in our April read, Kim Stanley Robinson¡¯²õ Red Mars, to a much closer-to-home future in Silvia Park¡¯²õ Luminous.

Like another of our reads this year, Sierra Greer¡¯²õ Annie Bot, this imagines a world where robots are integrated into society ¨C and explores how we might deal with this on many different levels: emotionally, spiritually, practically, sexually. Set in a reunified Korea, it¡¯²õ a compelling blend of three storylines: a police procedural, in which detective Jun is out to discover what might have become of a robot girl who has gone missing; a ragtag bunch of kids on an adventure, in which Ruijie and her schoolmates find an abandoned robot boy in a scrapyard; and a tale of a dysfunctional family. Jun and his younger sister Morgan grew up with a third sibling, a robot who disappeared when they were young, fracturing their family. They¡¯re still estranged today.

Author Silvia Park: ¡®No one is your enemy, not even death¡¯

Silvia Park, author of the May read for the 91av Book Club, 'Luminous' on emotional artificial intelligence, our inevitable love for robots and coping with grief.

I found Luminous refreshing and thought-provoking. The various strands combine to create a sensitive exploration of what it means to love somebody and what it means to lose somebody. Park, who wrote us a great essay about how the novel started out as a children¡¯²õ book but became something much darker, is a confident and elegant writer, and I can¡¯t wait to read what they write next (they told me in our video chat ¨C which covered everything from robot consciousness to Peter Pan ¨C that it¡¯²õ about man-eating mermaids, so that¡¯²õ a definite yes from me!).

Our book club members found different things to enjoy about Luminous. For TheGosia, it was Park¡¯²õ writing about disability. ¡°I¡¯m loving it! Really good characters and I¡¯m immediately gripped. What jumped out at me so far was bionic modification of humans portrayed in a positive way,¡± TheGosia wrote on our . ¡°Super interesting as given the opportunity I would happily abandon most of my very broken meat suit for a more functional, bionic one. But often it¡¯²õ written through the lens of what you¡¯d lose.¡±

Exoi was also a fan. ¡°I find it densely packed with so many thought-provoking ideas and stances on robotics and what it means to be a valued entity on our planet. There seem to be more ideas and themes in this book than some authors use in a lifetime, making it intelligent and nuanced. I¡¯m loving it so far.¡±

So was Karen Warren. ¡°Of course this is only one version of the future, but I could see the seeds of this scenario in our current society. And it got me thinking about how humans have always anthropomorphised inanimate objects (we give names to our cars, and children play games with teddy bears) ¨C it shows how desperate we are for connection,¡± she wrote. ¡°I found this quote from the author: ¡®How do we define what is real? So many of us spend most of our hours either asleep ¨C unconscious or dreaming ¨C or locked in a world that exists on a tiny screen. How can we say, then, that we live in reality¡¯, which I think sums up much of the book.¡±

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

Read an extract from Luminous by Silvia Park

In this extract from Luminous, the May read for the 91av Book Club, we meet a mysterious robot discovered in a salvage yard in Seoul, in a future reunified Korea

Alan_P was less taken with this latest read. ¡°Just finished Luminous ¨C and possibly I didn¡¯t pay enough attention, but when enough people have read it so it¡¯²õ not a spoiler, someone is going to have to explain to me what was going on,¡± he pleaded on . ¡°It¡¯²õ beautifully realised, but as I mentioned I¡¯ve got no idea what the ending was all about. And why were the kids so keen to hand around that damaged robot? ¡­ Why did years of therapy not help either brother or sister with their father issues?¡±

Matthew was also a little lukewarm. ¡°I found it slow going and really only finished it because I was two thirds of the way through waiting for something happen. Things happen sure, but they seem to be disconnected events rather than plot. Any plot twists and turns are signalled well beforehand.¡± Interestingly, Matthew did find the robot identities in Luminous ¡°better realised than in Annie Bot, where Annie was too human¡± ¨C but said that Iain M. Banks¡¯²õ Culture universe has ¡°the best robots¡±. Well, you can¡¯t compete with a Mind. Having read Banks¡¯²õ 1988 novel The Player of Games with the book club back in December, I¡¯m certainly finding it fascinating to compare his ideas with our current anxiety about artificial intelligence and how it is being reflected in our fiction, from Annie Bot to Luminous.

The 91av Book Club has been reading Luminous, Silvia Park¡¯²õ near-future story set in a reunified Korea in which robots are fully integrated into society. Head of books Alison Flood caught up with Silvia to talk about how this increasingly dark story began as an idea for a children¡¯²õ book, whether the advent of large language models affected their writing, and whether robots might one day achieve consciousness.

Read more: Why I explore our inevitable love for robots in my novel Luminous

In 2024, a joke became a headline: ¡°¡±.

As our love for pets grows ever refined and luxurious, our ability to have children feels more strained than ever. The usual milestones begin to look like mirages in a world that is economically and environmentally fraught, and increasingly disrupted by AI.

In my acknowledgments for , I mention that the novel started out as a children¡¯²õ book. A death in the family changed its course. There was a particularly rough stretch when someone close to me died each year, one after another, three, four years in a row. What I didn¡¯t say is which death started the domino effect.

It was the death of my dog.

Two excellent new sci-fi novels tackle robots in very different ways

Luminous by Silvia Park and Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer are both thoughtful and well-written science fiction novels, featuring robots in richly realised worlds. But there the similarities end, says Emily H. Wilson

Frail, with silky fur and long-lashed eyes, he was the kind of lovely that turned heads. He was also very cranky. He disliked children. But despite his dignified, aloof nature, he used to flop on the floor and wiggle in a dance whenever we came home. It was a different kind of dance that seized him, epileptic and frightful, the first signs of a brain tumour, when we had to let him go.

The death of a pet is inherently confusing. Rationally, we should be prepared for it. When we bring a furry animal into our home, we are signing a kind of social contract. We look them in their soft wet eyes and we should be thinking, I know one day you will die. I will probably outlive you. That¡¯²õ the natural way of things.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

And so we lie to ourselves. That headline reveals how many of us embrace a parental role in caring for these creatures. Fur babies, we call them. Cat dads and dog mums. Yet these strollers are not for babies too young to walk, but ones too old to hobble. And what could be more unnatural than losing something that feels like a child?

It was this unnaturalness that became the starting point for writing about robots, especially as children. In my novel, a robot child goes missing. She¡¯²õ the ¡°daughter¡± of an older woman. Later, my protagonist realises that the woman¡¯²õ deterioration isn¡¯t just that of a grieving mother. She has aged considerably, and lost mobility, because she lost a daughter, yes ¨C but also a housekeeper, a cook, a physical aide. This robot child was essentially a four-in-one bundle deal.

The love we¡¯ll have for these robots one day will be seen as unnatural because a robot is unnatural. Most uncanny of all is that the receptacle for our love, these robots, may not even be real in the first place. But without a doubt, we will love them. We will hate them and abuse them, as we do to so many living things. Yet many people will love them ferociously.

I wanted to focus on that love and grief. How do you grieve what society considers unacceptable? It was difficult to openly mourn a dog all those years ago without hearing ¡°but just get a new one¡±. Even now, there are jokes on TV about so-and-so taking time off work for a dead cat. Grief is awkward for many. Particularly if it doesn¡¯t go away. We talk about ¡°processing¡± grief as if it¡¯²õ a file that needs to be cleared from the queue. The world we live in places a great deal of importance on productivity. If you¡¯re too sad to work, you¡¯re an unproductive member of society. Doubly so if you¡¯re a childless woman who loves cats. The love we¡¯ll have for robot children will be met with this same suspicion.

And how right we are to be wary. How unscrupulous are the companies that peddle this service. How easily emotional labour can be simulated into something intoxicating. Imagine robots that clean and cook for us, robots that take care of us when we are elderly and infirm. How seductive they will be if they can also take the form of a child designed to love you and never leave.

So what if that love might not be real?

by Silvia Park (Oneworld) is the May 2026 read for the 91av Book Club. Sign up to read along with us, and join the discussion on .

That summer was immortal. July was especially savage with sixty-two heat deaths in Seoul, punctuated by the spectacular fizzing breakdown of a GS-100 security android when it crumpled knees-first outside a United Korea Bank. A cleaner broomed away the remains. The head was left grinning on the pavement, chirping at passersby to warn them of today¡¯²õ heat.

Then the monsoons came. Undeterred, hundreds of Red Devil fans flooded the World Cup Stadium, waving flags of their reunified nation. Their dreams vaporized after the first round. Mexico: 7, United Republic of Korea: 0. The very next day, the sky cleared. A white sun buttered a salvage yard with rust while an old bomb-disposal unit, the Grumman A-1, moved in a figure eight. It cleared the path for a young girl named Ruijie, who was dragging the body of a woman by the ankles, naked arms thrown back as if shouting hooray.

Two excellent new sci-fi novels tackle robots in very different ways

Luminous by Silvia Park and Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer are both thoughtful and well-written science fiction novels, featuring robots in richly realised worlds. But there the similarities end, says Emily H. Wilson

The woman might have been beautiful once. Lips pink and plush, and long blond hair, the kind that shone with each brush. She was falling apart. Her face had been shredded into confetti, held together by one bleary blue eye, while her torso was a smooth bioplastic vest, translucent as a milk carton. Ruijie had tried pressing the power button located on the nape of the woman¡¯²õ neck. She¡¯d gotten a twitch of the ankles, a froggy jolt, but nothing. The robot was dead.

Still, what exquisite legs. Ruijie planned to take them home.

She paused to check the battery level of her robowear. Two hours to go. Affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customized circuitry to aid her ability to walk. For she was beloved.

Close to the edge the salvage yard bloomed into silver grass. Tufty reeds stirred from the breeze while broken war machines slept like ancient dinosaurs, abandoned from the unification war. Ahead of them lay what could be the second-deadliest robot in the yard, the SADARM-1000. When it was still active and nimble, it was a house of horrors from whose impenetrable womb wave after wave of bladed robots would emerge, whipping through the air, keen to slice and beep and blow.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

Decades later, now retired, the SADARM reclined on its side like the Buddha of Miamsa, indolent in the shade. The belly had been decimated by a stray blast on a bridge, then pried open and plundered for wires, chips, anything glinty. Ruijie backed up against it, pulling the woman by the feet, but the woman¡¯²õ head knocked against a piece of buried metal, and her blue eye popped out. Cursing, Ruijie chased it through the grass¡ª the one eye! ¡ª until it slowed to a crawl at the base of the SADARM¡¯²õ belly and kissed the pregnant curve.

Ruijie took a minute to crouch and a second to reach for the eye, then froze. A hornet had landed on it with a flick. It unfolded wings of black glass. Another skittered down the slope of the SADARM¡¯²õ belly. More crawled out of the smelted head. Maybe under the visor, she¡¯d find a gold blanket trembling inside the SADARM¡¯²õ skull. They could be drones, the kind that slipped into your ear and slid a long thin needle into your brain, or maybe they were just yellow jackets, sedate until they weren¡¯t. Which was more deadly, real or not real?

The real knew no restraint.

She decided to be perfect and still. Like a robot. Except a robot wouldn¡¯t need mechanic braces to walk. A robot would be thrown away for needing anything at all.

Back away, back away.

The best new science fiction books of 2026

On the horizon for this year are Ann Leckie's latest, Neil Jordan's debut and more from Adrian Tchaikovsky. Exciting times, says our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson

Then a hum stirred from deep inside the SADARM. With a tilt of their wings, the hornets buzzed back, a righteous swell of anger, but the singular hum drowned them out. Low and peaceable, it lifted and dipped, from treble to bass, land to sea, the tide rising and pounding against time, the shudder of a temple bell, the ohmmmmmm in the vibrations that snaked up her robowear and scraped the hairs on her arms.

The hornets fell silent.

Someone¡¯²õ inside. Even her thought was a whisper. And it must be a magical someone to hum a nest of hornets to sleep.

?

RUIJIE WAS THE ONLY GRANDCHILD from both sides of her family. Her relatives in Fuzhou called her Rui-Rui and Mingzhu, and her father especially thought of her as a precious pearl.

Her symptoms first appeared in the fourth grade when her father was regaling them at dinner with Ruijie¡¯²õ science fair project, ¡°The Great Silence and Why I Think We¡¯re Not Listening,¡± which took the grand prize, and her mother joked about how the table could benefit from their own great silence. Ruijie snorted shacha sauce up her nose and she reached for a glass of water. Then dropped it.

Later that week she dropped her chopsticks. They clattered to the floor, dragging the slippery noodles by the hair. Her father remarked on her clumsiness. Ruijie remembered feeling sheepish, maybe defiant, but not scared. Not yet.

The tremors grew. Her fingers refused to fist. She took advantage and flipped off the annoying kids in front of the teacher. But she couldn¡¯t hold a pen, or type; then she couldn¡¯t stand without wobbling. Then came the tests, between endless waits in endless hospital lobbies, the glow-in-the-dark scans, the shots drilling deeper and deeper into her spine. The doctors lobbed acronyms, like ALS, PMA, and MMA, which regrettably was not the martial arts. There were nights she couldn¡¯t sleep because her body clutched her awake in a squeezing iron fist. These nights she¡¯d pretend to breathe softly when her parents sneaked into her room and knelt beside her bed so they could wrap her hand in sandalwood beads and pray.

?

She was measured for her first set of robowear. Ivory oblong disks, serving as both sensors and motors, rested on her hips to usher her gait, like a gentle push on the swings. For the first time in weeks, Ruijie stood on her own feet. Her father said she looked ¡°super.¡± Her mother took a picture and touched it with two fingers, as if the Ruijie frozen in time were more precious and real.

Prepare your hearts, the doctors told her parents, instead of her. But Ruijie, three-time winner of the science fair, believed in the miracle of science. She believed in the trillions of tenuous threads tying the self to the rest. ÎïÎÒÒ»ów. Matter and I are One. The grace of union so the swimmer flowed with the ocean, so the archer flew in the arrow, so the calligrapher bled from the brush. With this belief, she would wake, walk, and breathe with cosmic synergy, full of darkness and spinning lights, and her body, which broke down day by day, remained a solar system where all the stars would burst and burn, but until then, every quantum speck quivered bright with integrity.

This is an extract from? by Silvia Park, published by Oneworld, the May 2026 read for the 91av Book Club. Sign up to read along with us, and join the discussion on .

I set the 91av Book Club something of a challenge in April: make your way through the 600-plus pages of Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson¡¯²õ doorstopper of a novel, in just 30 days, and then tell us what you thought of it on our lively new channel (and do please show your working).

I¡¯ll admit to some self-interest here: I think of Red Mars as one of my all-time favourite books, but I haven¡¯t read it for years. So, when reviewer George Bass wrote me a great piece about how this story of the first 100 astronauts and scientists to live on Mars opens in 2026, I jumped at a reason to revisit it with our community of 25,000 avid readers. I wasn¡¯t disappointed. Robinson brings the vast landscapes and alien beauty of Mars to life with great skill, and I enjoyed the way the story moves between viewpoints. Sometimes we hear from Ann, who is desperate to ensure that this ancient world isn¡¯t interfered with by humans (she¡¯²õ a ¡°Red¡±). Sometimes we look in on Sax, who is out to terraform Mars as quickly as he can (he¡¯²õ a ¡°Green¡±). I particularly enjoyed the perspective of the practical and no-nonsense engineer Nadia, but I did find myself a little irritated with the drawn-out love triangle of John, Frank and Maya, all of whom very much suffer from Main Character Syndrome.

Author Kim Stanley Robinson revisits his vision of life on Mars

As our book club revisits Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson reflects on imagining a 2026 Mars mission ¡ª and how today¡¯²õ colonisation plans and climate realities measure up.

Some book club members were also rereading Red Mars, others were coming to it for the first time and yet another group had had it on their shelves for a while and were delighted to have a prompt to finally get round to reading it. First-time reader DavidC was instantly gripped: ¡°Even on the very first page there was something about the phrase ¡®But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness¡¯ I found really captivating,¡± he wrote on Discord. ¡°It tells me I¡¯m in good hands for the next 600 pages.¡±

TheGosia wasn¡¯t convinced by the dramatic opening, however, in which a key character is murdered. ¡°I¡¯m not loving the concept of spoiling the end with the first chapter? I think I would have preferred not to know where all this is going. Unless it¡¯²õ not the end but the middle? Still, not convinced so far¡­¡± she wrote. Members, including me, were quick to reassure her, and she kept going.

I actually asked Robinson about his decision to start the book this way, when I chatted with him in our video interview. ¡°It¡¯²õ a flash forward, which I think was a good trick,¡± he told me. ¡°We see Frank arrange the murder of John. We don¡¯t know why. He¡¯²õ obviously wound-up, intense, angry. We still don¡¯t know why, but we know that John¡¯²õ died. And then we go back to the beginning of the story. Building a town [on Mars] is not inherently dramatic. But if in that building of the town, you know that someone¡¯²õ going to end up so angry at the end of it that they are going to arrange the murder of one of their best friends, you therefore see every little incident of building the town as having a fraught significance that you know about, but nobody else knows about.¡±

Robinson reread the novel himself relatively recently, and found he was still pleased with how it turned out. ¡°I had forgotten enough that it was a little fresh, and it seemed to me it held up pretty well,¡± he said ¨C acknowledging that there are ¡°hilarious gaps in my knowledge of the year 2026 and after¡±. He delved further into this in an essay for the book club in which he also lambasted current ¡°fatuous¡± plans to colonise Mars, something he very much also got into in our interview. ¡°These people aren¡¯t thinking it through, the ones who say, like [Elon] Musk, ¡®Oh, well we need to colonise Mars in order save Earth.¡¯ That¡¯²õ crap.¡±

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

As for our team of readers, there was something of a mixed response, with many, like me, admiring Robinson¡¯²õ nature writing about Mars: the planet is probably the book¡¯²õ main character, I¡¯d say. But quite a few readers didn¡¯t warm so much to Robinson¡¯²õ cast of characters.

Read an extract from Kim Stanley Robinson¡¯²õ sci-fi classic Red Mars

This is the opening of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, the 91av Book Club read for April, as humans come to the planet to settle it

¡°I think it was amazing in a lot of ways: the nature descriptions, the general scope, how well researched it was; I loved the scenes of vast destruction. It also has interesting ideas about running society. But ultimately I couldn¡¯t really connect with any of the characters and a lot of the events didn¡¯t follow any logic for me,¡± said TheGosia.

Ani Greenwood made it to the end, but then had to dive straight into a relationship drama as a palate cleanser. ¡°I needed a relationships infusion after Red Mars, where the characters, though in themselves diverse, did not feel that complex to me and where the dynamic of the book was more idea oriented,¡± she wrote. ¡°The writing was so good, I really mourned my inability at the moment to give his story my heart. I would love to have lingered more over the nature descriptions.¡±

There were also some great discussions about how quickly things break down on Mars ¨C would the planners on Earth not have chosen their 100 astronauts more wisely, to have included fewer revolutionaries? ¡°I started in expecting/hoping for competence porn¡ªa story focused on a team of scientists and engineers overcoming life-threatening challenges in an unforgiving, harsh environment¡ªand instead got a soap opera mix of human politics, greed, callousness, and lack of foresight. The lack of foresight in particular was what bothered me most,¡± said Barbara Howe. ¡°I did like the descriptions of the Martian landscape and some sections¡ªmost of Part 7, for example¡ªwere pretty compelling reading, but the love triangle was annoying, and the only characters I really found interesting were Nadia, Arkady [a Russian engineer, revolutionary and anarchist], and¡ªsomewhat surprisingly, and late in the book¡ªAnn.¡±

Overall, I¡¯d say members enjoyed reading (or rereading) and dissecting this classic of science fiction; they certainly had plenty to say about it! As for me, I was pleased to discover Red Mars remains one of my all-time favourites.

Sign up here to join the 91av Book Club, and join the discussion on .

I¡¯m happy to think of people reading Red Mars in 2026. Its story begins around this year, but I wrote the book between 1989 and 1991, so naturally one aspect of reading it now is to note all the discrepancies between what the book thought this decade would be like and what it¡¯²õ really like.

That always happens to science fiction novels: as time passes, the story shifts from being about the future to being about a past set of ideas about the future. This is a valuable window onto what that past felt like to those alive in that time, something not easy to recapture.

When we read old science fiction, we catch glimpses of what people back then thought might come to pass, which was an important part of their reality. The old text then becomes not so much a matter of inaccurate prediction as it is quite accurate portrayals of that moment¡¯²õ sense of potentiality, expressing its hopes and fears about what seems to be coming.

Our writers pick their favourite science fiction books of all time

We asked 91av staff to pick their favourite science fiction books. Here are the results, ranging from 19th-century classics to modern day offerings, and from Octavia E. Butler to Iain M. Banks

Just as with all other fiction, science fiction is therefore always mostly about the present, even though it¡¯²õ set in the future, and, as it ages, becomes a window onto the past. In its form and its content, it serves as kind of time travel, both forwards into the future and backwards into the past.

That said, if you were to look at Red Mars as 1990 trying to imagine the 2020s, even though that isn¡¯t what it was trying to do, I still think it holds up pretty well. The US and Russia as failing empires, teaming up in a desperate attempt to hold off new emerging powers? Check. China and India on the rise? Double check.

And there¡¯²õ more that feels right, like the danger Earth is in ecologically and economically, hammered by climate change and geopolitical conflict even to the point of war. Or an emerging social order manifesting as a gigantic ongoing argument over what it should become. None of this took any special vision to call out; our situation has been a mess for a long time and something new is going to emerge, because things can¡¯t go on as they are, just in the physical sense. What can¡¯t happen won¡¯t happen, and what will happen is something that can happen. Reality bites, it won¡¯t go away.

I like noting the technological details in the book that I foretold pretty well, also the details that I missed entirely. Sometimes these two are mixed together, for instance when they are still using video tapes, but making something like YouTube out of them. Or when John Boone¡¯²õ Dick Tracy-style wristwatch includes a talking AI, Pauline ¨C a modest precursor to the many Paulines scattered through my subsequent work (see my novel 2312 in particular). That¡¯²õ what happens when you speak about the future: you are always wrong but sometimes right, in an interesting mix.

Kim Stanley Robinson on how to have a good Anthropocene

In his latest novel The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines what a future based on climate action might look like. He shares his take on the world with Adam Vaughan

As for Mars itself, when I wrote my trilogy we were still in the immediate aftermath of the huge amount of new information about Mars that had been given to us by the Mariner satellite fly-bys in 1969 and the Viking orbiters and landers in 1976. Those machines gave us Mars in a way that no previous generation had: a new world, real but empty, handed to us on a plate.

It¡¯²õ not a coincidence that our new knowledge of Mars was soon joined by a new speculative science called terraforming. Could humanity engineer an alien planet to make it a place where humans could ¡°walk around in their shirtsleeves¡±? This question got asked in part because an excellent candidate for such a transformation had just been found, right next door.

Terraforming ideas got applied hypothetically to almost every rocky planet and moon in the solar system, but the best candidate by far remained Mars. It has water, pretty significant gravity, a little atmosphere and all the various elements life needs ¨C although not as much nitrogen as one might like ¨C so perhaps the nitrogen currently wrapping Saturn¡¯²õ moon Titan could be transferred down to it? This was the kind of big-screen thinking that the terraforming community deployed in those days. It was as much science fiction as it was science, a game planetologists played after hours. For me, given my project, these discussions were immensely valuable. What sense of plausibility my book has is due to these scientists.

Now, 35 years later, it has to be said that we have learned more about Mars, and about human biology, such that the whole project of humans inhabiting Mars looks much more difficult than it did back then. The rovers of the early 2000s, for instance, discovered there are perchlorates mixed into the sand of Mars in the parts-per-hundred range, and these perchlorates are poisonous to humans in the parts-per-million range. It turns out the surface of Mars is extremely poisonous to us!

Also, we¡¯ve learned more about the bad effects of lighter-than-Earthly gravity on human bodies, and of unblocked cosmic radiation on mammal brains. So the bold claims made by certain billionaires about how we will soon colonise Mars are simply fantasies. They express a wish that the Mars we know now would revert to that earlier, more survivable version. But no. In 1990, I was writing science fiction; now that same story has become a fantasy.

Oh no! Like a lot of people, I wish it would work. I hold on to the dream, and indeed I still say we could go to Mars, but in a different way. It would resemble the way we go to Antarctica now. We could set up scientific stations on Mars somewhat like McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and people could go live there for a year or two, then return to Earth.

In effect, they would be living much like my characters did in Underhill in the third and fourth chapters of my book, but that lifestyle would not change. The visiting scientists would suffer some damage to their health, but would perhaps regard that as being worth it for the sake of their adventure. We would learn a lot from their efforts, and people would be interested in their project to the same degree they¡¯re interested in the work going on in Antarctica now ¨C in other words, not very much. Humans on Mars will be just one more aspect of the Anthropocene.

That¡¯²õ the science fiction story that looks most realistic right now. Possibly, if you extend the timeline out several thousand years and include in it the creation of a healthy relationship between humans and Earth, the terraforming and full inhabitation of Mars could eventually happen. I hope so.

Certainly a big obstacle to the Mars project now, even more important than its poisonousness, is the way we are poisoning Earth. We have to solve the problems we¡¯ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant. If and when we manage to create that healthy relationship, Mars will be there still, as a kind of reward for our success, a new project to try.

Remember this, please, when you see clickbait and pronunciamentos about humans very soon migrating to Mars. I, author of the Mars trilogy, call bullshit on that fatuous fantasy.

I want to finish by saying that all these aspects surrounding Red Mars are not what I feel are most important about it. Because it¡¯²õ not a blueprint or a prophecy or a technical evaluation, it¡¯²õ a novel. So what I like most about it are its characters and its plot. These are the elements that drive any novel, and are crucial to how a reader feels about it.

It¡¯²õ been so long since I wrote Red Mars that, a couple of years ago, I was able to read it without feeling I had it semi-memorised, and without trying helplessly in my mind to revise it one more time. I just took it in. What a pleasure that was.

Nadia and Maya, John and Frank, Sax and Ann, Michel and Hiroko and Arkady, Phyllis and Vlad and Ursula and Spencer and all the other secondary characters, they all stepped off the page and into my head. None of them are anything like me, and I don¡¯t know where they came from. They just showed up and told me their stories. What a gift! And what a story ¨C not just their interpersonal relationships, but also their political interactions with Earth and their terraforming work, and their lives through the many decades, all weaving together to become history, or, as my beloved teacher Fredric Jameson once put it, to History.

I¡¯m very happy that this book flew through me and stuck to the page, and is still there for readers to read. I hope you enjoy it.

The 91av Book Club is currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson¡¯²õ . Sign up and read along with us here.