Niall Harrison is an independent critic based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is a former editor of Strange Horizons, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others. He has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Guest of Honor at the 2023 British National Science Fiction Convention. His collection All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays is available from Briardene Books.
Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.