When the internet collapsed, it took the world with it, leaving its digital ghosts behind – and they are hungry. Former photojournalist Katerina fled the overrun cities to the relative safety of her grandmother’s village on the edge of a forest, where she lives a solitary life of herbal medicine and beekeeping.

When a wordless boy finds her in the marketplace with nothing but her name in his pocket, her curiosity won’t allow her to turn him away. But haunting his arrival are rumours of harvest failure and a rampant digital disease stirring up the ghosts, and the mood in the village starts to sour.

Accused of witchcraft, Katerina and Stefan escape into the forest, searching for his missing father and the truth behind the disease. If there is a cure, Katerina alone might find it, but first she must find the courage to trust others – because the ghosts that follow her aren’t just digital.

We Are All Ghosts In The Forest is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

The Rise (again) of Science Fantasy

by Lorraine Wilson

Science Fantasy is experiencing a resurgence as a sub-genre term, frequently to be seen floating around the hashtags and marketing graphics of some of today’s most exciting new SFF fiction, but it is a sub-genre that has proven a little unwilling to stick to a definition, isn’t it? When the term was first coined, way back in 1935, it was simply a synonym for Science Fiction. Marion Zimmer Bradley defined it as science fiction with fantasy elements in 1948, but in the 1950’s other authors considered it to be anything where the technology was currently impossible. So, almost all futuristic Science Fiction. But while the subgenre had a heyday in the 1950-60’s, it is Zimmer Bradley’s definition that appears to have stuck best through the intervening lull and into the subgenre’s current revitalisation. 

Browsing articles on the subject, I see people referring to it as stories where the magic is explained by science, or where hard SF has added fantastical elements. Star Wars is the classic example of that latter definition – a big space epic with wizards, or Dune, the same but witches. More recently, and leaning more towards the ‘magic explained by science’, N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth series, and This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Or how about mecha SF with added magic found in both Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee and Iron Widow By Xiran Jay Zhao? In contrast to such high action worlds, there’s the quieter, more literary-leaning, genre-defying books like Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel or How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. It’s a broad range, to say the least. But all of these books bring something of both traditionally science/tech based SF, and something of traditionally fantasy-based magic or fabulism together to form something new. 

My latest book, We Are All Ghosts In The Forest, is my first time venturing into this territory, blending an SF post-internet future of digital ghosts with fantastical herbal magic and sentient forests. The quite frankly unreasonable levels of fun I had writing this story made me dig a little into what the appeal is of the subgenre, and why it is flourishing again now?

The simplest answer to the first question is that there is no real division between SF and F anyway, just points along a spectrum and there’s a readership for every point, including the bit in the middle. But I think that’s a little too simplistic. While there might be no hard division in theory, in practice, the perceived separation exists and comes with a slew of standard genre plot types, tropes, markers and devices. A reader of SF picks up an SF book expecting shiny tech! the future! maybe dystopia, maybe spaceships! Whereas a reader of fantasy comes to their book expecting magic! mythical beings! or folkloric lands! Combining shiny tech with magic, or spaceships with the fae does something extremely splendid – it breaks down a reader’s (and a writer’s) assumptions. It says, ‘you think you know what is coming, but you really don’t.’ Some readers, to be fair, hate that. But I think there are a lot of us who buckle ourselves in and reply ‘sounds fun, hit me.’

Aside from the sheer fun of exploring uncharted story waters, the other enormous advantage of breaking away from preconceptions of genre is that it allows writers to also break away from constructs that don’t suit modern understanding of sociopolitical issues. The mindbogglingly pro-empire narratives of space operas, the pro-royalist narratives of epic fantasy, the tacit normalisation of militaristic, elitist or patriarchal force are all hard to escape if you want to write within the bounds of traditional, straightforward genre forms (although not impossible – see Emily Tesh’s wonderful, Hugo award winning Some Desperate Glory). But if we step away from the requirements of genre, what happens to those inbuilt sociopolitical frameworks? If your high tech society also contains elemental magic then your society is going to be forced to reckon with the environmental cost of technology – you cannot have earth magic if the earth has all been mined or poisoned. If your spacefaring society contains folkloric beings, you’re going to have to think about whose folklore made it into space and why. How about court fantasy with AI advisors (true AI, not … you know, that thing) – who built that AI, and who was it programmed to speak for, and would it stick to that? These are fascinating questions, but more than that, they are deeply relevant. Science fantasy is, I think, the genre space that gives writers the greatest freedom to break down and rebuild our assumptions about world orders and society meaningfully. 

Speculative fiction, arguably more so than any other genre, has always acted as a lens onto our society – challenging the status quo and posing the hard questions about where we’re going and how we’re going to get there. As those questions get ever harder, the challenges ever more daunting, it’s the stories that break the rules and try new things which I think are best placed to give us the answers. Not at all coincidentally, alongside the current rise of Science Fantasy, is a tide of other subgenres (sometimes in the same books) that are seeking these same answers – hopepunk, climate fiction, eco-feminism, etc. We are hungry for maps through the troubled landscape we find ourselves in, I think, and while some of those maps need to be logical or feasible, some need to be wildly imaginary because our greatest innovations and our best selves emerge when we let ourselves dream unbounded. 

For me personally, I am helplessly fascinated by folklore as an expression of a society’s relationship with its world, so I am hungry for stories that step into our futures but fill those futures with superstition and fabulism – the magic of the marginalia. We are, for all our tech and our science, an incurably superstitious species, and that’s not going to stop if, or when, we reach the stars. Myth will always lie beneath the thin skin of our civilisation, and I in turn will always want to peel that skin back to reveal the bones of who we are, how we see ourselves and where our fears and our hopes will take us. 

We Are All Ghosts In The Forest is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

Lorraine is an award-winning writer, biologist, herder of cats and drinker of tea. Having spent years working in remote corners of the world she now lives by the sea in Scotland and writes stories full of the wilderness and folklore, exploring themes of family, belonging and the legacy of trauma. Her debut novel won the SCKA for Best Debut and was a finalist for the Kavya Prize for Scottish BPOC writers and the British Fantasy Awards for Best Fantasy Novel & Best Newcomer.

Find her at https://linktr.ee/raine_clouds